Homeless Barbies and Talibangelicals

Above is the Gwen Thompson doll, put out by Hasbro. Gwen is a formerly homeless girl – here is her backstory:

Gwen and her mother Janine fell on hard times when her father lost his job; they later lost the house as they were unable to keep up payments. Soon after, Gwen’s father left them and they became homeless the fall before the start of the book’s events. Initially, Gwen’s mother has them live in their car until the winter comes; she then takes them to Sunrise House, a place for homeless women and children. Sunrise House helps them get on their feet and eventually get a new apartment.

The doll retails for $95. Hasbro will be taking all the profits it makes on the Gwen Thompson line and donating them to various homeless shelters and causes.

That last paragraph contains two statements, one of which is false. Guess which.

Also, this is worth repeating, as it is so damned clever. The leadership of the Christian Right in this country shall henceforth be known as ….. the Talibangelists.

Gasping for air

There isn’t much left of journalism in the United States – there are still those who chronicle events, noting that party A said this, while party B countered with this. But there are very few left who carry forward the trade of an aging Seymour Hersh – to find out what powerful people are doing, and report back to us.

Hersh is regularly derided on high for his work. I suspect he is even used by the powerful as a source from which false rumors can be floated and misinformation spread. But his instincts are good, and the craft that he practices, journalism, is an honorable one.

So, as we polarize into various blogging spheres and news sources of choice, it doesn’t hurt to lament about what journalism should be, how it was once practiced, and what it will someday be again.

Journalists these days measure their performance in terms of objectivity. If public official A says that for the sake of science and future scientists, evolution and biology ought to be taught, in our schools, the news story must also cite source B, who says that creationism is a valid scientific pursuit that ought to be taught. That source B is full of it and knee deep in mythology – no objective journalist would say such a thing. That would be unprofessional.

Journalists who weigh in on the worthiness of one position over another can be excoriated for lack of professionalism. Some are allowed to write opinion pieces, clearly labeled as such, as finally having their say, properly placed on the opinion page or clearly labeled as such. But most carp to the he-said-she-said mode, and keep their opinions to themselves.

It’s a tough way to live. I see the result most clearly in television journalism, where we get airheads in suits weighing in with gravitas on the important issues of the day, blithely repeating what powerful people say, sometimes giving both sides if both sides are considered worthy. “Democrat A says such and such, and Republican B says something opposite! We’ll have them both on Sunday, because we are balanced.”

Rarely is a progressive voice heard, never a Chomsky or Finkelstein, regardless of credentials. Oddly, right wing sources, like Coulter and Buchanan, Will and Malkin and Noonan seem to have ample exposure. Ed Abbey wondered about similar circumstances in his time in his essay “The Writer’s Credo”:

Like Huckleberry Finn, the American writer must make the choice, sooner or later, between serving the powerful few or the disorganized many, the institutions of domination or the spontaneous, instinctive, natural drive for human liberation. The choice is not so easy as my loaded phrases make it seem: to serve the powerful leads to financial rewards, public approval and official honors, your picture on the cover of Time or Newsweek (or Pravda or Izvestia) and the eventual invitation to the White House (or Kremlin) dinner; to oppose the powerful creates difficulties, subjects you to abuse and scorn, leads often -as in the interesting case of Noam Chomsky, for example – to what we call the silent treatment in the literary press: your books are not reviewed; your views and reviews no longer appear in the New York Times or New York Review of Books.

The choice professional journalists face is not one I envy. It’s not unlike that faced by the meek accountants of Enron – to go along or to go elsewhere. The choice is to square off with power, or to make a living and perform a craft. Most choose to have a life. They thereby internalize the contradictions, and live in cognitive dissonance. It is so ….. American.

Journalist Chris Hedges talked about this in and interview with Bob McChesney recently (link here, scroll down to August 30, 2009):

The whole notion of objectivity … is one that very rarely works. I suppose a very narrow kind of reporting where there are clearly two discernible sides, which almost never happens, possibly. But it’s a disaster when you’re reporting on those who are being silenced or oppressed, and the oppressor, because you elevate the oppressor to the same moral level as the oppressed.

Objectivity, by the way, was created at the end of nineteenth century by newspaper owners who previously had taken strong positions or advocated for the rights within their communities as a way of attracting advertisers across the political spectrum. And essentially what they did was wash their hands of moral responsibility.

So if you look at the way, for instance, the New York Times covered lynching in the South, and I think roughly between 1870 and 1920, about four thousand African Americans were burned, beaten, mutilated, hung – the Times, to give balance, would say it was mob violence. But these African American men prey on white women, and they rape white women.

Well it turns out we know that this is completely untrue, that these were fabricated charges. And so the paper, in its editorials, would write not about public lynching but the proclivity – and this is an actual quote – the proclivity of Negros to prey on white women is also a crime and a capital crime and so the state should carry out the punishment, i.e., the state should do the lynching.

OK, that’s balance. Look at the coverage of the Palestinians, where in a recent story in the New York Times, the reporters went into a village that had been decimated by the Israelis in the twenty-two day bombing off Gaza, the assault on Gaza, and quoted eyewitnesses who were there and who had suffered. And every other paragraph as an Israeli spokesman who hadn’t been there refuting it and making charges like – well, you know Hamas uses children as human shields and all this kind of stuff.

In essence, it’s just an updated version of the lynching. the Palestinians have just become “the new Negros”.

You see it in the health care debate. The parameters by which objectivity are defined are ones that often exclude, usually almost always exclude – the powerless, those who don’t have the kind of money to advertise like the pharmaceuticals and the for-profit health care industry.

But those doctors and patients who suffer at the hands of these institutions quite literally make their money off of human suffering and deaths. 20,000 Americans in this country died last year because they couldn’t afford proper medical care.

So objectivity is a creed that was created by newspaper publishers and owners to make money, worked quite effectively to make money. It often crippled effective journalism. The great journalists of the south were not the people Alex Jones [referring to Jones’ book “Losing the News: The Future of the News That Feeds Democracy”] holds up at his family newspaper, but the abolitionists and those who were printing these sort of underground sheets which, in the South during slavery, could be punishable by death. Very courageous figures, but of course they couldn’t make money. But they practiced real journalism.

Hedges covered conflicts in the Middle East, unescorted and boots on the ground, and once reported (in Harpers I believe – the piece has long since been taken down) that he had personally witnessed Israeli soldiers shooting Palestinian children, “for sport”. Unprofessional. He should have gotten an opinion from a highly placed Israeli official saying that the “children” were really just human shields.

And so we have American journalism, obsequious to power, self-adulatory and self-important. They give more awards to one another than at a grade school track meet. The meeker the journalist, the greater the honor bestowed upon them by the powerful. To project gravitas while lying, look credible while groveling … Walter Cronkite, Tim Russert, Tom Brokaw – great journalists in the American tradition.

Abbey:

What is both necessary and sufficient …is to have faith in the evidence of your senses and in your common sense. To be true to your innate sense of justice…”

To be free. To do more than gasp for air and survive in a profession that demands submission. To be more than David Barsamian’s phrase and book title, “Stenographers to Power”.

Fun in Randville

Some things seem so basic that I am surprised that I appear to be speaking “gibberish” to others. Maybe that’s why there’s a disconnect between me and the world.

An example is this notion of the “dialectic”. In philosophy it gets quite complicated, and I am not of that bent. I leave that to better minds. But in common parlance, it was put forth by Ayn Rand: Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.

So, for example, take the common right wing assertion that the American news media is “liberal”.

Then examine the underlying premises: The media is a unified entity > the force behind the media makes it espouse ideological views while pretending to be objective > that force is a liberal force.

Examine the contradiction: The major outlets for American news are owned by large profit-seeking corporations > the owners control huge chunks of wealth and desire to conserve it > the “owning class” could best be called “conservative”.

So what they are saying is that conservatives give us a liberal media. A contradiction.

What are the possibilities? Either end of the contradiction could be true or false. Perhaps the media isn’t liberal at all, but appears that way from the far right end of the spectrum. Perhaps the owning class isn’t conservative at all, but merely comprised of profit seekers. Perhaps the owning class is comprised of mostly liberal minds.

But the most intriguing possibility of all is that both ends of the contradiction are true – yes, conservatives own the media, and yes, the media is liberal.

Where does that lead?

This, from rather long comment stream at Electric City Weblog following a post by Dave Budge: Pain Update:

MT: Regulated capitalism produces more freedom than unregulated capitalism. It’s a contradiction. Everything contains contradiction. There are no pure philosophies that do not in some way force a yielding of principle to attain better results. This is where libertarians go wrong.

Steve: “Regulated capitalism produces more freedom than unregulated capitalism.” Up is down, black is white, war is peace, . . . How perfectly Orwellian.

MT: It’s an essential fact of life , Steve, seen even by Rand. We attain enlightenment by confronting contradictions. Deal with it.

Budge: I guess I have to brush up on my gibberish. It’s one thing to confront contradictions but quite another to espouse them as “truth.”

Round and round we go. Most blog discourse is pointless: We start with out conclusions, Google, find evidence that reinforces the conclusion, rinse and repeat. We accomplish exactly nothing. Better to confront contradiction. It’s not only useful – it’s fun.

So then, someone explain to me: Why does a conservative ownership give us a liberal media?

Food, Inc.

We saw Food, Inc. the other night. We left not wanting food of any kind. But that was no surprise. People had warned us that the movie would sap our appetites.

The movie was not widely seen – we lived in Bozeman when it came out, and it never graced the local theater. We saw it here in Boulder on the local campus as part of an International Film Festival.

Anyway, what can we say about slaughtering cows and pigs and chickens? It has to be done, and done on a massive scale to feed 330 million people. It’s not pretty.

What can be said about NAFTA? The union members who once worked the packing plants have been supplanted by low-wage workers? That is including millions of Mexican corn growers driven out of business by cheap subsidized American corn? Thanks, Bill Clinton. We’d be better off had you stuck to cigars and other preoccupations.

What can be said about high fructose corn syrup? It’s subsidized, it’s cheap, and is at the center of our obesity and Type II diabetes epidemic. (Most people in movie, other than Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation, were notably overweight).

Food, Inc. is about all of that, for sure. It is about a wide range of subjects, including the inhumane treatment of animals. Growers keep them confined, not even allowing chickens to enjoy a ray of sunshine during their 49 day life. Cattle are fed corn when their evolutionary path made them grass eaters. Harmful bacteria grow in the bellies of corn-fed cows – a diet of grass for a few days before slaughter would kill 80% of this bacteria, according to Pollan.

But that’s not cost-efficient. Instead, meat producers load the corn mash with antibiotics. The bacteria have grown tougher, and disaster in the food supply chain looms. E. coli outbreaks are common in this century, and Pollan thinks that worse, much worse is yet to come.

I left the movie depressed, feeling helpless. It wasn’t about the cows who can’t graze or chickens who never get to move around or even see light or pigs who never get to root or enjoy being pigs. It wasn’t about loss of good-paying union jobs or wild immigration.

It was about oppression – concentrated corporate power that cannot be dislodged. Just a few corporations now control most of our food supply – ConAgra, Monsanto, Cargill, and IBP. They behave as all people behave when given monopoly power – they clamp down, squeeze, push, take everything the can. They have armies of lawyers fighting for them at every turn, and their executives swarm in and out of government, usually ending up regulating themselves.

That is the nature of “public service” in America. It’s all about self interest.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was once an attorney who worked for Monsanto. Later he wrote the majority opinion in the Pioneer Hi-Bred International v. J.E.M Ag Supply case, which upheld lower court decisions allowing large agricultural companies to patent seed strains. The film intimates that Thomas was rewarding a former employer, but that’s not likely. It is simply part of the mindset of right wingers that government should not involve itself in the affairs of commerce … that things usually work out for the best.

Here’s how it worked out for Monsanto and soybeans: Monsanto patented a strain of seed that is “Roundup ready” – that is, that it is not affected by Roundup, Monsanto’s pesticide. At the time of the patent, Monsanto seeds comprised about 2% of the U.S. domestic market. It is now over 90%.

Monsanto does not force farmers to buy its seed, and makes it available through many other companies (but profits from every Roundup Ready seed sold). Here’s the catch – because it was allowed to patent the seed, Monsanto requires that anyone who uses that seed buy new supplies from Monsanto every year. This, in effect, outlaws the common practice of “seed cleaning”, whereby farmers set aside a portion of each year’s crop for planting the following year.

This requirement has set in motion onerous enforcement mechanisms, and Monsanto has a team of undercover spies roaming the country to make sure that farmers are not reusing seed. The result is a regime of oppression, farmers spying on each other, costly lawsuits, and in the end, castration and submission to power. Monsanto now owns the soybean crop.

Monsanto, of course, treats this all as normal, and defends its activities as legal, which of course, they are. But when corporations have the power to make their own laws, operating within the law is quite easy. Farmers, on the other hand, have no choice but comply or be put out of business.

Monsanto defends itself here.

The film makes one claim that the company did not address, however. It’s “GMO” (“genetically modified organisms”) seeds spread naturally – it is impossible for farmers who do not use them to keep them out of their fields. Monsanto has sued farmers whose fields have been involuntarily infected with their product, forcing them to stop seed cleaning, and forcing them under the regime.

No surprises here, and I do not have anything against Monsanto. It is merely behaving as power behaves, which is why we used to regulate power. The problem in part is the legal concept that allows patenting of of essential elements of our food supply, like soybeans. It’s an aberration, a departure from normal practice in American history.

Most agricultural research was once done at our land grant colleges, and scientific advances that came about were made freely available to everyone. Research was a public domain, and we all benefited. It was a free society.

Land grant colleges still do publicly funded research, and still leave all their advances in the public domain. But more and more corporations are funding university research and patenting the results for private use. Corporate oppression has invaded the colleges.

The real bottom line is something far afield from the mistreatment of animals, secrecy and oppression. It is the lack of enforcement of our antitrust laws. Monsanto has too much power. Too much of our food supply is in the hands of too few companies. Farmers have become serfs on their own land, and patent law, as it stands, acts against the public interest by allowing monopolistic practices to flourish.

And that’s why I walked away from the movie depressed – there is so much concentrated power now in the corporate sector, so much corporate control of government, that it is unlikely anything will be done until we have some catastrophe to reawaken the public. The beast will not soon be put back in its cage.

In the meantime, eat organic food, avoid high fructose corn syrup. Avoid fast food. Avoid monopolies and oligopolies. (That’s humor – by definition, we cannot avoid them.)

And by all means shop at Whole Foods or Wild Oats, two organic food outlets. They are in healthy competition with one another, forcing prices down.

Oh, wait. Hold on. Whole Foods bought out Wild Oats. The merger was approved by the FTC. Never mind.

Shop farmers markets – while they are there. Soon they will too be outlawed.

PBS goes all Baucusy on us …

Public broadcasting took a hard shot on the integrity-chin the day they took their first corporate dollar.

National Public Radio has a founding charter that says its mission is to “serve groups whose voices would otherwise go unheard.” What a joke that is, unless those unheard voices belong to people with car problems, investors, people who like word games, or fans of the fluffy interview. I think of NPR as being just like ABC, but with better production values. (How many interviews have you heard on NPR with gurgling brooks or birds singing in the background?)

Back in the 1990’s, NPR did some good investigative work on the Archer Daniels Midland lysine scandal so well covered in the current movie The Informant. ADM did the logical thing – it started giving NPR money. End of problem.

Public Broadcasting System is to TV what NPR is to radio. It is mostly an investors’ network where Ken Burns gets to try out his stuff. They have done some good work in the past, and Bill Moyers has had slot there, and the Frontline show was once a solid investigative program.

T.R. Reid is a documentary film maker who did a show called Sick Around the World that took a close look at health care systems in France, The U.K., Japan and Taiwan. Frontline asked for a follow-up, and Reid made Sick Around America.

But if you watched the Frontline show on PBS, nowhere in the credits will you see T.R. Reid’s name. He pulled out and split with Frontline before it aired.

The reason: Reid noticed that other countries that have successful universal health care systems have outlawed for-profit insurance for basic care. Frontline would not let him air that fact.

Since that was pretty much the whole thrust of the documentary, that for-profit health insurance is at the heart of our problem, Reid decided that he could not be associated with it, nor ever again with Frontline.

Russell Mokhiber writes about this at Counterpunch. Amazingly, PBS went beyond merely undermininig Reid’s message. They completely contradicted it, airing instead the following interview with Karen Ignagni, president of America’s Health Insurance Plans, the lead health insurance lobby in the United States.

Moderator: Other developed countries guarantee coverage for everyone. We asked Karen Ignagni why it can’t work here.

Karen Ignagni: Well, it would work if we did what other countries do, which is have a mandate that everybody participate. And if everybody is in, it’s quite reasonable to ask our industry to do guarantee issue, to get everybody in. So, the answer to your question is we can, and the public here will have to agree to do what the public in other countries have done, which is a consensus that everybody should be in.

Moderator: That’s what other developed countries do. They make insurers cover everyone, and they make all citizens buy insurance. And the poor are subsidized.

No mention of outlawing for-profit insurance everywhere else in the world – instead, and American health insurance lobbyist pushing what would months later become the Baucus plan – mandated coverage without a public option.

The United States is badly in need of a public health care system, and a public broadcasting outlet, one that “serve groups whose voices would otherwise go unheard.”

Wisdom vs knoweldge

This is a great exchange, from the Wall Street Journal on line (of all places) regarding the place of religion in our lives.

You can’t make people who don’t “believe” into believers. But there is something more to it than that. There is something there that “believers” who have gotten beyond virgin births and resurrections realize: We make our rules for ourselves. But if we do not look beyond ourselves, if we do not vest authority in something higher than ourselves, then we have no rebuttal to those who say that only the strongest shall survive.

In other words, we need something bigger than us. If it is just us, then we are no more than wolves.

Richard Dawkins has his appeal. He routinely smunches creationists with his background in biology, his erudite speaking manner, his inquisitive nature. No doubt he is right. There is no God, at least not one that we can discern with our limited abilities.

And yet, he has come to annoy me. He doesn’t respect his opposites. He doesn’t see their wisdom, even if they do not understand the evolutionary path we are on. They know nothing of the science of biology, and yet they know more than him.

It’s a question of wisdom. Not knowledge.

On pacifism and self-interest

I’ve been reading Reinhold Niebuhr for a while now – actually, I finished a collection of his essays, The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr, some time ago. My habit is to to use little 3M flags to highlight interesting passages of a book as I read it, and then later to transcribe those passages into quotation files on my computer. I may never look at them again, but there is something about typing out the words that allows them to penetrate deeper into my conscious brain. Such as it is.

Anyway, my late Friday afternoon is that process, and I realized as I typed that Niebuhr had in two short paragraphs very effectively dealt with a passion of the left, pacifism, and one of the right, the sanctity of self-interest.

To wit, pacifism:

It was inevitable that this [the scene at the cross] ultimate illumination should be mistaken again and again in human history for proximate forms of moral illumination and thus lead to pacifist illusions. According to such interpretations, the goodness of Christ is a powerless goodness which can by emulated by the mere disavowal of power. In such interpretations the tragic culmination of the cross is obscured. It is assumed that powerless goodness achieves the spiritual influence to overcome all forms of evil clothed with other than spiritual forms of power. It is made an instrument of one historical cause in conflict with other historical causes. It becomes a tool of an interested position in society; and a bogus promise of historical success is given to it. Powerless goodness ends upon the cross. It gives no certainty of victory to comparatively righteous causes in conflict with comparatively unrighteous ones. It can only throw divine illumination upon the whole meaning of history and convict both the righteous and unrighteous in their struggles. Men may indeed emulate the powerless goodness of Christ; and some of his followers ought indeed to do so. But they ought to know what they are doing. They are not able by this strategy to guarantee a victory for any historical cause, however comparatively virtuous. They can only set up a sign and symbol of the Kingdom of God, of a Kingdom of perfect righteousness and peace which transcends all of the struggles of history.

I suppose conservatives and libertarians will say that they embrace the following words, but my impression is that they believe that there are no bounds to the fruitful rewards of unregulated self interest.

In this country, and in spite of all our weaknesses, our pride and pretensions, certainly there is life. Our national life is based on the vitality of various interests balanced by various other interests. This is the heart of the free enterprise doctrine. These self-interests are not nearly as harmless as our conservative friends imagine them to be. Here we have to violate the parable, and provisionally make judgments and say, “This form of self-interest must be checked.” Or, “This form of self-interest must be balanced by other interest.” Otherwise we will not have justice if the powerful man simply goes after his interest at the expense of the weak.

Finally, a word for both sides – what goes around comes around:

Must we not say to the rich and secure classes of society that their vaunted devotion to the laws and structures of society which guarantees their privileges is tainted with self-interest? And must we not say to the poor that their dream of a propertyless society is perfect justice turns into a nightmare of new injustice because it is based only upon the recognition of the sin which the other commits and knows nothing of the sin which the poor man commits when he is no longer poor but has become a commissar?

To Rusty with love

In the comments below a post down below, 30,000 angry, suggestible victims, Swede links us to a photograph and an inspirational quote by Sam Adams very similar to one by Margaret Mead.

I suggested to Swede that he had linked to a faked photo of the 9/12-13 Teabagger protest in Washington. Right wing media all over the country misreported the attendance, and circulated a photograph at least ten years old claiming it was of the event. Their objective in saying there were two million there (when it was more like 20-30,000) was apparently to beat the attendance at the Obama inauguration.

That they can get away with shit like that in the age of Twitter and security cameras everywhere is a demonstration of the power of the right wing media.

Anyway, Rusty Shackleford asked if I could offer evidence that the photo was a fake. He could do it himself, I suppose. I wondered how he could miss something so widely covered on the Internet, but then realized that right wingers really, honestly, stay queued in their little domains.

Anyway, Rusty, the photo was exposed by a web site called Politifact. It’s pretty much foolproof – a building that was constructed in the last ten years, the National Museum of the American Indian, is absent in the photo given us by Swede. According to Politifact, the purported Teabagger photo is actually one of a 1997 gathering of the Promisekeepers.

That too is troubling.

Anyway, this is well-covered and all over the place. I’m just putting this up for Rusty’s benefit.

American journalism at its best …

From the New York Times, March 17, 1968:

The operation is another American offensive to clear enemy pockets still threatening the cities. While two companies of United States soldiers moved in on the enemy force from two sides, heavy artillery barrages and armed helicopters were called in to pound the North Vietnamese soldiers.

Quoting one participant, a Colonel Frank Barker,

The combat assault went like clockwork. We had two entire companies on the ground in less than an hour.

That was My Lai, by the way, that they were journalizing about.

Lest we think things have changed, during the invasion of Iraq, seventeen marines died in friendly fire in one incident – a PR disaster. The Pentagon searched around for a cover story, a diversion for the leashed media, a doggy bone to toss to them to keep them away from a real story.

The result: The Ballad of Jessica Lynch.

A right wing dichotomy

I am still mouth-agape as I peruse the comments following Rob Natelson’s post yesterday at Electric City Weblog, Using Your Money Against You. It brings out in the open one of the major defects in right wing thinking. It is a false dichotomy – there is us (dissipated citizenry), and them (government). Here’s Natelson:

The outrageous practice of using taxpayer money to lobby ought to be illegal in Montana, as it often is elsewhere. If public officials think a subject is so important they want to lobby on it, they should have to do what everyone else does – visit Helena at their own expense or take up a collection from like-minded people to finance the trip.

The dichotomy is further delineated in the comments. Gregg:

it frankly pisses me off that I have to take virtually a whole day off to go give my 10 minute blurb to a yawning committee, while the regulatory folks camp out with our legislators all day, propose language for the bills, and talk with them before and after hearings…all on our nickel. It’s supposed to be government for the people, not government for the bureaucrats.

Gregg, independent citizen-lobbyist. Gregg’s elected local government representatives: Bureaucrats.

A commenter, Ken Thorton, introduces the 800 pound gorilla

… that would be the special interest, industrial and the like private lobbyists.

Enter Dave Budge, Natelson sympathizer in this thread and candidate extraordinaire for the disjointed train of thought award:

Limit lobbyists … which part of the 1st Amendment do you what to throw out next?

Got that? Private industry lobbying is a protected first amendment right. Lobbying by elected officials is “using your money against you.”

Budge further adds

There’s no reason that citizens of any given municipality can’t band together to form a lobbying arm to go vent their spleens. But I don’t think you can ask anyone else to pay for it since lobbying our representatives locally can be done with a phone call or a letter…

This is right wing thought on parade, replete with disjointed suppositions and cognitive dissonance. Citizens of any given municipality have already banded together to form a lobbying arm. It’s called “local government.” For so long as those governments are elected by a majority of the citizenry, what they and their appointees and hires are doing in lobbying the legislature is called “representative government”. Corporate lobbyists are, or should be known as “special interests.-