The numbers are in, and lobbyists set a record last year by spending billions of dollars to make sure that corporations get everything they want from our elected leaders in Washington, D.C. . Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: The numbers are in, and lobbyists set a record last year by spending billions of dollars to make sure that corporations get everything they want from elected leaders in Washington. I’ve got Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins with me to talk about it. Gee, we’ve done so many of these stories over the year, but right now when it gets to $4.2 billion and you’ve got the Chamber of Commerce, who’s one of the big people that are trying to, the more immigration so they can bring in people. If the worker cuts their arm off, we’ll ship ’em back to Nicaragua or killing the possibilities of consumer lawsuits. Those are the two big things. They want to kill the right for a lawyer and a claimant to go into court and recover when a company has killed them with a bad product. That’s really big up there. And CEO wages, buddy, they’re spending a lot of money on making sure that CEO wages stay as high as possible. And last but not least, globalization. We want to globalize because we can have this work done less expensively in India, and we’re gonna make more money. It’s gonna put American workers outta work. But this is, those are the types of things we’re looking at here, right?
Farron Cousins: Yeah, absolutely. And it’s interesting, when we think of lobbyists, we think of these people that go to DC to get these favors done to benefit them, but a lot of the work that lobbyists do is to make sure things don’t happen. That’s the big thing that people really have to understand. It’s not that they want legislation to pass, it’s mostly protecting the status quo. I mean, if you’re a billionaire or if you’re a CEO or if you’re any kind of corporation in this country right now, things are great for you and they’re getting better by the day. Like with the things you mentioned here, no regulations. And that’s because they stop all that legislation. But they want to preserve that. They’ve gotta make sure that we don’t get to pass more laws where instead of 10 pharmaceuticals we can negotiate prices on, maybe we get a hundred. So they stop any kind of progress. And it is these scumbags, I’ll call them, because their job is to make.
Mike Papantonio: I’m good with that word.
Farron Cousins: Their job is to make sure that everybody watching this, that your life doesn’t get better. That is their goal in life. And they will spend, like you said, $4.2 billion in the last 12 months alone to make sure that you can’t afford your prescription drugs. You can’t put food on the table. You can’t afford to buy a house or even rent a house. That’s their job every day they go to work.
Mike Papantonio: And these legislators are out there with their hands, like a bunch of just disgusting, shameless punks taking all of the money. And you know what? You can’t miss this. The Supreme Court knew exactly what they were doing with Citizens United. Okay. They were changing the balance of power. If you read kind of the, if you just read the petitions and the briefing that was done on Citizen United, here’s what you see. The discussion was that first of all, the media is dead. Okay. There is no investigative journalists to protect consumers. That just doesn’t happen anymore. Most of the time, the lawsuit that’s brought starts the media. That’s the first thing. The second thing was that there are no regulations anymore because corporations, the US Chamber of Commerce owns most of the regulators. And so that’s the second thing that used to protect us. The third thing is that there was a balance of power on political influence until this level of money started coming in. Fourth thing, there used to be a balance with the judicial dominance. Okay. There wasn’t judicial dominance where it was all corporate, and don’t get me wrong, the corporate judges, it’s not just Republican.
Farron Cousins: Right.
Mike Papantonio: We have as many Democrats appointed that they, hey, this is a good judge. Well, it’s a good judge because they’re good on social issues maybe, but they’re terrible on consumer issues. They’ll always. So those four things occurred, Citizens United came along and the people that were saying, look, this is what’s happening. You give them all this money and it’s game over.
Farron Cousins: It is. And we’ve seen that now for far too many years where anytime we sit here, we do stories talking about, oh, it’s a good piece of legislation. This would make a difference in your life. This would protect you from this kind of pollution or this kind of toxin, or put more money in your pocket. None of it ever comes to fruition and it’s because of these lobbyists. And what they’ve also found now is, well, okay, Washington DC we’ve pretty much broken it.
Mike Papantonio: Oh, totally.
Farron Cousins: But we’ve still got states that are trying to do things that we don’t like or we need them to do things we do like. So now they’re pumping more money into the states than ever before.
Mike Papantonio: Because you can get more done local.
Farron Cousins: Exactly. And they’ve broken DC to the point they say, okay, our work here is done.
Mike Papantonio: You bunch of morons. We can’t accomplish it. This is a nuance that you and I have talked about. It’s really a nuance to this story. When they can make social media reporters or whatever you want to call it, when they stop us from telling stories like this, it’s a home run. And you know what? They’re already trying to do that. The way that they’re buying up social media, the way they’re getting legislation that supports social media that makes independents like us go away. The other thing they’re doing is they’re attacking us, just straight out attack saying that we’re somehow harmful to democracy. That David Pakman and Sam Seder and TYT and Ring of Fire and Farron Balanced and this show, that this is all hurting democracy. And they actually have people out there that are attack dogs that have come after us. Right?
Farron Cousins: Yeah. And they’ve literally said it is a threat to democracy. That’s not an overstatement.
Mike Papantonio: For us to tell stories like this.
Farron Cousins: Right. And it’s a threat to corporations because we’re exposing the truth, but a threat to democracy, we’re the only folks out there actually working to save it. So.
Mike Papantonio: Doing our best. Kind of hands behind our back.
