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Comment by gitarr | Hacker News Reader

This might be a stupid question, but as a European not all too familiar with US political laws I have to ask:

How is it not corruption when senators and congressmens votes can be bought by companies or whole industries?

In order to understand this you have to understand that in American corporations are persons. When Mitt Romney said, "Corporations are people too" at the Iowa State Fair he wasn't sharing his own personal beliefs. Instead he was telling the truth. See Corporate Personhood[1] for more.

From this it follows that Corporations have the right to free speech. This is where the supreme court ruled[2] that it is unconstitutional to deny corporations the right to political speech.

The legal requirements are disclosures and that's why you hear "paid for by Americans for a better tomorrow" or something like that. Corporations don't directly give to campaign coffers, but through a series of transactions often via PACs (political action committees) it eventually gets to where it's going. It is illegal for PAC's to coordinate with the campaign, but this does happen in subtle and less than subtle ways.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood [2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._Federal_Elec...

While this has been true for the past year, the linked page gets its data from OpenSecrets which tracks only hard money donations to campaigns. It's tracking almost entirely donations from people who work in the given industries, so I think it's misleading to bring up corporate personhood here.

It's not hard to imagine that hard money can be used as a proxy for soft money to some multiple. For example soft money is 78x what the hard money is.

Hard money donations are often given by corporations through PACs as well. The reason this is allowed? Corporations have personhood. Your other post is correct and I'm not down voting you, but if you really want to understand corporate money in politics you need to understand corporate personhood.

If anything the numbers are misleading, because all it really tells you how much people who identify their employer are really giving. That's just demographic data, not proof of a particular policy.

Uhh, campaign donations from corporations to politicans have been around for way longer than Citizen's United dude. That case is not the central issue here.

When they say "Time Warner gave $50,0000 to Senator So-and-So," that actually means "People who work for Time Warner gave a total of $50,000 to Senator So-and-So's campaign in donations of no more than $5000 each." It's illegal for a company to donate to a candidate. I think many Americans don't understand that either.

Also, surveys have shown that all those donors are giving because they already agree with the senators' views, not because they think they can influence them.

Right, except that Citizens United ruling by the supreme court allows corporations to spend unlimited funds on 'electioneering communications' (which was previously illegal under the McCain–Feingold Act). Steven Colbert has a 'super pac' which satirizes this state of affairs.

To answer the question, there is a grey area between bribery and lobbying. As long as the lobbyist does not violate the law by giving more money than is allowed to a member of congress, and by not explicitly saying that the money is for a vote (one way or another on a particular piece of legislation), it is not considered bribery.

Lobbyists will often take legislators on really fancy vacations that are called 'fact finding missions', where everyone stays at a really nice golf resort or something and the lobbyist hasn't actually given the legislator any money, so no laws have been broken. At the end of the day, the legislator can decide to vote however he/she wants, so again, they don't consider it bribery.

So, what is bribery of a legislator in the U.S.? You'd probably need someone on tape saying, "I'll vote yes if you give me 200 grand in this swiss bank account". (Or, more simply, see: Rod Blagojevich.)

It's certainly corruption, but it's corruption that's legal under our laws. There have been some attempts over the years to reform U.S. campaign finance laws, but they've failed (the people who make the laws like the system the way it is).

How are political campaigns funded in Europe? And don't large businesses have influence over politicians there too?

In some countries, the State funds political parties in proportion to their votes or some other parameter. Obviously this is never enough, so large businesses do have an influence over here as well. "Revolving doors" are a bit less common than in the US, but that's changing.

Note that corruption is not necessarily linked to the source of "original" funds. Italian politicians are the best paid in Europe... I rest my case.

As others have noted, the money isn't directly coming from companies, but from people who state those companies as their employers. So what's going on here may just be the "correlation does not equal causation" phenomenon.

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