- cross-posted to:
- politics@lemmy.world
- usa@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- politics@lemmy.world
- usa@lemmy.ml
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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…
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.
$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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
