Google, once disdainful of lobbying, now a master of Washington influence
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
1) Lobbyists costs a lot of money. The amount Facebook spent on WhatsApp is equivalent to fifty times the annual lobbying revenues of the top 10 DC lobbying firms combined.
2) Lobbying money goes to politicians pockets. American politicians are some of the most thoroughly scrutinized on the planet. Lobbying money doesn't go under the table to some politician. It usually doesn't even go to campaign contributions. The major source of campaign contributions is rich peolple making personal donations, not lobbyists. Lobbying money goes towards advocacy. For example, a lobbyist might commission a survey to show a politician that a particular position, advantageous to a client, is politically popular. They may also propose draft legislation, connect politicians with experts, etc. What Google is doing is a good example of the bread and butter of lobbying: simply helping politicians understand the prevailing point of view of an industry.
3) Lobbying is the same as corruption. The vast majority of lobbying is about helping politicians find votes. Its about showing how what's good for an industry is good for constituents. The message is overwhelmingly not "if you vote for this, there is money in it for you" but "voting for this will save 100 jobs in your district."
Do lobbyists help corporations exercise substantial political power? Yes. But most of the american labor force works for large corporations. Their livelihoods and that of their kids depend on these corporations. Their healthcare and retirement depend on them. Corporations don't need to corrupt the political system to wield power.
Then again, the amount FB spent on WhatsApp is twice the cost of the Large Hadron Collider, the largest and most expensive scientific facility every built. And roughly the same as the final cost of the experimental fusion reactor ITER, the holy grail of energy sources.
Comparing things to the WhatsApp acquisition price does not tell you much.
Private money - whether it be from rich people or large corporations - should have no place in politics. The vote of a poor single mother working two jobs to only barely feed her children should carry just as much weight as that of a rich tycoon. If you believe that money should institutionally equate to influence, then you do not believe in equality.
I have plenty of issues[1] with the whole lobbying process, but with your definition how does anyone get anything done at all? Ever? This is assuming you believe the system can be fixed while still working within the rules of the system. FWIW, I'm personally starting to doubt that but if anyone can pull it off it's companies like Google.
One the issues near to my heart is environmental protection. The advancements made in environmental protection over the last 50 years have all been accomplished through the expenditure of money. It costs very little money to convince people to adhere to the old ways. It costs no money to convince West Virginians that coal and coal mining is good. It costs no money to convince Oregonians that logging is good. Commissioning studies to show that the health damage from coal mining would double the price of coal if accounted for? Making movies to help people visualize the catastrophe of strip mining? That costs money.
What irks me the most about liberals' opposition to Citizens United is their failure to realize that money being speech helps them more than it helps conservatives. It costs very little money to promote conservatism. People are predisposed to wanting to preserve the status quo. Its those that oppose the status quo that benefit the most from high profile advocacy. The opposition of the tech industry to surveillance Is the paradigmatic example of this phenomenon. The tech industry will have to spend a lot more money on advocacy to move forward from cold war era views then defense contractors will spend to defend the status quo.
Perhaps in theory, but in practice a lot of money is spent on it.
The National Woman's Party is an example of a lobbying group which worked for decades first for women's suffrage and then for prohibition on sex discrimination and the Equal Rights Amendment. Where was the corruption in that use of money to influence politicians?
In your example of a poor single mother working two jobs, that mother is very unlikely to have the private money to take the time off. Thus, private money will always have an effect on politics.
There are ways to limit its effect. For one, tax the richest people and most profitable companies much more heavily than they are now, and increase social support for the poorest. But by your criteria that's still going to end up with corruption.
The people should be able to influence a politician more often than just at the ballot box. The question is, at what point is that extra influence inappropriate? I believe your use here "corruption" is too strict and binary, such that no government can meet that standard.
In addition, you bought a computer and paid for Internet service in order to access and post to Hacker News--which were also expenditures.
These are the sorts of things that lobbyists spend their money on.
So if I spend money to buy cardboard & a permanent marker, write a picket sign, and picket outside the office of a politician to influence him I am engaging in corruption?
The vote of a poor single mother working two jobs to only barely feed her children should carry just as much weight as that of a rich tycoon
To my understanding, their votes carry the same weight; the problem is the people's votes are easy to "buy". Prop 8 in California was passed when a surge of pro-Prop 8 money flooded the state. Did that money buy politicians? No, it bought votes.
As for money from corporations or private donors- how do you propose campaigns are funded? The only other source is out of the contender's own pockets. But I don't think you'll like that answer either, considering the better-funded campaign usually wins. Only the richest rich would be able to get elected!
Some people believe that each citizen should have the same ability to influence their government, regardless of how much money each one has to spend.
Agreed, but it's also impossible to avoid this as long as the people in Congress are humans and not robots.
We all believe in something, we all find some point of view more reasonable than another, and we all have experience in life (who we grew up with, who we associate with now) that vastly influence those cognitive biases. We'll always be able to strive to expand points of view and limit time monopolized by any particular cause, but in the end there's no avoiding "cognitive capture".
If you're a regular citizen / company, you can pay a politician $10,000 to have dinner with them, and hire their best friend as a consultant. If you're a lobbyist, you can't buy them a coffee.
Well, not till after they (or their staffers) retire it doesn't.
2) I have read too much of those 'drafts' which ended up being the legislation. And how come Google speaks for the whole industry? Are they In a particular need for change? Did the industry vote for them?
3) tay tuk yuu juuuuub
The interesting part of that is that it's completely reasonable that you have to get people thinking about things like how a search engine should function in a free market (beholden to the users, not the businesses it finds for them), but when it comes down to it, doing that is also fundamentally paying money to buy influence (even if that influence is just "that position now seems reasonable to me"). My initial reaction is to find lobbying distasteful in the same way I find marketing distasteful. An idea or product should stand on its own merits. Of course, it never works out that way: you might want to be noble and not introduce a new bias into the public, but people already have a host of biases, and to get them to even consider something new, you often have to help them get there.
The emails they got under a FOIA request are also interesting in that light[1]. The Post tries a bit to make them sound somewhat scandalous, and I know we're trained by the media to only be interested in smoking guns, but it's interesting in precisely how mundane and completely reasonable lobbying can be, while still being about shaping the entire dialog to be more favorable.
That said, there are some really bad parts here too, like describing SOPA as
> "And, in what Google saw as a direct threat to the open Internet, major lobbies such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Motion Picture Association of America were mounting a legislative campaign to place restrictions on the sale of pirated music and movies."
ugh. Kind of weird, too, as in the past the Washington Post has given good coverage of SOPA protests and why anyone would be protesting it...
[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/2014/04/12/how-g...
Yep. I think any article that describes SOPA as merely "placin[ing] restrictions on the sale of pirated music and movies" is begging to be criticized, especially here on HN. It makes you wonder what else it gets wrong!
On the Post's SOPA point: First, it's been illegal to sell pirated works since the Copyright Act of 1790, as amended. Second, it's been a felony to distribute (as in, not selling but merely sharing) pirated works since the NET Act of 1998. Third, as far as I can tell, Google has no problem with those long-standing restrictions on the sale of pirated music and movies. Fourth, that "restrictions" language mischaracterizes the many unrelated problems with SOPA.
I can tell the Post put a lot of work into the article, and it was a good read, even though it buried the lede (Microsoft's PAC is larger), made factual errors (companies don't donate to PACs), missed a big reason Google was able to reach out to libertarian/conservative groups (it toned down its misguided lobbying for aggressive Net neutrality regs/laws), spent too much time on a conference barely distinguishable from dozens of others (organized by an academic center that had for years publicly disclosed it received funding from Google), and claimed that limiting government surveillance draws "unexpected bedfellows" (left-right pro-4A coalitions linking ACLU and conservatives date back at least 20 years).
Disclaimer: I know most of the folks interviewed in this article and spent a decade in DC. Fortunately I'm now in the SF bay area and doing something rather more productive. :)
It's reasonable to disclose this in any case, just to remind the reader. (The WSJ does routinely.)
2) Grey area lobbying: Light rail manufacturers lobbied congress to increase federal spending to help with light rail projects across America. result: uses taxpayer dollars, might increase light rail projects in areas where it isn't needed, takes tax payer dollars and transfers them to the entity doing the lobbying
3) Bad lobbying: Chrysler, GM, & Ford lobbied congress to lower the fuel efficiency standard (MPG) and prevent increases. result: screwed themselves over because in the long run they could no longer compete fuel consumption wise with foreign auto makers and had to be bailed out
Most people don't understand that lobbying is a tool. It can be used to enact laws that benefit or hurt different groups of people. It's more talked about when it does bad so people assume all lobbying is bad. Same with "bacteria", "fat" and "cholesterol".
That's because it's not a free market. It's a system of political patronage where if you don't have political support, someone (possibly competitors, or even the Department of Justice) will go hunting for you. It's not merely distasteful, it's deeply corrupt.
rachelw@google.com lawyercat@google.com
I'm genuinely interested.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_action_committee
Have fun following the paper trail when donation disclosure can be delayed, and you can accept donations to your committee from other committees, creating as long and obfuscated a donation trail as you like, and then take the pooled-together corruption money and use it for anything you want.
I suppose it is still better than secret compensation under the table for favors, though. In some sense.
Petition: You expend resources to advocate your views to a public representative.
Lobbying: You expend resources to have a third party advocate your views to a public representative.
Lobbying is a form of petition. It sometimes draws attention because corruption becomes a technique -- just as is the case sometimes with direct petition -- but it is as different from corruption as direct petition is.
Which is also usually corruption and a violation of campaign finance laws which prohibit coordination between unlimited "independent" expenditures and candidates or campaign committees controlled by them.
Sure, that's a tactic that happens in lobbying, just as its a tactic that happens in people directly advocating their own views.
I am not saying that lobbying is free of corruption. But the reason the two often go together isn't that lobbying is fundamentally corruption, its that lobbying is an expensive form of petition, which makes its community of users overlap considerably with the set of people/groups with the resources to effectively engage in corruption independently of whether or not they were using an intermediary to do advocacy to public representatives.
Now that is hard to judge from the outside, but that is the real difference.
I suspect many people believe those in power now are mostly selling their vote for cash not making decisions based on the merit and just happening to side with those giving piles of cash because they heard those people give explanations of why favoring them was a good move for the country.
We don't have a government that produces representative policy outcomes for reasons of corruption and systemic flaws, like bad election mechanisms.
I think most people are not aware how commonplace this is.
Take Senator Ron Wyden’s son, Adam—directly upon graduation from his Columbia MBA program he started his own hedge fund, no doubt capitalizing on contacts he made interning at the $19-billion fund of one of his father’s supporters, David Shaw. “Not many college kids get to intern on a D.E. Shaw portfolio for the summer,” Brian Marshall, who once ran the fund, was quoted as saying in a 2011 Bloomberg article on the younger Wyden.
It might be a stretch here, but I think this is quite related to Piketty's groundbreaking book on capital -- this is the nature of the beast, wealth remains in the family through connections, and this is just one of the ways how it happens.
While it is large in scope, this is mostly about how campaign funds are funneled to relatives, and doesn't appear to include favoritism in banking, lobbying, foundations, etc.
Congress is bought and our laws are bought.
We all know how many people get jobs because of connections... the privileged among us just take it for granted -- indeed because it so unremarkable we often just forget how we got there or don't think much of it (I'll confess that I initially got a well-paying job (that I was entirely unqualified for) purely because of family connections). Just think how many of these backroom "hey instead of paying me $2000 for my campaign, hire my daughter who's having trouble finding employment" dealings there are that go unreported and are never found out. I'd say it absolutely is commonplace.
Seriously though, after working at a prestigious institution and seeing how often lunch and dinner conversations between peers involved talk of how "my daughter can work in your group!" and "your son can work in my group!", my intuition tells me this is just the way it is - nepotism is pretty much everywhere. Sure, more anecdotes, but that's all I got until someone does some solid research on it.
For now here're two more articles, that may have some more information: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/01/3...
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/07/in-prais...
There's no requirement that data must be exhaustive. And in most social science research, it never is (actually that is frequently the case in hard sciences, too).
No, I don't think we all know this. Most of the people I know did not get jobs through family connections. I suspect a trend analysis would show that the number of high-income workers who achieved their position through nepotism or some other form of non-achievement-based social connection is declining, not rising.
We're social animals, and "connections" will always be valuable. I don't see any evidence that D.E. Shaw treated Wyden's son differently because they wanted something out of his father.
The people with the funds and power to connect all those dots are in the set of people who are somewhat likely to have benefitted from those connections. I don't see a big move to get that research funded any time soon.
Unfortunately sometimes citizens have to resort to the old-fashioned and not 100% accurate "judge for yourself, based on the partial information that is available, to figure out what the bigger picture is".
No staffer-only meetings, the representative must sit through it and must fulfill a quota of X office hours per month, set according to their schedule. Each person / group gets 15-20 minutes. The hours can be cancelled up to 24 hours before for emergencies but must be made up within a week. How does that sound?
I get a bit mad when people suggest that representatives don't have time for that. That's their job, damnit! Make time.
This would really cut down the power of nepotism / cronyism in lobbying and bring politicians back down to earth, closer to the people they represent. Everyone should have equal access to their representative.
15 minutes per issue for eight hours (no accounting for breaks or time between) would be 32 issues. Per week. Even 40 hours a week is 160 groups, which seems pretty small given the size of the US.
Lobbying and staffers exist because the time of our representatives is really limited. I think it's a really awful solution, but I'm not surprised that it exists.
To make things more time efficient, you could even say than more than 5 people, with a designated spokesperson, can group together to block out an hour of time instead of making the representative hear the same issue the 5th time, and they have the benefit of being able to explain one subject in depth in an undivided manner.
Today we have the most amazing transportation and telecommuting technology available to perform duties in D.C., along with staffers to help. If representatives still can't make time for their constituency, maybe we ought to rethink their work division and responsibilities. Otherwise we run the risk of having presidents who don't know the price of milk.
For example, lobbying would be when the NRA gives tons of donations to the local republican candidate or party. The party can then use those funds to buy commercials and other advertising.
Corruption can be seen when someone directly benefits from money changing hands.
Corruption would be where the NRA actually writes a huge check to a congressman so they vote a certain way on a bill. There would be a direct benefit since the only person getting the money is the politician.
It's a thin line for sure, but the difference is who benefits and is it directly or indirectly? Remember the old saying, "follow the money"? That's how you define it.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobbying_in_the_United_States
Changing this system is Lawrence Lessig's prime objective...
* We the People, and the Republic we must reclaim (http://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_we_the_people_and_t...)
* On Aaron Swartz and the unstoppable walk to political reform (http://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_the_unstoppable_wal...)
"Nice company you have here, would be a shame if anything happened to it...."
Most lobbying does not including campaign contributions. Where campaign contributions are made, they must be reported and there are strict rules against the contributions personally benefiting the person running for office or his friends and family.
http://nation.foxnews.com/2014/03/28/reid-scandal-deepens-ca...
They are obviously not strict enough or they have no teeth. This kind of thing happens all the time. You read an article here or there about obvious corruption but then you very rarely see follow-through against the politicians. These ethics rules are written, revised, and enforced by the politicians themselves. What do we really expect?
It's kind of like the debacle of insider trading being allowed by members of Congress. Outright criminality that would land many in the private sector in jail (Martha Stewart), but we put up with it from our elected representatives.
Yes, because formally registered lobbyists have not also done under the table deals since time immemorial...
Don’t worry - if you don’t have money, you can influence government by voting! But who or what you vote on is dictated by a lobbyist. In other words, they set the table and you get to decide which side you sit on. Don’t like what you see? You can walk out in the rain with the other Americans who don’t bother voting.
Great example: 2008 financial crisis. Ordinary citizens were opposed to giving the banks bailouts, like 99% to 1% in polls. The banks beat the will of the people because they are heavy contributors to both major parties. Don’t worry - most of the important politicians behind that move are still in power, because there are a lot of stupid voters in this country. Good thing we also take a “one-size-fits-all” approach to voting and force the will of the (proven stupid) masses on all individuals.
And that’s why lobbying works and won’t ever change. You want representation in this country? You better have money.
Let's say you don't want oil companies to drill in ANWR. You give some money to the Sierra Club, who uses it to pay their staff to fight bills that would allow drilling. Those salaries would be reported in part as lobbying expenditures.
There is a constant confusion between campaign contributions and lobbying. They are distinct. Most campaign donations do not come from lobbyists, and most lobbyists do not contribute much money to campaigns.
Lobbying does not involve any exchange of value. Even buying dinner for a member of Congress is a felony.
Well, that puts a cramp in dating. No more, "I owe you one, let me buy you dinner"
That's quite a whopper. Instead of buying your congressman dinner, how about hiring his son or nephew for a "job?" It took me about 2 minutes of searching to find a huge report on how congressmen pipeline campaign funds to relatives "working" as "campaign consultants."
Holding a bake sale for the Sierra Club is just a time-waster to keep the peons busy while the real Washington is playing a whole different game, by different rules, with several orders of magnitude more money.
Because everything costs money, it's possible for every side of every argument in Washington to level accusations of corruption. That does not mean that they are all right.
And, money is hardly the only corrupting influence in human affairs. Religion, racism, sexism, xenophobia, environmentalism, empathy, and a whole host of other emotions and beliefs power the fights at the federal level. In fact the adjudication of these competing beliefs is the express purpose of our system of government.
The short answer seems to be that in return for good committee assignments, congressmen are required by their party to meet certain fundraising goals. If congressmen do not meet these goals then they may get removed from choice committees and the lack of funds will put them at a competitive campaign disadvantage. It's to the point where congressmen may spend over 2/3 of their time soliciting funds and must regularly solicit lobbyists for money.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/04/19/150904641/why-lobb...
But hosting an Obama fundraiser in Silicon Valley where each couple who wants to attend writes checks for $64,800 to the Democratic Party, why, that's just the cost of doing business!
This is, of course, what happens when Obama comes out here for fundraisers at the "Portola Valley home of star Silicon Valley venture capitalist Vinod Khosla and his wife" and the "home of Marci and [Flipboard founder] Mike McCue of Palo Alto": http://blog.sfgate.com/nov05election/2013/05/17/obama-headin...
Now, this isn't limited to the Democratic Party, of course, though they're better at extracting money from tech execs nowadays. Point is that it's rather silly to say "buying dinner for a member of Congress is a felony" when there are far more lucrative alternative means for influence-peddling politicians to extract $$$ from influence-seekers.
One of the biggest problems in discussing lobbying is that members of the press habitually and intentionally confuse their readers about what is and is not lobbying.
To go back to my ANWR example--I'd be interested to know how many of the attendees at that Obama dinner (or any $64k/plate dinner) were registered lobbyists for the Sierra Club.
edit to add: If we want more citizen participation in government, it has to start with an accurate understanding of how they can participate. Framing lobbying as something that necessitates $64,000 donations does not help people understand how they can support nonprofits (like for example the Sierra Club or ACLU) that engage in lobbying but not huge campaign donations.
Most people take too narrow a view of lobbying.
Writing a check for a $64K/plate dinner with Obama means you've reached the pinnacle of lobbying: a casual after-dinner-with-drinks conversation with the president while looking over the twinkling lights of Silicon Valley and talking about what the administration's regulatory priorities should be. And remember Obama wants you and your pals to continue to bankroll the party; meanwhile, the two college kids with a shoestring self-funded startup that's about to get squashed by that new regulatory priority don't know what hit them. They can't afford $64K a year in salary, let alone for an Obama fundraiser.
Also, why focus only on "registered lobbyists?" I recall looking into this a decade ago and the most influential lobbyist of the second half of the 20th century, MPAA's Jack Valenti, was not always a registered lobbyist.
It's a very narrow legal definition. There are plenty of ways to get around registration, including having congresscritters arrange to call you instead of you calling them, making sure only 20% of your time is calling "covered officials," giving speeches and TV interviews, golfing with your pal who happens to be Senate majority leader where only 1% of that is talking shop, etc.
One way to think about this is that congresscritters write the laws dealing with lobbying. Another definition of "congresscritter" is "future-lobbyist-in-waiting." It would really be a shame if they limited themselves and their bank accounts too much in the future. Right?
"Lobbying" is not a synonym for "influence." Treating it that way makes it impossible to speak specifically about how things are and how you think they should be. It would be like calling every software bug a "buffer overflow" or every browser "the Internet."
Those pious white house pentions are lobbying
Let's say a congresscritter introduces a bill in the U.S. Congress requiring art websites to verify the age of their users so Junior can't access DeviantART or somesuch. "WE MUST DO IT FOR THE CHILDREN! THINK OF THE CHILDREN!" intones Rep. Deanna DeGatte (D-Colo.) on the floor of the House of Representatives, and then the president says he thinks it's a good idea.
If you hire your college buddy who now works in DC and regularly goes drinking with DeGatte's chief of staff, because this stupid law would put you out of business, is it lobbying or corruption? Or is corruption when mainstream art galleries, who are facing Internet corruption, hosted a fundraiser for DeGatte, and then she introduced her bill a day later?
Hint: Consider the difference between offensive and defensive lobbying.
Highly recommend his book about it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic,_Lost
It is basically the way that our government is run by corporations, rather then the people they govern. It is one of the main reasons I detest politics.
I naively assumed it was present everywhere; but it's good news if it turns out that is not the case.
http://www.vice.com/read/are-google-and-facebook-just-preten...
Not to mention that if government is confined in its function by some external constraints, those same actors will have an interest in influencing whomever is imposing that constraint -- which, in a very real sense, is the most powerful part of the real government, even if goes by some other name -- to align the constraint with the actors' interests.
It's the very size and scope of the government and acceptance into all aspects of our lives that gives it power. That power is what lobbyists broker for companies.
Bottlenecking all of that power in Washington DC just makes it a more attractive target. If lobbyists had to maintain control across 50 states, the bar would be raised. In many cases, states would decide on ethical restraints upon lobbyists that would allow us to experiment with ways to control the damage that they do.
Having the power centralized in Washington does make it a more attractive target, but also subjects it to more scrutiny. In practice, state and local governments are far more corrupt than the federal government.
We already know that even within the context of "things that states can do", there is a tremendous amount of diversity amongst the states. This would continue even if states felt that they needed to fill some voids left by a defanged Federal Government. Federalism is a good thing. We see New York panicking and considering policies (like the "tax free zones/hiatus") they never would have in a vacuum because of revenue/brain drain to states like Texas that are more business-friendly.
In practice, state and local governments are far more corrupt than the federal government
They're corrupt in their own ways, but they don't have access to the levels of corruption of the Federal Government. State representatives can't legally inside trade on US stock exchanges. They can't even give themselves that kind of power. State representatives can't distribute national ethanol subsidies. State representatives can't bail out their buddies on Wall Street. The list of what States just don't have the power to do is really long.
I would expect, without looking at data, that the relationship is the reverse: More corrupt governments are weaker. This data seems to bear it out: