Working families are worried about affordable health care, public education, and earning enough to get ahead. Our people should know that Frankfort is working to solve the challenges they're facing - not furthering the self-interests of lobbyists and insiders.
Unless I can come in in the morning and smile, walk in the lobby and say, 'Good morning!' - if I am stressed - I am not going to do a good job. Everybody is watching us. They are feeding off of our energy.
I'm in favor of inequality if it comes about from people making great innovations that make us all better off. And I think those people deserve to be rich. But the people who get rich by lobbying the Congress to give them special protections that come out of the hides of the workers seems to be a bad idea.
Businesses have moved from doing business to doing lobbying, and I think that's a very bad thing.
I cannot conceive of circumstances where Labour MPs are marshalled to go through the lobby to vote against us staying in the single market and customs union with the likes of Jacob Rees Mogg, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove.
The quicker we get rid of the lobby system the better for all of us. I don't think in this day and age it is tenable to have these nods and winks, and on-the-record and off-the-record briefings.
Far too many businesses have been all too eager to lobby for maintaining and increasing subsidies and mandates paid by taxpayers and consumers.
For years, Republicans have effectively outsourced their thought leadership to the loudmouths at the end of the bar. But perhaps the most extreme example of that trend has been the issue of guns, where the party has ceded control to a gun lobby that has built its brand on absolutism.
The need to do something about global warming is obvious. And it's also pretty clear that the public understands the need for change and is ready to embrace it. What is missing is political will in Congress to stand up to the powerful energy companies and their well-paid lobbyists.
Certainly, my advice is that communicating, lobbying, fundraising and engaging the public in policy and politics is far more exciting and inexpensive via the Internet. Old guard organizations like Common Cause had to evolve to embrace this new environment.
