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Comment by xlayn | Hacker News Reader

This tells you all you need to know about politics and who elected people work for, it's a cancer that you can "hire" people to go and "talk" to another people in congress, what an infinite level of corruption.

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> it's a cancer that you can "hire" people to go and "talk" to another people in congress,

Is it? Regular Americans do this all the time. Lots of charities exist that, in part, use money to lobby members of congress. Lots of citizens do this as well. I do.

I have lobbyists that speak on my behalf as a card-carrying member of the ACLU.

So, you need to explain to me why I am not allowed to have someone else speak on my behalf?

Now, to be clear, bribing and other illegal things are still illegal. You need to answer why I am not allowed to have someone else speak on my behalf?

More importantly, why do you want to repeal the First Amendment?

I think the problem is we assume that lobbying is evil. It's not. What we should do is make sure we have stronger ethics reform and not what we have now (which is basically letting anyone get away with anything). But that's not getting rid of lobbying, which is just speaking to the government and addressing concerns.

You call it a cancer. I call it the First Amendment. Anyways, you have questions you need to answer.

I'm probably more worried that any corporation or trillionaire can dump limitless money into elections. That said, I'm encouraged to see that despite the far right buying up such a large share of the traditional and social media networks and astroturfing the shit out of our feeds with right wing AI slopaganda and dumping record setting sums into campaign ads that they still suffered a massive defeat.

Unfortunately, the defeat probably had less to do with their outright corruption and contempt toward American values or basic decency and probably everything to do with the cost of gas specifically.

That was a bit convoluted. I can tell you're very passionate and filled with hatred, but it seems your data on which US political party has more of a presence online and in traditional news media has been outdated since the early 90s.

They are correct. Efforts like the US TikTok acquisition and Warner Bros/Paramount merger were pushed through the FTC specifically to consolidate media power with GOP-friendly EOs like Safra Katz and Larry Ellison.

What causes you to disagree?

The fact that those, and Twitter, were recently bought and the mergers were allowed because they don't get close to the reach that Disney, Meta (Facebook, Instagram, and Threads), Google (especially Youtube), Netflix, Reddit, CNN, etc do. Do you really think these recent mergers have already produced biased content that gets more eyes per day than even the non-exhaustive list above? If so I encourage you to do some basic fact checking, and maybe I didn't account for something.

> the mergers were allowed because they don't get close to the reach that Disney, Meta [...]

Do you have a citation for that, or are you putting words into the FTC's mouth that nobody ever said?

You are every bit capable of googling it for yourself, this lazy behavior of asking for links is not a defense nor any kind of support for your argument.

The fact that you think approval of the merger by the U.S. Department of Justice on June 12, 2026, with no major concessions is "putting words into the FTC's mouth" is just plain annoying and, at best, misleading.

Since you seem to value links over rational thought and independent research, you can start here:

https://hls.harvard.edu/today/will-12-states-block-the-111b-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquisition_of_Warner_Bros._Di...

https://usaherald.com/doj-opens-antitrust-review-into-netfli...

Sometimes you have to buy Trumpcoins first before meeting with certain politicians. The most powerful politicians just do it in the open like never before.

The levels of hell run deep, and we just got schooled as to how deep. The revolving door is the surface, POTUS shitcoin was next level, pumping and dumping the world economy with fake Iran announcements to insider trade it and brag about it on national TV was next level, and there are levels beyond these.

Revolving door is a bit gross but we've just seen sooooooooo much worse.

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