Kabuki Democracy: Why a Progressive Presidency Is Impossible, for Now

Kabuki Democracy: Why a Progressive Presidency Is Impossible, for Now"Of course when attempting to determine why the people's will is so frequently frustrated in our system, any author would be remiss if he did not turn first and foremost to the power of money. The nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics calculated that approximately $3.47 billion was spent lobbying the federal government in 2009, up from $3.3 billion the previous year. By the final quarter of the year, lobbies were handing out $20 million a day. The most generous spreaders of wealth were in the pharmaceutical and health products industries, whose $266.8 million set a record for "the greatest amount ever spent on lobbying efforts by a single industry for one year" according to CRP. At one point, PhRMA employed forty-eight lobbying firms, in addition to in-house lobbyists, with a total of 165 people overall, according to the Sunlight Foundation's Paul Blumenthal."