Whoah – looks like our Congressional orientation had a lot more lobbyists than we thought. This is not okay. Lobbyists are not impartial – they are employed to influence legislation. 60+ incoming members were listening to panelists without knowing which were hired lobbyists. @Ocasio2018
The Harvard freshman orientation criticized by / featured at least 10 lobbyists & CEOs as panelists, according to a schedule of events One itinerary identifies these lobbyists as former members, not disclosing their lobbying gigs Jeff Stein in a
Washington Post article
The freshman orientation they are talking about was given by the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University which bills itself as
nationally recognized as the preeminent educational and preparatory program for newly elected Republican and Democratic Members of the House of Representatives. What it doesn’t say is that it is a collection of lobbyists trying to influence future legislation under the guise of education. I’ve said that we –
we being the Government of the United States – spend money where our national values are, but it is more complicated than that, we really spend money in areas that have the best Lobbyists. This year 211
defense companies paid $94,121,731 for 736 people to Lobby Congress for more war material and more war and, I suspect, several of them were at the Kennedy School of Government, giving advice (no wonder we are still fighting in Afghanistan and in the Middle East).
When Obama ran for president, he ran against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Hillary had voted for Iraq and the fact that Obama was on record as being against the war was one of the things that made him attractive to many Liberals. However, when he started going through the Presidential Orientation he was told by everybody, from the State Department to the generals, that it was a bad idea to pull out of Afghanistan at that time. The elections would be coming up in the fall and the experts all said that maintaining peace and order in the country was paramount, and, to do that, he had to leave the troops in the country. He went along with the experts and the wars continued, more people died, and, if anything, we became less safe. I have a theory about this that I call the
Unified Field Theory of the Outsider in which I postulate that Obama – and Bill Clinton – became president on the “Go along to get along plan” and were thereby preprogrammed to go along with the experts.
What is thrilling to me is that now, thanks to Ocasio-Cortez, I’m learning – not just me, actually, anybody who wants to listen – that some, if not all, of these experts, are not experts they are Lobbyists, posing as experts, pushing for their point of view, pushing for more war, more tax cuts.
I imagined how difficult it must have been for Obama to keep his beliefs in face of the onslaught from the Washington establishment who were saying, to quote the former CEO of Goldman Sachs, when he addressed the new members of Congress: “You guys are way over your head, you don’t know how the game is played.”. Obama was alone and there were experts everywhere, but Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are not alone, they have teamed up, they support each other Tweeting things like I am so incredibly proud of And I of you. Thank you for living out loud, for sparking a movement, inspiring a generation; leading the charge on a #GreenNewDeal as well as Tweeting about the depth of the swamp. It is exciting that the biggest agents for change seem to be four young women. They seem to be already starting to drain the swamp and they haven’t even taken office. Maybe the swamp will actually get drained after all.
Daily Reminder that anytime a conservative tries to lecture us about who “knows what they’re talking about” and who doesn’t, they are not operating honestly, and engaged in a project to protect their agenda and gaslight the nation. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez @Ocasio2018