The Angry Arab links to a stupid piece by some Washington Post blogger which claims to expose Which foreign countries spent the most to influence U.S. politics? The presented result in the piece, also picked by the Angry Arab, is this:
Top 10 foreign governments paying for influence in 2013
1. UAE 14.2 million
2. Germany $12 million
3. Canada $11.2 million
4. Saudi Arabia $11.1 million
5. Mexico $6.1 million
6. Morocco $4 million
7. South Korea $3.9 million
8. Republika Srpska (Bosnian Serb Republic) $2.4 million
9. Georgia $2.3 million
10. Azerbaijan $2.3 millionSource: Sunlight Foundation
The Sunlight Foundation database is filled with numbers from “foreign entities or their paid representatives reported to the Department of Justice for 2013.” Unlike the Washington Post it does not say that the payments are from “foreign governments” or “foreign countries”. An “entity” is not a “government”. The Washington Post author has sucked that from her toes.
As a German I found the list weird. The lobbying for Germany in the U.S. is done as it should be done by the German embassy and the consulates in various cities. Why would Germany spend additional money on some “hired PR”? The WaPo says:
Germany lobbied Congress on overseas military bases, presumably since several U.S. installations there are scheduled to be closed.
A two minute look at the database itself reveals that the list itself as well as the WaPo blogger are stupid. The database includes numbers of federal states and of partly government owned companies (foreign entities) that lobby for their business in the United States.
For Germany it lists a total of $12,008,299.34 but if one clicks down into the list one finds that the entities listed in total somehow up more than the $12 million:
- German State of Rheinland-Pfalz – $149,956.00
- Association of German Chambers of Industry and Commerce – $1,108,011.08
- Bavarian Ministry for Economic Affairs, Infrastructure, Transport and Technology – $1,474,329.90
- Deutsche Telekom AG – $11,858,343.34
- several others with no or little payments
There is simply no federal German government in there. There is the local state government of Bavaria lobbying for U.S. businesses to open new facilities in Bavaria. There is the state government of Rheinland-Pfalz which is the only entity that is spending a bit of money because of issues with U.S. military bases there. And there is Deutsche Telekom which spends about all the $12 million that the Sunlight Foundation categorizes for Germany and that pushes the country into the second place of the Top-10 list.
Indeed the sum the Sunlight Foundation presents on the mainpage for “Germany” is simply the sum of the Deutsche Telekom number plus the State of Rheinland-Pfalz number. The State of Bavaria and the industry lobby Chamber of Commerce are for mysterious reason listed in the details but not in the total.
Now the Germany federal government does own some 15% of the Deutsche Telekom shares and controls another 17% through a government owned bank. The privatization of the former national carrier is not yet complete. But Deutsche Telekom is hardly lobbying for Germany as a national entity. It is certainly not lobbying for U.S military bases in Germany. It is the holding company of T-Mobile U.S. which has some $25 billion revenue in the United States and Deutsche Telekom does of course quite a lot of lobbying to further its business interests and thereby that of all of its shareholders.
Given those numbers the Top-10 list of the Sunlight Foundation makes no sense. Germany is not paying for lobbyists in the United States. Not at all. Two of sixteen German states are paying but mostly for pure economic reasons. The inclusion of the Deutsche Telekom lobby payments makes no sense at all.
The Washington Post explainer for Germany being in the Top-10 list is “Germany lobbied Congress on overseas military bases”. But that false claim is based on only $150,000 by one local German state government out of a total of $14.5 million mostly commercial stuff by commercial entities listed in the details. How is such wrong reasoning helping the reader? How is writing such compatible with even basic journalistic skills?
The Washington Post piece based on a somewhat irrational database by the Sunlight Foundation is not news but very stupid uneducated entertainment for and by people who do not have the brains or common sense to understand the world they are living in. It is another step the Washington Post and its writers take down on the ladder towards irrelevancy.