Lobbying Is Corruption(carette.xyz) |
Lobbying Is Corruption(carette.xyz) |
However, "gross wealth" ala billionaires needs instead to have a definition of bell curve based (statistical) analysis, and outliers above X standard deviations need to have economic sanction tools used against them. Doing this means that no matter how inflationary or deflationairy the currency is, we're measuring gross wealth by standard deviations of the mean, rather than some number that can and will be gamed.
And how the billionaires got their money is never by their work, but instead the mass extraction of millions of people and scraping over the top. Of course, when 'scraping over the top' involves piss bottles, injuries and deaths 3x higher than industry average, and more abhorrent things, yeah you need to fall. Hard.
Huh? What Europe are they talking about?
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/at-your-service/en/transparen...
And although lobbying is generally bad public lobbying is a much healthier equilibrium than what a lot of countries do - everyone playing pretend that the government officials are acting out of some sense of noblesse oblige and there aren't powerful interest groups. Humans don't work that way, they've never worked that way and the whole idea that they might is quite likely a propaganda campaign by some very ugly people who would never be allowed to hold power if there was any level of public debate on what they were doing.
There is a huge issue here that alternative approaches must address - if wealthy, powerful people can't get what they want within the system then they'll destabilise the system until they can. The poor and powerless have, over the millennia, proven far too disorganised and unprincipled to stop the wealthy and powerful. It is almost always factional conflicts between wealthy, powerful people that move the status quo around.
There has never been a time when human power structures have been incorruptible nor will there ever be. The very existence of government implies corruption, and so the wise move is to find a way to exert as much influence as possible so the corruption benefits you.
May the best bastard win!
1 - Companies employ taxpayers.
2 - Companies are taxpayers.
Remove companies' right to advocate for their interests gives disproportionate influence to employees and the unemployed, resulting in economic policy that discourages investment and hiring.
Transparency -> yes, emphatically, and that's good enough.
But it is a bribe. It is not the fault of the people if legislation has been undermined in democracies to suit the rich.
This is a problem pretty much all democracies have, to varying extent.
Policymaking does not reflect the interests of various citizens fairly at all.
Here is a web page from the European Parliament using the same terms; https://www.europarl.europa.eu/at-your-service/en/transparen... including a whole paragraph on why lobby groups are important for europe. "This is a legitimate and necessary part of the decision-making process to make sure that EU policies reflect people’s real needs."
But let's be real the blog post author only wrote this to dunk on americans. It's just embarrassing they did it from such a clearly ignorant perspective.
I want to push back against that. Lobbying is not corruption. All interest groups should have the ability to talk to lawmakers and present their viewpoints. That is essential for good lawmaking. It should be open (and is in the EU) with lobby registers (author uses lobbying as a synonym for corporate lobbying, confusing the issues).
Lobbying easily involves corruption, and that has to be constantly worked against (Qatargate, Cash for Amendments in 2011) for example. Hiring EU lawmakers after they leave the office should have long cooldown limits.
Current problems with EU lobbying: Corporate lobbying is over 60% of registered lobby spending. Civil society interest groups, consumer groups, and labor unions have less money. Revolving doors, astroturfing from foreigin states and corporations, and too much reliance on self-declaration in transparency register.
These can be all solved: mandatory meeting disclosures, declaration of private interests and assets, MEPs should be banned on paid lobbying activities, and long cooling-off periods before MEPs can become lobbyists, independent refinforcement, public annex for all directives and regulation listing interest groups involved.
People should care and make these political issues.
Also, just to be clear, is the Teachers Union an embarrassment to democracy? Auto workers? Environmental groups? Or are there some forms of lobbying you're okay with as long as your ox isn't gored?
This definition is sloppy. If I buy a tacky "In this house..." sign and place it in my yard, I am using my financial resources to influence policy. Restricting that by law would be a disaster.
I think a better point could be made about the relationship BETWEEN financial resources and political connections. We should seek policies that limit the extent to which financial resources can easily buy political connections. This can be done by placing restrictions on public servants instead of restrictions on the public.
Of course, you're never going to totally remove the connection without totally destroying freedom of association.
In other words who would you trust to create a sensible encryption policy, Google executives or Chuck Schumer?
I know who I would pick
Just like the original post, make a definition that mistakes a pathology of the system for its core function (also: structural inequality is not corruption).
If you are a purist and eliminate all resource-backed influence by banning pooling money, hiring researchers, and organizing campaigns to influence lawmakers because "others lack those resources," you effectively ban organized labour unions, consumer watchdogs, civil liberties organizations. A well-organized national labor union has more leverage than a non-unionized gig worker in the EU. Asymmetry an inequity issue, not corruption. Well organized will trump over those who are not.
Corporations should be able to lobby, but they their lobbying should be limited more heavily.
Any mechanism that has a pathway of converting money into political influence is inherently rotten and will eventually have its flaws discovered. I don't even really see how your proposed policies are going to stop this - all the declarations, disclosures and oversights only work if there are hard lines drawn with someone watching them. We don't live in a rules-based world, so every point in the system has to be perfect.
Or we could just ban lobbying. It's never going to be equal anyway, because the interest groups of the wealthy can spend all their time and endless money to secure the best everything for themselves, even if that money doesn't literally go to the politician. Grassroots groups are composed of regular people who don't get paid to do this, have their own lives and don't have that much money to put down. It's always going to be unequal.
Why do lawmakers need to talk some interest groups? If they don't have enough information to make laws, they should appoint expert groups to collect information. Talking to money bags is going to help only one thing.
Point being, it's impossible to build incorruptible institutions, groups of experts, etc, but we need them nonetheless.
Lobbying in it's most basic form is simply the act of petitioning politicians that represent you, which is pretty essential in a democracy.
So... you'll have the representatives make their own lobbying groups? Also, each "expert" will have their own bias, so in doing so you'll inadvertently (or intentionally) block hearing from the wider community.
I think there's a problem with definitions here. How the general public, especially here in the U.S., tends to think of lobbying is essentially always in the form of monetary value or gifts. In an ideal world, this probably should be banned for fairness reasons. Smaller institutions would always have necessarily less influence and power over policy.
In theory any exchanges of monetary value or gifts should be well documented and must be disclosed. In actuality, it's much harder to document than meets the eye. There are so many ways around it that it's almost worth saying it doesn't exist (admittedly it seems especially egregious in the US but I'm no expert on how its done elsewhere).
But then, at the same time if we conclude that it's hard to document then it's hard to ban it. Its just a slippery slope all around. Institutions must be allowed to petition their government, but making sure that doesn't go too far and lend itself to corruption is difficult to enforce.
So that is likely where the author and the rest of us lead to the conclusion that the eventual result of lobbying as its implemented in essentially everywhere in the world is corruption.
Removing possibilities of corruption from MEPs means removing their power and moving it into deeper government bureaucracy where it is harder to spot. Now you have non-elected people who work whole their life in government using more power.
This is prohibited, not in an ideal world, but in essentially every Western democracy except the United States. I appreciate the political difficulty of implimenting this (or indeed any useful structural) change in the contemporary American political climate / level of dysfunction. But outlawing corruption is not some utopian dream.
> long cooling-off periods before MEPs can become lobbyists
They already earn a public pension. They should be banned for life. Corporations know too well the internal workings of the government what allow them to corrupt it. But cooling-off periods could be a good first step towards that.
I think we need better infrastructure for tracking who is operating on who's behalf so we can build systems that fix these problems.
Now, if you mean I shouldn't be allowed to take my representative on a Caribbean vacation, then we're agreed, because bribery is (or should be) illegal. And yes, I'm including many forms of campaign donation as "bribery".
Trade and especially the shared European market required industry input which you might call lobbying. Regulations had to be homogenized to create a level playing field. To attack what matters European law makers needed lobby input. This happens all the time on a smaller scale with trade agreements. Think of the famous chlorine-washed chicken in the US situation. If a country prohibits this their chicken industry might want a for-export exemption when a trade deal with the US is made.
You also have lobbying that could be seen as genuinely good. Insurance companies lobbied for a lot of car safety standards and fire safety standards. (That said I'm libertarian enough that I don't actually see enforcement of standards that protect the occupant by law as positive but most people do)
The trouble with democracy, of course, is that most people don't have (or don't think they have, at least) the time or resources to participate.
In principle that statement is not incorrect in that lobbying means that one is able to represent a view.
However had, if money flows, then this skews all bias towards that money addiction flow, at the expense of everyone else. And most lobbying is due to money, that's also a fact.
See here as a good example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qatar_corruption_scandal_at_th...
No politician or party is willing to listen to me since I'm not a 'paying customer'.
"GOTO considered harmful" :)
If you get to "talk to lawmakers" by giving them money, it is corruption.
Ah yes, Europe, famously friendly to business interests. Hence so many large multinational influential corporations domiciled in Europe and being started every day
Why can’t they pick up the phone or write a letter like the rest of us?
And you are also free to visit your representative's at their offices.
For example, Congress is open to visit - you can request a pass for specific sessions, you can schedule meetings with congressional staffers (face to face with the actual congressman is harder, but theoretically possible), etc. Local and state reps are typically easier to visit.
"All" is carrying a lot ow weight here. Should we publicly fund interest groups so they can go to Washington? How big or small does the group need to be? Are not I, alone, an interest group?
No. No more lobbying. What we need is a more direct democracy.
> Lobbying is not corruption.
Cool story, lobbying is corruption.
>All interest groups should have the ability to talk to lawmakers and present their viewpoints.
Me accidentally paying for a 3 star restaurant for an MEP isn't "talking" to lawmakers. It's buying them off. Total can do it 20 times every day. You can't.
Buying the house that a Supreme Court Justice's mother lives in, that's corruption.
These kind of down putting responses make everyone worse.
> paying for a 3 star restaurant for an MEP
Like I said, that's corruption in lobbying, not lobbying. Lobbying is the ability to talk to government officials.
Lobbying is indeed corruption with a suit on.
I say this because you could make monetary contributions illegal and lobbying would still be legal and ethical. We talk about campaign contributions as a separate issue and they have been treated in the courts separately.
I agree that putting strict limits on campaign finance is an important battle that is still ahead of us.
Campaign finance is [currently] corrupt. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
this one is new https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stgb/__108e.html
edit:: honestly germany is maybe one of the most corrupt countrys in the world because it was not only legal but best practice to work with the professional advise of the industry.
Here are some organizations that lobby:
- Cancer Society
- ASPCA
- Associations of students
- Local cities and counties
- Trade unions
- Regular every-day people (you can literally just go schedule a meeting with your representation. That is lobbying.)
Of course, if everyone gets to lobby, corporate interests can too.
Without this function, legislators would largely be blind during policymaking.
Lobbying does not, on its own, imply corruption or involvement of money. In California and federally, money spent for lobbying is tightly tracked and publicly released.
Us little guys probably want to hear the contents of those meetings so we can check that they do make sense. Private influencing is dangerous.
We also don't want people going from the Ministry of Defence or the Army straight into working for a defence company - that should be illegal and yet it happens a lot here in the UK.
Civil servants and politicians should get a comfortable pension and be unemployable for 3 years after their term.
Anyone who is an expert in their field knows that the government is completely clueless and ineffective when it comes to regulating what you do. That’s normal and fine, nobody can be an expert in every situation of every field, including regulators
When experts give feedback to the government, that’s lobbying.
Voting for amendments will be implemented as pull requests :)
(aww downvotes.. can't believe people still willingly suck up for politicians)
Then we went to our current system and both proliferated. In balance it seems to have been quite a mistake.
It would make a great documentary.
MADD [1] is a lobby group but they don’t have influence by donating billions of dollars.
Its makes much more sense to just reverse the changes in lobby rules (Citizens United) than to “ban” lobbying.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mothers_Against_Drunk_Driving
MADD does not pay politicians. MADD does not bring politicians gifts. MADD does not invite them to an expensive restaurant for three hours of one on one. MADD does not do any of the things a lobbyist does that is, for all intents and purposes, corruption.
So you know what ? Yeah, let's silence the don't kill puppies group, if it means that the leeches at the european commission also don't get their ways. "oh but then it will be done secretly" good that means it's officially corruption and we can jail everyone involved.
Did anyone go to jail for that or that was lobby ?
How former chancellor of Germany suddenly got a big title in Russian oil company , went on Putin birthday to celebrate and no one asked questions?
Or maybe Iran expert initiate ?
Or entire Austria chancellor fiasco ?
Caviar diplomacy maybe ?
At least lobby is transparent.
America half way out of their shame moment , Europe … not sure there’s ever way our due to how they distributed are . France and Germany entering the room in the next election cycle . Hungary before , Slovakia , Bulgaria , Czech Republic now
There's a fairly simple solution to this:
Also, political ads in the U.S. have become so obnoxious. I don’t know how it is elsewhere.
Ads in the U.S. are personal attacks at the opponents character or lies about them. There is currently an ad about how an opposing politician supports sex change surgery without parent consent. Nothing is believable about the ad - yet somehow it’s not slander or libel.
This is the ad. https://youtu.be/WFISHnLCmms
It is illegal under U.S. federal law for corporations to give money to campaigns.
This either means that a) buying our elected officials is cheap or b) we’re not looking in the right place to see the actual transactions.
A much more likely (and hard to regulate) form of corruption is “back-door lobbying” where there isn’t a clear payment now but a promise of bigger payment in the future. Such as “you helped our industry do X, so once you retire from congress we’ll reward you with a high layer do—nothing consultant’ role”.
What influence groups say to policy makers has to be able to be challenged by opposing interest.
Not only that, but it's important for these advocacy groups to disclose their financing for all to see.
Its always going to be a cat and mouse game because ultimately corporations want to have undue influence over politics, it helps them greatly.
The first stepping stone needs to be to acknowledged that the interests of corporations can and in many cases will be against the interests of the majority of constituents and so we can't allow for our laws and practices to just waver this fact and institutionalise corruption through lobbying.
It's very naive to think consumers and the general population can organise to the effectiveness and level of a corporation. But that doesn't mean people don't care, or don't deserve to have their interests protected.
I can indicate other citizens that I trust on the basis of their expertise, and they can further indicate others in the same way.
The roots of those trees are my representatives for whatever domain, they have unequal standing proportional to the size of their constituency, and I can reconfigure my pointers towards different representatives at different times, or I can point them all at myself and show up in person for some direct democracy.
Lobbying is corruption, and it's also pay to play. Noone gets anything good out of it.
when is the last time you lobbied 50 million dollars as a citizen? is this something you do frequently? maybe ask these questions before your gotchas
And women have been able to vote in the U.S. for decades longer than the governments of the E.U.'s largest countries (France, Germany, Spain, and Italy) have existed in their current democratic forms. When women got the right to vote in Wyoming, kicking off the movement towards national women's suffrage, the French were on Napoleon III, Spain had a king, Germany wasn't even a country yet, and Italy was a recently unified Kingdom.
Do you honestly expect a handful of humans to make decisions for billions?
Or do you expect a million bureaucrats to coordinate efficiently and fairly?
If you mean literally every person should have an equal vote, how do marginal groups get to have a say?
Lobbying spending isn't really "incomprehensible." The small group HN readers can easily fund lobbyists if they really want to.
https://apnews.com/article/nonprofits-lobbying-less-survey-1...
A lobbying group is dead-set on their preferred policy or solution to a problem, an expert group would be much more open-minded and exploratory. I don't see how these are comparable.
> Also, each "expert" will have their own bias, so in doing so you'll inadvertently (or intentionally) block hearing from the wider community.
Everyone has a bias, you can't reasonably remove that. Besides, hearing from the wider community will not make you less biased if the majority of the community is also strongly biased. However, a lobbying group has a pile of cash backing up their opinion (even if it is false), while a group of experts would be both more knowledgeable and likely have a more diverse set of views. It would be so much better.
On the other hand, the idea of one person one vote should also be applied to lobbying. It is possible to legislate into law that all lobbying attempts must publicize a list of signatories behind it. This empowers non-corporate lobbying, since they have the backing of the people, not solely money.
By enforcing lists of signatories, and mandate publication of signatories from all lobbying attempts, we provide transparency in the influence of government, which is a vital component in a well governed democracy.
The problem is our (USA) definition of bribery is too permissive. We allow lobbyists to bribe politicians through massive fundraising dinners and donations to preferred causes (see Trump's current relationship with TechBro billionaires and Russian oligarchs).
In reality, many companies would get Schumer attention on crypto, and other regulators, the companies would use their expertise to craft sensible policy, politicians would work with that, run it by lots of other groups and politicians, and if it passed enough tests along the way, it might come up as a bill.
It’s not like Google, or any company, likely can just put in ludicrous things, and use wizard powers to make laws. If a company breaks trust, they will lose the ability to get ears. If politicians, or parties lose trust, they get unelected. So, in order to have sane laws regarding any complex topic requires huge specialist inputs, and those specialists became expert by working in that field.
There’s simply not a pool of such people sitting around unassociated waiting to write laws to specifications of random internet people.
Academics and researchers are prone to groupthink and monocultures. To quote a form of Sayre’s law “Academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so low.”.
Researcher’s policies might be disastrous for society or industry yet they’ll often be insulated from any consequences, even just to their reputations.
Come now, do you seriously, deep in your heart of hearts, believe that it'll be WORSE than what we have had so far?
Can you recall 1 fucking year from all of humankind's entire history when there wasn't a war going on?
and the reasons for those wars?
[1] - https://www.npr.org/2015/06/03/411524156/in-search-of-the-re...
A) Vagaries that most people don't actually care much about.
B) Tradeoffs that didn't go the way you personally want.
That said, for single-person "I want to tell you about thing X", a staffer probably works just fine. That's why they're there.
For a local politician, who likely has much more impact on your day to day, this is all far easier. They're generally less busy, less travel, and more approachable. And, they're the ones setting real estate taxes, school policy, and other things that make places truly livable (or not).
False. An excellent example is the vTaiwan / pol.is platform. It incorporates the interests of all stakeholders:
government, business, AND citizens
There’s also no union for “the public” which is a little unfortunate since that should basically just be the government.
So yes, TLDR, first restore democracy and then we can talk about whether we need unions anymore. Until that time however, they are the only mechanism the public has to try to wield some degree of influence comparable to that of capital.
In other words, yes, big oil lobbying bad and auto workers union good.
So it may be more accurate to say that "a capitalist system that creates an increasing gap of wealth inequality and defines money as speech is a system that inherently tends toward corruption" but that's a bit wordy for a headline
The situation is the same on the other side of the pond. Money, power and algorithmic manipulation power have concentrated enough, that the premise of democracy can be ditched.
Read Gil Duran's The Nerd Reich for an update on the current situation, where tech has replaced democracy.
Or search THN for The Nerd Reich or tech fascism topics and see that most of the topics are flagged here for no reason.
Simply google the question, plenty of sources.
That’s a situation ripe for corruption.
You even get an instant all-inclusive free-trade agreement with the entire United States! All you need to be able to do is produce enough within your society to pay your land tax. By contrast try to start a little capitalist society within a 'social' economic system, and it'd be off to the gulags with you.
This freedom makes it quite difficult to take the hyperbolic claims against capitalism seriously. Obviously it has lots of problems, especially in the current crony capitalist system we have, but if the solutions were as simple as e.g. 'go be socialist instead' then people could prove it even within the system itself.