HeyBub wrote:

That's a separate issue. Politicians need two things to stay in
office: votes and money. The money supplied by the "special
interests" offset the cries of the easily manipulated unwashed masses.

It's a balancing act. Sometimes the mob prevails, sometimes those who
are most affected win.

"The mob," that's cute, you're really not all that impressed by the whole
democracy thing, are you. That view is usually held by those who assume
that in the good old days they would have been among the patrician class, it
never seems to cross their minds that they might have been piling muck in a
bog with their bare hands while yelling, "Help! Help! I'm being repressed!"

Lobbyists are good. Do you really want the electorate to decide the
railway tariff for unrendered yak-fat? Or do you want the railroads
and the yak wranglers to have input?

I don't want the final decision to rest on how much the yak-fat cartel
contributs to the campaign funds of key legislators, which is often the way
it is now. The banking industry spend three hundred million lobbying for
deregulation in the mid-90s, they got what they wanted and then indulged in
an orgy of greed and incompetence which has put all of us in trouble.
Lobbyists need to be kept on a short leash, and fat chance of either party
ever agreeing to that.