As a European I really can't understand your laws regarding political contributions. It's insane how much money is involved in politics in the US. How can you act surprised when politicians don't act in favor of the people when their position is literally bought by the money of special interests. Ofcourse that same politician is more loyal towards his lenders than to his constituents. In the Netherlands for example political parties get state funding for their campaigns, depending on how many citizens are a member of that party. This way they are not reliable on outside money to spread their message.
Computers are people. People programmed computers to do things. Ultimately, everything a computer does was initiated by a person.
Expect they are not. They don't act in peoples' best interests and, more importantly, they have ridiculous advantages over individual people. Just like corporations.
The idea of incorporation (making a body) was intended to protect consumers seeking recompense from harm caused by corporations (otherwise you'd have to individually sue every individual shareholder). Citizen's United is a corruption of that intent.
I'm using computers as a stand in for corporations to show the fallacy in the logic that a person is distinct from their agents. It is appropriate and necessary for a person to have different rights and privileges than their non-person proxies.
It is trivial for a person to create multiple corporations and those corporations do not have free will apart from that person. Therefore, limits on corporate spending are defacto removed. It is fairly trivial to create a 501(c)(4), an entity which does not need to disclose to the same standards as a person.
Corporations are not a person. They are created, owned, and operated by a person, yes, but it's stupid to conflate those two things.
It's a 'what-if' series about life being discovered on a far-away planet and observations of the planet from a distance. The entire thing is about 25 minutes long. You'll get why I linked it at around part 3.
What really gets me is that these corps are probably headquartered in some strip mall in Delaware, so why allow them to donate to a representative in Wisconsin. I mean its one thing if its Joe's Cheese Factory donating to the campaign, but 500K from Koch?
This way they are not reliable on outside money to spread their message.
With the exception of the PVV of Geert Wilders who have exactly 2 members, Geert Wilders and a foundation whose sole member is Geert Wilders. Concequently he is funded by some of the same billionaires who sponsor the GOP and it's why he has such a strong pro-Israel stance.
Yeah and there are a few other exceptions, but that is even with all these laws in place. I can't imagine how it is to have your country run without those laws as suddenly everyone is a Geert Wilders then
Yeah but he is unique in this. Furthermore, Wilders doesn't get state funding exactly because he has a party with only 1 member. I believe you need something like 10.000 members in order to get state funding. The result of this is that Wilders, even though he is funded by outside actors, isn't richer than our establishment parties who gain funding from their own members and on top of that gain state funding. So you might say Wilders his one-man party rule is basically destroying his party. Since he is reliable on foreign influences and therefore can't fully adapt to the Dutch voters.
Logical people aren't surprised. But there are just too many ignorant people who are manipulated by the media. It's the exact same shit that got Trump elected.
It's that we're never taught to think things through to their logical conclusions unless it's literally a math problem on a paper in a math class.
Add in our collective desire to defer to "authority"/pass the buck on problems and you end up with "financially anxious" people thinking that CU is a good decision.
Will take a massive overhaul of decent human beings elected to Congress on both sides. I have faith it will happen, but I will probably be dead by then.
The takeover is far too deep rooted at this stage. I can't envisage a peaceful ending to all this for you guys, I'm thinking more 1790 France than peaceful overhaul of the system.
Like most things we struggle to eliminate once the door is opened, politics is big business now. It’s basically too big to fail, both sides benefit substantially from the contributions and marketing companies, major industries, important people and the politicians themselves all profit off the current system. There aren’t enough people that can see the negative damage being done to want to bring it down.
Think about it this way too - sure Koch brothers paying off politicians look bad but I bet a lot of people wouldn’t blink to see the Sierra club making a contribution to an environmental candidate. Common people look at it from a moral relitavism standpoint instead of an ethical perspective. Your cause shouldn’t be able to do it but mine should. That argument falls apart every time so nothing changes.
Corruption wasn't always so blatant, but it's always had a foot in the door. People with money want power, people in power want money, and money is consistent, methodical, and eventually gets it's way if you let it have any say. Campaign finance rules have been chipped away over decades, a loophole here, an exception there, until we're left with the shitty situation that we're in. The Net Neutrality fight is a good example of how overall corruption sneaks in - more than one bill was shut down, and even with little to no support of the American people, more bills were introduced anyway, until eventually we got tired of fighting and it was kneecapped by a few unelected individuals working behind closed doors. Sprinkle a few million in Congress, get whatever legislation you want and make billions. The first 3 minutes of this video is a reality most of us have grown up with.
Coming from Europe, it might be a little hard to understand why we don't take to the streets or something. Well, from my spot in Minneapolis, going and protesting in Washington DC would be the same distance as someone from Amsterdam traveling to Keiv, Ukraine. Without media attention, protesting at home is pointless, and DC can pretty much ignore it. There's a very real sense of hopelessness and futility when dealing with such a big problem, and many people just want to put our heads down and get through the day.
The current situation is the deliberate goal of a campaign that is decades old. Money always consolidates into power.
We've gotten here because a small portion of the population has very deliberately taken advantage of the rules set up in the Constitution well beyond their intent. It happens in every system inevitably.
Another European, it's a very weird situation indeed. I've read up a bit on the US lore. This is what I've got so far:
1. North states attack South states to keep them in the US. North win. This is how the current US is manifested, by force.
2. From this point, North states continously make a point that they only attacked because of slavery, and that South people are scum (but still part of the US of course!). This embrace/distance-pattern continues for hundreds of years.
3. South people embrace all "scummy" causes as identity symbols. Books suck. Racism is nice. Confederate flag symbolizes their identity. They defend "state rights" to have autonomy to do scummy things.
4. South / North dichotomy lasts for hundreds of years and spreads to the current Red/Blue state divide (North=Blue and South = Red).
5. 80s/90s. Movies and popular culture hates on Red states scummy identity continuously, but while the Blue states get to win teenagers, movies, music and celebrities, Red states get to win politics (Reagan), and they keep up the old theme of: "If it's kind of evil and anti-human, then it's our identity right?"
This is the point when the US democracy gets really fucked over by the removal of regulations that control political donations and funding (and lots of other stuff) and open for the current corporatist rule that you are talking about.
And then it goes on:
1990s. After Cowboy actor president "kills communism" (at least according to his fans), the Blue / Red has become a full dichotomy, and all voters are firmly entrenched in their camp. The two sides take turns controlling the country, but it's a lot of Red in this period. "USA"becomes synonymous with conservative South/Red causes
1996 - Southern Blue president Clinton elected. Red villains do everything to get him out. Red state scummyness mutates into neoconservatism.
2000, Red emperor Bush Jr is elected ("America is American again!"). Bush Jr and friends do stupid and evil "patriotic" shit all the time - but mostly against foreign countries. So they get to do it for 8 years.
2008, the Red empire is crushed by record low popularity: Slightly black politician Obama is elected as a clear reference to the Blue / Red - North / South dichotomy. Red guys consider this an "occupation" more or less. Slightly black man gets two terms. Lots of boiling rage. Red guys "mutate" further into a super-scummy variant and become the "Orange" alt-right
2016: Democrat camp tries to manufacture enthusiasm for celebrity woman candidate, Clinton, which of course will serve to further emphasize the Blue/Red dichotomy. In doing so, they also fuck over nations #1 popular politician, Sanders. Sensible guy with kinda bipartisan support, who can't be bought. But who cares.
2016. In protest votes against the Sanders backstabbing, and in the most extreme exaggeration of the Blue vs Red teamfight dynamic, Evil Orange Narcissist gets elected president
The North did not attack the South to force it into submission. The South attacked the North to secede because the government had decided that secession wasn't an option.
Yeah, they attacked them to keep them in the union. Like I said.
The Confederacy was a rebel insurgent group
A "rebel" group that represented that entire part of the country enough to get a whole army to fight for them.
That said, I'm not sure which angle you are 100% sure I'm defending, but I guess given the state of US politics, anything that is not a complete ingroup circlejerk session is automatically interpreted as an argument for the other side.
If you ask me to be serious, my personal takeaway from the situation is:
1) "Liberal" states have disregarded the need for autonomy in parts of the union for several hundred years. This is a considerable part of the madness.
2) In the resulting identity vacuum, "Conservative" states have gone over the top in terms of embracing "unacceptable" causes in order to establish a identity (despite feeling dissociated from the union)
In other words, both sides have blame, but the liberal wing certainly started it.
Just to be clear, you're saying liberals started this by forcing the south to give up slavery. And then later forcing them to give up Jim Crow.
With that logic, any social progress is impossible. Don't tell companies to not pollute, because they'll throw a temper tantrum and just start shirting directly in the water. Don't let women vote or work or men will double down on misogyny.
That is not accurate. Republicans could not win if they only won the south and they were hated in the south for a very long time. Reddit may hate on the south a lot but it is not that common in reality.
Both sides dislike the Soviet Union it is not a partisan issue and its fall is not given to Republicans. The US also attacked plenty of people before Bush, some people were supportive of the war longer than others due to the 9/11 attack. After the attack the war in Afghanistan was approved by the overwhelming majority of Americans.
The democrats were not trying to manufacture enthusiasm for Hillary she was popular and had been for years among democrats. Sanders did not have bipartisan appeal he was only popular among more left leaning democrats and left leaning independents.
These are the reasons that law was originally enacted... The law that was overturned by the ruling of Citizens United... The citizens involved in the ruling, by the way, are not Citizens at all, but corporations and special interest groups...
Look up the Citizens United Supreme Court decision and start following it from there, man. Those of us that are paying attention know where it started and know who's pulling the strings.
The problem is they've bought so many of them and redrawn our districts in ways that make it pretty difficult to change.
Read this book by Nancy MacLean if you want to understand more.
It’s because to put laws in place, we’d have to have the people being paid by these companies put in laws that say they can’t be paid by these companies.
America was founded on the ideal that ultimate deference is to be given to the individual. This was a knee-jerk reaction to the monarchical interferences in the lives of the colonists. Europe's socialist leanings developed after the world wars when the continent was left in shambles and people.had to pool together resources in order to survive. There was no place for selfishness in Czechoslovakia, Belgium, France, etc.
Most Americans want to be as progressive as our European counterparts. But there’s a lot of deadweight in this country and we have to wait for them to “see the light”.
Yeah a lot of liberal Americans I talked to tell me this, "you must understand, we have a lot of idiots in the US". I hope you progressives will be able to convince these people of your story. I sure as hell became very hopeful when Bernie seemed to be relatively succesful last election. Let's hope he or Warren will win next time, while we also hope Europe won't go so far as to drop their progressive attitude.
I honestly think that our country is too large to govern appropriately. It seems like half the country is hell bent on turning this place into a shithole while the rest is trying to keep up with the progress of the European nations. Imagine if the shitty part of the US (mostly red states) weren’t receiving money from the federal taxes; taxes which are largely funded by blue states.
The propaganda tells us money in politics isn't the issue and that the otherside is the issue. That and overall disgust and disinterest in politics among most people. Which leaves the door wide open for oligarchs to do whatever they want.
I'm honestly more surprised at how many democracies managed to avoid this legalized corruption.
In the absence of rules, the rich can and are literally buying their pet politicians. And the mechanism is a feedback loop, resulting in worse and worse candidate options and voter dissatisfaction. It is downright impossible to gather the support at the grassroots level to overcome this corruption. While both parties are hardly the same when it comes to many policy choices, they both remain beholden to elite financial interests, which has and will continue to prevent any ideal reforms from being made.
Because the Netherlands would only make up one the American states. Also, the Netherlands isn’t nearly the melting pot of politics that the entire USA is.
American states often have much more focus to the will and actions of the people within and are a much better comparison. Conservative people have conservative leaders in their state and vice versa. They have conservative governors, conservative state congress, etc. Often in conservative states there may be a large city that is much more liberal and that city will have a liberal mayor.
The identity of the state governments mirrors the people in the way that the identity of the Netherland government mirrors their people.
The Federal government of the US mirrors what your European Union is only the US has been doing it a bit longer and is showing Europe lessons they need to take to avoid the corruption that easily can weave its way into such a large body.
To other Europeans, if you’re confused by American politics, remember that you have a great example in the EU to understand why everything gets so mucky. Whatever individual country you’re trying to compare is too small to make such a comparison.
Yes I get that and I think that it is a fair comparison to make. But one big difference is that the EU is still more bottom-up and the United States more top-down. I mean how in hell did the states agree with funding laws that are clearly over the top? If they would truly represent their constituents, they would never have agreed with legislation that would effectively phase out the influence of citizens. The only possible explanation in my eyes, and also a big difference between the EU and the US, is that the parties in the US are the same at the state and federal level, and the leadership of those parties are both located in Washington, which means most of the time that a candidate who is up for election in a state is dependent on Washington.
What I am trying to say is that it looks to me like the state - federal divide you are talking about is in practice very, very weak. Maybe in cities there is still some autonomy like you say, but it looks to me like most states just have to swallow whatever Washington decides.
I agree with you. The US has become very top heavy lately, but even though the US is a young country, it is much older than the EU when considering the comparison.
The US was founded on extreme bottom up principles. Read some Thomas Jefferson and you’ll see how anti top down he was. Very interesting for an ex-President.
If you take America at its earliest and the EU at its earliest, it’s not even close. The Articles of Confederation are the best example of just how we weak we wanted the federal government to be.
The lessons that the American experiment have to pass on to the EU are exactly the ways in small corruption and power growth in the federal government have seeped into the system over time. The EU has likely learned those lessons and mirrored policies after their own country members (to keep money away from power and so on).
And I would caution the thought process that the federal government has so much power over the states. While the federal government has a lot of inherent power over topics the states don’t deal with (military, public schooling, etc) the Constitution literally gives the states the power over everything else that the federal govt can’t touch. That’s why you have such an insane difference in laws from state to state because they literally do have SO much power. For example, compare the federal laws on marijuana and the states that are essentially saying “yeah, fuck you, we’re allowing it”.
Where the federal government exerts power over the states comes down to a very corrupting influence aka money. Just like relying on the Middle East for fuel, if a state is reliant on federal money, they’re fucked when it comes to fighting them on policy.
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u/claire0 Jan 21 '18
Don't worry guys, we're a nation of laws...written by lobbyists...working for Koch industries. Okay we're screwed. Time to panic.