The numbers are in, and lobbyists set a record last year by spending billions of dollars to make sure that corporations get everything they want from our elected leaders in Washington, D.C. . Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more. Link - https://www.nbcnews.com/investigations/lobbyists-spent-record-42-billion-2023-federal-lawmakers-rcna135943 Check out our merch by visiting our store: https://www.buyrof.com/ Subscribe to our podcast: http://www.ROFPodcast.com Become a member today!: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYWIEbibRcZav6xMLo9qWWw/join Support us by becoming a monthly patron on Patreon, and help keep progressive media alive!: https://www.patreon.com/TheRingofFire Spread the word! LIKE and SHARE this video or leave a comment to help direct attention to the stories that matter. And SUBSCRIBE to stay connected with Ring of Fire's video content! Support Ring of Fire by subscribing to our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/theringoffire Be sociable! Follow us on: Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/RingofFireRadio Twitter: https://twitter.com/RingofFireMedia Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ringoffirenetwork/ *This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos. The numbers are in, and lobbyists set a record last year by spending billions of dollars to make sure that corporations get everything they want from elected leaders in Washington. I've got Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins with me to talk about it. Gee, we've done so many of these stories over the year, but right now when it gets to $4.2 billion and you've got the Chamber of Commerce, who's one of the big people that are trying to, the more immigration so they can bring in people. If the worker cuts their arm off, we'll ship 'em back to Nicaragua or killing the possibilities of consumer lawsuits. Those are the two big things. They want to kill the right for a lawyer and a claimant to go into court and recover when a company has killed them with a bad product. That's really big up there. And CEO wages, buddy, they're spending a lot of money on making sure that CEO wages stay as high as possible. And last but not least, globalization. We want to globalize because we can have this work done less expensively in India, and we're gonna make more money. It's gonna put American workers outta work. But this is, those are the types of things we're looking at here, right? Yeah, absolutely. And it's interesting, when we think of lobbyists, we think of these people that go to DC to get these favors done to benefit them, but a lot of the work that lobbyists do is to make sure things don't happen. That's the big thing that people really have to understand. It's not that they want legislation to pass, it's mostly protecting the status quo. I mean, if you're a billionaire or if you're a CEO or if you're any kind of corporation in this country right now, things are great for you and they're getting better by the day. Like with the things you mentioned here, no regulations. And that's because they stop all that legislation. But they want to preserve that. They've gotta make sure that we don't get to pass more laws where instead of 10 pharmaceuticals we can negotiate prices on, maybe we get a hundred. So they stop any kind of progress. And it is these scumbags, I'll call them, because their job is to make. I'm good with that word. Their job is to make sure that everybody watching this, that your life doesn't get better. That is their goal in life. And they will spend, like you said, $4.2 billion in the last 12 months alone to make sure that you can't afford your prescription drugs. You can't put food on the table. You can't afford to buy a house or even rent a house. That's their job every day they go to work. And these legislators are out there with their hands, like a bunch of just disgusting, shameless punks taking all of the money. And you know what? You can't miss this. The Supreme Court knew exactly what they were doing with Citizens United. Okay. They were changing the balance of power. If you read kind of the, if you just read the petitions and the briefing that was done on Citizen United, here's what you see. The discussion was that first of all, the media is dead. Okay. There is no investigative journalists to protect consumers. That just doesn't happen anymore. Most of the time, the lawsuit that's brought starts the media. That's the first thing. The second thing was that there are no regulations anymore because corporations, the US Chamber of Commerce owns most of the regulators. And so that's the second thing that used to protect us. The third thing is that there was a balance of power on political influence until this level of money started coming in. Fourth thing, there used to be a balance with the judicial dominance. Okay. There wasn't judicial dominance where it was all corporate, and don't get me wrong, the corporate judges, it's not just Republican. ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faUJ5TeLJLI