Some good info

Lots of good info in this conversation. Why congress is totally useless, who really has the power, when things changed, who changed things.

I appreciate people who start with reality. These guests don’t bother with the textbook crap about “legislation” and “branches” and “rights”. They simply talk about what happens in DC. Their overriding rule is: Politicians only want to stay in power. Politicians don’t care about any of the textbook crap, don’t want “rights” or “justice” or even war. They do what will keep them in power. Pure Parkinson.

Government ends up making nothing but tyranny and torture and war because those are the commercially valuable products. The payments for those products enable politicians to stay in office.

In earlier decades unions were also at the big power table, so politicians often served the needs of workers. Unions are no longer rich enough to keep politicians in office, so workers don’t exist.

One change that I hadn’t heard before: When Newt took over in ’94 he eliminated the ‘Study Groups’ in congress, which had served as relatively neutral technical staffs to assemble facts about reality. Members could resist lobbyists better by consulting these Study Groups. Newt eliminated the technical help and gave all the power to lobbyists, who at that time were mostly Repooflican. Now all rich fuckheads are D, so Newt’s “reform” ended up serving the other party.

Reminds me that the same thing happened with the Fairness Doctrine. When Reagan canceled the FD, it opened broadcasts to specifically party-based “news”, giving Fox and Rush a huge boost. Later on, the same big-money switch turned all media to pure D, so the loss of regulation ended up helping D.

Around :45 they discuss in fine detail a fact that I heard back in the ’90s, probably from Dick Morris. When you see ads or emails urging you to “Tell Senator Smith that SB95 is bad!”, the ads aren’t talking to you, and the ads don’t expect you to tell anyone anything. The ads are talking to Senator Smith’s staff, to persuade them that big interests hate SB95.

According to these folks, the relevant ad carriers now are Axios, Politico and Bloomberg. The staffs read the Tell Your Senator ads in these media and gather their sense of where the big money is pushing.