Mike, I don't know how's the political landscape is in the USA, but you would say that there is few significative corruption and collusion?
Le 22/01/2012 21:16, Mike Godwin a écrit :
Theo10011 de10011@gmail.com writes:
On Sun, Jan 22, 2012 at 3:32 PM, Theo10011 de10011@gmail.com wrote:
Am I wrong to assume, that lobbying involves approaching a registered, professional consulting/lobbying firm in Washington who in turn, refer the client to politicians and then facilitate meetings and discussions in private, client are expected to pay expenses and other fees incurred in the process, usually a pretty hefty sum.
Yes, you're wrong.
Are those discussions and arrangements made in private, facilitated by lobbying firms, what is needed to get our voice heard?
No. It can be helpful to have an experienced Washington government-relations specialist to facilitate meetings, and to advise you on how to be effective, but the word "private" is inappropriate here. (The very fact that Politico was able to publicize WMF's engagement with such a specialist ought to be an indicator of this -- in the USA, especially for the last 40 years, there have been vastly increased requirements for public reporting and accountability, both for nonprofits and for traditional corporate lobbyists.) When I represented the Center for Democracy and Technology or Public Knowledge at the FCC or on Capitol Hill, for example, the first thing I had to do when getting back from a meeting was write up a report of whom I met and what was discussed. The reports became part of the public record, and part of these nonprofits' public disclosures as well.
You mentioned the protest, and how proud you were to have been associated with it, so were most of us. That was the right thing to do - open, direct and public. All of which this doesn't seem to be.
You'd be wrong about meetings with policymakers not being public. They're required be law to be reported and accounted for. As I have noted, many people have stereotypical notions about what it means to "lobby" in Washington. Too many movies and TV, I imagine.
Again, these might be stereotypes, but the general realities aren't that far off either.
Hugely far off, actually.
To compare: it's a little bit as if you took your understanding of police work from watching American police action films. It's not wrong to say that sometimes police rough people up, for example, but it would be wrong to say that is the norm. Most police work is dull and routine, and the sheer amount of paperwork an average policeman has to do is so astounding that nobody ever even tries to depict it in film or TV drama. You'd switch channels or walk out of the theater in boredom.
If you really think that (for example) the American Library Association's Office for Information Technology Policy (http://www.ala.org/offices/oitp) is having secret meetings with senators and writing big checks, then the American entertainment industry has done a huge disservice in educating people about all the ways public policy can be shaped. Not that this should come as any surprise.
(I'd love it, of course, if the American Library Association were capable of writing big checks, but that's another story.)
--Mike
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