Any popular election will be bought from now on thanks to SCOTUS and their Citizens United v. FEC decision. Corporations and organizations are not people yet we give them the rights guaranteed to people and then treat them better than people. A revolution is coming but I have no idea when.

Money begets power begets money.

 

LOL right. You do realize what the C.U. case was all about right? Some want the gov to be able to control the discourse by controlling the finance, not to mention one side absolutely dominates in media, entertainment and academia as it is. (You want real campaign finance reform, cut off all aid including 529 scams to all colleges/incubators but I digress). And for what? 30 second ads mostly. So either you're worried that you will have your mind changed over 30 second ads, or you're worried all the other people's minds will be changed over 30 second ads. So we need gov to protect us by controlling the message. What could possibly go wrong.

 

You may want to do a little research on the actual decision. A large part of it involved not restricting free speech among organizations/associations, and that giving money to a campaign in democracy was a part of free speech. (This is where the whole "organizations are people too" thing came from). Sounds okay, but the problem is YOUR donations given to a candidate can't touch what a corporation like a large pharmaceutical company, or say, a large bank, can give. Money in politics = power over politians. That's why you have candidates with voting records in favor of shutting down congressional investigations into shady opiod distribution and over-eager lending. Follow the money. The only thing worse than the "swampy" money in politics is when someone appoints former leaders of said swampy companies for cabinet postions. But the people who fell for the "drain the swamp" BS stopped paying attention after election night.

 

The swamp more refers to the deeply ingrained Washington elite who run roughshod over the country through regulations and washing as much tax money through the bureaucracy in dc. Supposedly like a 1/3 of the traditional highly compensated executive branch appts have never been made yet the US survived.

What we need is strict term limits at every office to help deinfluence the lobbyist power to get people re-elected over and over and then a periodic top down justification of every position in govt wouldn’t hurt either. Business reevaluate positions all the time but govt NEVER gets smaller just finds ways to justify more people despite technology improvements and increased productivity in the civilian side of the world.

 

Also since CU case corps are restricted from giving more than a certain amount of money to a specific campaign, just like individuals but they can give to pac’s Unrestricted (just like individuals) to run adds for a specific cause.
Funny thing is that most corps now seem to be leaning towards the liberal side (Nike, Gillette, Starbucks etc ) so maybe next election cycle the Dems will once again embrace (instead of complain) free speech for the corps...... oh but wait they consider corps as generally evil, so there’s that.

 

No argument there. Look up sortition...there was a Ted talk a while back on it. Democracy by random selection, not unlike jury duty. It's a pretty interesting concept.

 

C.U. continues to be a persistant low information voter bumper sticker politics talking point. There is simply no way to "get money out of politics" without massive government control of politics. Not to mention that leftist candidates, causes and issues are benefitting mightily from unlimited funding from corporations and billionaires. We're seeing it more and more in fringe populist ballot initiatives and pop culture candidates like the skateboarding billionaire man of the people in TX and the pajama boy manchurian candidate in GA, almost all with record shattering out of state money that dwarfs anything from the so called right.

While I don't like that, there is simply no way to empower the government to stop it without striking a massive blow at freedom of expression that amounts to government censorship and control of the process. We simply can't give the government the power to cencor and outlaw a film that someone wants to freely watch simply because its "election season". That's insane.

Here's a short and very easy read on C.U. but be warned, its from a super alt-right fringe conservative source called the LA Times.


https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-e...226-story.html

 

Term limits ebb and flow in and out of the political discourse and once again its a topic that's trending. While I'm not adamantly against it, I really don't see it as very much of a solution.

Even if the same interests couldn't allocate funding and lobbying to re-elect someone, it could and still would do the exact same thing to elect someone else. And does anyone think a lifer like Ted Kennedy (one of the poster children for the concept; there's many others on all sides) would simply go away politically after a term or two? Nah, they'd just recycle into some other office or role or lobbyist while someone functionally identical gets elevated to the spotlight of power that corrupts just the same.

Its a discussion we should have, and I'm not against the concept, but we need to realize that if implemented, it will change surprisingly little.

The real solution would be to actually enforce the 9th and 10th amendments and limit federal power to specifically what is enumerated. Aviation falls squarely within that realm but a great deal of things currently done do not. Until and unless people on all sides of the political spectrum realize that, it won't matter how many years the same types of people stay in their respective offices.

 

Regardless of your politics, this decision distances representatives from their constituents as money for re-election trumps the input of individuals. More money in politics raises the threshold for the ear of the representative. Eventually city council members will be beholden to the national party and its PAC collective.

 

People making a movie critical of a politician isn't "money in politics" any more than the Oscars or The View or the vast majority of major network news/papers or most college campuses are 24/7/365. Should we censor all that during "election season"? And if so, for what? To shelter the impressionable masses so as to protect their predetermined political viewpoints, few if any of which are actually changed by media content in the first place?

C.U. was absolutely the right decision because its impossible to enforce a contrary policy without horrifying powers of governmental enforced speech controls.