So if I'm a Senator/Congressman and Comcast came to me promising $500k for my re-election campaign if only I could help them slow down Google Fiber rollout in some town, is it illegal for me to agree? I mean, this is a bribe, isn't it?
If it's structured like that, sure, but it'll not be done that way.
One approach is for a politician/candidate to hold a fundraising lunch/dinner/whatever, and charge for seats. Lobbyists and other folks who want to get access to the senator will buy those tickets and get their couple of minutes to talk about whatever issue is important to them.
Any direction on bill will almost certainly be of a more indirect nature.
It won't be: "Vote against municipal fiber rollouts, and $ISP will give your campaign $10k".
It'll be more along the lines of: "We'd find it difficult to support the campaign of someone who wasn't seen to be acting in our best interests. We think that this municipal fiber rollout is bad for $ISP."
This is how it is done: A congressman proposes a bill (written by cable company itself) such as "Neighbourhood Protection Bill". It will impose regulations on digging for new companies in the name of lower pollution and noise. Then cable company will get behind that bill in the name of betterment of neighborhoods and give ton of money to the congressman for getting elected so bill gets his vote. Then they setup a foundation created for neighborhood peace which invites the congressman to run it. Then the congressman gets to sit on boards of 3 different related companies and get paid half-million each of that "service". Not to mention all the travels and talks engagement that his sponsor will set up around the world to preach neighborhood peace. Every single of this is legal and done openly in public. Congressman will actively seek the support of sponsors for his bill.
Economics wise, there are 535 congressman. Now assume a big company can make $50B of revenues from drilling into arctic. A 10% of this can then be utlized to purchase half of US congress and which comes to about $20M/congressman price tag. However rules allow much lower election donation. So companies often setup foundations, boards etc for congressman to run and get paid $20M over the years for those services.
A congressman salary is less than $175K/yr. US Congress has shit ton of "career politicians" who have held no other jobs for decades. Somehow most of them own a significant amount of properties and wealth nevertheless. How? Above is how. Yes, politicians are massively corrupt.
So you're saying it's 100%, without a doubt bribery, but we're just going to use some tricky language so it doesn't sound like that.
America is corrupt to the very core, don't try to explain it away with newspeak or some kind of roundabout language. It's extremely common to buy the favour of politicians.
> So you're saying it's 100%, without a doubt bribery, but we're just going to use some tricky language so it doesn't sound like that.
Possibly, but it'll depend on your POV and where you draw the line on what's bribery.
Scenario 1:
I represent a mega-corporation and I want legislation changed to make it easier for my factories to comply with pollution laws by changing the definition of pollution.
Is it bribery to say to politicians "Our friends see the current standards on pollution are an impediment to the way we do business. Friends help each other out. Would you like to be our friend?"
Scenario 2:
I represent a small business, and there's legislation proposed that would make it illegal for me to trade on certain days.
I've always given small donations to my local politicians because they've done things that helped my business, but now there's this threat that could ruin my business.
Is it bribery if I tell them "If you support this legislation, we, and all the other local businesses owners like me will no longer be donating to your campaign, we're going to support your opposition instead".
> Nobody should be giving any money to politicians, or their campaigns, for any reason what-so-ever.
I don't disagree on the fundamentals, but I think there's a lot of side effects of something like this.
How should election campaigns be funded?
I've heard suggestions of having the state pay for campaigns, everyone gets a fixed budget (or some variation of this).
But this leads to issues then around who should be eligible to have campaign funding from the state and regulation around that.
If Anna is standing as a candidate, what's to stop Anna's friends Barry, Celeste, and Dina standing, but spending all their campaign funds on promotion that makes it clear that Anna is actually a much better candidate.
Should candidates be able to contribute to campaign expenses themselves? For instance, in situations where there's a lot of travel involved - having better accommodation, more comfortable transport options, more assistants to help them out/etc can make a difference on even a short campaign.
What constitutes a donation? Just money? Time? Resources?
Can I hand out flyers, run a phone tree/social media account for the local council/town/city elections?
What if I own hall, can I let a candidate use that for free?
Maybe I own a restaurant, and want donate the use of that to a candidate for a big campaign speech where they're going to invite all the press.
The press wouldn't ordinarily be interested in this no-name candidate, but the event is at that restaurant that you can't get a reservation to without waiting for months. I also happen to have a bunch of celebrity friends that might just attend. You can be sure that all the journos will be wanting to come along, and that it'll be making the news, even if it's just for the celebrity thing.
Maybe I'm best mates with a candidate - I love flying my private jet, can I fly them around and let them use my Uber Lux account?
If I'm on an hourly contract working for the campaign, can I work overtime without charging the campaign?
These are all good questions, and details would of course have to be worked out, but in Sweden where we do have a system of state funding for political campaigns, I've never heard of these issues arising in practice.
I'm not sure what the details of our rules actually are, except that your party gets funding if you got more than 4% (edit – correction: 2,5%) of the votes in the last election and that people are free to volunteer their time.
You're making the classic mistake of not trying to improve anything because it's difficult and there are tons of edge cases.
Clearly the system as it stands now is terrible and needs to be fixed. Start fixing it now, and worry about the edge cases later. A 10% improvement is better than no improvement.
It's not done by giving money to politicians or their campaigns. This is extremely regulated and the dollar amounts permitted are trivial.
It's done by independently advocating for the candidate. And it's pretty hard to tell people they can't do that. Should you need to fill out a financial disclosure form to be allowed to write a positive comment about Bernie Sanders on Reddit?
Not long ago, I stumbled upon an old book in my uni library - Congress meeting notes from 1860s. It was fascinating to read about some dude who bribed congressmen to get his book published/distributed (the $50 book was about some tax rules, thousands of copies sold). One of his trial responses has stuck in my mind: "You gotta know someone to get things done". Nothing has changed. Oh, in that particular case, back then, a couple of congressmen lost their jobs, but no one went to jail, even though it was proven the bribery took place.
I think corporate donors are held to the same limits as individuals: $2,800 per election to the candidate, $5,000 to their reelection committee. The rest (which still totals less than $500k) goes to state and federal party committees.
Where the unlimited contributions come in (think Citizens United) are Super PACs, but those aren't technically affiliated with candidates, and they can't contribute to the candidates. The freedom of speech angle on this is that corporations or individuals can spend this money on political ads, but it has to be independent of the candidates.
> is it illegal for me to agree?
Yes, or it was illegal for them; this exceeds campaign contribution limits.
It's rare that such large sums would go through the campaign-finance slot. Supposedly Biden received only $200k from the credit card industry for his awful bankruptcy "reforms". Of course larger bribes are paid, but they are less direct and less public. One method I've seen up close (I worked for Lucent back when they were in business) is to hire close relatives of favored politicians at vastly inflated salaries for "show-up" jobs for which those relatives had no observable skills. Those relatives would eventually transfer large portions of the millions they "earned" to the politician, but there was no hurry. In addition, there are sweetheart "investment" opportunities that somehow are only offered to politicians. We've all heard about the exorbitant "speaking fees". ISTR a mayor somewhere published a book and arranged for certain constituents to buy thousands of copies of it. Avaricious politicians have imagination.
Perhaps you're thinking of "Healthy Holly," a series of self-published children's books for which Mayor Pugh was paid over $800000, which came to light last year.
