He's a reliable mercenary for the people who pay him. He used his position as FCC commissioner to further cable industry goals. Now the wireless industry is paying him and he's lobbying for their goals.
Lobbyists don't have to lobby for the same positions / organizations / goals their entire lives. They usually follow the money.
>Lobbyists don't have to lobby for the same positions / organizations / goals their entire lives. They usually follow the money.
I think the parent comment is trying to dispell the not entirely unpopular perception that the revolving door involves some sort of quid quo pro. The typical telling is that while working in government they'll enact policies that are favorable to some company, with the understanding that the company will give him a cushy job as a "lobbyist" in exchange.
Which will happen, unless the group paying him accomplished their major goals, can accomplish them some other way, or someone else pays him more to do something else.
See my other comment. If "public service" involves taking a job with mediocre pay, poor job security, and being barred from the field for 5 years, you'll only end up with rich partisan hacks and ideologues taking the post. All the competent people would be working at companies.
So in your world model, whoever Ajit Pai sides with is the worst group?
Or is it just the group that's willing to pay the most (and I guess Ajit Pai is the most expensive lobbyist)?
Because the article quotes from groups like Spectrum for the Future, which is an industry group funded by cable companies like Comcast, which are the former bad guys.
I just want to understand a coherent world model in which you can confidently draw an opinion on a complex subject base on the actions of one guy that was in the news 10 years ago.
>So in your world model, whoever Ajit Pai sides with is the worst group?
There was no value judgment made in the previous comment
about which group is worst. The word 'mercenary' is pretty self explanatory here. It's a bit contrived and tedious to view any discussion of the news as an opportunity to invent each speakers' worldview in your head, before they even speak about it, eh?
If you are paying huge sums of money to effectively bribe the government to do what you want, you are the bad guy
Edit:
If you think politics is entirely about budgets and taxes and not human rights or a fundamental respect for democratic governance, then yes, they're close - in that sense, there's barely any difference between the Government of the UK and that of Hungary's Victor Orban, since they both provide universal healthcare to their people. However, there's obviously major differences between these governments that go well beyond the myopic lens of stated party policy positions.
Lobbyists don't have to lobby for the same positions / organizations / goals their entire lives. They usually follow the money.