Areulder I think that's fair.
Charitable lobbying is an interesting one. You could say that people don't give money to charity in order for it to be spent on politics and this might be the thinking behind the US rule. On the other hand, it seems to me that homelessness charities should be able to seek to influence housing policy, mental health charities mental health policy and so forth. We should be able to try to fix the causes of some of the problems as well as just putting sticking plasters on the symptoms. As the old quote goes: "When I give food to the poor they call me a saint, but when I ask why the poor have no food they call me a communist." In Scotland the government holds consultations of "stakeholders" which it proactively seeks out - including companies, charities and other non-profit groups. In 2014 the regulator published guidelines on the extent to which charities should speak about the independence referendum, but these were generally thought to be less than illuminating. There's also the strange phenomenon of sock puppetry, whereby publicly funded organisations exist primarily to lobby the government.
As another example of circumventing the rules, I'm a director of a company that is a subsidiary of a housing association (provider of affordable rented housing, not sure what the US equivalent is). The association applied for charitable status because of the benefits that confers, but it does some things the rules say aren't charitable. These are now done by the subsidiary, a non-charitable company with 1 share, which belongs to the association. Mainly the company rents out houses that are a bit too upmarket to be officially classed as affordable (though still much more affordable and secure than a private tenancy). The association gave us the houses as a gift and manages them for us in exchange for a fee that is, by a staggering coincidence, the same as the rent the tenant pays. In one sense I think this stinks because it's blatantly loopholing the rules, in another sense I'm not concerned because we're hardly Nestle or Enron. We might expand into composting and small scale renewable energy. We're still the good guys.
A slightly more troubling example from the US would be the fact that the national advisory bodies on diabetes, heart disease and so forth are reliant on donations from food producers and their umbrella groups, leading to their dietary advice being distinctly non-radical.
The point is that whatever the rules are, organisations will find workarounds. I agree that the best solution is to specify very little and fall back on the intention of preventing undue corporate influence. I'm aware that in the GA we're mainly writing for US players with US expectations. To me it seems self-evident that corporate influence on politics is prima facie bad, but to what extent do you think other people will need to be persuaded of that? Am I likely to run into the view that lobbying will be most effective when governed by the free market or anything like that? Non parlo Americano.
