OVERLOADING THE MINDS OF POLICYMAKERS

                 “He [Lee Drutman] shows persuasively how big spending

                 on lobbying has changed the legislative environment to favor
rich corporations. As lobbying expenditures rise, the game

of influence has become far more competitive, so any given
business is required to spend more to gain access to lawmakers
and to develop the best expertise on various issues. Drutman

also notes that it is harder to change the status quo with new
legislation because there are so many influential interests

benefiting from existing law. The victor who favors change
is often the business that spends most.

                   “Over the years, business spending on lobbying has been
aimed at changing the ‘intellectual environment.’ The requirement
is again to invest ‘considerable sums in saturating the ‘intellectual
environment,’’ writes Drutman, making it possible to overload
‘the minds of policy makers and their staff so that when the time
comes to make a decision, certain argument[s] and frames will
come to mind quicker than others.’ The lobbying firms. with

their clients’ funding, underwrite think tanks that write research papers
and Op-Ed pieces and participate in countless panel discussions. The
number of think tanks tripled from one hundred to roughly three hundred
between 1970 and 1996, most of them right-wing. These include conservative
think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, the Business Roundtable, and
the US Chamber of Commerce. There are far fewer liberal think tanks,
an influential example being the center-left Center for American Progress.
‘Often, the intellectual environment is overwhelmingly on one side of the issue,
but is sparse on the other side,’ Drutman points out.”

Jeff Madrick, “How the Lobbyists Win in Washington,” April 7, 2016, in The New York Review, a review of Lee Drutman’ The Business of America Is Lobbying: How Corporations Became Politicized and Politics Became More Corporate, April 7, 2016, pp: 50-52.