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Comment by ravenstine | Hacker News Reader

Are today's government officials more starstruck with or paid off by big corporations than they were back in the Microsoft antitrust era? Big business gets away with so much bad behavior today but, in the US at least, it seems like years go by and nobody cares enough to pass regulation to preserve the basic right to privacy.

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With notable exceptions, today's political campaigns are often financed by wealthy individuals and companies. The type of politicians which receive contributions are, unsurprisingly, the type whose views best align with those individuals and companies. This funding is instrumental in lifting many of these politicians into office. When a question of political control or regulation of companies arises, it is also unsurprising that these politicians often see things from a certain perspective.

Corporations aren’t allowed to “finance” “political campaigns.” When OpenSecrets says stuff like “Google” contributed $X million to Democrats, it’s lying. What really happens is Google employees contributed that money.

While on paper there is are still limits on direct contributions to campaign organizations, the Citizen's United decision (combined with SpeechNOW vs. FEC) enables companies to instead donate to SuperPACs which are in theory independently controlled. I personally believe the distinction is for all intents and purposes meaningless. Doubly so when considering how little enforcement of the separation has actually been pursued.

So, yes, I do believe companies finance political campaigns. Whether the money flows through campaign organizations is not an important distinction to me.

It’s not a matter of what you “believe.” In election law, the “campaign” is a specific thing and financing it is something with specific meaning. Having an independent entity run ads because it happens to support that candidate is not “financing the campaign.”

Leaving that aside, SuperPACs account for just 15% of election spending in 2016. It’s inaccurate to even suggest that corporate money and money from wealthy donors is the dominant factor in campaigns.

While this is technically true, it's de facto false. With the Citizens United ruling, corporations can donate unlimited funds: "[Super PACs] can raise funds from individuals, corporations, unions, and other groups without any legal limit on donation size."[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_action_committee

SuperPACs can’t use that money to “finance campaigns.”

For most intents and purposes this changed with Citizens United v FEC.

What about when the FEC says that Google's PAC donated to particular Republican politicians?

Google’s PAC is just a way to pool donations from Google’s employees. That money can’t come out of the corporate treasury.

That's ostensibly true, but if you talk to people who actually donate to these PACs you find they break down into high-level management (ie: the company itself; people with more-than-normal control over compensation) and "employees who sort of opt-in as a show of support for the company but who have no real idea what the PAC does".

I think it's more than fair to attribute the Google PAC to Google, and not to a diffuse group of Google employees.

The Republican Party’s official position is that business should be as unregulated as possible [1]. So we shouldn’t expect to see any regulatory action under Republican administrations.

Obama focused on blocking mergers among companies with products that they charged consumers for. It looks mainly like the precedent of consumer harm is undefined when the products are free to start with, and no one has gone back to try to patch the hole.

[1] https://gop.com/platform/restoring-the-american-dream/

Dozens of politicians are elected over and over. Richard Byrd from Virginia retired from the Senate in 2010 after 51 years. That's the current "record".

It's similar in the House. John Conyers just stepped down due to scandal after 52 years.

IMO, that there are no term limits is absurd. Thomas Jefferson got it:

https://www.monticello.org/site/jefferson/quotations-jeffers...

As we've improved our understanding of the human brain through neuroscience, and how can see that ideals will get lodged in people's brains and not change, having people serve that long just leads to stagnant idealism controlling politics.

We’re in a decades long reaction to government regulation that pervades the west. The government used to tell airlines and trucking companies what routes they could sell and what prices they could charge. That level of government regulation proved to be such a disaster, that everybody abandoned it starting in the 1980s. As a result, you have an entire generation of administrators, on both sides of the aisle, who grew up with an extreme aversion to government intervention.

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