> In the US, lobbying is constitutionally protected, without which citizens would have no guaranteed way to communicate with elected officials.
Yet de-facto in the day-to-day it is not you-and-me average citizens lobbying at the highest level but HugeCorps because they have the connections and means to pay the right lobbyists that actual average citizens could never afford...
And the very word itself already has a bad connotation. It is not "democratizing" or "participating", it is "lobbying" and nobody associates a positive, generally beneficial democratic process with that.
Yet de-facto in the day-to-day it is not you-and-me average citizens lobbying at the highest level but HugeCorps because they have the connections and means to pay the right lobbyists that actual average citizens could never afford...
And the very word itself already has a bad connotation. It is not "democratizing" or "participating", it is "lobbying" and nobody associates a positive, generally beneficial democratic process with that.