Google, Apple, Amazon Hit Record Lobbying Highs (axios.com) 84
An anonymous reader shares a report: The last three months brought record-high lobbying spending from four major tech companies: Google spent $5.93 million, Apple spent $2.2 million, Amazon spent $3.21 million, Uber spent $430,000. Facebook spent $2.38 million this quarter, up from the same period last year but far from a record. Microsoft's bill for the quarter was just over $2 million.
legalized bribery? (Score:5, Insightful)
legalized bribery?
Re:legalized bribery? (Score:5, Insightful)
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it's not money, it's speech.
free speech isn't free (Score:5, Insightful)
... and going up against the combined anti-net-neutrality speech of Comcast, AT&T, Charter, Verizon, etc. weighting in at 572 million. I say good luck, yer gonna ta needid.
Re:free speech isn't free (Score:5, Interesting)
... and going up against the combined anti-net-neutrality speech of Comcast, AT&T, Charter, Verizon, etc. weighting in at 572 million.
Indeed. It is interesting that the donations of these four tech companies was emphasized, while the donations of a hundred times as much by their adversaries was not even mentioned.
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Because that's more normal for the media industry than the tech industry. I sort of wish the tech companies would simply squash the media companies. The tech guys have billions in their bank accounts.
Re:legalized bribery? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's more like a barometer of the health of the country.
The more money is spent on lobbying, the more ROI the industry believes that it can get for that money (secure lucrative contracts, pass anti-competitive laws, acquire land rights, and curtail competition, etc).
Thus the amount of money for lobbying is directly related to how much power the government exerts over its serfs - er... I mean... over the free people of the lone bastion of freedom who select from among their neighbors to act as their representatives to serve as their duly elected public servants.
While the government is capable of granting as many favors as it is, the money will continue to pour in trying to shape those decisions, no matter how many sham campaign finance reform laws the politicians pass.
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More like fighting back and not, as they say, "bringing a knife to a gun fight." There was a time, up through the '90s or so, when Silicon Valley wasn't much into playing the lobbying game. And it wound up hurting them fairly badly.
Consider just one law... How much money, time, and actual engineering work do you think tech has had to waste to comply with the DMCA? I couldn't even begin to guess, myself. How much Danegeld is Google forced to pay, for its YouTube unit alone, to the copyright cartels beca
Re: legalized bribery? (Score:1)
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Very little, I have no doubt. You are humoring the lie that a "pirated" work is a lost sale. It's not. I know this from personal experience. So...
Confessions of a former warez kiddie:
"Piracy" (It's not piracy, of course, no theft on the high seas is involved. But I'll indulge the cartels' weasel words.) is in no way about acquiring and actually using the content, be it software, music, or whatever. Do you think that some "pirate" who gets and cracks the latest pro version of AutoCad, for example, is a
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Why not just call it what it really is? (Score:5, Insightful)
The last three months brought record-high lobbying spending from four major tech companies: Google spent $5.93 million, Apple spent $2.2 million, Amazon spent $3.21 million, Uber spent $430,000. Facebook spent $2.38 million this quarter, up from the same period last year but far from a record. Microsoft's bill for the quarter was just over $2 million.
Just call it corruption. You know why?
It's because if any company did the same thing in the so called "3rd world", this same activity would be termed as "corruption" as part of "buying off politicians."
Sad.
SCOTUS said it is legal (Score:1)
Money is free speech.
The ironic thing is that if a bag of cash was dropped on the doorsteps of politicians in -any- other country from a foreign source, there would be people thrown in jail. However, it is considered completely legal here.
Re:SCOTUS said it is legal (Score:5, Insightful)
Tell me about it. In Sweden, if you are a politician and rent an apartment to a price questionably low, congratulations, you're being investigated for bribery and you're in the national news.
If you served in the government and someone buys you dinner, you better decline or you're up for a bribe charge and end up in the national news.
Turns out the key to efficient governing is making sure the government isn't schizophrenic (no corruption or conflicts of interest).
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Re:SCOTUS said it is legal (Score:5, Insightful)
Money is free speech.
Only in the USA. In more democratic countries, political donations are limited / capped.
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SCOTUS said it was legal because SCOTUS itself was put in place in part via corporate influence. It's recursive, and may get worse. Yes, a "slippery slope"; they do happen.
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It's because if any company did the same thing in the so called "3rd world", this same activity would be termed as "corruption" as part of "buying off politicians."
It is more like that when they were small and challenging the establishment, people would cheer them on. Sort of like with Lyft and Uber now. However, Google, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft (along with others) long ago ceased to be change agents disrupting and challenging the establishment. They are the establishment. Now they are in the mode of protecting and fortifying what they have.
If you want to eliminate corruption, elect people who don't take campaign contributions from large corporations. BTW, we
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what about the citizens the government "represents", should they pay lobbyists too?
They already do. Two of the top lobby groups, both in membership and in influence, are made up of millions of supporters. The AARP and the NRA both have a hand in some of these political games. I wouldn't be surprised if the ACLU is in there as well.
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You say there's corruption. If so, is the corruption in:
A) Corporations with deep pockets engaging in crony capitalism strictly for their own benefit.
B) A government engaging in such outlandish politics that the only way sanity gets a seat at the table is if corporations spend big on lobbying.
C) Both
D) Neither
Arguably, the answer in this case may be B. Apple in particular has a record for not spending much on lobbying, particularly given their size, but the last two quarters, i.e. since Trump was elected, h
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Apple in particular has a record for not spending much on lobbying
Microsoft also donated very little prior to 1998, when the feds initiated an anti-trust lawsuit that could have broken up the company and destroyed their monopoly pricing power. Since then, Microsoft has donated 10s of millions, and has had few legal problems despite very few behavioral changes.
It is silly to blame corps for donating when our political system provides so much value to big donors.
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It's physically impossible for your senator to talk to every person in his/her district [medium.com]. However, if you find a thousand (or even a hundred) like-minded people, pool in a hundred bucks each, your senator will be extremely eager to talk to you.
In fact, if you can get a thousand like-minded people who actually want to talk to your politician (instead of signing some kind of online poll), there is also a very good chance the pol
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It's only corruption as long as the politicians (and judges) that you paid off haven't made it legal yet. After that it's "contributions" or "financing".
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Bribery doth never prosper: what's the reason?
Why, if it prosper, none dare call it bribery.
To misquote Sir John Harrington [wikiquote.org]
Last laugh of corporate cancerism? (Score:4, Insightful)
Dismissing such corporate lobbying as "corruption" is far too simplistic an explanation to merit the "insightful" mod. Maybe it's just too soon for the story and better comments are yet to come, but (of course) I think it's just a reflection of the current "state of the Slashdot". Hint: The state of the Slashdot is NOT "strong, very strong".
There is a deep issue here, but it involves the prioritization of the single metric of "money, more money" above everything else. In reality, LOTS of other things are as important or even MORE important than money, but corporate cancerism now reduces everything else to that metric. If I were forced to pick a single metric, I would probably pick time, and I certainly think time is much more important than money. From that perspective, I think the deeper solution is to dump crude economics and evolve to ekronomics, a time-based approach to assess what is actually important in life, even for the so-called lives of corporations.
What is interesting to me about this particular story is the underlying conflict. WHY are they spending all this money?
I think we're seeing a climatic struggle here, and the giant (EVIL) corporations are obviously in favor of today's so-called Republicans. That's because they have some agreement on their priorities. Today's GOP actively wants government of the corporations, by the lawyers, for the richest 0.1% of the population.
The other side of the struggle has much simpler priorities. #PresidentTweety wants government of the Donald, by the Donald, for the Donald. The corporations obviously don't like that so much, but the joke is that Trump is NOT even in the 0.1%. The hilarious secret of Trump's tax returns is that his so-called assets are just laundry fees for Putin's dirty rubles. (Gross simplification, especially in that Trump's incompetence had driven him to dirty money long before Putin became a player.)
Government of the people, by the people, for the people? Ain't NO major player on that side. Ain't no one worrying about the country or Constitution these days. Especially on the GOP side, the priorities are just party politics, private profits, and personal power.
So you want to invoke their oaths to defend and protect the Constitution? ROFLMAO
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I think the deeper solution is to dump crude economics and evolve to ekronomics, a time-based approach to assess what is actually important in life
Economics is about exactly that. If you think economics is about money, you don't understand the topic. Economics is the study of how scarce resources -- including time, but also including many other resources -- that have multiple competing uses, are allocated. Focusing only on time and excluding all other resources, that would be "crude economics".
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Most people also believe in taxing corporations.
Now reconcile those two positions. If you want to tax corporations, then you have to give them some form of representation in government. Since corporations can't vote, the only avenue left is lobbying and political donations. Hence lobbying is legitimized.
IMHO we should just abolish all corporate taxes AND prohibit any type of lobbying, donatio
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Well, you sound sincere, but I think you are extremely wrong. I hope I can differ politely enough to avoid the usual uncivil results on today's Slashdot.
Taxes are important, and corporations are actually the main beneficiaries of the good things that taxes can provide. Not to say that the current system is doing a very good job of providing those things, but that's a different problem, and abolishing taxes is just a silly idea, along the lines of the baby in the bathwater.
It is better to think in terms of w
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... and the giant (EVIL) corporations are obviously in favor of today's so-called Republicans. ...
The whole D vs R debate is just to keep us distracted, don't buy in. Not unlike how BLM, bathrooms, "white privilege", etc are great distractions. The only social platform that they are really against is the 1% vs 99%. That one was actually on target and thus had to be crushed. To ensure that it doesn't get resurrected the 99% had to be fragmented, which is why post that the news went into overdrive to fragment the 99%. BLM, white privilege, athiest vs Christian vs Muslim, corner case bathroom debates
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Why is it corruption? Lobbying your senators is hard.
Look at me. I've written up a policy for a universal social security that cuts taxes on literally every single individual, cuts business income taxes, and cuts payroll taxes. It stabilizes OASDI (because it replaces part of it, and that proportion becomes larger over time). It stabilizes the middle-class through tough economic times, cutting back the severity and duration of recessions. It remediates a large part of the welfare system and, as a res
There's an old book about that... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Yeah, a 16 year old book. Very relevant. Thanks, creimer.
A 16-year-old book that I first read when it came out, one of the first books to be written about the Microsoft antitrust case, and relevant to the current discussion.
$2 million? (Score:2)
Accountining Line Item.... (Score:1)
Hookers and Cocaine.
Filed under "Business Expenses."
Uber spent $430,000. (Score:4, Insightful)
You know, we can overturn citizens united whenever (Score:2)
Not really that much (Score:2)
The pharmaceutical industry's revenue was about $446 billion, and they spent $246 million on lobbying. Or 56 cents per every $1000 of revenue. 19x more.
The telecom industry's revenue was about $750 billion, and they spent $86 million on lobbying, or 11 cents per every $1000 of revenue. 4x more.
The TV/movie/music industry
Cheap at ten times the price (Score:2)
Owning a legislature? Priceless!
This is an outrage (Score:1)
A company as large as, and as subject to government restriction, as Uber is spending a measly $2M per year on influencing politics?
I'm sad to see my politicians go so cheaply.