Janine Jackson interviewed Public Citizen’s Jane Chung about Big Tech lobbying for the April 2, 2021, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Public Citizen (3/24/21)
Janine Jackson: A new report from Public Citizen on Big Tech’s political influence opens with some illustrative quotes, including one from former Trump official Mick Mulvaney, about his time as a House representative for South Carolina: “We had a hierarchy in my office in Congress. If you’re a lobbyist who never gave us money, I didn’t talk to you. If you’re a lobbyist who gave us money, I might talk to you.” It’s nice to have it put so boldly, I suppose, but that is our understanding of how things often, regrettably, work.
So what does it mean that Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google—all wildly profitable enterprises that are being challenged on multiple fronts, from internal practices to societal impact—are showering money on Congress at startling levels? What are they looking to buy? Are they getting it? And how would we know?
The report is called Big Tech, Big Cash: Washington’s New Power Players, and we’re joined now by its author, Public Citizen’s Big Tech accountability advocate, Jane Chung. She joins us now by phone from Brooklyn. Welcome to CounterSpin, Jane Chung.
Jane Chung: Thanks for having me.
JJ: As I say, although it stinks, no one is really shocked to know that money changes hands in DC, that industry and lawmakers rub shoulders at parties and then—huh!—here’s favorable legislation. They might be surprised at the sheer scale of the outlays you document, and their increase. Give us a sense of the scale of the lobbying, campaign-contributing effort of these Big Tech corporations.
JC: Sure. Some comparisons I make in the report, I think, help illustrate the scale. When I was just coming into my political awareness, I’ll say, I learned that Big Oil and Big Tobacco, for much of the ’90s and the early 2000s, got their way in legislation and regulation in Washington because they were pouring money into lobbying and campaign contributions.
What I found throughout my research phase of this report is that Facebook and Amazon—which are now the two largest individual corporate spenders on lobbying in Washington—they now spend about twice as much as the companies Philip Morris and ExxonMobil. So that just gives you a sense of who today’s big players are, as compared to yesterday’s, when we know that Big Oil and Big Tobacco were really the biggest forces in Washington.
JJ: This is an update to a 2019 report, so you can also see the increase, right, in the spending from those actors?
JC: Yep, exactly. And it’s not surprising; as you mentioned earlier in your introduction, there’s a lot of regulatory and legislative challenge that is coming to the Big Tech companies. We’ve seen it last Congress, we’ll see more this Congress, and if I had it my way, hopefully, it leads to some real action and change as well.
JJ: Each of the players, of course, has their own set of issues and problems. Amazon workers, listeners know, are struggling to unionize right now, after years of complaints about workplace conditions. They have got a friend in DC, who’s not new in town, and who reflects another thing that the report spotlights, which is the revolving door. That plays a role with these tech companies as well, doesn’t it?
JC: It plays a huge role. And to give you a little bit of a sense of what happens behind closed doors: I call myself an advocate; really, I’m also a lobbyist, but we like to think of ourselves as lobbyists for the people.
JJ: Right.
Jane Chung: “We really can’t understate the importance of relationships in Washington, and specifically how much the revolving door benefits corporate interests.”
JC: And corporations have their own lobbyists.
And so much of our job is calling and messaging staff members on the Hill, to try and get meetings, to tell them about the issues that are important to us, and to try and move them toward what we think is the best solution.
When it comes down to it, and you have an email in your inbox or you have a missed call, and it’s your buddy from 10 years ago when you worked together on the Hill, you’re much more likely to pick up than someone whose phone number you don’t recognize. And so we really can’t understate the importance of relationships in Washington, and specifically how much the revolving door benefits corporate interests.
JJ: It seems important to say: Lobbying is not inherently bad, and receiving money isn’t prima facie evidence of co-optation or corruption, necessarily, on the part of an official.
In comments you made to the New Statesman, you were saying that sometimes the reason behind lobbying is self-evident, but at other times, it’s not clear. And part of what you’re trying to do is not just say, “hey, this money went from here to there—voilà!,” but try to figure out what is the interest that a company might have in particular legislation.
And something you said, that I thought was very interesting, is that sometimes, a company could be lobbying for an issue that seems counterintuitive to its business interests, but there’s other reasons that they’re doing that. Can you just talk a little bit about that?
New Statesman (2/15/21)
JC: Sure. You mentioned earlier, many of your listeners probably know, that Amazon is facing a lot of scrutiny for its labor practices, as workers in Alabama are counting up votes this week to establish a union for the first time, it would be for the first time in Amazon‘s corporate history.
Amazon has spent a lot of money, lobbying and advertising about raising the federal minimum wage to $15. They’ve bought out full-page spreads in the New York Times, they’ve bought out every newsletter that any Washington politico subscribes to, and even in the lobbying filings, as I was going through them, they list a $15 minimum wage as an issue that they’re lobbying for.
You might think, “Well, that’s objectively a good thing.” And given Amazon‘s history of not exactly treating their warehouse workers well, this seems like they may have turned a new leaf. Why would they want to pay their workers more? Why would they do something that seems so counterintuitive to an employer’s interest?
And the reason in this case is because they want to overshadow all of the abuses that are happening in the workplace with this great PR slogan about how they were ahead of the curve on raising their minimum wage to $15. When the reality is, when they raised their warehouse workers’ wages to $15, there were plenty of reports online around how this actually didn’t raise the real wages for a lot of workers, and they cut back a lot of benefits and incentives at the same time, so the workers weren’t experiencing, actually, any better material conditions as a result.
Other reports online say that warehouse workers, typically, made much more than minimum wage, and so Amazon is putting downward pressure on the industry-wide wages for that type of work.
So we really can’t take anything these companies say at face value. Another great recent example is, a few of the companies—including Facebook and Google and Amazon—created a new group in Washington, called the “Chamber of Progress,” where they’re touting progressive slogans, and interests like “democracy reform” and “income equality”; all the while, we know that this is really just a front group for advancing corporate interests in Washington. And so I think it’s a sleight of hand that we have to pay attention to as we look at these companies.
JJ: “Chamber of Progress” makes me want to puke, I’m just going to say that right now.
JC: Exactly.
Former Obama press secretary and current Amazon vice president Jay Carney
JJ: When we’re talking about Amazon‘s new friend in DC, that’s a guy named Jay Carney. And I just wanted to point out that his official title appears to be “senior vice president for policy and press,” which I find very interesting, as a way of thinking about image management as part of what is going on here.
Well, one of the reasons that you and others track lobbying outlays and campaign contributions, even though that’s not the only kind of influence peddling that’s going on, but it’s one of the pieces of information that you can get. And we should note that you’re working with data from the Center for Responsive Politics; they’re online at OpenSecrets.org.
But other things happen that we just can’t get a spotlight on, that we can’t measure, right? So you’re not trying to say this is this is the whole of it, yeah? This is just a piece of it.
JC: Sure, yeah, that’s exactly right. The spending that I cover in this report is just a slice—and we don’t know how big of a slice that is—of the full pie of spending that not only Big Tech, but corporate interests at large, are spending in Washington.
So just to give you a few examples: This report covers federal lobbying and campaign contributions. It does not cover state-level lobbying and campaign contributions, as well as local, which are much more difficult to quantify and track, because there are different standards on a state-by-state or locality basis. This doesn’t track super PACs and other intermediaries; we know that a lot of corporations will essentially launder money through a bunch of different names and organizations and super PACs and (c)(3)s and (c)(4)s to obscure the source of the funding, and contribute to elections and candidates in that way.
And then a whole new frontier that we’ve recently discovered is advertisements, funding research, funding academics. We’ve seen recently that David Brooks, of the New York Times op-ed column, was publishing all sorts of great things about Facebook while not revealing that Facebook is one of the sources of funding for his new projects.
JJ: Right.
JC: So these are all ways that Big Tech takes its tentacles into the Washington machine, and are very, very, very difficult for us to track.
JJ: Let me just ask, finally: I started out by saying, “no one’s shocked,” but just because we’re jaded doesn’t mean we accept, in a society with democratic aspirations, shall we say, that it’s just “money in, policy out.”
Briefly, unfortunately, what do you think about in terms of change? In terms of the problems that this report outlines, what are the big things that could change, and should change, that would ameliorate, anyway, the problems you outline?
JC: One of the things we call for at the end of this report is for all of these tech companies—and we’ve made this call for corporate America at large—to shut down their PACs, to end all super PAC contributions. And that’s a small fix that the companies can do themselves.
But in terms of the government, we really need the federal government to come in and make a stance, and pass things like HR.1 or S.1, the For the People Act, which has a lot of reforms in it to reduce the influence of corporate money in politics and increase transparency. These are the sort of changes we need to see, to ensure that the democracy that we all participate in is reflective of what the people want and need, rather than what Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple want and need.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Jane Chung, Big Tech accountability advocate for Public Citizen. Find the report, Big Tech, Big Cash, on the site citizen.org. Jane Chung, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
JC: Thank you.
This post was originally published on FAIR.
