News / Economic Divide

Growing corporate, union spending in US election campaigns

Friday, 27 March 2015 8:57 AM [ Last Update: Friday, 27 March 2015 8:57 AM ]

US Congress on Capitol Hill, Washington DC

Technically speaking, lobbying is a paid activity in which special interests hire well-connected professional advocates, often lawyers, to argue for specific legislation in decision-making bodies such as the US Congress.

Corporations and industry groups, labor unions, single-issue organizations spend billions of dollars each year to gain access to decision-makers in government.

Criticisms have particularly grown recently over indications that lobbying is already becoming an underground business given that lobbyists are found to use increasingly sophisticated strategies to obscure their activity.

Today, lobbying has specifically become popular to corporations that are suspected of reaping huge benefits as a result of this activity.

In 2014, the Democratic Senator from Nevada and the current Senate Minority Leader, Harry Reid, said at the Senate floor that the Koch brothers were trying to “buy the country.”

On this edition of the Economic Divide, we discuss the lobbying system in the United States, its current powerful players and the criticisms as well as the controversies surrounding it.

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