[1] https://www.thorn.org/partnerships/
[2]https://web.archive.org/web/20130420162917/http://www.wearet...
Naively I thought it would cost millions to get a politician to support you but actually it's cheap enough a FAANG engineer could individually pay enough to lobby someone lol.
Edit: Literally the user base on HN would be able to crowdfund and organise a lobbying group greater than the NRA ($2.93M in 2022) if we wanted to - lobbying is such a smaller industry than I intuitively expect
I'm sure there is additional money for lobbying that is not on the books. Holidays, houses, good bullion, crypto, free memberships to exclusive clubs and the like that is gifted to politician's and their spouses by big industry.
This is... a little misleading. They also have at least two PACs (here's the big one: https://www.opensecrets.org/political-action-committees-pacs...)
Now, you could claim, though not particularly credibly, that money spent on PACs is not lobbying money.
>Now, you could claim, though not particularly credibly, that money spent on PACs is not lobbying money.
There are PACs and then there's AIPAC with a 70M/year budget.
So divide 57 by 115, and you get about 0.5 million euros on average for the high estimate.
(Some of the respondents may work for the same organization which complicates calculating the average. Hence why they’re reporting the sums instead, I guess.)
Knowing you are losing an election and getting dumped into a $350k/yr easy-mode job takes the edge off.
In the EU, a lot of laws are effectively written or co-authored by companies, which saves the politicians and their staffs incredible amounts of time and expertise. This must be quite expensive, just to have the lawyers on payroll who are able to do that.
"Be thankful for your government, it's the best that money can buy"
2) You aren’t going to move the needle much with 5 figures for anything at a national level.
The real work comes when you hire the congressman’s favorite PR firm for X and their cousins polling firm for Y and their former chief of staff for $15k a month retainer and so on. The vast majority of this gets done via “consulting” agreements and public relations firms and law firms, where the nominal work is irrelevant and the relationships and introductions are the product.
https://youtu.be/1nBx-37c3c8?si=vA0IIew7ripABUTD
I think the idea that if an opposing idea went to an NRA friend and offered more money, in almost all cases they would refuse because the lobbying dollars aren’t to convince but to support someone who asked believes what you do.
In some cases, probably like crypto laws, a politician might think “sure I don’t care or have an opinion, you bought some donations and I don’t hate your opinion so I’ll help out”, but that is a lot different than “you pay me x and I vote y.”
I think taking the agency out of the politicians hands, in most cases, is the wrong perspective.
There's no difference between companies and people here; no one, spending their company's money or their own, should be able to influence solely through money. They only can because of corrupt state employees, who should be replaced.
There is because individuals are not normally the clients of lobbyists, nor do they - normally - approach politicians directly with money in hand except for some countries where campaign donations are a thing. They shouldn't be because they are effectively corruption but unsurprisingly countries where this practice is established never get around to abolishing it because it put the people who are in power in power in the first place.
> They only can because of corrupt state employees, who should be replaced.
If the state employees receive that money off the books then yes, but if it is structural it is not the employees that should be replaced but the system that should be replaced. And that is a much harder task. Because you could replace employees until the cows come home, if the system remains the same nothing will really change.
There are lots of things where we trust individuals to do a good job. If we can identify things as being the results of corruption via lobbying, why not fire them or prosecute them?
That's an excellent question. In many places 'lobbying' is legal, technically it is supposedly to inform the clueless legislators about various interests. But in practice it very quickly turns into 'soft' corruption, meetings in holiday resorts (oh, do bring your family) and so on. Whatever lines are drawn the amount of money available to get around them is practically infinite and politicians (and civil servants) are not all equally good at determining when they are targeted and might be across the line before they realize it (and then it gets much harder to go back than to have never crossed it before).
Occasionally people are terminated, and occasionally there are prosecutions. But there is a very large amount of information about who may have been involved in corruption and only a limited amount of prosecution and investigatory power so the bulk of these cases will end up being ignored.
I don't think many people would get such a pass. The whole point of paying them from money taken from people's incomes is so they can be impartial. There's no point having them if they don't add value.
You'd be surprised. Especially if the last review of the rules is a while ago or if they have been recently updated. People are sloppy, especially if they think nobody is looking and that it doesn't matter.
> The whole point of paying them from money taken from people's incomes is so they can be impartial.
That's the theory, but as the US supreme court proves that doesn't mean much.
> There's no point having them if they don't add value.
It's never that black and white except for the most extreme cases and those are the ones that in the end usually do make it to prosecution. Also note that in the EU different member states have entirely different views on what constitutes corruption and normality.
> Companies don't have the right to vote
https://www.businessinsider.com/some-cities-are-allowing-cor...
It just happens that most lobbyists are paid by groups who are seeking to enrich themselves at the cost of everyone else.
However, there are some lobbyists who work for organizations that attempt to guide policy that helps under-represented groups (like nature, animal welfare, human welfare). Those lobbyists are fewer and poorly paid (as their "clients" typically have little or no money), but they work hard to at least inform policymakers of their perspective.
Here's a few examples of registered organisations that lobby the EU:
* the Electronic Frontier Foundation https://ec.europa.eu/transparencyregister/public/consultatio...
* the Mozilla Foundation https://ec.europa.eu/transparencyregister/public/consultatio...
Do you think it's corruption when they inform the EU of the risks of legislation (like eIDAS) and fight against potential loopholes (successfully in the case of eIDAS)?
Same with "expats" vs "immigrants".
Let's not pretend that a slick lobbyist hired by vested interests to talk to representatives with no money changing hands is comparable to the stuff that goes down in high corruption countries, where there's literally briefcases full of cash given to politicians.
That's just a make-up, parfumerie on top of the same exact concept: use money in some way to corrupt decision making.
Just because in some countries it's done with a veneer of legitimacy, in a way that doesn't look as dirty and disgusting as "those other over there with their dirty hands full of bags of money", it's just corruption with a façade of high-class. It's still the same thing, just has more layers of indirection and make-up on top.
> The CPI measures perception of corruption due to the difficulty of measuring absolute levels of corruption
So the difference consists primarily in perception, the slickness of it all as you put it? How well we can hide corruption with a facade of legality and civility. Somehow the crude briefcase full of cash feels more honest and direct.
> “…it was publicly disclosed that Boehner in the last week of June 1995 walked around the House floor delivering six or more of the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp. PAC checks.
> “in the same week Boehner was giving out the checks on the House floor, the House Appropriations Committee met in its room in the Rayburn House Office Building and voted down (17 to 30) an amendment that would have ended the government's price support program for tobacco. Seven Appropriations Committee members each had received a $500 check from Brown & Williamson's PAC, including one for the committee chairman, Rep. Bob Livingston (R-La.).”
This kind of activity seems to refute the “objective difference” you’re imagining.
2. 500, even in 1995, is a token amount of money to the representatives. I highly doubt they changed their vote for that little money.
In the post-soviet countries (many of them now in EU), you can't imagine how much you can "get done" by "gifting" the right person a bottle of their favourite poison - which costs a token amount by almost any standard (like, high school pocket money).
My point is that these are two names for the same thing, an attempt to justify the "rules for you but not for us" on the moral spectrum. Microsoft can launder open source code with generative AI, but don't you dare even look at their sources.
Same shit, dressed pretty.
The point that I and several others have made is that what “low corruption” often corresponds to is that corruption has been legalized in various ways.
Re the amount, the fact that it’s a token is kind of the point in those cases. It’s a public display and reminder to everyone where their campaign funding is coming from. Other amounts are often donated at other times, and larger amounts may come from other companies in the same industry. They didn’t change their vote for those specific checks, it’s more like a reminder that the vote that had already been bought was coming up.
Their tactics apparently worked on you to make you inclined to ignore the exact kind of blatant corruption you had just been criticizing. It’s not “low corruption”, it’s corruption that’s apparently less easy for many people to recognize.
Somehow it seems different when 'presenting the case' is accompanied by gifts and money.
This is the main problem, and there is a solution. If campaigns are financed by enough public money, donations have less power and can be regulated more heavily.
Similarly, if individual politicians get enough from the state to feel secure even if voted out, we take away the power of the promise of a next job and can enforce a grace period before working on anything related.
Lobbying I'd argue is an essential part of democracy because it allows groups of people that have a shared concern to come together and make their case to the politicians.
Otherwise I'm very curious how NGOs can lobby.
Lobbying is not inherently money oriented.
That would be solved by referenda, with their results and number of people affected being presented to the politicians so that they must deal with the problem. Lobbying as it is now in many countries (possibly all of them) has nothing to do with that and to me is just legalized corruption.
page 26 (or page 24 in in-document numbering) ... amazing that Thorn was just an "NGO" .. instead of the company that wants to sell filtering tech.
so, can we get the actual expert opinion of these wonderful folk?
I'm sure it'll get reintroduced in a year or so, and if it doesn't get enough media attention, it'll pass.
They only have to win once, we have to win every goddamn time.
If you look at the developments in Hungary and Poland (or the polls in Austria), any form of surveillance will be just used as another vehicle to keep autocrats and would-be dictators in power.
I doubt that the election in Poland in 2023 would have turned out like this if the PiS had seamless protocols of the opposition's communication.
If legislators feel strongly ideologically about an issue, no amount of lobbying will make them vote the other way.
https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...
> If legislators feel strongly ideologically about an issue, no amount of lobbying will make them vote the other way.
Some people really do have principles they won't violate. We just don't get enough people in politics who don't have a price.
As far as I can tell looking from the outside the US system is set up so that if you aren't ridiculously wealthy yourself you pretty much need lobbyist money to fund your campaign to get elected.
Also if everyone can give/spend as much as they want legally it at least stays semi transparent so in theory voters can base their decisions on that. Illegal bribes, kickbacks etc. are a bit harder to track.
Out of curiosity, how accurately do you feel are the opinions of outsiders with no experience living in your country who comment on your country's state of affairs?
But outsiders have no emotional stakes in convincing themselves that your country is the best on earth. Consequently, I feel the non-US media are freer than US mass media to discuss the true state of American healthcare. Outsiders are less susceptible to your country's patriotic propaganda.
This does go both (or all) ways. The US are an example here, not a singular special case. Every country tries to convince its citizens that it's better than everywhere else.
In general I would expect someone who speaks the language of the country I live in now at roughly the same level I speak English to have a pretty accurate understanding of what is going on here. It would, frankly, be quite weird to speak the language and have no idea of what is happening here. Of course America is a special case because of how the internet is dominated by US media, commentary and content.
Considering their whole country started as a place where only wealthy male landowners could vote, and they literally deify some of those wealthy male land and slave owners, as well as their written works, it's no surprise really.
The prices are available at https://www.medicinpriser.dk/?lng=2
I don't think there's a topic where lobbying doesn't work to at least some degree. Or do you have an example?
I wasn't saying lobbying doesn't work at all.
Well maybe a tiny bit of doubt.