[shadowgovt]

"Controlled by special interests" is half the story.

The other half is to realize that in the US representative democracy, the people who change policy are the ones who are dedicated enough to the task to make a career out of it, at the expense of other things they could be doing. Because the system isn't managed by the will of the people; it's managed by the will of the subset of the people who put the (quite large amount of) effort in to be known and heard. Most Americans don't even do the base work of showing up to vote in every election (and the turnout numbers are too low to explain that effect by voter suppression alone).

Those with other things to do and not enough time to be devoted full-time to policy-craft label those who do "special interests."

The NRA is a special interest, but so is the ACLU. And the NAACP. And the AFL-CIO. And the EFF.

[mark_l_watson]

Well, the ACLU and EFF are my personal special interests, but I think you probably know that I am talking about corporate lobyists buying the votes of democrats and republicans in congress, of corporate news media that sways public opinion.

[shadowgovt]

Right, but the ACLU and EFF are part of that story; funding SIGs that have the human expertise to interface to politicians efficiently is one of the mechanisms corporations "buy votes." Not all corporate lobbying is by people with the corporation's name in their title; corporations outsource by supporting SIGs aligned with them.

The EFF has received millions in funding from both Google as a corporate entity and one of Google's co-founders as direct donation.

This is one of the reasons campaign finance reform is such a wicked problem; if the real goal is to diminish the corporate voice relative to the voice of the common citizen, one has to account for the fact that money can buy basically every mechanism by which voices are amplified. It can even, subtly applied, buy the opinion of the common citizen.