Google led in lobbying spending by ten tech firms who pumped a combined $61.15 million into efforts to influence federal regulators and lawmakers in 2013, up 15.9 percent from a combined total of $52.78 million, according to records filed with the Clerk of the House this week.
Apparently AT&T is not considered to be a technology company, because they spent more than Google. All in all, virtually all companies heavily increased their spending on legalised corruption in the US.
Call it “legalized corruption” or whatever you wish, having representatives at court, near the tribal leader, lobbyists for parliament or Congress, the practice is as old as when humans first formed tribal groups and began creating civilization. And as distasteful as it is, it’s a fact of life that will never go away. Politicians will never vote to eliminate the practice, and interest groups and companies will always want a method of getting to politicians to influence their votes.
The companies spending money for influence do not vote, but they are made up of people who do vote, so it behooves the legislators to consider what the lobbyists have to say. By the same token, a national carrot-growers association is made up of individual carrot farmers who do vote and want legislation that is favorable to their industry and they have no concern for the broccoli growers. Again, it’s a fact of life.
Edited 2014-01-23 11:03 UTC
So are diseases. Should we not fight disease?
Take the blue pill, everything will looks… smells much sweeter then :
http://takeawhiff.com/
Kochise
Edited 2014-01-23 11:18 UTC
cut out the corrupt politicians. they carry no responsibility for their part in this? Or the voters who have access to all the same information who do nothing about it? There is no “corporate capitalist boogie man” here and the failure is at many different levels.
Edited 2014-01-23 13:26 UTC
You can’t cure it, but you can accept it and stop kidding ourselves that politicians do what’s best for us and tell us the truth.
Assume them to be lying cheating bastards, because that’s what most are and the ones that aren’t will become.
A disease unchecked, un-vaccinated/prevented can wipe out a population. Lobbyists cannot, there is just a bit of difference between the two. Unless, say, a particular group of lobbyists are advocating for a company they represent that has a death ray that can wipe out a portion of the population if fired and they want to sell that to the military. But we’re talking lobbyists for computer device manufacturers here, so let’s be reasonable.
And since when are companies’ legislation desires always in line with the people they’re made up of? I work for a, let’s say, patent-loving multinational, yet I don’t agree with software patents at all.
They often aren’t, that’s another sad fact of the situation, it is ONLY about the company itself, its bottom line, and its investors. Like I said, it’s a fact of life as old as civilization and will never be lost.
I’m perfectly fine with stockholders banding together to pool their time and money to influence their representatives, as is their right under the US constitution. However, that lobbying organization should be completely separate from the corporation that is chartered by the government for financial and liability advantages, not for lobbying.
Make corporate contributions and lobbying illegal, and drive regulation to the lowest level of government practical so that it is most easily influenced by private citizens, and you’ve taken two giant steps in the direction of effective governance.
It departs from
the first axiom of democracy:
One citizen – One rock.
Now,
On defense of Google:
In between wolfs, show your teeth.
Lobbing is a legalized form of
bulling the wish of the non-lobbied, the non-rich.
Lobbing is the main instrument of plutocracies.
There are other forms of group bulling
over democratic processes,
unions, guilds, etc.
But the real FUD comes from lobbies.
Edited 2014-01-23 15:44 UTC
You Know
somebody has fallen
from Olympus Mons
when their issues
are subjected to democratic processes.
http://aeon.co/magazine/living-together/forget-elections-lets-pick-…
Edited 2014-01-24 03:11 UTC
What most amaze me
is how few petty millions bucks
are needed to
twist the will of a Nation
and to alter the route
of trillions of bucks.
:/
Here you have
a mechanism to control
lobby bulling:
An amount equal or greater than
all official and non-official lobby aportations
should be taken from taxes
in order to protect
the non-lobbied.
The non-lobbied lobby.
Remember:
The evil is always in the details.
Mmmm….
Various mafia types use to control large sections of New York.
By your reasoning shouldn’t they have been listened to as well since they are made up of people who live in the city?
The problem is decisions are being made through the use of money, by organizational structures not accessible to those who must live with the consequences of these decisions.
That is corrupt because it is power exercised without due process of the republic clearly spelled out in the Law of the Land.
Whole sections of the Law of the Land are now obsolete.
The evil this is spawning is going to be so horrendous, they will have to burn the bodies from the mass death that will result from all of this mischief you read about in the news.
History is repeating itself. Mass death will be much more efficient than in the previous wars.
They will have so many dead bodies they will have to resort to burning them.
They will blot out the sun.
-Hack
The problem with corporations lobbying is, in reality, it basically comes down to the C-level executives and board spending company money to lobby for whatever the feel are the right positions – regardless of how the people in the company feel and what’s actually good for the company in long run, let alone the rest of the country.
Letting individuals hire lobbyist to help them advance their own issues – not perfect, but OK. Letting chief executives, who already have a inordinate amount of power in society, use company funds to lobby the government to support their interests – just drives inequality deeper, and does not result in good or stable government.
So is murder, theft and rape but you don’t see that being legalized.
What benefits the corporate entity is seldom the same as what benefits the individual employees.
If you look back, there were a bunch of wolf whistles in the form of regulation that the president conveniently “stopped” that was (potentially) a signal to these industries that if they didn’t start “donating” money and become “politically involved”, they would be up shit creek.
But once upon a time we actually did bust the corrupt, remember Ab-scam? The reason why I personally think the current system is doomed is that there is no longer any fear of consequences, these lawmakers tout their corruption in the open and care not because its by the 1% and for the 1%.
When the financial bubble bursts, which it will, it is no longer avoidable but inevitable, it will make the great depression look like a flash crash and the people won’t just crawl off to silently starve to death like in the 30s, its gonna get French Revolution levels of ugly. Look at the chart around the 4.30 mark of this video, compare the 29 levels to current, its gonna be some kinds of nasty.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OF87sMjYlws“>
First off the largest companies will obviously spend more money than the companies that don’t. Concluding that makes them the worst is obvious trolling.
You win.
The legalised corruption is unlimited campaign contributions from undisclosed sources.
Lobbying isn’t legalised corruption, per se.
When government, who has a monopoly on force and law, gets involved in something… those involved now are incentivized to manipulate that power to their benefit.
You, like every other libertarian, has got that backwards. Who has the monopoly on force and law is the government. In the US, the capital G Government is a hired goon for corporatists. They are the government.
There will always be government.
True the corporations have a lot of control of our government here, however your statement that ‘there will always be government’ is misleading since one government is not the same as the next. Our government here has been expanding its power for at least a hundred years so of course corporations have a huge incentive to buy their favor (and influence lawmaking and law writing).
However I agree with you that it’s not clear cut that the government is 100% to blame and the corporations share a lot of the responsibility. I guess it depends on which corporations have more control and which are just trying to buy-into favor in a corrupt system. Speaking as a libertarian here. I call it all human insanity — the human condition of suffering.
Edited 2014-01-28 21:17 UTC
a political activist. You are an American. We are the most passive bunch of people on the planet. Your opinion is valued but you are preaching to the chorus. Before you get up in arms about Google paying off politicians maybe you should try to find out what kind of things they are asking for? Same goes for a lot of these technology companies. I think you’d probably be surprised more than disgusted.
Where do I claim to be one, exactly?
I am not.
You don’t come here much do you?
hohlraum,
“a political activist. You are an American. We are the most passive bunch of people on the planet.”
Well, if you look there are actually lots of protestors for many different causes, be it against industrial pollution, corruption, whatever. As an example in my home town they’re organized against fracking due to the contaminants it releases into the environment, including radiation from radon trapped in the earth. Combine this with the fact that many here use well-water, that’s a huge problem.
http://frackingandhealth.ca/fracking-dead-cows-andradiation/
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/fracking-america/
Some of my friends back in PA are highly involved in the protest, yet despite the protests and petitions, it’s already happening. If you don’t advocate violence, and honestly most do not, then your faced with the reality that laws are written by those in power for those in power. I wish it weren’t so, but that’s what your up against as a protestor.
Obviously that’s small beans compared to the highly visible “Occupy Wall Street” and “99%” protests. That was the most active you can get short of physically interfering with the banks you are protesting, which would break the law. US protesters are stereotypically strongly against war and violence. Let me ask this: does the fact that they are peaceful render them powerless? For it’s part, the government was prepared to treat the protestors as a terrorist group.
http://news.yahoo.com/fbi-treated-occupy-terrorist-group-021450389….
This begs the question, what power do the people have to make a government listen when they’re bent on following the corporate wealth instead?
Occupy Wall Street was huge and didn’t accomplish anything what-so-ever. Protesting someone or something that doesn’t care about what you have to say, or care about you period, is a lost cause. If you’re being raped, you can ask the rapist to stop but it’s unlikely to happen.
Politicians act against the will of the people every single day. They’re prostitutes for corporate America. The system is rigged from the ground up. When you have corruption that’s actually built into the system it self, the only way to get any real change is by tearing it down and building a new one. That’s simply too much work for people here to take on when there’s new episodes of Keeping Up With The Kardashians and Here Comes Honey Boo Boo to watch.
No it doesn’t…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question
The right to petition the government IS NOT corrupt.
The right to __have_more_money_than_some_other_guy__ IS NOT corrupt.
The right of some guy with lots of money to pay another guy to fly to the seat of government to argue, beg and hound is a natural extension of these things.
You are barking up the wrong tree.
Now… I (and I suspect most of us) would like MY views to be better presented and better argued. I do give money (when I can) to some groups which I believe will go to lobby the “right” side of things.
Bribes, blackmail, those sorts of grease-the-wheels are a different story, but you insult your audience when you refer to lobbying as corruption.
But when you look at the amount of money spent on and by lobbying “companies” it’s pretty obvious that it involves a lot of those things. Lobbying in this context, and what most people think of as lobbying, isn’t individuals and small organizations trying to influence politicians by legal and ethical means.
Speak for yourself, I’m a member of this audience and I wasn’t insulted in the least.
Edited 2014-01-24 00:05 UTC
We have separation of Church and State for good reason.
For the same reasons we all know that money induces people to make bad decisions.
We can’t have that sort of influence if we want a fair society.
Unless this is addressed, there is going to be much more suffering. Children are not born wanting to blow things up.
They are taught that by the societies in which they live, and adopt those values because there is no other choice or chance to prove them wrong.
Humanity faces a critical juncture now. In the old days, tyranny and slavery could be avoided by running off to a far away undiscovered land.
Likewise wars could be avoided and the bankers that fund all of that mischief could be left behind by fleeing.
Likewise these tyrants only had access to simple cannon, muskets.
Now, every psychopath in the world has access to advanced weaponry that can destroy the entire world.
You can’t flee.
You can’t run.
We will either address the needs of the many and equality for all, or we will perish as a species.
-Hackus
I think the foundation of this issue is best described in this documentary:
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/inequality_for_all_2013/
One inevitable fact mentioned in this documentary is that when the rich have too much money, they use this money to buy power to further entrench their dominance. Unless Americans stop playing the game for the rich and think of society as a whole, the rich will continue to dominate their future. I think another revolution of the American mind needs to get going like that of independence, civil war and minority rights.
That’s how the ratrace ( http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/ratrace.html ) works, “average” people want a part of the cake…
(also, the myths of “land of opportunity” or “American Dream” …while the US is actually at the bottom in the metric of this stuff, social mobility)
Here’s the kicker about this. Google wasn’t lobbying until after they were sued by the justice department. They won’t let them not be apart of the evil.
An operating system is like a government: allocation of resources, security, etc.
An ego works like a booting operating system, driving construction (and procreation), recreation (dancing and singing its way into hearts, minds, and machinery), and infotainment. Lobbyists are an egoic force and spur the horse we rode in on, dealing addictive processes, capitalism, protectionism to the world.
World means both “my neurons” and “my perceived objects”. My ego can spot ego in the world. Ego is world-constructive, is “love and war”, “all’s fair” instructions for construction and destruction. So ego governs our personal structuring and posturing, similarly to the way lobbying, with its financing and information influences government structuring and posturing: for production, creation and conservation. Voters were supposed to drive government attentions.
Resources and security (and other OS functions) are the motivation for both both world’s. Can personal behavior somehow affect national government any more, or is national government permanently out of our pains reach?
Will it ever end? Egoic processes, so full of strife and corruption, end with the end of the world construction. The end of science, the end of work, the end of ego, these things are occasionally posited. Internal conflict is part stupid, part constructive. “Do I take the red pill then go to battle the concentration of wealth and power? Or do I take the blue pill in order to turn to dissolution, magically transforming the harshness of the world into perfumed lotus petals (even as the OS turns to a blue screen of death), transferring full strength to peace-engendering shields of tolerance?” What makes the differences we wish to see in the world? How? When?
I took the red pill, while holding also that all kinds of war is still a kind of civil war, an internal war, and while hoping “star wars” is an oxymoron.