[blindwatchmaker]

I'm sure it's just coincidental that senators and their family/friends frequently get lucrative positions on the boards of various companies, investment sweeteners, and actual positions in these companies for family. For example Joe Biden, a leading Democrat, has been in bed with the credit card industry for most of his career and supported/written legislation in their interest. MBNA was one of his biggest donors and hired one of his sons at an executive level, no doubt with very high pay.

The campaign contributions are just window dressing for the rest of it. It absolutely is bribery.

[DubiousPusher]

There's no coincidence about the revolving door and corporate nepotism. But it's not as simple as I give you money, you employ my kid.

I kind of wish it were because that would be much easier to do something about. Those things are just the long term effects of paying for access. The frequent close work between lobbyists, politicians and career servants lead to friendships and strong network effects. I'm not defending the system. I'm pointing out why $6.6 million is more than enough to influence a bill. It's because they're not buying a vote. They're buying time to discuss an issue that will probably never get argued any other way to the representative.

[blindwatchmaker]

Sorry, but it is that simple. We live in a second gilded age with near total regulatory and legislative capture and trying to soft pedal it by using euphemisms like 'strong networks' does not obfuscate the fact that this is a commercial relationship between bought politicians and the corporations that buy them.

In the face of overwhelming pieces of evidence, year after year after year like the article being discussed here, doing so is just pointless sophistry and contrarianism for the sake of it.

[DubiousPusher]

I absolutely disagree. There is a difference between quid-pro-quo corruption and what we have now. And there are important differences in the way you architect a system to prevent one vs. the other.

[C4stor]

I think it's because you're are defending your point from a deontological point of view, while the person you're responding to is arguing from a consequentialist point of view.

For a consequentialist, arguing on the ethics of the acts leading to the consequence is moot (and I think he's quite right that from a consequences point of view, the situation is hard to distinguish from quid pro quo corruption).

Of course, I'd love to see you too reconcile Kant and Machiavel, but you're fighting bad odds here ^^

[vidarh]

Another way to think about it is that if people were actually straight up buying votes on a regular basis the prices would likely be much higher. If politicians were admitting to themselves they were selling their vote, a large proportion of them would likely think about the value their vote have in a particular setting and price it accordingly.

Part of the reason it's cheap is because most of the time the politicians in question likely tell themselves they're not being bought, because they're taking donations for access etc. or other things that are sufficiently separate from a direct transfer of money that they too are pricing it based on access rather than on the value of a changed vote, as you suggest.

[blindwatchmaker]

> Another way to think about it is that if people were actually straight up buying votes on a regular basis the prices would likely be much higher

And as I said earlier, the campaign contributions are window dressing for the rest of it and I gave a concrete example. Families like the Clintons have made massive amounts of money cashing out after office, and secured lucrative sinecures for their daughter while in it.

These people and their families are insanely well off as a result of their work in government, and its not because they legislated or governed in the public interest.

[vidarh]

But while I'm sure some of them had that in mind, I think very of them went around thinking "how I vote on this specific piece of legislation will make a difference in how much I make afterwards".

The Clintons is a good example of why that would no sense: Their revenue is effectively diversified enough that it would make very little difference. They're trading off their perceived status and recognition - if they'd pushed policy in a different direction, their revenues would just have come from being popular as speakers etc. with different sets of people, it wouldn't have evaporated. It might have been different, and it is possible they'll have thought about that at times, but it is unlikely that they kept thinking "this will increase/lower our income later" because it's way too abstract how it would influence things.

Yes, I'm sure outright vote-buying happens, but I don't think most lobbying is outright vote buying. That doesn't mean it isn't wrong, but that trying to paint it as outright vote buying rather than paint it as wrong by making the point that disproportionate access is equally bad is counter-productive. Because if you accuse the average politician of outright selling their vote, they'll consider themselves unjustly victimized and just think you're a crank that's totally off the mark.

[blindwatchmaker]

I'm not overly concerned with hurting a politician's feelings. I am bemused at the idea that someone can observe the last few decades of the capture of the government and major political parties by corporate and oligarch interests and the increasingly lucrative payoffs to these people, and not come to the transparently obvious conclusion that these are commercial relationships.

This is institutionalized and legalized bribery, not just 'access' or 'networking' or whatever euphemism you want to use to couch this in niceties.

[vidarh]

Saying "these are commercial relationships" (that we should try to stop) is different from saying "people are outright buying specific votes".

The problem is that people are too often looking at this as if it is the latter, when it usually is the former. That doesn't mean it's not a problem, but it means that attempts to try to address the latter will be totally ineffective, and addressing the former is far harder in general, because the "payoff" can be very tangentially related and non-obvious.

E.g. it can be as tangential as "look at me giving money to this cause over here that I know that you like (wink, wink)". No direct exchange needs to happen. No direct benefit needs to be had then and there - just the acknowledgement that party X will be very grateful were you to listen more carefully to what they say (not even one on one with you, but say, in a committee, or even in PR releases) and understands your interests.

Direct bribes are "easy" to stop in comparison. And so they're the wrong focus. The consequence of shifting focus to more indirect influence is that the only viable solutions to stop this kind of influence is to disperse power of politicians more by weakening their individual influence, and to reduce the powers of potential beneficiaries of there decisions inherent in accumulation of capital. You draw the conclusions.

Politicians feelings doesn't come into it - nothing you try to do to stop this by regulating their interactions with business will have any real effect.

[learc83]

> Families like the Clintons have made massive amounts of money cashing out after office

No need to look into the past for examples. The current administration isn't even waiting until they are out of office to cash out.