Intel spends a fortune on lobbying
WHILE INTEL LAID OFF employees and slashed costs to ride out the recession, it increased what it shelled out for political lobbying to more than $877,000 in the last quarter.
Capitalist tool Forbes went through the fine print in Intel's financial reports and found a huge blowout in the chipmaking giant's lobbying budget.
To put it in perspective, $877,000 spent on lobbying is not a huge part of a $111 billion company's budget. But AMD only managed to spend a fifth of that figure on lobbying, however.
Chipzilla spent most of the cash on trying to convince politicians to back it over antitrust issues. The US Federal Trade Commission is investigating AMD's antitrust allegations, and the European Union has fined Intel a record $1.45 billion for allegedly selling chips below cost and paying computer makers not to use AMD chips.
All this requires Intel to open the drinks cabinet and do some serious lobbying, apparently.
Chipzilla also lobbied Congress in the April through June period on immigration, spending on education and health care, tax matters, energy issues, and US and Europe competition laws.
In the prior quarter Intel spent only $500,000 on lobbying. µ
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so any time soon we can expect intel to get massive government contracts using oodles of public money and then ex-politicians assuming directorship posts at intel
corruption is not the word...
Can someone explain to me what the differance is between lobbying and bribery? I never really could grasp the distinction...
It's not Intel fault. It's not current Politicians fault either, really. It's the fault of that rotten and permissive system made by yesterday politicians that is abused / rapped by all corporations, including Intel.
In the end, it's our fault, the electors, who accept this aberration in the first place and do nothing to denounce a system that work for the good of the wealthy and powerful.
The system is not at the service of logic, reason, justice and the better good of the citizen. The system is a bitch that bend over at corporations demand if the cash incentive is good enough.
Lobbying, in its current indecent and corrupted form, should be outlawed, period. In fact, this old archaic political system should be thoroughly reviewed, dismantled, and a new much more effective one put into place.
I doubt the American people are ready for such a drastic revolution. You don't want to fight for what is right? Then shut the fuck up and go back to sleep.
That's what is so cool about the American dream: You have to be asleep to believe in it.
Ramon Zarat
The original linked article stated "a portion of the money went toward antitrust issues"
In Nickese, this translates to most of the money went to antitrust issues.
Nick - do you know how the money was spent relatively or are you just making stuff up again and guessing? I would not ask if this was an article on Apple, but usually you don't just guess and distort articles on things non-Apple related...
Ramon,
Pardon my expression, but what you are saying is absolute nonsense. Large corporations are among the most impacted groups of people by political decisions. Politicians can, at their whims, increase regulation and taxes on corporations that can absolutely cripple the ability for them to be competitive, which in turn affects all of the stock holders and employees, not to mention all of the employees of their suppliers. Why, then, should it be illegal or immoral for a corporation to want to represent their viewpoint on how political decisions will impact the corporation?
Now more then ever, the government is making huge impactful decisions that could cripple our economy, or more specifically a corporations ability to be globally competitive while still maintaining US operations, including Cap and Trade and the Healtcare bills. For example, the healtcare bills will install a tax on top of the existing benefits that the corporations give to their employees to fund the healcare of non-employees. Increasing the cost of business with no immediate benefit to the company's employees is, at best, of interest to the company and at worst could impact the ability of the company to hire or maintain workforce, or force the company to reduce benefits to existing employees.
You are making the false assumption that all lobbyists are corrupt types that slip money to lawmakers in small unmarked bills. In actuality, a lobbyist is really someone that is paid to represent the ideas of one group to the political system. Those "lobbying fees" are likely the salary and costs of travel associated with talking with the lawmakers.
Seeing the pending legislation, do you really think it is in the best interest of the corporations to just take it in the teeth time after time with no representation? Don't the "wealthy and powerful" deserve their opportunity to have access to lawmakers, especially since this could dramatically impact their ability to continually employ the 10's of thousands of poor, pathetic abused workers that they currently do? Especially since they generate an already huge amount of the tax burden that the "poor, working class" types are already largely exempt from paying through our ever more "progressive" tax system?
Just my 2c
Chris
why the
children of the children of the children of the children of the children of the children of the
children of the children of the
children of the children of the
children of the children of the
children of the children ...
of the U.S. Taxpayers, of course.