Also, don’t we the people have the power to have a say in the government? I heard somewhere that the government literally almost never listens to people and instead to powerful oil and gas companies.
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As to how they buy influence:
– Campaign contributions to a candidate are capped, but PACs and SuperPACs exist, the latter allowing corporations to give unlimited money to political causes. Now, they can’t _directly_ coordinate with a candidate, but they can make it clear that the company has certain priorities, and they will support (with big $$$) anyone who promotes said priorities
– Non-political spending. If a company is looking to build a major factory or headquarters in an area, they can influence politicians in that areas to push certain policies for them (Look at Amazon and HQ2). They can also threaten to move operations from an existing district. Politicians will do this because it means jobs and money for their constituents.
– While bribes are illegal, offering cushy consulting gigs post-office is not. Politicians that play ball in office will find themselves with many good revenue opportunities post-office.
And to your second question, of course we do. We as the people have the ultimate power to make our voice heard by voting politicians out of office if they don’t promote policies that we like. The problem is that most people don’t use the power they have – voter turn out is consistently ~50% in _presidential_ races, and can often by <20% in odd-year elections. When people don’t use their power to hold politicians accountable, we can’t be surprised that the politicians do whatever they please.
Running for President costs more than a billion dollars. Major Congressional races cost tens of millions of dollars.
Corporations have millions of dollars to pay for these races. People don’t.
Politicians want to keep getting elected because being in politics is a way to get incredibly rich. To keep getting elected they need *tons* of money. So they listen to people willing to give them money.
Congress passes laws that impact every aspect of American life and the economy. They not only cannot be experts on literally everything, they cannot even afford to hire experts in everything they pass laws impacting. In a lot of cases, there aren’t even enough real experts available to *be hired* by every congressman. Even if you have studied a field, unless you’ve actually got practical experience in it there’s still a lot that you don’t know and can’t accurately predict how a new law or rule will impact it.
Who are the experts? Mostly people employed at companies that are actually doing that work.
Most of lobbying is from companies filling in the information gaps: Congress is looking at laws that will impact them, so they try to inform the lawmakers about how the law will actually impact them, especially unintended consequences and how to shape rules to get to the intended effect.
Of course, companies are also looking after their own best interests. So lawmakers need to be savvy enough to separate out which information is useful for shaping their legislation to actually achieve what they want, and which information is meant to give the lobbying company an advantage. Edit: And that’s not always an easy tradeoff. Often, it’s much easier (or the only possible way) to achieve a policy goal with a rule that favors some subset of companies than it is to achieve that goal and keep a level playing field for all companies.
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