K Street goes local…
Joe Costello notes that “the DC lobbying industry is reaching out to state and local governments, bypassing elected officials” in Our Corrupted Politics.
He quotes a recent NY Times article:
The news that the Washington lobbying industry is rapidly extending its tentacles into cities, towns and school districts across the country should be an outright embarrassment to Congress. Elected lawmakers — not high-paid lobbyists — are supposed to be best attuned to meeting the needs of their localities. And localities are biting, having seen the sorry evidence that lawmakers tend to deliver earmarks more readily for Beltway lobbyists than for hometown nobodies.
The NYT article is here.
It appears the lobbying industry is consolidating its position as the sole arbiter of input from the nation to Congress. I’ve borrowed a couple of slides from Debugging Democracy, and marked them up to illustrate:
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