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- Hacker News
- > "It's part and parcel to a system that fully embraces free speech," said Tom Garrett, a vice president at the Institute for Free Speech. "All Americans have the right to express themselves and exercise their right to political speech to the fullest extent possible."
Corporations are people, my friend.
by lapcat - Citizens United is possibly the worst SCOTUS decision ever, on par with Dred Scott and Plessy v Fergeson. Abomination.
- Money is not speech, no matter what the courts say.
- Corporations are only people when it comes to rights and profits. When it comes to responsibilities they revert to being nebulous entities whose behaviors are emergent phenomena that no one can actually be held accountable for. Or, to borrow the old maxim, "Corporations aren't people until Texas executes one."
- > Corporations are people, my friend.
Then maybe we should start taxing them like people...
File the 1040 take only the standard deduction no matter your income. Revenue, not profit, is your income. Etc.
by triceratops - "Citizens United" turned "one man, one vote" into "one dollar, one vote"
It must be overturned. It was a bogus ruling.
by k310 - > It must be overturned. It was a bogus ruling.
Don't I have a right to buy a $10 yard sign? A $100 bard sign? A $1000 billboard? A $10K radio ad? A $50K book printing?
Why should I lose any of these rights because I join with others to help me afford it?
by elevation - That's a tough ask of a court where half its members (including the chief justice) were caught not only accepting lavish gifts from wealthy individuals who brought cases before the court, but where the outrage was that the gifts were merely undisclosed.by atmavatar
- Article says that there is an increase of 40% from 2024 to 2026 for political donations.
Interestingly, the NASDAQ over the same time has also grown 40%.
by einszwei - > Interestingly, the NASDAQ over the same time has also grown 40%.
There is an argument to be made that quantitative easing produces more asset-price inflation than consumer-price inflation in economies where wealth is concentrated at the top (and the new money also mostly goes there).
That could help explain why the massive QE programs after 2008 in both the US and Europe coincided with unexpectedly low consumer-price inflation but large increases in stock, bond, and property prices.
In a way, stocks and property are just consumer products for (relatively) rich people.
by dinfinity - Good point, the endless growth means comical amounts of money at the top.
It feels like they discovered in 2008 that you just never let the stock market go down. Then corporations have endless funds and excess can flow freely into politics.
They just have to convince everyone the market going up is good for the average person. The big problem is most people can't afford to invest so they don't give a shit what it does.
Fortunately they are creating a $1000 investment account for all newborns so everyone will be addicted to the market remaining green from birth.
by ericmcer - This is how democracies die.by cdrnsf
- From one perspective I am not against lobbying in general.
The idea is that legislator don't have the full context and don't know the impact of their work - so they welcome industry or matter experts. Which is quite reasonable. I would argue that the job of the legislator is to know what they are doing, but I can see it being hard for specific technical issues that really benefits from first hand experience.
I am not even particularly against the idea of donating money to make sure a particular issue is known to the public, so that the public can make an effective voting decision.
But all of this seems quite too much.
Companies have disproportionate amount of money to donate and much less synchronization issue that citizen.
by siscia - The issue is that lobbying puts the power in the hands of the one that has the most money. Yes, politicians should hear out expert opinions when discussing policy matters because nobody knows everything. However with lobbying, the only people that get a voice are the ones paying the most.
Combine that with these megacorps with infinitely deep pockets, it becomes extremely hard to hear both sides of an issue, and we end up in the opposite of the original issue, where the only context legislators get is the context paid for by monied interests.
It's blatant bribery. I come from a 3rd world country where bribery takes the form of slipping a cop or judge some cash to let you off the hook, and in my mind this is in no way different. Hell, it's maybe even worse because we pretend it isn't blatant corruption and is somehow recognized as okay!
by sensanaty - Lobbying is legalise bribery, plain and simple. You pay money to get politicians to return the favor in terms of regulations and policies that benifit you (even if they are harmful to the general public)by dpacmittal
- Yeah, I don't mind walmart making a psa about theft if that's what they want to do with their money. I very much do have a problem with them putting their thumb on the scale and donating millions to one political candidate over another.
You want to hire a lobbyist to show up and educate a senator on soybean production, more power to you, but it shouldn't come with a check.
by wing-_-nuts - Thanks John Roberts!
It’s been turtles all the way down since the Citizens United decision.
by disposition2 - > It also leaves out the $106 million-plus Google co-founder Sergey Brin has spent in California fighting a proposed wealth tax and other issues
Damn, I can't think of a better argument for wealth tax if one dude alone is willing to spend $100m to fight it. He clearly has too much.
by oefrha - The passing of Dolly Parton has really had me thinking how much good these unfathomably rich people and corporations could do. It enrages me to think of how many people $106 million could have helped.
- I’ve always wondered why candidates need so much money. I mean, this doesn’t go directly into their pockets, it’s largely used to fund ads, right?
I have a pet theory about political ads that I would love to find data to be able to confirm/deny. My theory is that those political ads don’t actually convince anyone about who to vote for, and aren’t intended to. Instead, it’s about convincing the people who already support you and your party to show up and vote. If that’s true, then the root cause of all of this money being injected into politics is really a symptom of low voter turnout. And so anything we can do to improve voter turnout will lessen the influence of money in politics.
My justification for this theory is that I see all of these political ads and really don’t find them convincing or liable to change my vote. I actually find attack ads often have the opposite effect on me, where I am immediately skeptical of whatever claim they advance and feel sure there’s important context they are leaving out. Of course I know I’m not the average voter, and other people may see it differently, but I’d love to see some data on this.
by openasocket - I always wondered why the US accuses other South-Asian nation states of deep corruption when they have the most gigantic corruption system in the world.by lenkite
- It's like with commercial advertising. It only needs to influence enough people, whether it convinces them to buy (or vote) what they already wanted, or it convinces them to want that.by goatlover
- I dont think its just ads. This money is the lubricant to mobilize media++, consultans and private networks.
- This depends on the ad. Professional political analysts make it a job to understand whether they need to increase voter turnout, convince fence-sitting voters, etc, and shape ads that target those demographics.
Low voter turnout is much more of a problem in the US where voting isn't compulsory.
by Daishiman - I think you may be taking for granted the political dupoloy and candidate equality.
Third-party candidates are almost always unknown and remain unknown to the public, because they have no money to advertise and achieve name recognition, get their message out. The pay-to-play nature of elections preserves the duopoly of the major parties.
Consider also primary campaigns: typically an incumbent has vastly more money to spend than challengers, who are again usually unknown.
When it comes to general election campaigns between two duopolist candidates, there is usually less of a difference in fundraising ability, so it may seem like money doesn't matter a lot. I see campaign donations as more of an entrance fee than a guarantee of victory. It's gatekeeping, where the gates are closed to any politician who can't be purchased by wealthy interests.
by lapcat