In the second quarter of 2015, Google spent a whopping $4.62 million on lobbying efforts. That's just slightly less than the $5.47 million they spent in the first quarter, but it still makes the search giant the third largest corporate lobbyist. Facebook increased its spend from $2.44 million to $2.69 million in the second quarter, while Amazon's budget grew from $1.91 million to $2.15 million. Meanwhile, Apple spent just $1.23 million of its huge mountain of cash.
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Immigration issues also topped the list as the companies lobbied the government to create more pathways for high-skilled foreign workers. It's a topic about which Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been particularly outspoken, going so far as to launch an advocacy group called Fwd.us back in 2013 with the explicit mission of fixing the immigration system.
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The companies also prioritized taxation and trade policies. Facebook lobbied for the extension of the R&D tax credit. Amazon lobbyists, meanwhile, pursued the issue of the Remote Transactions Parity Act of 2015, an internet sales tax Amazon has endorsed that would require online stores to pay taxes in each state in which they sell goods.
Sigh. None of them lobbied for Robanukah.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Mike on Friday July 24 2015, @04:06PM
It's simple: Tech corps want people to do the same job for less. They can't find that here so they want the law changed so they can import people who will work for less from elsewhere. They don't want to pay a living wage. Why do we keep buying their backdoored garbage anyway?
In all fairness to the tech companies (not that they deserve any), their wages are generally 'living' wages. Fair or equitable they are not. I would have a lot more sympathy for them if they were trying to solve the fictional 'shortage of worker' problem in a more constructive manner, say through offering higher (i.e. competitive, you know capitalist and all that) wages and lobbying to support affordable and better education throughout the country. I think their import-low-wage-worker strategy makes sense for their short term bottom line. But for the rest of us and our elected representitives, it really should only garner disrespect and ridicule for the obvious sham that it is.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 24 2015, @09:39PM
Google Employees Have Been Sharing A Doc With Their Salary Info [refinery29.com]
N.B. Many sites split their tiny articles on this across multiple pages.
A pox on the lot of them.
-- gewg_