Have you always tried to explain lobbying to a European?
Neither have I. But George Hotz fair did the opposite: he explained it to everyone who is not American.
Read it. It is short, funny, and devastating.
His type goes akin this.
Corporations and affluent group provision prosperity to politicians. Not directly, of course: to their campaigns. The politicians afterward hear to the group who paid them, and continue the laws those group want. It is not a bribe, since a bribe would be illegal. It is a “Super PAC”. And if a politician was really helpful, he can depart government and get a comfortable consulting job alongside the extremely group who lobbied him.
He ends alongside the declaration all European hears:
You fair don’t get it logic you aren’t American, lobbying is certainly not bribery.
He is right, apart from for one detail: as a European, I comprehend the concept, but I do not use the term “lobbying” to depict it.
I use another word: corruption.
I opened the Wikipedia page, and the archetypal paragraph made me smile.
Corruption is defined as the abuse of entrusted power for personal gain, and it explicitly includes bribery, power peddling, embezzlement, and fraud, “as fine as practices that are lawful in many countries, specified as lobbying”.
That is the trick, written in a neutral encyclopedia voice: the custom is the same, lone its legality changes. The leaf equal has a division called “legal corruption”, anywhere power is abused within the confines of the law, exactly since those alongside power can compose the laws that defend them. Depressing.
So we don’t really differ George, we fair name the same animal differently.
It seems the trend in the US is to rebrand entirely everything, including “corruption”.
So, in decision and as a European, I comprehend that lobbying is corruption. The chief difference is that lobbying comes from a guy in a nicer suit, alongside a attorney supervising.
Simple, basique.
