Final-Fan said:
Kasz216 said:
Final-Fan said:
Please Kasz, your post assumes the people will be just as alert to politicians' actions as the corporations. "All the corporate money in the world" won't make politicans stand by BP when they caused the disastrous Gulf of Mexico oil spill, but if it's not making headlines ...
Owning politicians means corporations can do serious damage to our country (for short-term or special interest gain) and all they have to do is keep a majority of people in the dark about it. Or shit, if they get stupid politicians (not rare), they can just buy off the next one when the first one gets run out on a rail. (I'm sure you know the big companies spend on both sides.)
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Just as alert? No. Still alert enough though to detect anything big... which generally is the stuff that's "Against the people".
Just about anything particularly important that particularly hurts the majority of people is untouchable. All the little subsidies and things they do I don't think they see as "against the people" nor do most people. It's justified to most people and most polticians because in general they get won over by the arguement.
For example, you are one of the people who think the 2008 crisis was caused by the repeal of glass steagal right? If I remember correctly that was done during the "Banking Modernization Act" which received massive bipartisian support and had basically nobody voting against it, and in general people thinking it'd be good for the economy... and banks likely thought that as well.
Everytime there has been an attempt to get lobbying money out of Washington, at best it's failed, and othertimes it's often made things worse.
Why? Because you are essentially asking the bribed to stop themselves from being bribed.
The only way to stop bribery from the highest levels of government is to take away their power over the small things that can be influnced.
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A lot of little things get by because they aren't big enough to affect enough people, even when the people who do care mostly think it's bad.
The banks probably thought it would be good for them, and IMO there's a problem there in terms of taking the long view.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I'd hope that many politicians would prefer to see less lobbying money in politics ... they just don't want to be the one to get less of it than the other guy. Therefore they wouldn't have a problem with trying to evenhandedly close the floodgates. Of course, that's a lot easier said than done, and real reform in this area might earn the authors a certain amount of backlash from those groups. But that's how the bribed could stop themselves from being bribed ... because the bribery is part of a competition with other bribed people. If they cooperated, I'd think they could fix the problem without disadvantaging theselves.
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See, I think that when politicians see the choice as for companies and against the people, they side for the people everytime. It's just most legislation doesn't look like that to them. It looks more like one corporation vs another.
Otherwise they'd be too worried it'd get brought up against them... the smallest stupidist things can kill you in politics.
As for less lobbying money in politics, i'd suggest your wrong for three reasons.
1) A few senators have been trying this since, Clinton, and there seems to have been massive problems/loopholes added to every legislation that tried to tackle this.
2) Incumbents almost always have a funding advantage because incumbents always win.
3) In general the studies done by the freakanomics crew actually tend to show that money doesn't effect your electability that much, and really, you get more money when your more electable. I mean, if Bill Gates came in and decided to spend his whole fortune to get Hulk Hogan elected as President... it isn't going to work.
