Absolutely not. This is expertise.
Lobbying is persuasion. Those are two different things. Purpose of lobbyingis to achieve specific decisions. If those decisions are defined by objective expertise, then they are alined but lobbying usually have different goals.
Do hearings, have technical staff to consult you on issues, etc, instead.
so while some will come back and say lobbyist are only pushing politicians to do what the politician was going to do it simply ignores this is all just a shell game to avoid the limits on campaign donations and similar by providing a means to funnel money to friends and family of the same.
Everyone has a right in the US to petition their government but damn if that doesn’t sound like a convenient workaround
Which is not lobbying. It's illegal quid pro quo.
But being humans and all, people slip. But there's a difference, just as their is between Syria and NYC when it comes to "crime" rate /chance of dying. Just because you have a x% chance of dying from a crime in NYC, doesn't mean it is the same as Syria.
Unlike corporations and their biggest shareholders, regular people don't have resources to influence politicians. Any lobbying attempt backed by non-corporate interests will not be able to reach politicians' ears. Politicians have no time for groups/think thanks which don't have a track record of paying up after politicians finish their terms.
Idealized theoretical forms of lobbying bear no resemblance to reality. To bring the ideal closer to reality, politicians would have to start reaching out to people instead of the other way round. Currently, the only reason politicians reach out to people is for a PR photo op.
Also, without know the specific details of the policy change we can't know how to value this approach.
Likewise, blackmail. People imagine envelopes with incriminating pictures. But that kind of blackmail rarely gets used, because once you've given in to it, then what? The blackmail will still hang over your head. You'll serve the blackmailer for life. At that point the victim may think they have little to lose. (Relevant regarding Donald Trump. He has far too much ego to serve someone else for life, even if there was some "Moscow tape").
Instead, the blackmail that's powerful is the one that the victim knows will cost the blackmailer a lot to use. The understanding that if I go down, you all go down with me, is a lot more useful to make us come to an agreement. That's probably how Epstein got away with things for so long.
Well, that's reassuring.
Behind closed doors, not at all, I very much agree with GP, there's a lot of pernicious shit going on that is actively harming democracies across the globe.
Corporate lobbying is for the most part a well-funded, knowledgeable adversary generally in opposition to a bunch of people who at best can sign some petitions or march in the streets. It's an asymmetrical game that should be acknowledged.
We have chosen a non-direct, representative political system and lobbying is a direct causal result of this chosen system.
It is not a side-effect. We intentionally wanted to create a group of people who could spend their time educating themselves on the issues at hand better than people as whole ever could.
Lobbying is what we wanted as a result of this system. Unfortunately this sometimes leads to regulatory capture.
Some countries have been better at managing political corruption than others.
In most other democratic countries this is illegal.
It's intellectually dishonest to pretend that lobbying just means "reaching out to politicians about an issue and educating them about it."
Lobbying wouldn't be such a problem and corporations wouldn't have such unshaken influence on politicians compared to the People, if that was all there was to it.
But it's not just that - it's about those companies making "donations" to politicians that will then be much easier to "convince" to vote their way.
Watch this video if you aren't convinced, which is just a nice visual presentation of a study that was done and found out that what People want doesn't matter, but what corporations want has a direct correlation to how politicians vote:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tu32CCA_Ig
Also, I remember when one Congressman said post-SOPA that the anti-SOPA petitions made by people and all the calls were nice and all, but it wasn't until Google and other big companies got involved that politicians started really listening and many changed their minds on the vote.
That's the same exact thing - it sponsors their campaign = their political career.
>I don't think it can be tit for tat either
Just not as a written contract. It's very much tit for tat otherwise.
How is this different from receiving a 'gift'? It's extremely reductive to even mention gifts as bribery at this stage because we are far beyond that primitive level of interaction.
This unspoken agreement between politicians and think thanks is exactly the same as bribery. They're bribing politicians with (at best) implicit promises future money.
This legal approach to bribery is not only evil but it's also extremely hypocritical. Usually, when people do evil things, at least they know it's evil and many of them will hear a voice at the back of their heads telling them that they should stop doing it.
Now, the only voice at the back of politicians' heads is telling them "It's OK, it's not a gift/bribe, it's just a job offer given based on my skills" - Nevermind that the salary offered is 10x what they're getting now; that's just an irrelevant detail. A think tank's promises and its reputation for paying big are its currency; the result is exactly the same as bribing with gifts or money.
Lobbyists don't give perks. They funnel in money directly because it has been made completely legal.
That is not the case.
