MS Lobbies to Cut DOJ Antitrust Budget

Forward The Light Br sent us a washington post article that talks about (no I'm not kidding) Microsoft Lobbying the Government to cut funding to the DOJs Antitrust department. I'm pretty amazed by this one.

Comments

a problem with our democracy

[konstant]

This is a problem with our democracy, not just a problem with MS. Most residents of Washington state are aware that Senator Slade Gorton eats out of the hand of not just Microsoft, but also Boeing and Weyerhaueser, the next two largest local companies. Politicians who perhaps are already inclined towards helping business can easily be swayed with strategic "contributions". Microsoft clearly forsees a future in which it has emerged from the current anti-trust battle and continues to practice dubious business tactics. They wish to avoid a repeat of the current finagle. This offers us an interesting insight into their corporate mentality - evidently BillG doesn't believe he is going to lose the DoJ case. Not in the long run, at any rate. The dismaying part is that they are correct. You can own Congress. As I once heard someone say, "A congressman is the best long-term investment of all". Soft money has to go. Disclosure is poor at the moment, but even full disclosure would be ridiculously ineffective. The whole point of representative democracy is that I don't have to monitor every legislative detail that comes down the pike. What then are the chances that I will want to monitor every financial detail? Politicians will "fully disclose" their contributions buried somewhere in the back pages of the classifieds, and nobody will ever read them. The Supreme Court has several times ruled that money is speech. They are right, but they take it to illogical extremes. A contribution to the campaign of my favorite politician is indeed a means of indicating my support for him or her. But does a person with ten times as much disposable cash as myself really have ten times as much to say? Far from it. Let's put some teeth into limits on campaign contributions. Ban soft money and PACs. Microsoft can only do this because the corrupt infrastructure allows it.
-konstant

Re:Setting the standard for Arrogance

[jilles]

They are a perfect example of how perverted the US is these this.

As a dutch person I was shocked to read this:

"But Sen. Slade Gorton (R-Wash.), whose campaign has received about $51,000 from Microsoft or its employees since 1997, has been an outspoken supporter of a cut in the antitrust budget."

If this happens in Italy or South America you call it corruption. I don't think there's another word for it. MS is just using the system, they didn't create it. The whole DOJ case was lobbied for by other parties like SUN and IBM. Nobody is talking about that. Needless to say those parties benefited from the DOJ case by taking market share back from MS.

It's disgusting what you can get away with if you have money in the US. As a comparison, if a dutch politician would accept "gifts" like this and it would get into the media, he could start looking for another job.

What amazes me most is that in the current campaigns for the US presidency, the candidates are actually using the amount of bribing money they received to prove how suitable they are for the job. Judging from this George Bush seems to be the most corrupt/best candidate of all.

The fault lies not in our stars, but in ourselves

[evilpenguin]

The illness in American Democracy is not Microsoft. It is not even big money. It is not even the absurd (IMHO) Supreme Court decision that money is speech. The illness is me. The illness is you. The illness is the fact that you didn't go to your precinct caucusses, did you? (Neither did I, I'm not getting holier-than-thou here).

The sickness is the way regard the government as "them" and the people as "us." I've got news for you folks. The government is "us." Why have "evil special interests" taken over the government and made lapdogs of legislators? Because we were not there.

This government is ours. It is structured to do what we want it to do. But we are not there saying what we want!

Instead, we participate in focus groups where the same researches who figure out why we buy one brand of toothpaste over another ask us a series of provocative questions and measure our emotional responses. They are not looking for what we think, they are after what we feel because they know a dirty little secret. People are not motivated by intellect, they are motivated by emotion.

This system allows our political discourse to descend from open discussion of matters of vital interest to us (like anti-trust and patent law, like tax policy and welfare reform) to grainy black-and-white advertisements showing a prison with a reveloving door and that scary black man! (I'm referring to the George Bush "Willie Horton" ad here, but both parties do this -- I'm not being partisan, I just think the Willie Horton ad was the most despicable example of this.)

Now, your intellect knows full well that if you vote for Dukakis, you wife will not autmatically be raped and murdered by a black man. But it, along with the rest of the scientific marketing research, designed to find your emotional hot buttons, creates an "emotional aura" around the candidate that is pervasive and insiduous, hard to identify and reason with, difficult to resist.

So what do we do? We aren't totally blind. We aren't robots. These ads don't MAKE us vote in a particular way in and of themselves, but they do make us digusted and fed up. We feel in our guts that this ISN'T democracy, so we turn off. The political diet is empty calories and we go looking elsewhere for nourishment.

I think this empty, mindless, constant appeal to emotion is why we stay away from the polls in droves.

Well-funded interests are all too happy to step in and take what they can from the carcass of our freedoms. What the hell? We don't want it.

We CAN stop this. While our government may seem to be totally out of control, and that we are powerless, our government still retains the FORM of democracy. Call your local library. Find out where your party caucus is held. Go. Talk. Question. Discuss. There will be organizers there for candidates. They will have a platform. They will have votes and positions. They will try to pressure you to keep your mouth shut. They will try to control the election of delegates. Don't let them. Speak up. Go. See how it works. It will make you mad, but don't knuckle under. Bring some friends. Insist on talking about what bothers you.

I've seen it here. Slashdotters have some definite opinions on real matters of law and commerce. Don't settle for the way things are. All the tools needed to take back our government are there. Make the next Congress an "open source" Congress (forgive me for such a weak and strained linkage, but I think the same kind of spirit that imbues open source/free software can be tapped to bring reality back to politics).

Think of it like exercise, or, yes, open source programming. I get paid to write software at work. I set aside a little time every week to work on my free software project. This year, I've decided to set aside a little time to work on my "software patent" idea. I'm going to my caucus and I'm going to get a vote on a platform plank. A platform that patents on software be limited to no more than 24 months. I know that many would like no patents on software, but other forces will want patents to stay just as they are. I'm going for a compromise.

Whatever it is that upsets you, go. Make your voice heard. Write your congretional delegation.

You must not wait for others to give you your freedom. You must take it for yourself. It is yours, but if you leave it lying on the ground, don't be surprised when someone (maybe Microsoft) picks it up and says, "hey, I could use this!"

It is you country. Take it.

Re:What's so amazing about it?

[Mr. Slippery]

To allow the USA to have a truely 'free market' economy, the antitrust laws would have to be repealed.

Fine. Just so long as you eliminate all those other artificial market restritions, too - you know, state creations like intellectual propery, corporations as legal individuals with full rights but lessened responsibility, absentee ownership, the banking system, the common currency, and all the other acts of government that make capitalism possible.

In the meanwhile, though, if the state is going to allow the creation of corporations like Microsoft, and support them by artificial intellectual property rights, I see no problem with antitrust laws that keep the state's creation from getting too far out of line.