Ok…so what? They haven’t done anything illegal. How do we counter this? Put more money into bullshit ads instead of spending it on important stuff like caring for the poor?
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it’s true. i knew someone who was in the political data mining game. the state of the art a few years ago was to correlate drive-by features of your house to your voting preferences. did you know that a visible swing-set is a very significant predictor of being Republican?
it’s only gotten “better” since.
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i thought it would at least be polite to require every cut of $X in public spending to be accompanied by the introduction of Y suicide booths in economically-depressed areas. accountability, y’know?
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Have you been living under a rock these past 10 years?
Money wins elections, pure and simple. 90+ percent of the winners in the 2008 elections outspent their opponents.
Does the name Les Lessig mean anything to you?
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In 2004, the Sierra Club distributed a brochure that advocated electing Kerry over Bush.
Before it was legalized by the decision in the Citizens United case, that activity was a crime. The Federal Election Commission fined the Sierra Club $28,000.
This is the very scary, Democracy-killing heart of Citizens United: people don’t lose their First Amendment rights just because they’re organized as a corporation.
Doesn’t seem that scary to me.
(Plus, you anti-Citizens United folks, don’t you realize you’re basically advocating that the government censor a movie?)
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Holy shit! My neighbor, who is republican, did have a swing in his front yard. The tree died and they cut it down. Does that mean he is democratic now or independent?
We are a democracy of money.
Thats from the second article I linked above, the one by Lessig.
A democracy of money is called a plutocracy 
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Arguably the point of spending all the money on election advertising is to create the impressions that it’s the elections that matter, not the policies enacted afterwards, nor that there’s any other way to effect political change, so that people should go out to vote once every few years and go home and not do anything else about politics.
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They should know by now that it’s cheaper to just buy the voting machines in all the swing states, and…wait, what?
Sorry, I forgot that already happened repeatedly.
Very good point. I talked once with one of Saul Alinsky’s henchmen who pointed out the purpose of politics is to distract us from where the real power is.
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They should know by now that it’s cheaper to just buy the voting machines in all the swing states, and…wait, what?
Sorry, I forgot that already happened repeatedly.
he’s an outlier. report him immediately.
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I just wanted to point out that I amassed my millions through the sweat of my brow. That’s still possible in Disney Comic Book America and don’t you forget it!
Those of you who posit that money is a shared illusion: I have swum through your shared illusion and let it bounce on my head.
Buying politicians at a national level is a fool’s game. You get your best returns at the City Hall level. Ooops. Did I write that out on the internet?
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i’m not intrinsically opposed to Citizens United, but the devil is in the details. a side effect of maintaining some level of decorum in high-stakes affairs was to avoid a lot of painful questions, but we’ve chosen instead to have Freedom™.
for instance, what would be the civil penalty for libel if it’s proven that one of these wondrous examples of free speech cost someone the presidency? could it really be the difference in GDP between that under the hypothetical should-be-winner and the actual president? would you hold the individual donors accountable for that loss? (no, you wouldn’t because they’re a magical corporation which means they have rights but no responsibilities.)
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This is a beautiful euphemism for “speech we don’t like.”
Please tell me how one could realistically “prove” that a single act of speech cost someone the presidency.
That last sentence is what pisses me off about the modern corporation. It’s a responsibility deflector shield that protects those with the most power and true responsibility from being accountable for anything they do. If something bad happens it’s always the “corporation’s fault” even though the pro citizens united people keep insisting that a corporation is just a lump of people. But no people have any responsibility for the corporation. So in the end all risk is socialized or externalized, and all profits are privatized and everyone turns their little circles in the corporate machine which somehow magically is just a collection of people but no people are responsible for.
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[quote]Corporation: an ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.
~~ Ambrose Bierce[/quote]
(source)
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This is a beautiful euphemism for “speech we don’t like.”
no, it really isn’t. i’m sorry if you don’t understand the distinction, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not there. to give you a small hint: i disagree with some of what Henry Kissinger said, but i find Sarah Palin to be a vapid piece of shit beneath most other “reality celebrities”. does that clarify things a bit?
Please tell me how one could realistically “prove” that a single act of speech cost someone the presidency.
the legal standards of libel are well-documented. do your own fucking research. generally it goes like this: 1) make up a lie, 2) propagate it as fact, 3) profit! the details vary. you can start here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_defamation_law
i also didn’t say it would be a “single act of speech”. it would, obviously, be a concerted effort of many acts of speech, perhaps financed by a group with a cool $billion to spend on it without formal accountability.
you’re either a shill or a dumbfuck. don’t bother me again, and thanks for reminding me what happens when i give people the benefit of the doubt.
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It does! Personally, I’m in favor of Kissinger and Palin (and the American Communist Party and the ACLU and Amnesty International) enjoying their full, robust First Amendment protections.
That’s just me, I guess. I believe in equal protection, not protection for those who stay above a “vapidity” threshold.
Well, now you’re talking about multiple individual suits against multiple actors (unless you think, and can prove, it’s coordinated by a central, Lex Luthor-figure).
If it’s a “concerted effort of many acts of speech” how would you prove which one caused the loss? It’s easy enough to prove something isn’t true, but, like the underwear gnomes, there’s something missing before your third step: How do you prove this information (individually or collectively) caused the election outcome, short of quizzing each of the 126 million voters about what specifically made them vote the way they did?
You might want to practice a little “decorum” yourself. 
