So nobody went to jail, though
Likewise, blackmail. People imagine envelopes with incriminating pictures. But that kind of blackmail rarely gets used, because once you've given in to it, then what? The blackmail will still hang over your head. You'll serve the blackmailer for life. At that point the victim may think they have little to lose. (Relevant regarding Donald Trump. He has far too much ego to serve someone else for life, even if there was some "Moscow tape").
Instead, the blackmail that's powerful is the one that the victim knows will cost the blackmailer a lot to use. The understanding that if I go down, you all go down with me, is a lot more useful to make us come to an agreement. That's probably how Epstein got away with things for so long.
Well, that's reassuring.
That's the same exact thing - it sponsors their campaign = their political career.
>I don't think it can be tit for tat either
Just not as a written contract. It's very much tit for tat otherwise.
How is this different from receiving a 'gift'? It's extremely reductive to even mention gifts as bribery at this stage because we are far beyond that primitive level of interaction.
This unspoken agreement between politicians and think thanks is exactly the same as bribery. They're bribing politicians with (at best) implicit promises future money.
This legal approach to bribery is not only evil but it's also extremely hypocritical. Usually, when people do evil things, at least they know it's evil and many of them will hear a voice at the back of their heads telling them that they should stop doing it.
Now, the only voice at the back of politicians' heads is telling them "It's OK, it's not a gift/bribe, it's just a job offer given based on my skills" - Nevermind that the salary offered is 10x what they're getting now; that's just an irrelevant detail. A think tank's promises and its reputation for paying big are its currency; the result is exactly the same as bribing with gifts or money.
Unlike corporations and their biggest shareholders, regular people don't have resources to influence politicians. Any lobbying attempt backed by non-corporate interests will not be able to reach politicians' ears. Politicians have no time for groups/think thanks which don't have a track record of paying up after politicians finish their terms.
Idealized theoretical forms of lobbying bear no resemblance to reality. To bring the ideal closer to reality, politicians would have to start reaching out to people instead of the other way round. Currently, the only reason politicians reach out to people is for a PR photo op.
Also, without know the specific details of the policy change we can't know how to value this approach.
Behind closed doors, not at all, I very much agree with GP, there's a lot of pernicious shit going on that is actively harming democracies across the globe.
Corporate lobbying is for the most part a well-funded, knowledgeable adversary generally in opposition to a bunch of people who at best can sign some petitions or march in the streets. It's an asymmetrical game that should be acknowledged.
We have chosen a non-direct, representative political system and lobbying is a direct causal result of this chosen system.
It is not a side-effect. We intentionally wanted to create a group of people who could spend their time educating themselves on the issues at hand better than people as whole ever could.
Lobbying is what we wanted as a result of this system. Unfortunately this sometimes leads to regulatory capture.
Some countries have been better at managing political corruption than others.
In most other democratic countries this is illegal.
It's intellectually dishonest to pretend that lobbying just means "reaching out to politicians about an issue and educating them about it."
Lobbying wouldn't be such a problem and corporations wouldn't have such unshaken influence on politicians compared to the People, if that was all there was to it.
But it's not just that - it's about those companies making "donations" to politicians that will then be much easier to "convince" to vote their way.
Watch this video if you aren't convinced, which is just a nice visual presentation of a study that was done and found out that what People want doesn't matter, but what corporations want has a direct correlation to how politicians vote:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tu32CCA_Ig
Also, I remember when one Congressman said post-SOPA that the anti-SOPA petitions made by people and all the calls were nice and all, but it wasn't until Google and other big companies got involved that politicians started really listening and many changed their minds on the vote.
But being humans and all, people slip. But there's a difference, just as their is between Syria and NYC when it comes to "crime" rate /chance of dying. Just because you have a x% chance of dying from a crime in NYC, doesn't mean it is the same as Syria.
Do hearings, have technical staff to consult you on issues, etc, instead.
Because in many situations there's a very fine line between "lobbying" and "making decisions based on the will expressed by constituents". An organized group of concerned citizens is a lobby.
When it comes to outright bribing politicians, that's easy (and illegal). But there's a ton of grey-area in there. In fact, I'm not sure how you even could remove lobbying from the political process.
So you get a group of interested citizens together, you write to politicians, you tell them your point of view. Nothing wrong here yet.
Then some of those politicians then agree with your group. You like that! So you start raising funds to get them re-elected. At face value, nothing here is wrong.
Except that you just used your money as an incentive for politicians to agree with you. They might now openly support you, not because they personally do, but because they want your financial support for re-election. Since actions speak louder than words, it just makes sense to support politicians who don't just say they agree with you, but to support politicians who actively enact policy you want.
At this point, we have reached 'paying politicians for enacting policy you want'. That is bribery. Where did it all go wrong? When your lobby was able to raise funds and spend that on getting a politician re-elected. And when a few lobbies being a 'concerned group of citizens' turned into a facade for corporate interests. Simply because there is just so much more money behind corporate interests than behind concerned citizens. And hence those lobbies get more influence.
How to solve this? Limit political spending to natural persons, and limit their contributions.
At this step:
> Then some of those politicians then agree with your group. You like that! So you start raising funds to get them re-elected. At face value, nothing here is wrong.
I think this would prove to be exceedingly difficult in practice. In fact, this kind of is the system we live under, and it doesn't work.
Sure, you could argue for changes in the amounts, and who can donate to what, but consider this: I believe Obama's biggest corporate donor in 2008 was Goldman Sachs, and the value of their contribution was on the order of $1,000,000 (correct me if I'm wrong). Considering the funds that Goldman Sachs has access to, and the cost of a Presidential campaign, this is a pittance.
Clearly there are other forces at work here. You can fiddle with the numbers, but I don't know how you set up a system that doesn't reward "cheaters" or the already wealthy (ie received their "contributions" in advance). Which is where we're at.
stop calling it "lobbying" like that means something special, it's called free speech and representative democracy. you don't like people speaking in secret? how about we register them, and call that lobbying.
irritated that the people who speak up get heard? that's called life.
you want to be heard, you need to speak up.
A relative of a friend was a politician. He used lobbyists indirectly to work on issues. Say he needed help understanding a school textbook issue. He would call up his oil lobbyist, whose job it was to make him happy. It was definitely not his job to piss him off. He would quickly get a report on the textbook issue, probably written by the expert in the field.
This is kind of a weak argument, because this goes for literally every law. Even though this is true, as a society you can still make the decision that it isn't okay. By making it as okay as it is right now, you're saying that it's just a fact of life and we need to accept it because of that. Murder is a fact of life too (as in: it happens regardless of it being illegal), but that doesn't mean we need to make it legal.
It's a wierd sort of politician problem solving, making do with the resources you have.
A politician might cover or be involved with a lot of different industries during tenure in office. You can't go to work in any of them after? What if you're one-term-and-done at age 45? What are you supposed to do?
Sure, you could ban them. That's a sure-fire way to a government of low-competence, career politicians.
[0] https://www.ncsl.org/research/ethics/50-state-chart-lobbyist...
Absolutely not. This is expertise.
Lobbying is persuasion. Those are two different things. Purpose of lobbyingis to achieve specific decisions. If those decisions are defined by objective expertise, then they are alined but lobbying usually have different goals.
so while some will come back and say lobbyist are only pushing politicians to do what the politician was going to do it simply ignores this is all just a shell game to avoid the limits on campaign donations and similar by providing a means to funnel money to friends and family of the same.
Everyone has a right in the US to petition their government but damn if that doesn’t sound like a convenient workaround
Which is not lobbying. It's illegal quid pro quo.
Lobbyists don't give perks. They funnel in money directly because it has been made completely legal.
That is not the case.
It just so happens that the lobbyists that get the most attention are those that represent the most powerful groups. But equating it with bribery is completely misleading.
From Wikipedia. So spending 460M USD on public officials. Was it simply to have 1:1 conversations with politicians?
So you have 535 members of Congress. Other govt officials (State, trade and aid agencies, ...) foreign powers have a legitimate interest in meeting probably brings that figure to a 1000. Congresspeople have aides, staff, &c — who also need to be dined. To maintain the whole show, you need to have your own staff — well-educated, worldly people — who need to be paid, need offices to work in, ....
I don’t think anyone buys yachts from this.
Every other country in the world where lobbying is not legal, all of this is done with government staff, this usecase cannot be a justification for having lobbying when everyone else gets along fine without it
when a foreign government employs a third party firm it looks like it wants plausible deniability , or that they are trying purchase access and influence that these firms have as Kushner was selling .
This is BS. Lobbyists serve the companies they work for and nobody else. There have been many cases of lobbyists getting fired for not sticking to the corporate agenda even on small matters. It's institutionalized corruption.
The hypothetical 'legitimate lobbyists' are 'low performers' and they don't stick around very long. Either they will be underpaid and quit or they'll be fired outright.
So do lawyers. Defendants pay them to meet with prosecutors and judges. This is not evidence of corruption. It's a process.
Lobbying: Senator, my clients would like that the recent changes in the tax code stay as they are but the deduction on ....is increased. (maybe a dinner or a small campaign contribution, as other lobbyists will oppose this one)
Very, very different.
Not so different. Granted, honest lobbying does occur at some levels (my friend’s dad lobbies for firefighters at state legislators), but there are some really scummy corporate lobby activities that look like bribery with extra steps.
Weird. Can you name one case where this happened?
https://ethics.house.gov/travel/travel-connection-official-d...
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2018/...
It's not exactly challenging to disguise these gifts as "fact-finding missions", "consultancy", or some other sneaky misdescription that disguises their true nature.
The only way to fix the problem would be to remove all private money from politics. Politicians get a campaign fund and an expenses fund and that's it.
If they can't make do with that, they don't have the skills to do the job.
Currently getting rewarded for lobbying is the definition of the job. It's just that most voters don't realise that the system is based on corporate sponsorship, and their vote is only useful as a rubber stamp on decisions that have been made for them.
Where is this meme coming from? It surfaced recently (from the progressive echo-chamber maybe?) as a fact when it's a complete distortion.
What is with this demented obsession on HN with sending people to jail?
The response to any misbehaviour is 'send someone to jail!'
Nobody even seems particularly concerned who goes to jail - it's usually just 'someone needs to do to jail for this.'
They aren't physically dangerous people. They don't need to be isolated for anyone's safety.
Perhaps it'll happen. :)
Especially in the EU, where our criminal justice systems aren’t nearly as unreasonable as in the US.
So that's why there are custodial sentences for bribery.
Airbus is getting huge fines, how is that not enforcement?
Custodial sentences aren’t and shouldn’t be the only way of enforcing the law.