Once, His Lordship the Grey One put up a post comparing stats for his Mighty Blue Implement of Power and that of some Potter fanzine site. The difference was truly Awesome, and the Potterites showed what “dedication” and “popularity” really look like in online communities/causes. In that spirit, I offer the following. Do read the whole thing:
The results suggest a startling conclusion: On average, companies generated roughly $28 in earmark revenue for every dollar they spent lobbying. And those at the very top did far better than the average: More than 20 companies pulled in $100 or more for every dollar spent. By any standard, that’s a hefty ratio: The companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index brought in just $17.52 in revenues for every dollar of capital expenditure in 2006. Or look at the results in direct marketing, where an extremely successful campaign might bring in $5 in revenue for every dollar spent. “If mainstream American businesses got a 28-to-1 ratio in sales, they’d be ecstatic,” says Steve Zammarchi, president and CEO of Wunderman New York, a sales and marketing firm.
It’s not that I despair, exactly, but I left a tangentially related comment over at OpenLeft, because politicians are cheap and the heart of the matter is how to disengage government from unelected cronies.
I was at the State Capitol recently, and outside the House chambers awaited a literal mob of lobbyists. Not allowed on the floor, they congregate like so many dollar hookers at a red light, waiting for congresscritters to scoot by on the way to an office or meeting. Flashy, young, pretty, dripping with money and pretty clothes and expensive gadgets, the one Little Person I saw that day was utterly lost. He was ugly and in a wheelchair and probably smelled bad, so I’m sure his request for more VA or social services money or whatever wasn’t that important. The excitement in the building had so much more to do with insider baseballism, and not silly issues like who will actually suffer should this government shut down in ~two weeks.
As I told someone this morning, our battle has many fronts. I’m not really sure about what to do with the lobbying problem, but I do know that if I want to understand why certain things happen, it’s the lobbyists, and not the media or politicians, I need to scrutinize. Which is why I totally disagree with this post. Shutting up, playing nice, caring about these things in the first place- missing a lot of the point.
Front page
CD, I agree with you in disagreeing with that Booman post
Gawd, does it piss me off when Repubs make a mountain out of a molehill (or a mountain out of a progressive’s perfectly sensible point) and liberals wring their hands over one of their brethren’s or sisteren’s shameful shrillness.
boo may even be "correct" in one sense, but kabuki
and kabuki critique are still and only just that.
i wish i were as cool as lambert, because i’d find a good video of mobsters robbing someone in an opera hall. while the critics hiss and whisper about the cut of the soprano’s dress and tell victim to be quiet so they can enjoy the show.
Great catch on that BusinessWeek article
That is a shocker, about the interest paid on lobbying investments.
I’d love to find some analysis of the actual dollars involved in money received by private sources, and the dreaded “earmarks,” for instance. Earmarks are usually Federal money spent in the district on various sorts of public works. What’s bad about them is the lack of transparency.
We have to de-link elections from private money, and it ain’t gonna be easy with this Supreme Court. But we gotta do it, and we gotta put it on the agenda, and we gotta also put on the agenda making Americans aware of the tragic fact that counting of votes and free access to voting is becoming as compromised as it was before the Civil Rights movement changed all that, or so we thought.
Democracy is more than elections, but without fair and open elections in which all eligible votes are cast and counted are an absolute though not a sufficient requirement for any democratic republic.