alt Hacker News> This article is written as though lobbying is some sort of unstoppable force.
The issue here is that the line between lobbying and corruption is very thin and blurry. For instance, the relation between Nellie Kroes and Uber is not an easy one to classify in a judicial context. Who officially pays you has little value in corruption cases. Whether the main culprit is the bribing corporation or the bribed official is also not very interesting.
And while lobbying from corporations is not an unstoppable force, it has certainly shown to be overwhelmingly strong when compared to the lobbying power of individual citizens or non-profit citizen groups.
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> And while lobbying from corporations is not an unstoppable force, it has certainly shown to be overwhelmingly strong when compared to the lobbying power of individual citizens or non-profit citizen groups.
That has less to do with corporations and more to do with the fact that nonprofits and citizens avoid lobbying because they see lobbying as an unstoppable evil force, which becomes self fulfilling. Civil Rights was won when people took lobbying seriously. Louis Rossman started an organization that lobbied for Right to Repair legislation in states and you can see real changes in companies like Apple. Sure Rossman didn't get everything he wanted, but neither do corporations.
https://apnews.com/article/nonprofits-lobbying-less-survey-1...
The line is not thin, it doesn't exist. All lobbying is corruption. If it were not none of the parties would object to all of the proceedings and data being public.
> Whether the main culprit is the bribing corporation or the bribed official is also not very interesting.
This is just an opinion of yours, and not in itself interesting either.
It's also a bad idea: if you mis-assign blame away from the regulator who is getting paid out of hard-earned taxes to be misinformed and corrupt, and to the lobbyist, which seems to happen all the time in this topic, then you're never going to fix the problem.
> And while lobbying from corporations is not an unstoppable force, it has certainly shown to be overwhelmingly strong when compared to the lobbying power of individual citizens or non-profit citizen groups.
That's what I'm saying. Why is that?
For example: nepotists hire family members over other people. Would you describe that as "And while being a family member is not an unstoppable force, it has certainly shown to be overwhelmingly strong when compared to the hiring chances of other people." Or would you say "nepotist bad"? And doubly so when you're forced by law to fund the nepotist's salary?