In Robert B. Parker's 1982, this would have been the end of Ryan's career, and the Kochs and the NRA would be vilified as corrupters of the political process.
In 1971, only 175 companies had registered lobbyists. By 1982, there were nearly 2,500, and today there are over 12,000 lobbyists just registered in DC. Oligarchs were dumping huge amounts of money lobbying for favorable legislation, although it still isn't really visible to most Americans until tragedies like mass shootings give us an insight into how it all works.
As the Reagan administration rolled into power in 1981, so, too, did the #MorbidlyRich oligarchs, who were seeding brand-new right-wing think tanks devoted to espousing the same free-market, Andrew Mellon/Warren Harding ideologies that led to the 1929 Great Crash: massive tax cuts, deregulation, and privatization.
Back during the era of Nixon, Americans understood the power and dangers of corruption.
As Lamar Waldron and I point out in our book Legacy of Secrecy: The Long Shadow of the JFK Assassination, when the milk producers association wanted the Nixon administration to increase milk price supports (to increase their profitability by over $3 billion), they hid/laundered their "campaign donations" through local GOP groups and a briefcase with $3 million in cash, which were later determined to be illegal, an event that became a major part of the Watergate-era Nixon scandals.
But that was all so pre-1976, the year when the Supreme Court's Buckley decision ruled that rich people (or rich corporations) owning their own personal politicians wasn't corruption; it was free speech.
While it's taken us over 40 years to fully integrate the 1976 Buckley decision and its spawn into our body politic, the corruption of this entirely new interpretation of the First Amendment is systematically taking apart our nation. And has made it easier and easier for maladjusted people among us to stockpile weapons of war.
For example, can you imagine Richard Nixon lying about how environmentally destructive some industrial poisons are? Nixon couldn't imagine it; he put into place the Environmental Protection Agency. And he was fine with the fairly strong gun control laws that several states, from California to New York, had in place.
But today's Republican Party (with a few very, very rare exceptions) is so in debt to -- so owned by -- a few petrobillionaires and coal multimillionaires and oil companies that they're perfectly willing to look the world in the face and lie through their teeth about the science of global warming.
They're so fully-owned by the gun lobby/NRA that they've made it illegal for the US government to do any meaningful research into gun deaths; they've banned doctors, in a number of states including Florida, from even asking kids if there's a gun in their home; and McConnell and Ryan have successfully prevented any sort of meaningful legislation to restrict guns from getting a vote even when they know it would pass.
As a result, we're the laughingstock of the world, and we lose over 30,000 people a year to guns and another 40,000 a year to a lack of access to health care. That's a lot of blood on GOP hands.
Good government was perceived, prior to the Buckley decision and its embrace by the Reagan administration, as the singular hallmark of American democracy. Today it's a joke.
In the wake of the most recent Florida school shooting, we find politicians who've taken literally millions of dollars through their careers from groups like the NRA refusing to engage in any meaningful discussion about gun control. Forget legislation; they won't even allow a debate.
This echoes the legislators who've taken Koch or ExxonMobil money and refuse to discuss climate change.
Or those indebted to Big Pharma who won't talk about reforming Medicare Part D so the government can negotiate discounted drug prices.
Or those taking money from agricultural chemical and seed companies who ignore evidence of cancer and other problems with GMOs and the herbicides and pesticides associated with them.
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