It doesn't mean paying politicians.
Lobbying is simply that - petitioning your representative for change (or no change). No money changes hands, you literally just get time with your representative to argue your case.
When a company spends $1M on lobbying, it's $1M given to a lobbying firm to put together a strategy and a pitch to representatives.
If you want fund raising laws to change, then say that.
I think many people are aware of what lobbying means. They're just using standard motte-and-bailey tactics to make it seem like they're defending something innocuous (petitioning the government) while they're really defending bribery and corruption.
The Strategy: Hey $senator, wouldn't you like $500,000 donated to your re-election campaign? Of course, we would need to know that you share our commitment to Clean Coal!
(I assume the lobbyists themselves get to pocket their share of the $1M, but don't know what the markup is on bribes)
I mean, EFF uses fundraising to lobby the government for privacy protection. Should we ban that?
• Entities which receive more than half their funding from any non-human "persons" (corporations, other legal entities) or where more than 50% of the funding comes from the top 500 donors, or who have fewer than 10,000 unique donors (in the past 4 years) overall, cannot provide any funds to any candidate's campaign, nor run ads mentioning, hinting, or suggesting any candidate or party, nor any other BS shenanigans astroturfing PACs legally do today.
• The rest of the entities who don't fall under the above, still cannot make contributions, but can run ads, assuming the ad starts and ends with the phrase "(TRUE LEGAL NAME OF ORG) [supports/opposes] (name of politician, bill, or ballot measure)"
Politicians taking meetings and listening to ideas based on who is paying for their (re-)election campaigns is corruption. They don't represent corporations, they represent all of the people in their state or district. When they take a meeting from a campaign donor, they are saying that only wealthy people's voices matter to them. It's corruption. Legal and yet still morally depraved.
Though perhaps lobbying (as practiced or in general) should still be considered inappropriate.
This is true but when people are talking about restricting lobbying the kind of lobbying they want to restrict isn’t companies saying “hey this policy isn’t good for us”. It’s companies spending millions of dollars on donations and advertising to force politicians to make laws that benefit them. It’s possible to restrict the second kind without impacting the first kind, for example by implementing spending limits.
Aren’t the rules on donations made by companies pretty restricted in the US? Isn’t it normally that companies persuade their employees to give to some company pac (as a deduction from their paycheck) and that pac then makes maximum campaign contributions to various politicians. (The limits on both contributions to the pac and to campaigns are pretty small. On the order of $5k. It seems unlikely to matter much to a politician but maybe they do care).
Maybe you’re not talking about the US or maybe I’m wrong or there is some other mechanism I don’t understand
They aren't forcing. They'd just rather take the money than not. If politicians weren't corrupt, we'd only have the first kind of lobbying, as no one will spend money on something that doesn't work.
> Even ignoring lobbying, you see regulators reaching out for comments from industry about new rules.
Yet somehow the only times those "comments from industry" are taken into consideration in a meaningful way is when they come from large businesses with deep pockets or astroturf consumer interest groups funded by large businesses with deep pockets. Genuine grassroots consumer interest groups rarely leave a mark.
Corporations have always been legal persons, going back to the Middle Ages (guilds, chartered cities, universities) and even Ancient Rome:
Opinions and precedents vary:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_person#Rights_and_respon...
No where in that article does it cite a jurisdiction where a non-human legal entity has the same rights and responsibilities as a human. My point still stands that a human has a different, albeit overlapping, set of rights and responsibilities in comparison to other legal entities.
Who else besides people would control a monopoly?