Richard Barnes reports..
Lobbying is the scourge of the Australian body politic. Described by the eminent retired public servant and publisher John Menadue as “pervasive and insidious” and here at Michael West Media as a toxic and powerful influence over democracy, it is now coming under political purview via an inquiry by the Senate into lobbyist access to Parliament House.
olddogthoughts 
Maximizing profits by risking the health or lives of product consumers will likely always be a significant part of the nature of the big business beast.
Unfortunately, much of the Western world is governed within a virtual corp-ocracy. Yet, none of the highly corporatized mainstream news-media, very much including the neo-liberal New York Times and Washington Post, dare describe it as such, thus so very little of society realizes it. With Canada’s virtual corp-ocracy, it’s enabling the biggest of businesses get unaccountably even bigger, defying the very spirit of government rules established to ensure healthy competition by limiting mass consolidation.
As it is, corporate lobbyists actually write bills for our (Canada’s) governing representatives to vote for and have implemented, supposedly to save the elected officials their own time. I believe the practice has become so systematic here that those who are aware of it (e.g. mainstream news-media political writers) don’t bother covering it.
Meanwhile, powerful business interests can, and sometimes do, debilitate our high-level elected officials through implicit or explicit threats to transfer or eliminate jobs and capital investment, thus economic stability, if corporate ‘requests’ aren’t accommodated. It’s a political crippling that’s worsened by a blaring news-media that’s permitted to be naturally critical of incumbent governments, especially in regards to job and capital transfers and economic weakening. …
In America’s case, any president who, quite unlike Trump, seriously tried implementing truly humane, progressive policies — notably universal single-payer healthcare, a significant reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions, military spending, a genuine anti-war effort, and increasing the minimum wage while also reigning in Wall Street abuse/corruption [etcetera] — would likely be assassinated. Bernie Sanders as president comes to my mind as a good example of this.
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