talkpolitics | Foxes in Charge of the Henhouse

brother-dour.livejournal.com posting in

...and they are greedy foxes.

Ladies and gentlemen, please turn your attention to the Huffington Post article I found today via an anti-lobbying community I watch on Facebook (yeah, I know, talk about shooting for the moon):

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mansur-gidfar/theres-something-absolute_b_4177330.html?utm_hp_ref=politics

In a nutshell: there is a bill currently in the U.S. House of Representatives which eliminates key anti-speculation regulations in the Frank-Dodd Act which supposedly has 'broad bipartisan support'. This is what is destroying the U.S., and by association the rest of the world: corporate lobbying run rampant. Special interest groups which have essentially unlimited lobbying power in the U.S., to the point that U.S. politicians are allowing them to write bills. Sure, there were other examples- SOPA comes to mind, being as it was pretty much exclusively written by MPAA and RIAA shills. But in both cases, this is proof that the U.S. is no longer anything like a representative government- it is a plutocracy, plain and simple.

And while it is easy to say 'lobbying must stop', unfortunately I see three problems here (and two are fundamental with the U.S. system of governnance). One, the very people who in the United States would be drafting and approving anti-lobbying legislation are the same people who benefit the most from lobbying - the foxes (U.S. Congresspeople). You can hardly expect anyone to cut their own throats, especially career politicians! Second, thanks to SCOTUS rulings on corporate personhood and campaign contributions, any kind of meaningful lobbying reform, will most likely require a Constitutional amendment. And who traditionally implements Constitutional Amendments? That's right: Congress. The third and possibly most insidious problem, though, is public apathy. We argue back and forth about Left versus Right, Conservative versus Liberal, with gusto here and all the time. But really, those arguments are pointless while the system is fundamentally broken. The fact that most Americans even are totally ignorant of how lobbying affects them and how much it has diluted the political power of the voter only makes the status quo more resilient to change.

EDIT: so we know what must change to prevent another 2008 housing collapse, or another 2013 government shutdown / borderline default. The question is: given the above, how do we change it?

Mood: aggravated

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

notmrgarrison.livejournal.com

One might say the system is fundamentally broken because we argue left vs right, as if that is what's so important.

Or maybe I should say that's what enables it to be so broken.

Edited Date: 30/10/13 17:59 (UTC)

From:

peristaltor.livejournal.com

Exactly. The people perpetuating the problem are setting the argument in terms that obfuscate the real problem.

If they challenge the real problem, their campaign money evaporates.

From:

hardblue.livejournal.com

Now, the House is scheduled to vote on a bill that would roll back these derivative regulations and let banks go back to the same set of rules that let them break the economy in the first place.

-- from the Huff article

Now, you see, everyone knows that the economy broke because the Democrats tried to use government to make housing more affordable for the poor, or something like that. The regulations are what is keeping this economy from humming like a fine European sports car. You need to have more trust in capitalism and less in government.

It's hard to argue against logic like that, especially when it is so well-funded.

From:

badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com

Special interest groups which have essentially unlimited lobbying power in the U.S., to the point that U.S. politicians are allowing them to write bills. Sure, there were other examples- SOPA comes to mind, being as it was pretty much exclusively written by MPAA and RIAA shills. But in both cases, this is proof that the U.S. is no longer anything like a representative government- it is a plutocracy, plain and simple.

Here's a few random tidbits:

1) We all have "essentially unlimited lobbying power," as it's a protected Constitutional right!

2) Politicians can allow any of us to write bills, and we can do that ourselves and send them to our elected officials.

This is not evidence of a plutocracy.

Second, thanks to SCOTUS rulings on corporate personhood and campaign contributions, any kind of meaningful lobbying reform, will most likely require a Constitutional amendment.

Corporate personhood has nothing at all to do with it. Because lobbying is Constitutionally protected, it doesn't matter who is doing the lobbying (much like Citizens United noted that it didn't matter who was doing the speaking), but merely that the lobbying is being done.

EDIT: so we know what must change to prevent another 2008 housing collapse, or another 2013 government shutdown / borderline default. The question is: given the above, how do we change it?

With lobbying, we effectively have two options:

1) Accept that corporate entities will lobby, and accept it as such given that the regulatory state impacts them significantly while "fighting back" with citizen lobbying groups that are also well-funded and act in accordance to the wishes of their groups.

2) Severely deregulate and remove the need/necessity/desire to lobby the government from corporate and business entities. The regulatory state is largely supported by big businesses to reduce competition anyway, so if plutocracy is your concern, regulatory reform (not restrictions on Constitutional rights) should be your goal.

It's not discomfort with lobbying people have, but instead lobbying by people or groups of people that anti-lobbying people disagree with. So how do we change it? A good start would be coming up with a compelling reason why we would want to. "But corporations!" isn't really what we'd call a good reason.

From:

peristaltor.livejournal.com

This is not evidence of a plutocracy.

No, this is potential evidence of democracy. Actual evidence of plutocracy is who is actually allowed to lobby/craft bills.

You know the difference, don't you? A boy walks up to his father and asks him the difference between "potentially" and "actually." Dad tells him to ask his older sister and mom if they would "date" their favorite hunky star for a million dollars. Both, of course, say yes.

"There you go, son. Potentially, we're sitting on two million bucks. Actually, we're living with a couple of whores."

Your two "solutions" further the potential/actual problem. As long as the corporate interests can massively outfund the citizen lobbying groups, there's no chance of actual change; and as long as the corporate lobbying targets enhance future revenues for those corporations, the problem will get actually worse.

Further, since "deregulation" is often the goal of lobbying efforts, the potential benefits of such must be quite a bit different from the actual. Which brings me to:

It's not discomfort with lobbying people have, but instead lobbying by people or groups of people that anti-lobbying people disagree with.

As a person who has lobbied congress in the past and still finds problems with the current system, I must accuse you of either deliberately or unintentionally missing the real problem. As long as money dictates who gets heard in the lobby wars, none of your potential points is actually useful.

From:

badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com

No, this is potential evidence of democracy. Actual evidence of plutocracy is who is actually allowed to lobby/craft bills.

So everyone being allowed to do such things is a plutocracy?

As a person who has lobbied congress in the past and still finds problems with the current system, I must accuse you of either deliberately or unintentionally missing the real problem. As long as money dictates who gets heard in the lobby wars, none of your potential points is actually useful.

It doesn't really matter, though. If those who are so crazy against lobbying are not pooling their own resources to lobby themselves, or are not working harder to elect people who will not listen to those exercising their Constitutional rights, none of those potential points about a supposed plutocracy actually matter.

From:

brother-dour.livejournal.com

What makes it a plutocracy is that while everyone can theoretically lobby, the only ones who practically can lobby are the ones with the most money. It's the potentially/actually thing as

peristaltor says.

Here, let me put it this way:

Acme Co., has a net income of $50 million annually. It spends 1/2 of 1% of its net income on lobbying for what it wants- that would be $250,000. Citizens Against Acme Co. wants exactly the opposite, but the problem is they are funded by the donations of average two-income families making $50,000 a year, not a huge corporation. So to match Acme corp dollar for dollar, if each member also donated 1/2 of 1% of $50,000, they would need 1,000 members to donate $250 each. Now, which do you think is more likely to happen?

Allowing everyone to lobby only works on paper, but in reality it grossly favors large corporate lobbies. The only way to ensure fairness is to eliminate all lobbying to politicians. It is far more fair to let all special interests lobby the voters, not the politicians.

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