The health insurance companies? Both Ds and Rs collect millions in lobbying efforts from the healthcare industry; it's the 6th largest industry in terms of campaign contributions, more than the oil and gas industry.
Here's another way of framing this headline: "A company that provides critical services has lobbyists - just like pharma, hospital networks, national defense, and food and agriculture."
> Facebook and Amazon are now the two biggest corporate lobbying spenders in the country.[9]
> Big Tech has eclipsed yesterday’s big lobbying spenders, Big Oil and Big Tobacco. In 2020, Amazon and Facebook spent nearly twice as much as Exxon and Philip Morris on lobbying.
> Big Tech’s lobbyists are not just numerous, they are also among the most influential in Washington. Among the 10 lobbyists who were the biggest contributors to the 2020 election cycle, half lobby on behalf of at least one of the four Big Tech companies. Together, just these five lobbyists contributed over $2 million to the 2020 elections.
>Without lobbying, how would corporations share their expertise on the matter for politicians to take into account?
There is literally an entire govt department in the US whose core job is to unbiasedly keep the politicians informed on the expert details of the areas they're legislating.
Specifically, the Library of Congress (this is why the US Congress has a library), and it's Congressional Research Service.
>> Lobbying is simply the practice of petitioning the government to adopt a given policy.
Adopting a policy is different from having them mandate what people buy.
Hey, have people buy epipens and keep one at the school for each kid with allergies. Then later we will raise our prices 1000 percent. That's not influencing policy, its fucking people all the way to the bank - with government assistance.
> it's not a secret that mega companies use huge amount of funds on lobbying to influence politics
Companies also spend billions on marketing. But there's no reason to believe either of these things actually /work/. And lobbying is not giving money to politicians.
"They also found that lobbying expenditures in that industry are correlated with increased regulation, higher profits and lower entry. Unsurprisingly, they found that lobbying and regulation tended to keep out smaller companies to the benefit of larger ones."
> In the US, lobbying is constitutionally protected, without which citizens would have no guaranteed way to communicate with elected officials.
Yet de-facto in the day-to-day it is not you-and-me average citizens lobbying at the highest level but HugeCorps because they have the connections and means to pay the right lobbyists that actual average citizens could never afford...
And the very word itself already has a bad connotation. It is not "democratizing" or "participating", it is "lobbying" and nobody associates a positive, generally beneficial democratic process with that.
The health insurance companies? Both Ds and Rs collect millions in lobbying efforts from the healthcare industry; it's the 6th largest industry in terms of campaign contributions, more than the oil and gas industry.
https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/sectors/summary...
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