A Quiet Corporate Coup - Instead of lobbying, lobbyists are now becoming congressional staff
A Quiet Corporate Coup on Capitol Hill
Instead of lobbying congressional staff, lobbyists are now becoming the staff.
By Jim Hightower
3/31/2015
...Few people realize that congressional staffers have gained far-reaching control over legislation. While the mass media has ignored this power shift, which further removes the people from the making of our laws, corporate lobbyists have long understood it and assiduously wooed staff members with flattery and gifts.
But then it dawned on lobbyists that instead of wooing staff, they should simply become the staff. So when Republicans took charge of the Senate in January, K Street lobbyists moved right into the Capitol Hill offices of the new corporate-hugging majority.
What a sight to see Tom Chapman, a former top lobbyist for US Airways, now sitting atop the legal staff of the Senate aviation panel that oversees — guess who? — US Airways.
And there’s Joel Leftwich, who pushed furiously to water down nutrition standards for school lunches as a senior lobbyist for Pepsico. Now he can do it directly as the new staff director for the Senate Agriculture Committee, which will re-write the school lunch funding law this year....
http://otherwords.org/a-quiet-corporate-coup-on-capitol-hill/
= new reply since forum marked as read
Sorry. It's raining. It's cold again after a beautiful warm day. My stomach hurts and I didn't get enough sleep. And it's all because of the Republicans and religious fanatics! 
a bit of goodness for your morning:
The state’s rightward lurch mobilized thousands, but the progressive movement behind Moral Mondays has deep, enduring roots.
That synthesis is working in North Carolina. The Moral Monday movement has brought tens of thousands of people into the streets and offered them a way to express their values so that elected officials are forced to take notice. And the majority of those participants would not have identified themselves as being part of any political movement prior to the last few years, Barber says. He points to further evidence of the movement’s effectiveness: the crowds in Raleigh are multiracial but predominantly white. When Barber visits a western part of the state—like Mitchell County, which is more than 60 percent Republican and 97 percent white—the residents come out to see him in droves, drawn by the movement’s inclusive message. Moral Mondays and the Forward Together movement are not only multiracial and intergenerational; they also don’t just involve the usual suspects—and that’s helped attract massive media coverage, Barber says. “The history of the white ‘Southern strategy’ is to keep people divided,” he adds. “This movement directly challenges that.”
http://www.thenation.com/article/180491/how-moral-mondays-fusion-coalition-taking-north-carolina-back?page=0,1
or people who hate politics, or it's all Obama's fault people?? You can't talk to them. It's so d*mn frustrating. 
its time to nationalize the banks, this cuts the powerful off at the knees, this is why they are out attacking CFPB and this is why we have so called staffers in office of Congressional members wring there collective hands on how to screw everyone except themselves.
Call me crazy, but I think we need to think outside the box.
The CFPB is to protect us from how they fine print borrowing to the consumer, they are in essence lending us our own money out of the U.S. Treasury, that they borrow from us to have a business, this is how they get political power off the interests of our money they lend to us.
Why not have language on the contract that all interests and such will not be used to pay for lobbyists and legislation to invalidate the consumer protection clauses from nefarious actions by the firm using our money like ALEC or any other oligarchic special interest.
This agency if I remember correctly has the power to insert language into fees and such without asking Congress, this alone if done correctly would in the long term go after campaign funds from these banks and the Wall Street Ponzi schemes, the FEC and the SEC are doing basically nothing and it will and can attack Citizen United, by using the agency as a end run around the U.S. Supreme Court and the corporate interests of that "corporations are people to my friend" mentality, take the money away from them.
Then these jerks that are on the staff using there ALEC spreadsheets would have no power to further the Congressional corruption, there is a law that a elected official has to wait to become a lobbyist (but that is a joke unto its own self) but not a businessman or woman.
They are always devising schemes to rip us off and get more power why not use what we have the WARREN model of the CPFB to attack them-----or am I just crazy
Thanks for a most important post.
(to say the least).
