Foxes in Charge of the Henhouse

[brother-dour.livejournal.com]

...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?

Comments

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

You're not going to like the answer, because the incentives are two things:

1) The corporate tax rate, which sets up a "taxation without representation" thing for groups of people. We cannot expect to take from the coffers of groups and then not expect them to want a voice.

2) The regulatory state. We regulate these entities when they lack a say, we see these entities use and promote these regulations for competitive purposes.

Remove the corporate tax, reduce the regulatory state as much as possible, and there's no reason left for corporations to lobby.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

Remove the corporate tax, reduce the regulatory state as much as possible, and there's no reason left for corporations to lobby.

That only applies for corporations that lobby to remove the corporate tax. Most do not. Most lobby instead for reducing regulations which will benefit their bottom line.

Strangely, those regulations that affect neither the bottom line nor the safety of the public are generally left untouched. Weird. . . .

[brother-dour.livejournal.com]

I think both of these arguments are rather weak given the many examples of corporations chugging along quite happily in much more regulated nations like the EU and Japan, for example. How do they manage to be profitable and stay in business with oh so much more taxation, less representation, and more regulations?

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

Those nations actually have lower corporate tax rates, and they have a different situation in place with the smaller geographic areas having different regulatory rules.

[brother-dour.livejournal.com]

Which automatically means that couldn't possibly work here, too?

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

I'd love to see us go to a low-to-no corporate tax model with regulatory stuff deferred to the states.

[brother-dour.livejournal.com]

I predict that would lead the Southern states to a fact track to Third World status (even moreso than they are now)