Lobbyists are just paid representatives of the people. I rather like the thought that the people actually have access to a politician.
If you have a problem with lobbyists, then support smaller government. The less government intrudes in our lives the less need we have for lobbyists.
What's unique about democracy is that it's the only form of governance in the 6000 year history of modern civilization in which the power, authority, and credibility of government is derived from its citizens, and from its citizens alone.
In feudal states, people with the greatest wealth own the apparatus of governance and hold absolute control over the lives of average people.
Three years before the Declaration of Independence, in 1773, the East India Company lobbied the King and Parliament into reducing the Company's tax on tea and giving them an Enron-style multi-million-dollar tax rebate. Thus the East India Company could sell their tea and other products in the Americas at prices that undercut and threatened to drive out of business tens of thousands of colonial entrepreneurs.
So America rose up against the world's largest and most powerful multinational corporation and ejected it from the Americas at the Boston Tea Party.
So the British Parliament reacted with the Boston Port Act, which taxed the citizens of Boston more than a million dollars (in today's money) to repay the East India Company.
So basically a single corporation was able to change a nation's tax laws to its benefit without the people having a say in the matter? That's taxation without representation, and led us to the American Revolution.
To America's Founders, democracy meant that a government drew its power and legitimacy from its citizens, and must be responsive solely to its citizens, and not to any other institution.
So long as our Supreme Court continues to assert that non-voting corporations are "persons" entitled to Bill of Rights protections, including the right to participate in politics alongside voting citizens, we will continue to move further from the Founder's vision of a true republican democracy. We are moving more towards feudalism, and it is happening all over the world, not just in America.
A handful of megacorporations and their lobbyists are democracy, corrupting our political processes, and wiping out local businesspeople and putting free enterprise at risk along with the democracy it once nurtured.
Stripping personhood from corporations, a return to the policies of our Founders, will open the door to truly reforming our electoral process, putting it back into the hands of the people, and make it possible to return to our airwaves the voices of politicians who haven't sold their souls to corporations for funds to buy advertising. This can be done by bringing back public service and public debate programming requirements, a ban on corporate money in politics and elections (they can't vote, the Founders said, so why are they involved in politics?), and putting in place instant runoff voting (IRV) to widen the political spectrum.
With these steps, We, The People, can bring about a revitalization of democracy in America, and reverse our current slide into banana republic neofeudalism.
Really.
