no influenece

[marcinstl]

http://www.salon.com/2015/03/10/robe...t_all_partner/
"First, American corporations exert far more political influence in the United States than their counterparts exert in their own countries.
In fact, most Americans have no influence at all. That’s the conclusion of Professors Martin Gilens of Princeton and Benjamin Page of Northwestern University, who analyzed 1,799 policy issues — and found that “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”

Instead, American lawmakers respond to the demands of wealthy individuals (typically corporate executives and Wall Street moguls) and of big corporations – those with the most lobbying prowess and deepest pockets to bankroll campaigns.
The second fact is most big American corporations have no particular allegiance to America. They don’t want Americans to have better wages. Their only allegiance and responsibility to their shareholders — which often requires lower wages to fuel larger profits and higher share prices."

hehee, Fox News can lie all it wants, that's just showbiz and entertainment for the retarded. what a voter may believe(thru some interpretation of "truthieness") has a statistically non-significant impact upon public policy. what you think is "your country" is run by hedge funds and Wall St. good luck.

[b4uqzme]

Aaaah marc...you make my point for me. Thanks. Average Joe Citizen has more influence over this country through his wallet. Give the free market free reign and AJC has a chance to get what he wants. Limit the role of government and you limit the "corporations" ability to manipulate the market. Corporations may be able to corrupt politicians but they cannot buy off 300 million consumers.

[JohnR]

Robert Reich and ivory tower college professors are neutral sources? I'm immediately skeptical of anyone who repackages Marx's old mantra about the evil capitalist bourgeoisie in modern language.

I do tend to lean toward the conspiracy theories about the one-worlders/illuminati/Bilderbergers having all the influence on governments, but they are somewhat ideology and power-driven. They are also drivers of some large multinational corporations, and I believe that is the motive for their government influence, not the tired old meme of capitalist greed. They are abusing capitalism to discredit it, so they can kill it and replace it.

[berettabone]

I am skeptical about anyone who goes through an American school system...................................the things they teach these days...........................

[knkali]

Aaaah marc...you make my point for me. Thanks. Average Joe Citizen has more influence over this country through his wallet. Give the free market free reign and AJC has a chance to get what he wants. Limit the role of government and you limit the "corporations" ability to manipulate the market. Corporations may be able to corrupt politicians but they cannot buy off 300 million consumers.

+10000 and the SCOTUS aint helping us in that manner.

[ScottM]

Aaaah marc...you make my point for me. Thanks. Average Joe Citizen has more influence over this country through his wallet. Give the free market free reign and AJC has a chance to get what he wants. Limit the role of government and you limit the "corporations" ability to manipulate the market. Corporations may be able to corrupt politicians but they cannot buy off 300 million consumers.

That's a beautiful theory b4uqzme, but wallet-based influence is always a trailing one. It takes multiple fiscal cycles for consumer influence to work its way to a business' consequences. Have a look at Blackberry or the US Auto industry or Radio Shack or even IBM for example. None of those firms react to shifting market pressures within the same year, so if they were to do something harmful to the public, you couldn't expect them to react any sooner than their board of directors told them to. That's the problem with academic corporatism, it only looks at the theoretical best cases. So, with Blackberry and Radio Shack, who cares, right? They're mere blips. But with companies that pollute public air, water and land you need more immediate consequences, especially since companie spin up, do their thing and dissolve without consequences whenever there are no public guardrails to hold them accountable, and many of those companies are foreign, using US shell companies as "burn phones."

Take bank regulations for example. Are you intimately familiar with the events leading up to 2008? I am - I had 2nd-row seats to the whole thing. In the simplest of terms, banks created a financial instrument called "derivatives" tat derive their value from bundles of securities. They then used those derivatives to create another financial instrument called "swaps" (also called CDOs or collaterized debt obligations) to resell lending risk to others at a slight loss (and a slight profit to the buyers) to maximize their lending leverage. Yea, that's the simple version, sorry! As deregulated lending to home owners bloomed, and real estate values skyrocketed, and the economy sailed along, everything worked like a charm. Banks made record profits, buyers got ample credit and the risks got hidden in opaque real estate-backed CDOs. But those CDOs coagulated into risk centers, mainly within Bear Sterns, AIG, Citi, JP Morgan and a slew of others. And then the real estate market collapsed! People stopped making payments they couldn't afford (often because their Jumbo loans ballooned) and the CDOs started to default, leaving those with concentrations of CDO exposure to go bankrupt. Under the pure corporatist/capitalist model, that's perfectly fine, right? Let the stupid banks collapse. Let the homeowners lose their homes. Let the retirement savings of those who unknowingly owned exposure vaporize. The problem was, there was SO much system risk, that letting all that happen would have so devastated the economy, credit markets, employment rates and thus durable goods sales, that the Bush administration (I think correctly) and the Treasury and the Fed stepped in with the help of a couple surviving FIs (JP Morgan being the most important) to bail the situation out.

I say all that to underscore what happens when public interest (through government) gets out of the way and lets business take are of themselves. They behave badly. This has been shown again and again and again, and it's amazing that the philosophy of corporatism/unfettered capitalism still has legs outside of academic think tanks.

Also, when Government stays completely out of the way, corporations consolidate into monopolies to remove choices to maximize advantage. I've worked in very large companies for 25 years and the pattern is the same across nearly every sector. That's why there are long-standing public rules against monopoly. Without those, and that's what pure corporatists/capitalists want, Average Joe Citizen is removed of even his most trailing influence on the corporations.

[ScottM]

Robert Reich and ivory tower college professors are neutral sources? I'm immediately skeptical of anyone who repackages Marx's old mantra about the evil capitalist bourgeoisie in modern language.

I do tend to lean toward the conspiracy theories about the one-worlders/illuminati/Bilderbergers having all the influence on governments, but they are somewhat ideology and power-driven. They are also drivers of some large multinational corporations, and I believe that is the motive for their government influence, not the tired old meme of capitalist greed. They are abusing capitalism to discredit it, so they can kill it and replace it.

I respect that skepticism and yes, there are people who would love to try pure Marxism, Socialism or Fascism here at home. It wouldn't work. Indeed, ANY economic "ism" should be roasted until brown and crispy because nothing is without its negatives. To give pure capitalism a pass is just as wrong.

In fact, America has never had pure capitalism. Ever. There has always been a need to hold individuals and groups accountable for their public impacts, all the way back to colonial days when citizens would haul exploitive shop owners into the square for a proper beating.

[knkali]

That's a beautiful theory b4uqzme, but wallet-based influence is always a trailing one. It takes multiple fiscal cycles for consumer influence to work its way to a business' consequences. ......................
I say all that to underscore what happens when public interest (through government) gets out of the way and lets business take are of themselves. They behave badly

Maybe the effect is slower but nonetheless it is still effective.
As to the last comment, I take offense to that. As a businessman, I try to be better than my competitor. I covet my customer. I cannot stay in business any other way. You have never run your own show. I wish you did. I think your perspectives would be a lot different.

[ScottM]

no influenece

Maybe the effect is slower but nonetheless it is still effective.
As to the last comment, I take offense to that. As a businessman, I try to be better than my competitor. I covet my customer. I cannot stay in business any other way. You have never run your own show. I wish you did. I think your perspectives would be a lot different.

Do you think BP would care more about shoddy well encasements if it didn't have to pay fines for dumping oil into the gulf? It didn't do so, even with the regs and fines, and it is fighting hard today to mitigate its obligations. Do you think FIs would give more of a crap about system concentrations of derivative risk if they continue to believe they're too big to (be let to) fail? (Yes, I know that sounds like a contradiction of my prior position but that's because the damage was already done - the fiscal risks had already been passed off to the public).

I owned a software business before I sold it for a profit, and I privately consulted for years. I managed I.T. shops with employees in some of the most highly regulated industries, directly supporting corporate legal and compliance teams, sometimes solving for inane financial regulations, and sometimes supporting ones that I'm glad exist as a consumer (like requiring full disclosure of fee structures).

Good businesses and businessmen suffer because of bad ones, no doubt about that, and of course the government makes things harder for those good businesses than it needs to. But that's not the argument most here make - their argument is to discredit the role of government altogether, not to debate the relative merits of a particular regulatory control. To most here, it's a binary proposition - everything is regulated or nothing is regulated. Since folks here by self-selection don't want their firearm choices to be regulated, there is a propensity to believe that any regulation is bad and that anyone who wants to do so for any reason is a Marxist/Socialist/Nazi/Illuminati/Liberal/Tyrant/Mouth Breather.

[yqtszhj]

I have to agree with scott on the financial collapse. I remember sitting in the neighbors backyard in 2007 and the neighbor invited their drunk redneck friends. Well the drunk wife was braging about how she was making all this money filling out mortgage paperwork and getting people loans. She just bought a new building too. Home values were skyrocketing back then and before I met them i knew it wasn't going to go well for the country. After I met drunk chick and her drunker husband I asked myself what qualifies this thing to be a mortgage broker? That day I really knew this wasn't going to go well for our nation. Well one year later the economy crashes, O gets elected as president, and i heard drunk chick and her drunker husband got divorced.

For what its worth as a character reference the drunk couple got in a fight in the neighbors yard that day. There never was that much excitement before when I lived in a lower class neighborhood.

[knkali]

Do you think BP would care more about shoddy well encasements if it didn't have to pay fines for dumping oil into the gulf? It didn't do so, even with the regs and fines, and it is fighting hard today to mitigate its obligations. Do you think FIs would give more of a crap about system concentrations of derivative risk if they continue to believe they're too big to (be let to) fail? (Yes, I know that sounds like a contradiction of my prior position but that's because the damage was already done - the fiscal risks had already been passed off to the public).

I owned a software business before I sold it for a profit, and I privately consulted for years. I managed I.T. shops with employees in some of the most highly regulated industries, directly supporting corporate legal and compliance teams, sometimes solving for inane financial regulations, and sometimes supporting ones that I'm glad exist as a consumer (like requiring full disclosure of fee structures).

Good businesses and businessmen suffer because of bad ones, no doubt about that, and of course the government makes things harder for those good businesses than it needs to. But that's not the argument most here make - their argument is to discredit the role of government altogether, not to debate the relative merits of a particular regulatory control. To most here, it's a binary proposition - everything is regulated or nothing is regulated. Since folks here by self-selection don't want their firearm choices to be regulated, there is a propensity to believe that any regulation is bad and that anyone who wants to do so for any reason is a Marxist/Socialist/Nazi/Illuminati/Liberal/Tyrant/Mouth Breather.

Well put, but you are making the big assumption that the G and the mega corps are exclusive of one another. However, I can meet you on some middle ground. There are clearly roles the G must be involved in to protect the people but the amount of protection and that scope is vastly overrated. The G knows how its bread is buttered and visa versa.

[ScottM]

Well put, but you are making the big assumption that the G and the mega corps are exclusive of one another. However, I can meet you on some middle ground. There are clearly roles the G must be involved in to protect the people but the amount of protection and that scope is vastly overrated. The G knows how its bread is buttered and visa versa.

We completely agree in that middle ground. Feels good!

[deadeye]

http://www.salon.com/2015/03/10/robe...t_all_partner/
"First, American corporations exert far more political influence in the United States than their counterparts exert in their own countries.
In fact, most Americans have no influence at all. That’s the conclusion of Professors Martin Gilens of Princeton and Benjamin Page of Northwestern University, who analyzed 1,799 policy issues — and found that “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”

Instead, American lawmakers respond to the demands of wealthy individuals (typically corporate executives and Wall Street moguls) and of big corporations – those with the most lobbying prowess and deepest pockets to bankroll campaigns.
The second fact is most big American corporations have no particular allegiance to America. They don’t want Americans to have better wages. Their only allegiance and responsibility to their shareholders — which often requires lower wages to fuel larger profits and higher share prices."

hehee, Fox News can lie all it wants, that's just showbiz and entertainment for the retarded. what a voter may believe(thru some interpretation of "truthieness") has a statistically non-significant impact upon public policy. what you think is "your country" is run by hedge funds and Wall St. good luck.

Yeah! Fooey on Fox News. After getting a lot of insight into what our institutions of "higher learning" are teaching, I am a firm believer in academia. After all it did produce Ovomit and many others of the same ilk. As far as analyzing goes, is there anything anyone would like analyzed? I'll do it for you. All you have to tell me is what results you want. For instance, do you want carrots to be poisonous? I read an analyzation a few years ago that proved carrots are poisonous. Everyone who ate them in the 17 century died. See?

[ScottM]

You do know many GOPers are Ivy League educated too, right?

I like carrots.

[b4uqzme]

ScottM. First row here. The only problem with your financial derivatives story is that you are starting at the midpoint. Reseach back and see how that table was set. Thanks.