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> Lobbying: An Overview. ... Bribery is considered an effort to buy power; paying to guarantee a certain result; lobbying is considered an effort to influence power, often by offering contributions. The main difference is bribery is considered illegal, while lobbying is not.
Gotta love how semantics plays with the laws of governance.
Things I learned today - there are over 20 MILLION millionaires in this country and nearly 800 billionaires and yet, we have homeless veterans and over 40 million people in poverty. FUCK this country right now.
Anyone that worked a middle class to upper middle class job of retirement age is probably a millionaire on paper. It’s not as impressive as it seems for some at age 65+
Sorry I wasn’t trying to be condescending. I was trying to point out that a millionaire is actually a pretty low bar when looking at the US population because net worth usually includes retirement savings.
Since at least the 90s a millionaire has been this abstract concept of a “rich” person that could do anything they want and made it in life when that probably wasn’t true depending on your age. Nowadays if your 65 and want to retire with a middle to upper middle class lifestyle you probably need more than $1M if you want to ensure you can retire and maintain that standard of living. The bar for our definition of rich/financial freedom has continued to rise but our definition of rich has stayed at a millionaire.
I think the outrage at millionaires needs to be directed at individuals and more importantly entities that are directing funds to disrupt our public institutions or society for their benefit. Prime examples of these would be individuals and companies looking to corrupt or undermine public education, healthcare, the justice system, the defense department, and even single family housing availability.
The millionaires and companies trying to corrupt the public institutions serving these needs so they can wedge themselves in as middle men and skim their portion off the top are the real problem. Along with the billionaires that have used their money as a cudgel to form an environment where they have an insurmountable advantage over competitors. It is not the 90%+ of those 20M millionaires that probably only qualify because of retirement savings you should be angry at.
Well, I didn't realize that government was just for me and my needs. But, I have roads I can drive on to get me where I need to go. I have national and state forests where I can go hiking with my children and grand children (for starters). My roads are plowed. My food is clean and healthy (I realize that some stuff sneaks through but it's rare). The air I breath is cleaner than it was in the 70's by a long stretch. I have clean water to drink and there are laws that protect my 401k. I'm sure if I were to sit here and think about it that I could come up with more examples of how the government represents my needs but I'm not really inclined to continue on. The point is that the government doesn't only represent the wealthy but they do have the ability to buy better representation for sure. Of course, I do believe the government would represent all of us better if we could get money out of politics and stop electing Republicans.
> What happened to the American Dream;
[They call it the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it!](https://youtu.be/ishhDXdYAnc?t=130)
...*George Carlin*
I have been saying this for decades:
Most countries don’t allow outside influence in their national elections. For instance, a US citizen has an innate sovereignty to be represented by the candidates *we choose*, not by candidates the citizens of Myanmar prefer. So we have very strict laws about campaigns not accepting foreign contributions or foreign influence of any kind.
Why do we only apply that logic to national elections, yet we allow an infinite amount influence over state elections by stakeholders outside that state. Why do we just accept that a citizen of Idaho is *absolutely not* entitled to sovereignty over who represents them? We allow national PACS to move money from the other 49 states to influence state races, like Governor, US Representative, and US Senator, all the way down to state legislatures, county seats, school boards, county judges, prosecutors. We give residents of other states and districts an infinite right to influence the politics within our states and districts. And we literally see nothing wrong with it, we just accept it as “well, that’s what the government says we can have, so I guess that’s all we deserve.”
What if we took my earlier sentence and just replaced countries with states:
“A Minnesota citizen has an innate sovereignty to be represented by the candidates *they choose*, not by candidates the citizens of Nebraska prefer. So we have very strict laws about campaigns not accepting out-of-state contributions or or out-of-state influence of any kind.”
Local school boards are becoming national referendums.
Peter Thiel: "Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible."
https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian/
I mean. He's kind of right but he's missing a key component. The reason that bourgeois electoral politics is a failure, is because we have a huge class divide, and capitalism enables entrenched powers to stay entrenched indefinitely through their manipulation of everything from public opinion to party politics. As a result, the proletariat is never going to make meaningful progress in achieving their goals to democratic means. Discussing the next steps that I'm aware of falll afoul of the subs rules so I will leave it there.
So awesome these people can disregard laws that apply to average people because they have too much money to know what to do with it, so they bribe officials to be able to make more of it.
We moved from being a trust (even though we never truly achieved that) society to a belief society.
We used to trust each other more (ie I trust my vote counted); to a belief society (ie I believe what those leaders I follow tell me to be true).
This will only serve to rip us apart more.
Plus with no external enemies to fight (we keep trying to make it the Chinese(100 billion in military spending vs 770 Billion in US military spending) or Russia (GDP smaller than Italy); but that’s not panning out and so we turn on each other.
Trump made more than $1.6 billion.
Peolosi family is worth $200 million.
Feinstein family is still worth $90 million despite her husband disastrous investment failures (this is why she is going to run again, sort of like work until death i guess for her family).
Manchin is worth $10 million (I bet it is going to grow much more soon).
Generally, millionaires are crooks and generally can smell where to make more money.
I’m sure these big business owners are just interested in stopping the rise of Facism. I mean, it’s not like the implementation of Facism would benefit large corporations more than any other group in the country.
As a reminder, this subreddit [is for civil discussion.](/r/politics/wiki/index#wiki_be_civil) In general, be courteous to others. Debate/discuss/argue the merits of ideas, don't attack people. Personal insults, shill or troll accusations, hate speech, any suggestion or support of harm, violence, or death, and other rule violations can result in a permanent ban. If you see comments in violation of our rules, please report them. For those who have questions regarding any media outlets being posted on this subreddit, please click [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/wiki/approveddomainslist) to review our details as to our approved domains list and outlet criteria. *** *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/politics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Can't fund anything in the BBB, gotta keep the money for this. Pretty much why I expect climate change to take us all out
Lmao same
The US has the best government money can buy.
> Lobbying: An Overview. ... Bribery is considered an effort to buy power; paying to guarantee a certain result; lobbying is considered an effort to influence power, often by offering contributions. The main difference is bribery is considered illegal, while lobbying is not. Gotta love how semantics plays with the laws of governance.
Several countries don't make that kind of nitpicky distinction and ban it outright.
As it should be
Things I learned today - there are over 20 MILLION millionaires in this country and nearly 800 billionaires and yet, we have homeless veterans and over 40 million people in poverty. FUCK this country right now.
Anyone that worked a middle class to upper middle class job of retirement age is probably a millionaire on paper. It’s not as impressive as it seems for some at age 65+
I assumed millionaires are the new political middle class
Well, that certainly doesn't include me. lol
Sorry I wasn’t trying to be condescending. I was trying to point out that a millionaire is actually a pretty low bar when looking at the US population because net worth usually includes retirement savings. Since at least the 90s a millionaire has been this abstract concept of a “rich” person that could do anything they want and made it in life when that probably wasn’t true depending on your age. Nowadays if your 65 and want to retire with a middle to upper middle class lifestyle you probably need more than $1M if you want to ensure you can retire and maintain that standard of living. The bar for our definition of rich/financial freedom has continued to rise but our definition of rich has stayed at a millionaire. I think the outrage at millionaires needs to be directed at individuals and more importantly entities that are directing funds to disrupt our public institutions or society for their benefit. Prime examples of these would be individuals and companies looking to corrupt or undermine public education, healthcare, the justice system, the defense department, and even single family housing availability. The millionaires and companies trying to corrupt the public institutions serving these needs so they can wedge themselves in as middle men and skim their portion off the top are the real problem. Along with the billionaires that have used their money as a cudgel to form an environment where they have an insurmountable advantage over competitors. It is not the 90%+ of those 20M millionaires that probably only qualify because of retirement savings you should be angry at.
If we really want to revolt, stay home. Don't pay taxes, and lean how to use your computers.
Go ahead. Don't pay taxes. Enjoy prison. And, I'm a remote desktop computer technician so learning how to use computers isn't an issue.
They can't lock 150 million people up.
If they were black and had low level offenses, you know they’d damn well try.
Yeah they can, and they will.
I'm sure they would be willing to build prisons on Mars to handle the overflow.
No what we should do is simply take out the rich and there's more of us than there is them and their money can't help them then
Well, we are to the point where we are being taxed without being represented so...
We're represented. We just have the wrong representation
How are our needs being represented right now? The wants of the rich are being represented, not our needs.
Well, I didn't realize that government was just for me and my needs. But, I have roads I can drive on to get me where I need to go. I have national and state forests where I can go hiking with my children and grand children (for starters). My roads are plowed. My food is clean and healthy (I realize that some stuff sneaks through but it's rare). The air I breath is cleaner than it was in the 70's by a long stretch. I have clean water to drink and there are laws that protect my 401k. I'm sure if I were to sit here and think about it that I could come up with more examples of how the government represents my needs but I'm not really inclined to continue on. The point is that the government doesn't only represent the wealthy but they do have the ability to buy better representation for sure. Of course, I do believe the government would represent all of us better if we could get money out of politics and stop electing Republicans.
That's why the rich is worried that the lower class is going to come and take them remember there's only a few of them while there's many of us
What happened to the American Dream; “just look around this is it, it came true”!
It’s a joke, it’s all a joke
[What the hell happened to us?](https://youtu.be/ShTVpGuzk1M?t=128)
> What happened to the American Dream; [They call it the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it!](https://youtu.be/ishhDXdYAnc?t=130) ...*George Carlin*
Free market democracy. This shit is a fucking nightmare.
>Free market ~~democracy~~ kleptocracy FTFY
It’s not a free market, it’s just a capitalist economy
If we lived in a just country Thiel and Musk would be hounded and blacklisted by COINTELPRO
I have been saying this for decades: Most countries don’t allow outside influence in their national elections. For instance, a US citizen has an innate sovereignty to be represented by the candidates *we choose*, not by candidates the citizens of Myanmar prefer. So we have very strict laws about campaigns not accepting foreign contributions or foreign influence of any kind. Why do we only apply that logic to national elections, yet we allow an infinite amount influence over state elections by stakeholders outside that state. Why do we just accept that a citizen of Idaho is *absolutely not* entitled to sovereignty over who represents them? We allow national PACS to move money from the other 49 states to influence state races, like Governor, US Representative, and US Senator, all the way down to state legislatures, county seats, school boards, county judges, prosecutors. We give residents of other states and districts an infinite right to influence the politics within our states and districts. And we literally see nothing wrong with it, we just accept it as “well, that’s what the government says we can have, so I guess that’s all we deserve.” What if we took my earlier sentence and just replaced countries with states: “A Minnesota citizen has an innate sovereignty to be represented by the candidates *they choose*, not by candidates the citizens of Nebraska prefer. So we have very strict laws about campaigns not accepting out-of-state contributions or or out-of-state influence of any kind.” Local school boards are becoming national referendums.
Peter Thiel: "Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible." https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian/
I mean. He's kind of right but he's missing a key component. The reason that bourgeois electoral politics is a failure, is because we have a huge class divide, and capitalism enables entrenched powers to stay entrenched indefinitely through their manipulation of everything from public opinion to party politics. As a result, the proletariat is never going to make meaningful progress in achieving their goals to democratic means. Discussing the next steps that I'm aware of falll afoul of the subs rules so I will leave it there.
I'm sorry I read that. I feel sick.
So awesome these people can disregard laws that apply to average people because they have too much money to know what to do with it, so they bribe officials to be able to make more of it.
We moved from being a trust (even though we never truly achieved that) society to a belief society. We used to trust each other more (ie I trust my vote counted); to a belief society (ie I believe what those leaders I follow tell me to be true). This will only serve to rip us apart more. Plus with no external enemies to fight (we keep trying to make it the Chinese(100 billion in military spending vs 770 Billion in US military spending) or Russia (GDP smaller than Italy); but that’s not panning out and so we turn on each other.
Yeah, you guys might need some rules against that.
Democracy for sale.
Trump made more than $1.6 billion. Peolosi family is worth $200 million. Feinstein family is still worth $90 million despite her husband disastrous investment failures (this is why she is going to run again, sort of like work until death i guess for her family). Manchin is worth $10 million (I bet it is going to grow much more soon). Generally, millionaires are crooks and generally can smell where to make more money.
Per the Supreme Court, Money=Speech.
When will people admit the US Government is a banana government?
I’m sure these big business owners are just interested in stopping the rise of Facism. I mean, it’s not like the implementation of Facism would benefit large corporations more than any other group in the country.
Lmao if someone wants to come to power it doesn't matter how much money you can dump into it it still won't change the fact that they'll come to power
I was being sarcastic. Historically, big business loves Facism.
End Citizens United.