$20 Million on Lobbying Defeats CA Privacy Bill

sphughes writes "The San Francisco Chronicle is reporting that banks, insurance companies and other corporations spent more than $20 million in campaign contributions and lobbying expenses to defeat a recent consumer privacy bill SB773. The story can be found here. These are preliminary figures through July and may actually run much higher. The bill had been modified from opt-in to opt-out but was still killed."

Comments

Lobby the Banks

[Troy H Parker]

Has there ever been a run on a bank because of a position they've lobbied? If banks are going to be politically active, maybe the choice of bank you use should also be politically motivated from now on.

Simple way to end it

[hrieke]

Make the companies selling your information cut you in for a peice of the profit everytime they sell your information.

eGray

[dr_eaerth]

Gov. Gray Davis received more than $1 million in contributions from banks, insurance companies and other corporations that opposed Speier's bill.

Looks like the banks are getting good use out of eGray. And who says the Internet can't be profitable.

What have you done about it.

[Yohahn]

These companies need to see that these kinds of actions have consequences.

Have you canceled your MBNA credit cards and told them why you were canceling it?

There are plenty of other banks and Credit card compaines. Time to move your account elsewhere. And vocally explain why.

Re:What have you done about it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you canceled your MBNA credit cards and told them why you were canceling it?

If you're just now cancelling an MBNA credit card for something like this, where have you been? I do believe that MBNA is about the most evil corporation out there. They are the ones that set up fake "credit counseling" classes at colleges which turn out to be "credit cards are your friend" propaganda presentations.

This company preys on college students and thier inexperience with credit cards. If you ever notice a credit card company doing something unethical on your campus, check it out, 99.9% of the time it will be MBNA. They also give out most of the t-shirts, hats and other goodies in exchange for your application, so they can't be all bad, right?

Posting Anonymously to protect my credit rating. ;)

Corruption and democracy

[revscat]

I am beginning to believe that corruption is the Achille's heel of democracy. South American nations are getting very disenchanated with their own experiements in democracy for this very reason, and America is currently struglling with it at the highest levels of government. Money is a corrupting influence when tied in with politics, and I believe it goes against the very principles democracy is based upon.

I would scream it from the rooftops if I felt it would do any good: CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM! It may not solve every problem, but strong, enforced CFR would at least help. The rich and powerful are vastly overrepresented in the legislatures, some effort at restoring balance is incredibly important. This is not about freedom, it is about the health of the democracy. I, for one, reject the notion that spending money is covered by the First Amendment. Speech is saying something. Spending money is buying something.

GOD how did Bush get elected President? I'm a Democrat, but if McCain had been on the ballot I would have voted for him in a heartbeat. Now we have a President that has spent over half of his time in office either on vacation or fund raising, or a combination thereof.

... sorry, I seem to have drifted from my original point ...

Re:Corruption and democracy

[Guppy06]

"I would scream it from the rooftops if I felt it would do any good: CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM! It may not solve every problem, but strong, enforced CFR would at least help."

The laws are a joke and I should know. All campaign finance reform laws have done is increased the amount of paperwork required to run for office. I have to file paperwork with the Louisiana Ethics Comission, the Clerk of the House the Federal Election Commissions, and I have to send a copy of FEC paperwork to the Louisiana Department of State. All that paperwork does is provide another bureaucratic layer for the candidates to hide behind. Does it increase public access to information on my funding? Not really. Most people don't even know of the existance of these organizations, let alone how to obtain copies of the papers I've filed. It sure as hell isn't as informative to the general public as this, but most politicians want you to know as little about them as possible. It seems that most major candidates spend more time running interference on each other than actually sharing information with the voting public.

"The rich and powerful are vastly overrepresented in the legislatures, some effort at restoring balance is incredibly important."

You're not going to get it with the current batch of party sheep. If anything, they know what they needed to get into office themselves and aren't about to give it up easily.

"I'm a Democrat, but if McCain had been on the ballot I would have voted for him in a heartbeat."

Maybe too many Americans are too busy toeing the party line to see that most of the problems lie in the current two-paty system in the US. Guess how all those legislators probably got all their money? It was likely all funnelled through the state and national Democratic and Republican committees. All that most of the required election paperwork seems to have accomplished is to make sure more money is funnelled ("laundered?") through the party rather than going to the politician directly.

"Now we have a President that has spent over half of his time in office either on vacation or fund raising, or a combination thereof."

Which is completely different from what Clinton, Bush, Regan, Carter, Ford, Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy, Eisenhower, Truman, Roosevelt, Hoover, Coolidge, Taft, Wilson, Harding, Roosevelt, or McKinley have done in office? Should I go through the nineteenth century as well?

Most of the "this president is the most lazy/money-grubbing yet" stuff is just talk from the other party. If anything it's just more politicians running political interference. We have an executive that is very much alone and very easy for the press to focus on, and we have 535 legislators that can easily hide behind each other and can generally get away with more individually and as a group than the president. In my opinion, all this party nonsense about bad-mouthing the president's policies is little more than Congress keeping the attention shifted away from the real seat of corruption in government.

And the same goes for the states as well. Most governors would know better than to shoot themselves in the political foot by vetoing a bill with a title like that. But if it never gets to the governor's office to begin with, who's the wiser?

The only real solution to this problem is both very simple and the one nobody ever brings up:

1.) Go find the California Legislature on the internet

2.) Find the bill on-line

3.) See which state Senators voted against it (whoever is represented by Senator Haynes is in luck, otherwise...). The measure passed the State Assembly, but it might be worth seeing who voted against it there as well.

4.) Vote against them next election. In fact, tell them you're going to do so. Better yet, run against the bastard yourself. It's a cushy job and looks good on a resume at the very least.

It's that easy! And you're still not going to do it, are you? Most people don't even know their national legislators, let alone their legislators at the state level. Nobody even bothers to vote for anybody in the state governments, except maybe the governor. Maybe. This is probably little more than the state legislators showing the same contempt for the voters as the voters seem to have for the legislators. They listen to campaign contributors because they're usually the only people talking to them.

CAMPAIGN reform, not campaign finance reform

[wowbagger]

I agree with you that the system is broken, but I disagree with you as to the solution - what we need is not campaign finance reform but rather campaign reform.

Let me lay out my assertions:
1) Supply and Demand - Supply always equals Demand, or rather Supply(price) = Demand(price), so solve for price.
2) Laws cannot significantly change Demand(price), all they can do is change Supply(price). Demand(price) is set by the consumers.

Now, in the case of campaigns, "price" isn't money, rather it is the availability of money. Demand(price) measures how much candidates (a.k.a. the consumers) and political parties are willing to sell favoratism for money, and Supply(price) is how much money donors are willing to give to get that favoritism. The Demand(price) curve is set largely by the political parties, while CFR would only change Supply(price) by making it harder for donors to fork over money.

The idea of CFR is that lowering the money supply, you will somehow make the candidates more responsive to the people. What will ACTUALLY happen is the big spenders will be able to ask for more favors for the same amount of money. They will find a way to funnel the money in - look at what happened when we started regulating "hard money" (money given directly to a candidate for him to use directly) - the big spenders simply invented "soft money" (money given to political parties and political action committees) to get around it. When we started regulating soft money, the big spenders simply started donating valuable services (while claiming the services weren't valuable).

OK, if you accept my premise, then CFR won't work. What would?

Remember, Demand(price) is set by the political parties. A candidate must run for two elections - the primary and the general election. Thus he must spend roughly twice as much money (increasing Demand(price)). Remember that the primary is not defined in the laws governing election - it is purely a party function (ther are laws regulating the primary, but there is no law mandating its existance). In my state (Kansas) you CANNOT vote in the primary unless you are registered with that party - thus I cannot pick a Democrat and a Republican that I like.

And that is how the parties control your options - when you vote in the primary, you can only select for one party, and when the general election comes around, you take the options you are given by each party. And so I assert that the primaries are part of the problem, and should be removed from the system.

Since there is no law creating the primaries, how can we get rid of them? First, do NOT allow the parties to use public facilities for the primaries unless they allow every eligible voter to participate. If they wish to exclude all non-party members, then let them use their own damn machines in their own damn locations!

Second, do not allow the parties to ask anything other than "Are you eligible to vote in this district?" Don't let them see if I am a registered Republican or Democrat. It's none of their damn business!

These two steps would greatly de-emphasize the importance of the political parties and their primaries (which is WHY you will never hear a Republican nor Democrat offering this idea up). It would lower the bar for independants, and it would remove a great deal of the cost of getting elected (lowering Demand(price)).

Next, how do we insure that the general election is more responsive to the people?

Binding None Of The Above

Require that for every race, one entry on the ballot be "None Of The Above", and that if there is no plurality (no candidate gets more votes than the others) or if NOTA gets the plurality, then all candidates in that race are disqualified from running for that office this term (that's the "binding" part).

I'd require the second election to happen within 1 month of the first - that way they cannot stall for time.

Consider the last US presidental election. Many of the people who voted for (Bush|Gore) were really voting against (Gore|Bush). Even within their own parties many people said "I really don't like (Bush|Gore), but I won't vote for (Gore|Bush), and I won't throw my vote away". Now, if one of the entries had been BNOTA, how would YOU have voted? I assert that we would have disqualified both Bush and Gore.

Now, some people have said "Yes, but then we might NEVER elect someone". I don't think so - the political parties aren't stupid. Again, consider the last presidential election: Had BNOTA been the law of the land, the Democrats would have said "Yes, he's the incumbent VP, but people don't like him. If the Republicans run anybody worth a damn they will win, and if they run Bush, then NOBODY wins. We'd better run somebody people will like." The Republicans would have reasoned simillarly.

Also, BNOTA makes it easier for third parties to come in. Let's say both the Republicans and the Democrats had run Bush/Gore. Individuals like Nader could have sat back and NOT entered the first race. Instead, they could have spent their efforts convicing people to vote NOTA. When Bush and Gore were knocked out, THEN they enter and campaign. Meanwhile the big parties are scrambling to get another set of candidates ready.

Now, back to the Demand(price) curve -when you have only a month to run your campaign, you are limited in what you can do - there's only so much ad time on the air, so many events you can go to, so many HOURS until the election. A smaller party can blitz just as effectively as a big one.

OK, that's my opinion. If you've read down this far, please think about it before hitting that reply button.

Bypass the jerks and have a direct vote

[Tablizer]

Much of the lobbying involved buying meals, hosting parties or providing favors for politicians and their staffs, ranging from business lunches and dinners all the way to the $24,078 golf game in Santa Cruz that lobbyists for the American Electronics Association last year provided a group of legislative aides.

Perhaps politicians should be required to purchase their own fricken lunches and banned from constituant-backed parties. Then again, such legislation often borders on intrusions into personal freedoms.

BTW, why can't they put that bill up to vote? You only need a million signitures in CA for such. IOW, bypass the greedbags in the state capital by putting it on the ballot as a "proposition", as they are known in CA.

It would be interesting to see what kind of "lobbying" the companies do in TV ads. They have been known to confuse and bomboozle voters also. I remember the Gerymandering compaign where they showed bubbling chemical polutants in the ad when the proposition had just about zilch to due with polution.

Re:privacy bill

[The Electric Messiah]

It wasn't about them getting more information from you, but about selling that information to third parties.

Speier's bill was designed to restrict banks and other financial companies from selling or disseminating information about customers' income and spending to third parties.

The banks already have most of your personal information. This is understandable, considering they provide credit cards, mortgages, loans, etc. Similar reasons apply for insurance companies. They need to know your personal info so they know how high your premium should be. This bill was designed to prevent said institutions from selling that information to third parties without express consent from the consumer. These institutions lobbied against the bill so that they can continue to sell this information to direct-marketing-type people. As much as I personally loathe this practice, it makes perfect sense from a business standpoint. They trade bits and bytes for hard cash. They don't give any physical resources, and they get cash.