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If politics was a game of rock, paper, scissors:

What is the counter to Amazon's lobbying?

I've done some DIY lobbying myself. Fought city hall, won some (very) minor battles, lost the war. Burned out after a few years.

Still foraging for role models, case studies, examples of effective policy organizations. Some kind of playbook.

Keep hoping some one, some where has some ideas -- actionable, reproducible, sustainable -- for bottom up organizing to effectively counter the boa constrictor squishing the life force out of civil society.

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I know it’s not popular here, but unions are a counterweight to political power of corporations. As professionals we’ve been conditioned to “not talk politics” at work… the one place where you engage most with political decisions. But thankfully we as workers have the freedom to pool our money and fund our coworkers to engage in politics on our behalf.

Perfect? No. But it seems like the alternative is to throw up our hands and let unelected billionaires hoover up all the senators.

Unions and also cooperatives. Unions to me are like holding a wolf by the ears. The capitalists don't want to treat their workers right but the union can demand it. Unions don't take start up capital to form so they are a good stopgap, but I see them as a short term solution towards full worker ownership, or ultimately community ownership as even non workers should have a stake in the means of production.

Collective action and interest groups in general are the counter to lobbyists/political power of corporations. Unions are definitely a form of interest group, but even groups such as AARP, NAACP, NRA, etc., are examples as well.

Or in this context, maybe EPIC or EFF.

> unions are a counterweight to political power of corporations

Unions represent the interests of the workers, not the consumers. Why would a union care about consumer privacy?

Unions can care about whatever it is their members care about.

Workers often care about not throwing the people who use their products under the bus, or at least those who are paid on salary have a less strong financial incentive to throw people under the bus than shareholders, and thus in many cases may be able and willing to exert a positive influence.

Unions are looking after their workers which goes back to how well the company does. They have zero incentive to protect consumers.

That's a very limited view of how unions operate. They aren't nearly as circumscribed in their activities and campaigns as you suggest.

exhibit A: The Chicken Tax is a 25 percent tariff on light trucks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax#Diplomacy_failure_... In January 1964, President Johnson attempted to convince United Auto Workers' president Walter Reuther not to initiate a strike just before the 1964 election and to support the president's civil-rights platform. Reuther, in turn, wanted Johnson to respond to Volkswagen's increased shipments to the United States.[15] The Chicken Tax directly curtailed importation of German-built Volkswagen Type 2s in configurations that qualified them as light trucks.

Strongly disagree. I have many examples where unions are the political force that is part of the (anti consumer / anti citizen) lobby; even stronger than the company's management sometimes. It's a bit naive to think just because the unions serve employees they are some a force that cares about the common good.

(They also do not always serve employees well. Same as every elected authority does not always do a good job and often invovle a self-serving small circle).

So many examples...

Many more examples corporate misbehavior. And yet strong regulations and unions are still some of the best tools we have. (Best does not mean perfect… not being naive.)

If you believe in some libertarian ideal of everything being handled by contract law and individuals, then I’m not sure there’s more to discuss.

I agree with storng regulation. Unions become pretty much the same as cooperations (they do not algn with the cooperation interest, but have their own) after a decade or so from their inception. Really not a good tool from the civilian point of view IHMO.

Having been in the military and worked in universities and corporations… I’m skeptical of any large group of people (grew up Catholic too… churches don’t get off the hook here). But again how else do we solve problems except by collective action? Big groups of flawed people! Democracy is messy but the alternatives are worse.

It's only one data point, but here in Washington state grassroots organizers have stopped Amazon (and Microsoft) from passing the Bad Washington Privacy Act three years in a row now. The key has been the Tech Equity Coalition, a loose coalition group of organizations and individuals (including civil rights, labor, immigrant rights groups). Local progressive activists have also gotten deeply involved, and of course we've gotten help from national groups like EPIC, Consumer Federation of America, and EFF. We also got the King County Council to pass a ban on government use of facial recognition -- and that's Amazon and Microsoft's home turf!

Of course, we still haven't passed strong privacy legislation yet. In the 2021 session Amazon and Microsoft's lobbying was enough to prevent the bill we brought from even getting a hearing. So, we'll see what happens in 2022. But it feels like momentum is on our side.

This - is not it. He who plays in the defense has to be eternally vigilant and can not loose once.

Best approach in my eye is to form a "one" cause party, whos only "cause" is to power-bust and promptly dissolve afterwards, and not touch on partisan issue. "Block Buster"Party might sound strange, but if the only purpose is to disrupt power imbalances and then self-dissolve to trigger the next election - that could get a majority.

How would this one party overcome the partisan divide? Seems like wishful thinking. Is there any evidence of this strategy working somewhere?

Parties don't just float candidates in elections. They also form policy, endorse, fund raise, lobby, etc.

Tammany Hall was this party in New York for a long time. They just didn’t go away.

More recently, New York had a thing called the “independent democratic conference” that caucused with the Republican Party to provide them with majority control of the NY Senate.

The problem with these types of entities is that they are about power, not policy.

It wouldn't, that's the whole point of partisan divides, to distract people from what really matters with more emotional and easy-to-understand but less consequential issues.

Yes and: Offense beats defense.

My own efforts gained far more traction when I pivoted from opposing evil stuff to advocating good stuff.

Further, yes and: With the decline of our political parties, issue based advocacy has filled that void. For better or worse.

I know I’d be instantly suspicious of such a party, there’s a long history of groups saying similar things and then just staying in power once they’ve actually gained it.

People study and apprentice in PR and lobbying just as hard as programmers learn to program. It is a skill with high stakes outcomes, so planning and preparation is important. Ultimately you want to build broad consensus with influential people around your position such that decision makers feel your choice is the safe, obvious, and ideally only choice. Nothing of substance can be done with brute force alone.

Big companies can afford to hire legions of people who have a track record of getting things done legislatively and with public perception. Frankly I know of no antidote. The know how to astroturf grassroots campaigns, defame anyone who opposes them, get an audience with anyone, and research anything at scale.

The best I’ve come up with over the years is some kind of law that requires disclosures about all spending on PR and lobbying, and that those are presented along with all communications. Sort of a nutrition label for hot air. Of course, that would be astonishing difficult to pass into law, with their whole trade leaning against it. Another policy could be to stop making their expenses tax deductible. There was some movement towards making advertising 50% tax deductible rather than 100% a several years back, but American Advertising Federation lobbying made sure it never got any traction.

Their handiwork: https://www.aaf.org/Public/Education-and-Resources/Governmen...

They are sort of the anti-EFF.

Anything you organize that becomes a threat, they will try to disorganize… from the top down or bottom up.

If there is a better way let me know and I’ll get behind it.

One suggestion that I've heard, based on a lot of research, is to give Congress more relative power by having more closed door committees and committee votes.

The problem being if Congressional activities are too transparent, then the power shifts to whomever can lobby the best, which often means who can best track the behaviors and intimidate people into behaving certain ways. While citizens can view more with transparency, we often don't, and the richest companies and orgs do.

I've tried to loop in James to shed more on the research behind it but it's at congressionalresearch.org

I've also heard this was an unanticipated consequence of increased transparency. I'm not ready to give up my faith in the wisdom "the solution to democracy's problems is more democracy". But do try to be mindful that there's always tradeoffs.

> "the solution to democracy's problems is more democracy"

By democracy, do you mean direct democracy, representative democracy, both, or neither?

David Graeber style participatory democracy. Put decision making closest to the people impacted.

Doesn't scale. Which is a feature, not a bug.

If it doesn't scale, what would be the largest size it would work at, and then how to resolve conflict amongst those groups?

The other problem with this is that the existing votes are already choreographed for public consumption, so the existing transparency is an illusion.

There was a bill earlier this year to expand police funding. After a year of "defund the police" from AOC et al, it turned out that if she would have voted against it, it would have actually defeated the bill. So instead she voted "present" and the bill passed.

Most people aren't going to notice that, but that was equivalent to voting yes. And if her vote wasn't actually necessary to pass the bill, she'd then have been able to vote no specifically because it wouldn't change the outcome, even though as we know she would flip when it mattered. That happens on a regular basis too but in those cases it's undetectable.

One devil can the others. Who watch the agent behind close doors.

Hmm? I'm not sure what you meant, could you rephrase?

That seems like a very real effect, but the votes need to be disclosed after they occur. Otherwise, the lobbyists have even more power, because the committee has an incentive to collude with the lobbyists, if their individual votes are not known, and they accept bribes. (I agree that having their votes be unknown helps if they do not accept bribes).

The only foolproof solution is to remove power from the lobbyists.

> The only foolproof solution is to remove power from the lobbyists.

How do you do this though?

Suppose Facebook wants to gut privacy rules. They control which news stories get prioritized for their users. They express their policy preference in public, then penalize politicians who cross them. Even if politicians pay no attention to this, the ones who cross them are more likely to lose their seats. Assuming politicians aren't too oblivious to notice it, they comply to avoid that, without Facebook ever explicitly threatening them.

The fact that Facebook can send someone into Washington to tell the politicians what they want in person instead of publishing it on their website doesn't really change the math, does it?

Yes it's hard to stop people from speaking and intimidating. That's why I almost see an elegance in this solution: if FB and other corps don't know who is contributing which part to a bill and they only get to look at the final answer, it's harder to know who to intimidate and who to blame. In other words, it's believing that politicians are being intimidated to decide in one direction or another and trying to give them cover to make more sound decisions.

Right. Someone comes in to bribe you, you take their money, you go vote against them anyway. Then when they come to you to object, you can shrug and say it must have been someone else. There is no way to for them to verify that their bribe is having the intended effect, so they'd have to pay you on faith. And who is going to trust a politician who is accepting bribes? They could be taking them from both sides!

Precisely.

And without knowing for certain whether that person actually voted in the committee for X or added X to the bill, it also makes it hard to know whom to intimidate, whom to threaten by being primaried out, whom to defame, etc.

James and the CRI go more in depth with this, but from what I recall, the idea is to have close door for committee deliberations so that they can work with each other to come up with a bill that works, then they come out and release either their committee votes or the floor votes.

Similar to how the Supreme Court releases their final votes but doesn't show people how the deliberations are being done.

From interacting with him and reading the CRI stuff, I learned a lot about how lobbyists will sit in on the bill making process and basically monitor the lawmakers' every move in the negotiation part of the bill.

He said to me once that they were called lobbyists because they used to have to wait in the lobby before they could talk to people, now they get to sit directly in the lawmaking chambers while it's happening.

A possible improvement for this is to only publish the vote totals for measures that pass, not for measures that fail. Then if a measure the lobbyists wanted fails, they have no idea who to blame, but the public always knows who was responsible for a change to the law.

This could be further improved by displaying the live vote total during the vote and allowing anyone to change their vote until no votes have changed for at least 60 seconds. That way anyone can see if a measure would pass even without their vote and then change from no to yes if they don't want lobbyists to see that they would have been against it.

I'm quite intrigued by this.

I think its always been about money and time, effectively this is what happens:

- A lack of people able to make sustainable time commits to the cause means even with a fair amount of money, you could lose out in numbers (voting or otherwise)

- A lack of funding to sustain the cause, even if you have members that can make the time commitments, and importantly, not enough money to have professional lobbyists working your cause singularly

Other lobbying organizations, typically with corporate funds, don't have either of those problems. Corporate friendly organizations like the one's Amazon employs (or employs lobbyists directly, not an uncommon practice either) have hefty sums of money to keep lobbying, 24/7.

Some of this could be fixed with reform, of course, at least on paper. For instance, removing term limits allows representatives to bulk up on expertise on issues, which is actually makes them more resistant to outside influence, all things being equal.

The other thing that has gutted this is organizations that do exist are either always scrambling for money, like the EFF, ACLU etc (yes they have money, but compared to corporate lobby organizations, they have a finite amount of donors they can "call action" to, without hitting a wall), or have been gutted in other ways. One forgotten aspect about labor unions, is they did act as an effective lobbying force in politics for workers rights and other causes[0], sometimes not even labor related directly.

Even on a local scale, you have incumbents who can fall back to their local network of people, and challengers have to build this over and over again. Thats the fundamental problem.

I think systematic reform would be the actual long term solution, but its hard to change a system that is primarily concerned with perpetuating itself.

[0]: https://exhibitions.lib.umd.edu/unions/political/environment

> removing term limits allows representatives to bulk up on expertise on issues, which is actually makes them more resistant to outside influence, all things being equal.

How has that gone for Senators? Not well at all. No term limits there has engendered some seriously malicious Senators.

Regardless of malice, it makes them incompetent in the world that younger people live in. For example, I would expect the vast majority of senators (and other politicians) are completely detached from how people use and want to use the Internet. That’s why we have moments like Clintons “Pokémon Go to the polls”… despite being the most popular mobile game of all time at the time, completely miss the zeitgeist.

https://youtu.be/9VgwxKW0J6I

All things aren’t equal either. Key aspect of the idea is barring any other meaningful difference.

I should expand in these points but this one thing is not the only thing that matters to make positive change. Our voting system using ranked choice voting and having more parliamentary style elect would help tremendously too

Sure, but that has to do just as much to do with voter apathy. The primary elections are almost always a ghost town. And with the advent of the internet, it is easier and less expensive to run for office than ever.

> One forgotten aspect about labor unions, is they did act as an effective lobbying force in politics for workers rights and other causes[0], sometimes not even labor related directly.

I'm not sure why this never caught on from the consumer side. Something like Costco, but a coop that uses 1% of revenues for lobbying on behalf of consumers seems like it could be pretty popular. Is there a law against it or something?

I think the people from CRI might argue the counter to Amazon lobbying is counterintuitively to have less transparency in Congress.

Some proposals being as simple to restore more closed-door committees and committees votes, that were removed in the sunshine reform laws of the 70s.

Lobbying orgs often lobby for greater Congressional transparency while simultaneously trying to get more corporate privacy, creating more info asymmetry.

Also, with more congressional transparency, while citizens can theoretically lobby as well, these big lobby orgs seem to do it much much better, sitting in committee meetings, tracking every committee vote, etc.

This is what I've gleaned from the research at CRI and conversations with James D'Angelo but you may read it differently. Regardless, I highly recommend checking out their work.

Congressionalresearch.org

Absolutely agree. Think about how LBJ pushed through civil rights and voting rights act, as a Senator of the “solid south” that kept anti-lynching legislation in committee for a half century.

It wouldn’t be possible today.

The situation in state legislatures is even worse.

Exactly. That site I linked has a lot of examples like that. But just more intuitively, imagining that committee mark-up sessions have lobbyists sitting in the back reporting almost every single move, decision, word, etc., does not make me excited to want to be in Congress.

For me, I used to believe that it was the most deliberative body in the world, and yet, with the current over-the-shouldering, I don't know how people deliberate. But I think we can restore it, if we want to. I think we can get caught in the trap of wanting others to not manipulate Congress into doing what they want them to do, but wanting us to be able to manipulate them to do what we want them to do. Personally, I'd rather elect people who I think are smart, talented, kind, and considerate, and let them make the best decisions they can.

Essentially mobilization of society by making people feel deeply emotionally connected to a cause. Successful politicians have an intuitive feel for what will trigger a loss in elections and will change course those that don't are wiped away irrespective of wealth lobbying.

This has happened and continues to happen many many times in many many countries but it usually does take a group of motivated people (and another group of people who have faith in them to underwrite their living expenses) to essentially focus on the cause to the exclusion of everything else.

It is remarkable if you go through history just how much has been achieved through persistent (years or decades) of the above types of efforts with very little money. The reason ordinary political campaigns require a lot of wealth is because they're run by people and on issues which people running them don't really care about much.

> If politics was a game of rock, paper, scissors:

It isn't, not even at a level of it being a useful metaphor, so anything based on the premise given is inapplicable to reality.

> Keep hoping some one, some where has some ideas -- actionable, reproducible, sustainable

Political organizing and policy entrepreneurship is highly context-dependent. Actionable ideas are plenty, but reproducing success with carbon-copy tactics, or even sustaining success with them, isn't all that likely. Deep knowledge of the decision-makers, stakeholders on all sides, and the respective interests, resources and constraints of each are needed, for any specific policy issue.

(If you have lots of resources yourself, you can avoid some of that by being less efficient but outgunning the opposition, of course.)

I commend your efforts, I suspect many have the same question you've raised.

I'd like to add that, It's only 'Lobbying' in U.S. and in most other countries where these MegaCorp(s) operates it's just straight 'Corruption'[1]. Corruption might get faster results to them than lobbying, But it's straightforward to fight back for us as all we need is evidence of corruption(Note: Fight back != Victory).

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/20/amazon-starts-probe-over-b...

For the past few years, I've always thought it would be cool to have a kickstarter lobbying company. Where consumers could fund a lobbyist to lobby for them. Additionally, they could then share what happens behind closed walls for us all to see.

The media & now social media?

Politicians want to get/stay elected. If something is super popular & in the media a lot it will sway their positions. Sometimes not through elections I think gay marriage is an example of how quick we see major shifts in a short time.

Sometimes they just play theater and hold hearings like the FB stuff, but I think that's just an example of how most people don't actually really care...

I agree with the perspective that it feels like we've lost power to corporate interests, but looking back at the vanderbilt era etc maybe not..

My uneducated guess is something like Mondragon.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation

Given what's going on with climate change inaction, we may be headed towards a world where the only way to get anything done is via direct action, and that gets very messy, very fast.

Consider supporting Electronic Frontier Foundation instead: https://eff.org.

Ralph Nader talks to people with such structures for action as your after on his radio show/podcast

Campaign finance reform is the only antidote I’ve ever come across.

Boycott.

Boycotts don’t work unless they’re organized on a massive scale. Otherwise it’s just a blip, or a relatively constant background. People are boycotting Amazon right now and this is incorporated into their decisions.

Make lobbying illegal

Lobbying is protected by the 1st Amendment (the right “to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”)

1. It can still be made illegal, It just requires bigger changes.

2. I understand that what needs to be made illegal is some kinds of lobbying that includes financing parties, not all of it.

It was the 2010 Citizens United v. FEC decision that decided campaign donations qualify as protected expression. Presumably it would take a constitutional amendment to change that.

(The usual: I'm not a lawyer.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC

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