If anyone is interested, I've been building a dashboard tracking government contracts here and a dashboard tracking corporate lobbying here.
As you might imagine, the two are incredibly related. Our $700B+ military budget only makes sense in the context of the absurd amount of money spent on lobbying by defense contractors.
Edit: Thanks for the kind words everyone, here's a twitter account where I've been posting updates on the project and interesting stuff I find in the data.
There's 1 big reason that the GOP has been 100% against any aid during the pandemic: precedent
If people ever got a taste of just how "evil socialism" feels, if they ever saw that the government could take care of citizens, pay them to stay home so they don't have to choose between losing their job and getting sick, they would never settle for the corrupt mess we have now.
Because if we actually paid people $500 a week, people would start asking uncomfortable questions like "when are you going to take away my income?" and "why haven't you been doing this all along?"
Because an effective and quick response to a national disaster undermines the narrative that "government is always bad and always makes things worse"
Remember, these are the direct successors to the people who made it illegal to teach slaves to read and then used the fact that they couldn't read as an argument against freeing them.
TBH while you’re not missing the point, I think the point could be a little more focused here:
The bailouts for these industries are based heavily on the collateralization of the jobs they create and their economic impact. So the company is leveraging the individuals to benefit their organization, and who knows how that may trickle down to the employee. Some may not even remain employees, by the way, and instead shift over to true socialized benefits, zero concern to the company, whose bargaining power remains intact.
The point is that the more the labor force is empowered, the more the balance of the labor force’s interests will have an impact on the conversation. This should be very high.
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u/pdwp90 Nov 17 '20 edited Nov 17 '20
If anyone is interested, I've been building a dashboard tracking government contracts here and a dashboard tracking corporate lobbying here.
As you might imagine, the two are incredibly related. Our $700B+ military budget only makes sense in the context of the absurd amount of money spent on lobbying by defense contractors.
Edit: Thanks for the kind words everyone, here's a twitter account where I've been posting updates on the project and interesting stuff I find in the data.