I didn’t watch The Real Housewives of DC the night before last, but it may have been playing in the background while I was trying to fall asleep. Besides hearing people Obama name drop often enough that you could make a college drinking game out of watching the show, I also noticed that lobbying was mentioned multiple times. I don’t really get how lobbying works, but I know that anyone (or I should say any entity) with a political agenda pretty much has to participate. For every interest there is a lobbying group, and some are far more powerful than others. Often this power goes against the public interest. U.S. PIRG is a non-profit federation of state Public Interest Research Groups that “stands up to powerful special interests on behalf of the American public, working to win concrete results for our health and our well-being.” They’re headquartered in Boston, MA; however, they have a Federal Advocacy Office in Washington, DC and state chapters all across the country. Oddly enough U.S. PIRG and its affiliates have chosen to fight lobbying and special interests by being a lobbying group. I understand that they’re fighting for the public interest, but that’s still a special interest, right?
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