Lobbying is a tiny industry in the United States and corruption is basically a nonissue. With the exception of the current president I haven’t seen any evidence for widespread corruption in the United States - at most it’s a collection of isolated low impact and rare incidents.
I can only speak for the U.S., but I know a lot of large instances where lobbying was a direct result or sibling of corruption. BMW, Mercedes-Benz, and Bosch all combined their efforts to kill grey market imports into the U.S. starting in 1994 after a campaign they initiated in 1988. This effectively killed imports from Britain, France, Spain, Russia, and Italy and severely shrunk the market for luxury sedans and coupes in the U.S., which backfired as the Japanese were faster to manufacture and took up the slack. Oshkosh created a system to undercut AM General in order to push the L-ATV design over competing JLTV designs. They repeated this tactic in 2021 to ensure they got the contract for the mail delivery vehicle despite not matching the statement of objectives paper as well as Mahindra or Workhorse. Verizon and Comcast combined forces to kill net neutrality, each whittling away at it with targeted campaigns since 2011 until it was finally ended in 2017 and barred from reimplementation this year. Uber, Lyft, AirBnB, Doordash, and other "disruptor" companies collectively spent hundreds of millions of dollars to bypass classifying their workers as employees and to excuse themselves from taxation. Even now they're still trying to reverse the legal landmark that those workers are employees and can form unions. Blue Cross Blue Shield spent tens of millions of dollars cutting off parts of the Affordable Care Act they didn't like. Currently license plate reader manufacturers are lobbying to get contracts with local governments at the city and county level to install facial recognition cameras everywhere they can, and they're lobbying the federal government to allow this breach of privacy in exchange for access to the databases.
Lobbying is only tiny if you look at the individual amounts. Most lobbyists only put forth $5-10,000 at a time because they're not doing it at a national level. But it's the fact that so many do it in so many different places that makes it a threat. Somebody running to be on the city board can have their entire campaign financed by a single donor. A mayor can have their entire income for the year matched by two lobbyists laying the groundwork for a national campaign. One Senator or House member having seven to eight lobby sponsors can almost match their guaranteed salary for that year. There are entire divisions of the finance departments of companies that are dedicated to budgeting for lobbying over the fiscal year. It's a massive force, composed of nearly $4,000,000,000 in "contributions" in 2024 alone.
I strive to live in a version of the USA half as nice as the one you think we live in. We definitely didn't overthrow legitimate governments in the name of big business in South America, the Middle East, or even Hawaii. /s
I remember when I found out that a highly intelligent friend believed the earth was six-thousand years old. But at least he had the excuse that his idiotic religion was pushed on him since birth. Intelligent people on this site are sometime incapable of basic media literacy and I find it wholly depressing.
Keep voting against your interests while others of us fight you tooth and nail to try to make the world better for everyone (rather than just our own teams), even including you.
> Sorry but voting in favor of the 1% is very much in my interest.
Which is why people like me have to fight people like you tooth and nail. Despite having a very privileged life, probably similar to yours, I still want the best for everyone, not just my team. I pointed this out in my prior comment. You've now confirmed that you're too selfish to vote against your interests for the betterment of humanity. And you apparently have no sense of shame about it. Have a great holiday.
Seeing this thread again scrolling through my comments, and after the holidays feeling perhaps calmer than when it was current. I'd like to make a case, invite you to look at things from a different angle, because I think we might have more common ground than it appears otherwise.
> I have zero shame for voting in favor of the interests of myself and the people that matter to me.
...and you shouldn't. It's better than fine to do so and you ought to work towards things that benefit you. This is something a lot of people seem to misunderstand when I talk about anything political, and it's likely a failing in how I communicate. I don't think that people should sacrifice themselves for the common good just because "it's the right thing to do". It isn't and that's never what I'm driving at.
When I (and perhaps others who share part of my worldview) talk about governance and lobbying and similar stuff, it's not out of a sense of pure morals or ethics - these are issues of ecosystems. Some shapes of systems are healthy and robust and others are self-destructive. Mesh networks are strong, centralized (and unreplicated) control systems are fragile - as an SWE you know this to be true.
What I'm arguing here is that it's in your interest to exist in an environment that:
- prevents an accumulation of power or control too tightly, to avoid single points of failure in decision and governance
- avoids recursive loops which have a habit of wastefully consuming resources and starving critical systems
- maintains flexible responsiveness to environmental conditions due to being reactive to the state of all constituent stakeholders / subsystems / individuals
The issue with the top 1% of the top 1% having too much power is that it breaks all those safeties, and is actually bad for those people too. What will happen in this kind of a situation is that the excessively empowered will desiccate the environment for everyone - including themselves.
You already see it playing out in the form of crumbling infrastructure, ballooning homelessness, economic shocks, and the empowerment of bad actors who take advantage of the disenfranchised masses. This is bad for you, too.
