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The leaked internal slides from Intuit are really disgusting [0][1]. From the article: > Internal presentations lay out company tactics for fighting “encroach

The leaked internal slides from Intuit are really disgusting [0][1]. From the article: > Internal presentations lay out company tactics for fighting “encroachment,” Intuit’s catchall term for any government initiative to make filing taxes easier — such as creating a free government filing system or pre-filling people’s returns with payroll or other data the IRS already has. “For a decade proposals have sought to create IRS tax software or a ReturnFree Tax System; All were stopped,” reads a confidential 2007 PowerPoint presentation from an Intuit board of directors meeting. The company’s 2014-15 plan included manufacturing “3rd-party grass roots” support. “Buy ads for op-eds/editorials/stories in African American and Latino media,” one internal PowerPoint slide states. I'm always stunned and disappointed at how easy it is to game the American political system. I say that with great respect for this country and the freedoms it affords me, but those freedoms mean little if skullduggery like this goes on. [0]: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6483065-Intuit-board-of-directors-presentation-2007.html https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6483065-Intuit-board... [1]: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6483061-Intuit-TurboTax-2014-15-Encroachment-Strategy.html https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6483061-Intuit-Turbo...

macjohnmcc 6y ago
And it is relatively inexpensive.
- sebmellen 6y ago
  And a good investment. For example, an 86,000% return on $43,000 in campaign donations: https://truthout.org/articles/you-too-can-buy-a-congressman/ https://truthout.org/articles/you-too-can-buy-a-congressman/.
  - csharpminor 6y ago
    One of the major points I took away from Lessig’s Republic, Lost is that these campaign donations trackers are unable to factor in the credible threat of a donor funding an opponent. The dollar amount may be relatively low, but the value to an incumbent politician is that wealthy stakeholders will not fund a challenger.
    - sebmellen 6y ago
      That's a very interesting game-theoretic view of the issue. I've got to read that book, thank you for the recommendation.
    - dragonwriter 6y ago
      > One of the major points I took away from Lessig’s Republic, Lost is that these campaign donations trackers are unable to factor in the credible threat of a donor funding an opponent. They also aren't able to factor in independent expenditures (especially direct independent expenditures), or facilitation of donations (bundling) as opposed to direct donation, as well as the credible threat of doing those things, as well as direct donation, in the opposite direction.
- ultimoo 6y ago
  I was taken aback by this the most when I saw some lobbying dollar amounts earlier this year — I don’t recollect the specifics but most are probably rounding errors for multi-billion dollar Fortune 500 companies, let alone trillion dollar tech juggernauts.
  - rayiner 6y ago
    Shouldn’t that tell you something? What kind of high return market attracts so little investment?
    - ultimoo 6y ago
      Sorry I don't understand what you're implying -- can you expand on this?
  - ip26 6y ago
    Sometimes it's just depressing to be sold out so... cheaply.
    - 93po 6y ago
      They're selling out because companies threaten to give your opponent millions. Take the $50k and do what they want or you'll be out of a job permanently next election
- wolfram74 6y ago
  This[0] was an interesting read back '19 comparing total political spending with the size of the almond industry. It's a weird comparison. [0]https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in-almonds/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in...
- juskrey 6y ago
  It's easy to buy central government.
  - qwantim1 6y ago
    Easy is not the word I’d use. Lucrative maybe. Not easy.
    - girvo 6y ago
      Although it's cheaper than you'd expect. > Well, according to www.opensecrets.org, oil, gas and coal companies donated at least $43,000 to Zincke’s campaign. That’s more than 10 percent of Ryan Zincke’s total contributions from Political Action Committees. https://truthout.org/articles/you-too-can-buy-a-congressman/ https://truthout.org/articles/you-too-can-buy-a-congressman/ I've seen other articles which back this up for other lobbying too: tens of thousands, not millions!
      - bobthepanda 6y ago
        It's interesting to compare this to, say, the UK, where political spending is capped at £30,000 per seat, presumably to stop elections from being pissing contests to see which companies can spend more on effective lobbying. https://www.bbc.com/news/election-2019-50170067 https://www.bbc.com/news/election-2019-50170067
      - rayiner 6y ago
        I don’t understand. You think a pro-coal industry position is, what, unpopular with voters in Montana? Your interpretation of the facts seems to be based on the preconception that voters in Montana have an antagonistic relationship toward the coal industry in the state. Such that there would be a conflict and companies would have to lobby the elected representative to do something they want at the expense of what is constituents want. That’s not what’s happening. Montana voters know where the jobs come from. And in fact, polls show higher trust in corporations than the government: https://www.wsj.com/articles/more-trust-in-business-than-in-government-and-media-survey-finds-11610533801 https://www.wsj.com/articles/more-trust-in-business-than-in-... Read Gallup’s polling on the issue. Americans are incredibly suspicious of government and government regulation: https://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Production/Cms/POLL/fvpmserw7uegpcwbidbvdw.png https://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Pro.... Just 23% of people say there’s “too little” regulation of business. 45% say too much. Now think about the $43,000 in lobbying, except assuming that voters in Montana want what’s best for the coal companies in their state. In that view, it makes more sense to understand that lobbying not as changing the vote, but coal companies communicating what they want to a politician that knows that his voters support giving coal companies what they want.
rayiner 6y ago
> I'm always stunned and disappointed at how easy it is to game the American political system. It’s easy to be a cynic, but you still need to match your beliefs up against reality. This particular belief really shouldn’t have survived the Trump era. Trump won in 2016 and almost won in 2020 despite Clinton and Biden having a huge financial edge from donors in the biggest industries (Wall Street, media, tech, etc.) See: https://mobile.twitter.com/annalecta/status/1323370439306055683 https://mobile.twitter.com/annalecta/status/1323370439306055.... See: https://www.npr.org/2020/10/26/927453369/outspent-in-the-homestretch-trump-campaign-says-its-ground-game-is-stronger https://www.npr.org/2020/10/26/927453369/outspent-in-the-hom... Bloomberg spent $100 million in Florida alone only to have Trump win it by a bigger margin than in 2016. See also: https://www.cnbc.com/2016/11/09/trump-spent-about-half-of-what-clinton-did-on-his-way-to-the-presidency.html https://www.cnbc.com/2016/11/09/trump-spent-about-half-of-wh... (“Trump spent about half of what Clinton did on his way to the presidency.”). In the 2018-2020 timeframe, gun control supporters vastly outspent gun control opponents. They failed. Supporters of Prop 209 in California vastly outspent the opposition. They failed by a huge margin. It’s actually hard to “game” the American political system. What companies like Intuit do is spend money to expose existing fault lines. Republicans are up and down the line opposed to easy tax filing because they think it’ll make it easier for government to raise taxes if people have to manually do their taxes every year. Intuit didn’t create this political fault line. It’s pre-existing. It’s based on ideology. The money is to connect Intuit’s issue (tax filing software) to this existing political fault line.
- User23 6y ago
  > It’s actually hard to “game” the American political system. Time magazine disagrees with you[1]. [1] https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/ https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/
  - rayiner 6y ago
    The Time story supports my point. Trump was a historically unpopular President who had basically stopped governing during COVID. And as the Time article points out, Biden had everyone from Wall Street to the media to Big Tech in the bag for him. Biden vastly outspent Trump in October. Bloomberg dumped $100 million into Florida. Yet Biden won by just 80,000 votes in Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada, with Trump getting the second most votes in history, higher than Obama. Maybe the full backing of Wall Street, Tech, and the media combined pushed Biden over the finish line. But it was at best a nudge. And how modest that effect was should be good for thought for skeptics.
mssundaram 6y ago
Imagine what goes on that we don't even know about
fsloth 6y ago
"I'm always stunned and disappointed at how easy it is to game the American political system" Isn't that the point of a political system without hegemon? And open political system is not one that is fair to all. It is a system that is open to gaming by all. A democracy and a "completely fair system" are completely different things. I don't think anyone has any idea how the latter would work.
- sebmellen 6y ago
  If a political system can be controlled by using power or capital to change political outcomes, without relying on the will or consent of the people, it's hard to argue that that's democratic. In that case, the hegemon is a faceless allocation of capital and dark interests as opposed to a strongman. This setup is probably better for individual freedoms than a dictatorship, but "results may vary" for anything else. I don't think a plutarchy is an open political system; a plutarchy is, by definition, closed to all without obscene amounts of capital, or access to it. The Wikipedia article on plutocracy is an interesting read on that [0]. There is a gray line, like Prop 22 in CA, where Uber, Lyft, et al. convinced voters to vote yes on Prop 22 by spending over $220 million on ads and campaigning [1]. Does this constitute a plutarchy? I would say no, because the voters were still the ones who chose the outcome! That's a big difference from a backdoor deal with a politician or inviting a them to a $43,000 "lunch" which will change their mind on your issue. However, it does highlight another issue — that of political advertising — but that's something for another time. The main issue here is that the US did not adequately plan for mitigating the influence of money in politics. The NY Times ran an article highlighting the shock and horror with which the British see the American political system [2]: > Justin Fisher, a professor of political science at Brunel University London, said the American system was seen in Britain “as the worst of all worlds,” focused on “raising money and not about getting ideas across.” Living in Switzerland, I came to the conclusion that their political setup is demonstrably better than that of the US (though also, arguably, more workable because of Switzerland's small size). In Switzerland, it would be nearly impossible for a lobbyist to pay a Swiss politician to make an important policy change and get away with it. And in most other Western European countries it would be a scandal/make big news if a politician got €50k to change their mind on something. In the US, that happens every day. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutocracy#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutocracy#United_States [1]: https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Here-s-what-you-re-paying-for-Prop-22-15870617.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Here-s-what-you... [2]: https://www.nytimes.com./2015/05/05/world/europe/britains-campaign-finance-laws-leave-parties-with-idle-money.html https://www.nytimes.com./2015/05/05/world/europe/britains-ca...
BLKNSLVR 6y ago
Advertising is an attack on human psychology. Children need to be educated to reason beyond the surface to protect themselves from the ubiquity of modern-day advertising.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  Advertising is a cancer on modern society. Not only it messes the psyche of individuals, it also ties businesses in wasteful arms races. We need more than education, the industry needs to be reined in with a regulatory hammer.
  - HotVector 6y ago
    Hypnotism is banned in UK television. Advertisment is not that far off from hypnotism, and needs to face similar consequences. Promote your product all you want, but don't exploit human pyscology to manipulate people into doing what you want.
- shrimp_emoji 6y ago
  On the Internet, it's a literal attack on your machine (slows the page down, incurs extra bandwidth, and can inject malware). :D TV commercials back in tha day didn't have any of that, although nowadays they can play ultrasonic sounds that apps on your phone listen for to facilitate analytic tracking.[0] 0: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/11/beware-of-ads-that-use-inaudible-sound-to-link-your-phone-tv-tablet-and-pc/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/11/beware-of-ads-th...
- tweetle_beetle 6y ago
  That may be, but my understanding of the comment you are replying to is that it is non-advertising techniques which are distasteful. > manufacturing “3rd-party grass roots” support ...is effectively trying to achieve advertising goals outside advertising channels using deception - astroturfing, etc.

macjohnmcc 6y ago

And it is relatively inexpensive.

sebmellen 6y ago
And a good investment. For example, an 86,000% return on $43,000 in campaign donations: https://truthout.org/articles/you-too-can-buy-a-congressman/ https://truthout.org/articles/you-too-can-buy-a-congressman/.
- csharpminor 6y ago
  One of the major points I took away from Lessig’s Republic, Lost is that these campaign donations trackers are unable to factor in the credible threat of a donor funding an opponent. The dollar amount may be relatively low, but the value to an incumbent politician is that wealthy stakeholders will not fund a challenger.
  - sebmellen 6y ago
    That's a very interesting game-theoretic view of the issue. I've got to read that book, thank you for the recommendation.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > One of the major points I took away from Lessig’s Republic, Lost is that these campaign donations trackers are unable to factor in the credible threat of a donor funding an opponent. They also aren't able to factor in independent expenditures (especially direct independent expenditures), or facilitation of donations (bundling) as opposed to direct donation, as well as the credible threat of doing those things, as well as direct donation, in the opposite direction.
ultimoo 6y ago
I was taken aback by this the most when I saw some lobbying dollar amounts earlier this year — I don’t recollect the specifics but most are probably rounding errors for multi-billion dollar Fortune 500 companies, let alone trillion dollar tech juggernauts.
- rayiner 6y ago
  Shouldn’t that tell you something? What kind of high return market attracts so little investment?
  - ultimoo 6y ago
    Sorry I don't understand what you're implying -- can you expand on this?
- ip26 6y ago
  Sometimes it's just depressing to be sold out so... cheaply.
  - 93po 6y ago
    They're selling out because companies threaten to give your opponent millions. Take the $50k and do what they want or you'll be out of a job permanently next election
wolfram74 6y ago
This[0] was an interesting read back '19 comparing total political spending with the size of the almond industry. It's a weird comparison. [0]https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in-almonds/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in...
juskrey 6y ago
It's easy to buy central government.
- qwantim1 6y ago
  Easy is not the word I’d use. Lucrative maybe. Not easy.
  - girvo 6y ago
    Although it's cheaper than you'd expect. > Well, according to www.opensecrets.org, oil, gas and coal companies donated at least $43,000 to Zincke’s campaign. That’s more than 10 percent of Ryan Zincke’s total contributions from Political Action Committees. https://truthout.org/articles/you-too-can-buy-a-congressman/ https://truthout.org/articles/you-too-can-buy-a-congressman/ I've seen other articles which back this up for other lobbying too: tens of thousands, not millions!
    - bobthepanda 6y ago
      It's interesting to compare this to, say, the UK, where political spending is capped at £30,000 per seat, presumably to stop elections from being pissing contests to see which companies can spend more on effective lobbying. https://www.bbc.com/news/election-2019-50170067 https://www.bbc.com/news/election-2019-50170067
    - rayiner 6y ago
      I don’t understand. You think a pro-coal industry position is, what, unpopular with voters in Montana? Your interpretation of the facts seems to be based on the preconception that voters in Montana have an antagonistic relationship toward the coal industry in the state. Such that there would be a conflict and companies would have to lobby the elected representative to do something they want at the expense of what is constituents want. That’s not what’s happening. Montana voters know where the jobs come from. And in fact, polls show higher trust in corporations than the government: https://www.wsj.com/articles/more-trust-in-business-than-in-government-and-media-survey-finds-11610533801 https://www.wsj.com/articles/more-trust-in-business-than-in-... Read Gallup’s polling on the issue. Americans are incredibly suspicious of government and government regulation: https://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Production/Cms/POLL/fvpmserw7uegpcwbidbvdw.png https://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Pro.... Just 23% of people say there’s “too little” regulation of business. 45% say too much. Now think about the $43,000 in lobbying, except assuming that voters in Montana want what’s best for the coal companies in their state. In that view, it makes more sense to understand that lobbying not as changing the vote, but coal companies communicating what they want to a politician that knows that his voters support giving coal companies what they want.

rayiner 6y ago

> I'm always stunned and disappointed at how easy it is to game the American political system. It’s easy to be a cynic, but you still need to match your beliefs up against reality. This particular belief really shouldn’t have survived the Trump era. Trump won in 2016 and almost won in 2020 despite Clinton and Biden having a huge financial edge from donors in the biggest industries (Wall Street, media, tech, etc.) See: https://mobile.twitter.com/annalecta/status/1323370439306055683 https://mobile.twitter.com/annalecta/status/1323370439306055.... See: https://www.npr.org/2020/10/26/927453369/outspent-in-the-homestretch-trump-campaign-says-its-ground-game-is-stronger https://www.npr.org/2020/10/26/927453369/outspent-in-the-hom... Bloomberg spent $100 million in Florida alone only to have Trump win it by a bigger margin than in 2016. See also: https://www.cnbc.com/2016/11/09/trump-spent-about-half-of-what-clinton-did-on-his-way-to-the-presidency.html https://www.cnbc.com/2016/11/09/trump-spent-about-half-of-wh... (“Trump spent about half of what Clinton did on his way to the presidency.”). In the 2018-2020 timeframe, gun control supporters vastly outspent gun control opponents. They failed. Supporters of Prop 209 in California vastly outspent the opposition. They failed by a huge margin. It’s actually hard to “game” the American political system. What companies like Intuit do is spend money to expose existing fault lines. Republicans are up and down the line opposed to easy tax filing because they think it’ll make it easier for government to raise taxes if people have to manually do their taxes every year. Intuit didn’t create this political fault line. It’s pre-existing. It’s based on ideology. The money is to connect Intuit’s issue (tax filing software) to this existing political fault line.

User23 6y ago
> It’s actually hard to “game” the American political system. Time magazine disagrees with you[1]. [1] https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/ https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/
- rayiner 6y ago
  The Time story supports my point. Trump was a historically unpopular President who had basically stopped governing during COVID. And as the Time article points out, Biden had everyone from Wall Street to the media to Big Tech in the bag for him. Biden vastly outspent Trump in October. Bloomberg dumped $100 million into Florida. Yet Biden won by just 80,000 votes in Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada, with Trump getting the second most votes in history, higher than Obama. Maybe the full backing of Wall Street, Tech, and the media combined pushed Biden over the finish line. But it was at best a nudge. And how modest that effect was should be good for thought for skeptics.

mssundaram 6y ago

Imagine what goes on that we don't even know about

fsloth 6y ago

"I'm always stunned and disappointed at how easy it is to game the American political system" Isn't that the point of a political system without hegemon? And open political system is not one that is fair to all. It is a system that is open to gaming by all. A democracy and a "completely fair system" are completely different things. I don't think anyone has any idea how the latter would work.

sebmellen 6y ago
If a political system can be controlled by using power or capital to change political outcomes, without relying on the will or consent of the people, it's hard to argue that that's democratic. In that case, the hegemon is a faceless allocation of capital and dark interests as opposed to a strongman. This setup is probably better for individual freedoms than a dictatorship, but "results may vary" for anything else. I don't think a plutarchy is an open political system; a plutarchy is, by definition, closed to all without obscene amounts of capital, or access to it. The Wikipedia article on plutocracy is an interesting read on that [0]. There is a gray line, like Prop 22 in CA, where Uber, Lyft, et al. convinced voters to vote yes on Prop 22 by spending over $220 million on ads and campaigning [1]. Does this constitute a plutarchy? I would say no, because the voters were still the ones who chose the outcome! That's a big difference from a backdoor deal with a politician or inviting a them to a $43,000 "lunch" which will change their mind on your issue. However, it does highlight another issue — that of political advertising — but that's something for another time. The main issue here is that the US did not adequately plan for mitigating the influence of money in politics. The NY Times ran an article highlighting the shock and horror with which the British see the American political system [2]: > Justin Fisher, a professor of political science at Brunel University London, said the American system was seen in Britain “as the worst of all worlds,” focused on “raising money and not about getting ideas across.” Living in Switzerland, I came to the conclusion that their political setup is demonstrably better than that of the US (though also, arguably, more workable because of Switzerland's small size). In Switzerland, it would be nearly impossible for a lobbyist to pay a Swiss politician to make an important policy change and get away with it. And in most other Western European countries it would be a scandal/make big news if a politician got €50k to change their mind on something. In the US, that happens every day. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutocracy#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutocracy#United_States [1]: https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Here-s-what-you-re-paying-for-Prop-22-15870617.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Here-s-what-you... [2]: https://www.nytimes.com./2015/05/05/world/europe/britains-campaign-finance-laws-leave-parties-with-idle-money.html https://www.nytimes.com./2015/05/05/world/europe/britains-ca...

BLKNSLVR 6y ago

Advertising is an attack on human psychology. Children need to be educated to reason beyond the surface to protect themselves from the ubiquity of modern-day advertising.

TeMPOraL 6y ago
Advertising is a cancer on modern society. Not only it messes the psyche of individuals, it also ties businesses in wasteful arms races. We need more than education, the industry needs to be reined in with a regulatory hammer.
- HotVector 6y ago
  Hypnotism is banned in UK television. Advertisment is not that far off from hypnotism, and needs to face similar consequences. Promote your product all you want, but don't exploit human pyscology to manipulate people into doing what you want.
shrimp_emoji 6y ago
On the Internet, it's a literal attack on your machine (slows the page down, incurs extra bandwidth, and can inject malware). :D TV commercials back in tha day didn't have any of that, although nowadays they can play ultrasonic sounds that apps on your phone listen for to facilitate analytic tracking.[0] 0: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/11/beware-of-ads-that-use-inaudible-sound-to-link-your-phone-tv-tablet-and-pc/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/11/beware-of-ads-th...
tweetle_beetle 6y ago
That may be, but my understanding of the comment you are replying to is that it is non-advertising techniques which are distasteful. > manufacturing “3rd-party grass roots” support ...is effectively trying to achieve advertising goals outside advertising channels using deception - astroturfing, etc.