The way I see it, there should be no method for influencing government affairs in which the richer and better organised can outperform any given citizen. While, for instance, I’m grateful for the work that HRC does, I am still not very comfortable that it is more effective at influencing the government than I, by myself, can ever hope to be.

Political influence is a zero-sum game. The more influence organised parties have over politics, the less influence I have.

Why allow any lobbying at all?

“Lobbying” is the act of attempting to influence decisions made by elected representatives and is a very important part of democracy. It can be as simple as a grassroots letter-writing campaign or a public protest like the one going on in Wall Street. The reason “lobby” has become a dirty word is that the system is so perverted by financial interests that Washington is currently run by professional lobbyists who have inside connections and answer to the highest bidder.

The current system of lobbying needs major reform, but get rid of it entirely and you also lose major battles currently being fought by the Human Rights Campaign, Amnesty International, Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, the ACLU and dozens of other causes you may or may not support.

(although that should rather be “stop fucking with us”, I guess).

Anyway, from my side of the pond, this OWS thing seems pretty cool. Wish I was in NY.

Now you have a situation where all banks are basically in the proprietary trading business, and using your government insured deposits to provide an asset base for their leverage.   Why are the banks getting out of the loan business?  Because they can make better returns by and large robotrading, subsidized by the feds, and of course individual depositors.   Thats partly why the screaming about Basel III.  It raises the cost of investment capitol for large banks.

hows that for using the system.

Breaking up big banks is another big area that needs talking about.  How are you going to fund it (or are you just going to seize them)?

If they can merge then they can break up. Like others pointed out, they did it once with AT&T (and if you ask me it’s about time to take that company back to the chopping block too).

As far as the big banks – Canadian Prime minister Paul Martin, did not let the big banks merge, as well as reduced the deficit to zero – one of the reasons Canada was able to bear the downturn. Also in Canada savings and investment banking were kept separate, and mortgage requirements were more stringent – no such thing as nina loans.

So much of the problem was foreseen and could have been caught by proper regulation.  Back in the 90s – Procter & Gamble sued Bankers Trust (one of the largest banks at the time) for ripping them off.  The court case exposed a lot of problems with derivatives. But Greenspan and Rubin didn’t want regulation for ‘regulations sake’.
Even after Long Term Capital Management blew up – and almost caused systemic failure in 1998 they still didn’t want to regulate it.

and prosecute the likes of Goldman Sachs for selling sub-prime mortgages to people that couldnt afford it – and then repacking and selling them and betting against them.

ditto for the likes of Hank Paulsen who called for the first bailout as Treasury secretary, and only four years as head of Goldman Sachs earlier argued for increasing the debt to leverage ratio to 30-1.

Patience and planning paid off for me.

So you patiently planned for a market crash, a housing crash and a federal stimulus project?

With that being said, the time for pseudoscientific economic bantering is over.  It’s time to make demands, and if those demands aren’t meant, it’s time to start fucking shit up.

I’m all for restricting lobbying (and campaign donations) using public money.  
Additionally– if organizations that got large government (over 10k?) contracts were not allowed to lobby or donate, unions would lose their influence too.  http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/list.php

Just out of curiosity, does the rest of the G8, or G20 take the absurdity of corporate personhood as far as free speech? I am going to guess that they don’t. And yet, they have corporations . . . interesting.

A couple of points.  The paying back the bailouts tax:

If I understand it right, the bailouts themselves where government purchases of shares and bonds.  In effect, loans to the Government.  I’m more familiar with the British bailouts, but as I understand it the US one is pretty similar.  These are projected to make a small profit, that’s certainly what has happened historically (Sweden in the 90s).  The deficit is caused by the economy (and thus tax base) shrinking while government liabilities such as unemployment payments increasing.  You could definitely argue the banks should pay for this too, but that’s different from saying they should pay for their own bailout.

The tax itself, well it would need to be international for a start.  I’ve also not seen anything convincing on why it would be a good thing in itself.  There are lots of ways to increase taxes on banks with predictable outcome (taxing profits, bonuses, payroll etc.), why pick one with potentially huge unintended consequences?

Breaking up big banks is another big area that needs talking about.  How are you going to fund it (or are you just going to seize them)?  Are smaller banks going to need governmental support, as they get in Germany?  What about big foreign banks, will, for example, HSBC be allowed to operate normally, or in a restricted capacity?  How will the affect consumer credit rates?

Lobbying is the most tricky of all.  You run into minefields everywhere.  Is this a proposal that the banks can make no representations over legislation on their own business?  They have the most knowledge of the potential impact of the legislation.  They’re not the only voice you want to hear, but they are an important on. 

It is both good and bad.  Corporations get due process under the 14th amendment.  A town government can’t just arbitrarily point their finger at a business and make it drop dead or confiscate all of its assets. If they want to do that, they have to follow “due process” (i.e., use the courts) as proscribed by the constitution.  Police can’t raid a corporation without a warrant due to 5th amendment protection.  Stuff like this is without any doubt a good thing.  It would be very bad if the police could bust in on any business they feel like and ransack the place.

Where it gets hairy is when you extend 1st amendment protection to a corporation.  So, you could also say that corporations are entitled to have contact with politicians and launch political ads due to 1st amendment protections.  You might not want this.

Personally, I wouldn’t want to completely remove corporate personhood.  I like companies having due process, protection from warrantless search and seizure, and things like that.  

I would be more inclined to write a law altering corporate personhood such that the default is that corporations get all of the protections of the constitution unless specifically prohibited by law, and perhaps set a slightly higher bar for such laws to pass.  So, unless  you make it specifically legal for police to ransack a place of business, it is illegal.  Unless you make it specifically illegal for corporations to launch political campaign ads, it is legal.

Of course, the downside is that once you open the door, you will never close it.  Currently, Google can contest having their records taken by the government without a warrant under the 5th and 14th amendments.  Under my proposed law, the government could make it legal to take the records without a warrant and Google would be out of luck in terms of legal recourse.

I guess my point is that there is no easy answer and that it would be foolish to simply remove corporate personhood without rebuilding some of the completely valid and needed legal protection that provides.

People tend to stop taking you seriously when you use hyperbole like, “a thousand mafias combined.”

You don’t think that all the police in the US and all their firepower is equal to a thousand mafias?  Because they’re the enforcers who are going to evict you when your house is foreclosed.

Everything else flows from this. You can regulate their political speech if they are not people. Once you can regulate their political speech you can limit their donations etc. Once you can do that you can start to regulate them.

Or, you know, we could let these companies go under when they are bankrupt, so that these gamblers and crony capitalists lose everything.

I think that was implicit under “#1: Break up the monopolies.” Once companies are no longer “too big to fail” (without dragging down the whole financial system) then you can go ahead and let them.

1)  Apply insurance reserve rules to derivatives.  Those were unregulated insurance bets, that AIG did not have the resources to pay.  Try that in Vegas.  Repealing Gramm would presumably have this effect, but put those under clear enforcement jurisdiction and apply adequate resources to monitoring.

2)  Require full transparency and crowdsource bond rating.  The information asymmetry in the financial markets is what brought us to this crisis.  It is clear that rating agencies and accounting firms cannot be trusted to certify undisclosed material conditions, so without transparency, ratings are worthless.

3) Tax all electronic stock transactions to choke out the flash trading. 

How about just outright banning/outlawing lobbying.

Hell yeah! We should organize some kind of group to get that message to our legislators!

Oh, shit.