How big $$$ corrupts: Who writes the trade agreements and legislation? Who serves in the admin.

[Skwmom]

It's not brain surgery to figure out how money has corrupted our government.

As was pointed out by a recent voter: You don't get that money for nothing.

Update: I was flipping through the channels last night and they were talking about brutal dictators that were invited to the AESN trade meeting in California. The interviewed someone (not sure if he was one of the dictators or just a member of their teams) but he said something about dictatorship and crony capitalism and corruption. As an American I was so proud.

[Jefferson23]

1. The Structure of Washington Lobbying Networks Mapping the Ties that Bind

Frank R. Baumgartner, Penn State University,
[e-mail]
Timothy M. La Pira, American University and the Center for Responsive Politics,
[e-mail] F. Thomas III, Penn State University, [e-mail]

Abstract

Making use of a newly collected data set consisting of the employment histories of a sample of
lobbyists registered under the Lobby Disclosure Act of 1995, we provide a comprehensive
analysis of the networks that connect Washington lobbyists to their former federal government
employers. For each of 1,717 lobbyists who have registered in any six-month reporting period
from 1998 to 2006, we have compiled a database including reference to each of their former
government and private sector employment positions, some 8,670 positions overall.

Additionally, these registered lobbyists can be linked to data on lobbying activities from 87,739
semiannual lobbying disclosure reports filed over the course of nine years. Lobbyists in the
data set previously held every conceivable policy-related government position, ranging from
members of Congress, White House political appointees, and cabinet secretaries to legislative
staff, obscure budget analysts, and regulatory attorneys. This new data set allows us to review
comprehensively the linkages connecting government offices and lobbyists, the largest statistical
treatment so far undertaken of the revolving door between public service and private interest
representation.

We assess the social network “centrality” of each government office, and of each lobbying firm /
employer. That is, for each entity, we assess the degree to which it has links with a large or a
small number of active participants in the system. This allows us to note which government
agencies provide the central locus for future lobbying work in the largest range (and greatest
number) of lobbying organizations, and which lobbying firms and clients have the most and the
broadest range of linkages with government agencies and congressional offices.

Of course, since the data are available for each six-month period from 1998 to 2006, we can
assess differences associated with shifts in partisan control of government, and we can
systematically investigate the differences in Democratic and Republican patterns of interaction
using measures of network density.

in full: https://www.unc.edu/~fbaum/papers/MPSA08_Baum_LaPira_Thomas.pdf