Re:Google Security Team Member on NSA: "Fuck These Guys"
by craftsman on Thursday November 07, 2013 @08:52AM
(#6689252)
I took the meaning of the OP to be generically 'those who pay to influence politicians', not strictly the lobbyists themselves. So although you are technically correct that there is a distinction, the spirit of the original one-line comment was that individual voters don't have the power that organized interests do. I gave a practical example in which the interests of individuals are overshadowed by leverage that an employer has over those individuals. It's a case in which a vague threat of 'hey, you want a job don't you?' turns into aggregating money into the hands of a few people who lobby (in the generic sense) politicians to support things that may be against the interests of the employees. Such is the game they play.
As to your last statement, largely it is the shareholders and executives who are the beneficiaries of the lobbying they do. You can argue that the employees are beneficiaries in the sense that they have a job, but that misses the point: the benefits of lobbying fall asymmetrically. Again, it's a leverage thing. They leverage the desire of the little guy to have a job and raise his family and in turn reap huge rewards for the shareholders. So although you can say everyone benefits and gets what they want, the result is really a distortion of power and influence.
Lobbyists are unregulated employees or contractors, whose budget is only limited by the largesse of the sponsor. Its goal is to affect legislation and regulation through swaying the votes and actions of elected officials, political appointees and to a lesser extent career bureaucrats. In this regard they are limited by anti-corruption and bribery laws.
Campaign finance is a highly regulated system through which politicians amass money to fund campaign to sway the votes of the public. PACs and other organizations channel money to candidates whom they believe will be sympathetic to their causes.
Regardless, forget about the PAC money and the campaign finance. I assume BigCorp has lobbyists, and those lobbyists look out for BigCorps interests. As an employee of Big Corp, you are a beneficiary of those lobbyists.