- cross-posted to:
- politics@lemmy.world
- usa
- cross-posted to:
- politics@lemmy.world
- usa
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I still don’t understand how lobbying is legal. Like, it’s straight up bribery.
Because the people who decide what is legal are the people who benefit from it.
Lobbying is supposed to be making your case to a politician, and hoping they vote/propose a bill/etc. With that interest in mind. You yourself are allowed to lobby your congress critters…technically.
We’re allowed, but without a fruit basket stuffed with money they’re not going to listen.
They’re surprisingly not that expensive to buy though, 10k will get you pretty much whatever you want…
$10k will get you access, but you won’t convince a politician to do something that will cost them all of the other $10k checks they get from special interests.
Like if you wanted to buy a senator in order to get some earmarks for your development projects, you could probably get that buying a table at a fundraiser or two. But if you want them to pass legislation supporting unions or reducing the influence of money in politics, you’d basically have to bankroll their whole campaign because they wouldn’t raise another dime.
I wonder if I could use $10k to get a law passed that every company needs my safety manual in their business that I totally had professionally bound and didn’t print at Kinko’s.
The majority of Americans don’t have 10k unneeded liquid cash
No, but a bunch of Americans together have 10k, it just so happens that it’s just the conservative ones who figured it out.
The lobbying is not the problem. The donations that sway opinions are the problem. If it was entirely unrelated to donations and the congress person was just hearing out all sides of an issue, that’s a good thing.
How often do companies fund biased or outright falsified studies that are then presented as fact by lobbyists?
I could maybe get more behind lobbying without donations if all data points were required to be peer reviewed. The lawmakers hearing these arguments are not experts (see any tech related legislation ever), it’s real easy to lie to them; basically removing the money then means that the most charismatic and/or best liar ends up winning.
If donations did not affect outcome, no company would donate.
Even when a legislator’s decisions are unaffected by lobbying, companies still control legislation by ensuring legislators who earnestly believe in legislation that favors the corporations over the people get elected.
This is how Biden sided with banks and the prison-industrial complex for half a century yet didn’t have enough money to fund his son’s cancer treatment without selling his house until Obama paid off his medical debt.
“hearing out all sides” somehow invariably turns into siding with whoever controls the most capital - I wonder how that happens.
Donations aren’t to sway opinion they’re to maintain a stock of dependent politicians who already agree with your position but who also need your funding to stay in office
Which will happen when hell freezes over
Edit- not saying you’re not wrong though
If you ever called or wrote a letter to your congress person about an issue you cared about you were a lobbyist when you did that.
The problem is not lobbying, the problem is pay-for-play. Something like 80%-90% of candidates who spend the most money end up winning their election. Our politicians are owned by wealthy corporate interests who fund their elections. The solution is to get money — especially corporate money — out of politics.
There are a number of policy proposals that might limit the power of money in our politics, federally funded elections, regulations for how much air time each candidate gets, perhaps bring back the fairness doctrine, just to name a few.
The “tea party”/freedom caucus are literally groups funded by the Koch brothers. The entire “movement” existed because they willed it to be with their money.
“Americans for prosperity” is Koch manipulating politics through who they fund to run.
Yeah but there’s a difference between making one phone call and your job being to convince people to do things they would never do otherwise.
In theory, it’s partially meant to educate politicians who cannot be experts on everything in a world where information exponentially grows, but this system has clearly been intentionally used to abuse power.
Met a dude in 2015 who was a lobbyist for Boeing in DC. I heard he made 750k a year back then. He must be a really good educator!
And I know lobbyists who are just regular people who looked up the process and did it. I’m not advocating for it, just giving context.
There are other examples of programs and policies being used in this way. Now, to me, the question is whether or not they are intended to easily abused by design. I don’t have the knowledge to say one way or another. However, as previously stated, it’s obviously being used as a bribery under another name.
I used to work for a lobbyist on the hill, doing line standings. I would get paid to stand in line for hearings and committees and then the lawyers would come relieve you right before the hearing. Sometimes they wanted you to camp out the day before the hearing, and usually there were other line standers and it would be a circus, lots of fun.
Cool gig actually
That’s the point. It is meant to be legalised bribery.
Exactly. Its legal so they’re not corrupt, but they still get to keep bribes
Read about Citizens United please
I think politician should be under 24 hour stream.
id love to see them all going to the bathroom 😁
If lobbying were illegal, that would mean all of the organizations that fight for justice lose their voices too.
Lobbying isn’t bribery, it’s persuasion
Money ≠ speech. Now go back to bed, Mr. McConnell
No it just means they use their voices not money
We didn’t deserve Carter. We still don’t. He’s a better category of human than nearly all of the politicians we have at the moment.
That is why the Democratic party drastically changed its primary rules after Carter was elected (to make them less democratic, and to give establishment elite party members more power).
They tried to tighten the collar on the public even more when Occasio-Cortez primaried an establishment Democrat.
The left-wing of the Democratic Party, including President Jimmy Carter, are the red-haired stepchildren of the party, and they’ll never let us forget it.
There are more secret fascists than it appears who will Hail Hydra when Secret Hitler makes his appearance.
The Democratic party tried to primary AOC 3 times afterwards, too ☠️
Didn’t the rules change because Hubert Humphrey got snubbed by the DNC just flat out ignoring the primary results in states that had them?
Hubert Humphrey got snubbed by the DNC just flat out ignoring the primary results in states that had them?
I didn’t know this and am eager to find it. Was it during the 1968 election against Nixon?
I don’t quite remember, all I personally have off the top of my head is that it was the major contributing factor to the chicago DNC riots, and an overhaul of the nomination rules to appease the folks who called fowl.
Think “the superdelegates will only vote if a majority candidate isn’t found in the first round ballot” but I think it was actually even bigger when it happened.
clearly he’s old enough to run again.
Man. The guy can grow peanuts, build thousands of houses, kick cancer’s ass, and is brilliantly insightful.
No wonder he lost reelection. He’s competent. I’m kinda shocked he won in the first place. We didn’t deserve him, and we still don’t.
Well, between that and Reagan and Iran Hostage Crisis.
That and his own party turned against him when it became apparent he cared more about the country than their profits
The guy facilitated crimes against humanity in Indonesia and Afghanistan. I’d rather an incompetent war criminal than a cold blooded architect of genocide.
He can also fund and arm the Indonesian government while it commits genocide in East Timor
And he wasn’t competent. He squandered a Democratic majority in both the House and Senate for two years by sitting to the right of both chambers of Congress, and ended up heralding the deregulation and deunionization that we blame Reagan for.
Like all US Presidents, Carter is a piece of shit
Thank you, Mr. Last Good American President very likely ever.
We never deserved to be led by this man. We’d rather be lied to by actors.
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I mean he’s right.
Yeah. And…
And the general population should stop accepting it as if we have no choice in the matter.
Fair enough, I’m not refuting this. But I think this is not a new thing rather an open and well known fact. And the incentives for politicians to change this situation aren’t in our favors. So good job Carter. But lets have some results.
And… It shouldn’t be normal.
I agree with what is being said in the article. However, I have seen an uptick of articles older than 2 years being posted as “recent news” or “breaking news”. This article is from 2015 and while it is pretty accurate, especially in these times, something from 8 years ago should be noted as such.
Seriously. This is political discussion, but not news (current events).
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It was a process. Reagan’s election in 1980 was a big step.
From that moment forward, we were on the express train to capital-driven fascism.
The CIA extrajudicial detention and torture program triggered my are we the baddies? moment, and yet somehow the US publice still kept voting for the let’s-go-back-to-feudal-monarchy party.
The next destination is civil war city, unless we can stop or reroute the train. But the Democratic party isn’t willing to give up some power to the public to save the nation and democracy.
So civil war it is.
Technically they didn’t vote to do that, every Republican since iirc Bush one had lost the popular.
Technically George W. Bush won in 2004. By a thread. As the incumbent. Versus John Kerry, possibly the blandest candidate the Democrats would offer… by swift boating the poor sod.
Aside from the fact that it was one of the most questionable election results of the last century.
This is a perfectly concise explanation and I appreciate that. I was born in the early 80s and didn’t really take a hard look at politics until all this was well on its way to fuckville.
The thing that astounds me is that so many people simply buy into it and vote along party lines or whatever that it’s becoming increasingly impossible to change course.
And my problem with heading for civil war city, is that the gun toting, second amendment maniacs tend to be the ones voting for the worst of the worst; to borrow your phrasing, they’re voting for the ones pushing towards capital-driven fascism.
I have a serious concern that those fascists will end up being the victors since they seem to be represented and voted for by those whom are constantly practicing for the civil war outcome. To me, that means the chances of such a civil war having a more democratic outcome than a fascist one, are small.
Bruh. There will be no civil war or at the very least it will be heavily decided by which side the Military Industry chooses (hint it’ll be the side of maintaining status quo)
Jim bob with his ar-15 ain’t gonna do shit against basically any modern Military equipment (ie drones and f-35s)
It’s retired CIA analysts who specialize in civil wars and the symptoms that show high risk that pointed to the current state of the US in an interview on PBS. Noting that the precarity of the people combined with the uprising and political takeover of federal and state governments by the white Christian nationalist movement is going to lead to a conflict of interest neither tolerable in its contentious state, nor reconcilable by nonviolent means.
Essentially BLM (The public) vs. the law enforcement state. It’ll look like La Résistance versus the German occupation of Paris, with another layer of communication security / surveillance on the internet.
The US Armed Forces are not supposed to be deployed in the states, as we saw during Trump’s term. They’ll be extremely resistant to take sides, and it’s not clear if they’re going to want to side with the guys who are slaughtering drag queens and running thr prison complex like concentration camps, even though that will be the side that has legal authority over them, yet issuing illegal orders to them.
But unlike the German Reich, the US is huge and a lot of different things will be going on at the same time. There will also be more opportunity to interfere with the complexity of government and logistics of supply. It compares to the land war in Asia problem.
You bring up a good point of the Christo-fascist movement.
If all the jimbobs organize as zealots that could certainly lead to civil war with very messy borders
You’re not wrong and many of the military are on the same side as the gravy seals… aka those that are geared up for a military style incursion without the same training dicipline or structure as military personnel.
unfortunately, IMO, it would appear that’s the side that seems to have the most right wing, authoritarian/facist people involved. So any conflict is going to be super short lived.
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Let them eat cake.
Carter put solar panels on the White House roof. Reagan took them off because he was beholden to the fossil fuel industry. And now look at the planet.
Pretty much everything Regan touched turned to shit
Yeah he helped create it. The first US president to begin to embrace neoliberal ideology and fictitious capital. Set the path for Ronald Reagan to bring in neoliberalism proper. And armed the Mujahideen, which lead to the crisis in Afghanistan. This is equivalent to Eisenhower warning everyone about the military industrial complex.
Had to scroll all the way down for this comment. The only response to this article should be : “Thanks for making this happen”
It’s frustrating. They say good things when they are removed from power. He sounds like a good person, but he was not a good president. Obama will probably gradually come around to this kind of talk when he gets older too. He recently all but admitted middle class decline due to concentration of wealth was responsible for the rise of MAGA. Don’t know if he will ever admit that drone “assassinations” he was in charge of were war crimes (assassinations in quotes because more than half the time the intelligence wasn’t even correct).
Just testing out IDF doctrine
It’s insane to think this guy, who was a pastor, lost the Christian vote to the cheating twice divorced Reagan
It’s very clear what the evangelical vote actually is for. They also largely voted for Trump over Biden, who’s a Catholic.
That one like half makes sense because evangelicals are obviously protestant and Trump is nominally protestant, but he is literally the fakes Chsitian to ever live. He is the kind of fake Christian you would only see in Christian media aimed at kids. I hate orange man bad “humor” but his saying “Two Corinithians” to an audience of Christian university students and faculty will live rent free in my head until I die.
it was a concerted strategy on the part of the republicans who made anti-abortion policy a cornerstone of their platform while convincing pastors to preach about how it was a sin.
Racism do be like that
The initials, the carpentry, the advocations for peace and against extreme wealth. You’d think a certain group would like this guy.
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Jfc I am ashamed of my species
We know.
Oligarchy is baked into the U.S. constitution. Only rich (land-owning) White Males had any say. The Senate (mostly wealthy) has a permanent veto over any real power sharing. Oligarchy is nothing new in the USA, they have just added window dressing to make people THINK it ever was a democracy.
It’s an oligarchy?
Always has been
