[beloch]

This is what happens when you allow money to influence power without check.

What can be done to curtail it? Ban corporate donations to political parties and PACs. Limit personal contributions. Implement campaign spending limits so parties can't spend hundreds of millions on an election if they somehow manage to get that much money.

Other nations (e.g. Canada) do this. It's not perfect. Money is always looking for a way, and politicians are always looking for the kind of power that money buys. It's an eternal game of whack-a-mole, but it's a game worth playing.

American politicians aren't going to propose this. Americans need to demand it.

[JohnMakin]

> Ban corporate donations to political parties and PACs

Doubtful - the SC determined this was a 1st amendment right for corporations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC

But it almost doesn't matter anymore - the bribing is being done so much in plain sight anymore, that these mechanisms are hardly needed anyway. It is a cultural rot that won't be fixed by "just make some rule," the people making the rules are the ones benefiting the most from the corruption.

[beloch]

If every employee at a corporation has the right to free speech and to make political donations, why should the corporation itself have need of such rights? Just because big money won in 2010 doesn't mean the ruling should go unchallenged for all time.

People, not capital, should have rights, because rights are there to protect people from power.

[JohnMakin]

I'm not being supportive of it, I'm explaining how unlikely it is that this ruling will be overturned. It tends to be very rare, especially a scope of 1st amendment ruling. that's just how that court works, and if it does happen, is on decades time scales, not a matter of a year or two, which is sort of what is needed right now. I would say in this case it's essentially impossible, given that this same SC also ruled that it's acceptable for they themselves to get "gifts" from politically motivated persons, as long as the gift is received after the act done, and no explicit quid pro quo conversation happened. In other words, they literally legalized bribery. There is no universe this court or any future court overturns this, the levers of power have been seized, no one is coming to save anyone, "vote harder" isn't going to work. If that sounds fatalistic or hard to read, sorry, but people have been predicting this outcome for 20+ years and nothing has come close to being done about it, much the opposite.

reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snyder_v._United_States

[beloch]

This is what I don't understand as a non-American. Why is this creeping corruption not opposed? What happened to, "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance"?

A CBC political commentator recently said, "America is not this way because Trump is president. Trump is president because America is this way." Things aren't going to magically improve if the Democrats win the mid-terms or the next election. America is this way and will likely get worse. Her former friends and allies need to take steps to protect themselves.

[bigbadfeline]

> "America is not this way because Trump is president. Trump is president because America is this way."

Trivially true, of course.

> Things aren't going to magically improve if the Democrats win the mid-terms or the next election.

Also true but far from trivial for the vast majority of the US population. The medias of all sorts fervently maintain the illusion that electing the other party is going to fix the damage done by the current one, ad infinitum.

Anyone who dares to challenge the above orthodoxy is quickly canceled/shouted-down/name-called/downvoted/etc into oblivion by bot farms with the latest AI at their disposal.

> Her former friends and allies need to take steps to protect themselves.

I don't see a big difference in the situation of former friends and allies. More likely than not they'd be sold a veiled version of the same, in other words, they'd follow - under the usual vague slogans which mean different things for their authors and audience. To be precise, if there is a way out of this mess, America and her former friends will have to find it, and walk on it, together.

> America is this way and will likely get worse.

Only if we keep wasting time in fatalistic contemplation and fruitless hopes of finding hiding places individually.

[JohnMakin]

> This is what I don't understand as a non-American. Why is this creeping corruption not opposed? What happened to, "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance"?

This is just one person's POV that I would say is more informed than the average american, by no means an expert -

I would say to answer your question very simply - most Americans, if you asked, would have no idea about the Supreme Court in general, let alone the nuances of those rulings I have linked up thread, let alone the implications of them. Americans are raised from a very early age, in school and reinforced by culture, that their institutions and rights are unflappable and almost even incapable of error or harm - while simultaneously teaching historical lessons that blatantly show this isn't true, like chattel slavery, women's sufferage, civil war, etc. This creates a sort of cognitive dissonance that I can't really explain but seems to make people incapable of seeing any harm done by their own systems.

That's one area. The other area is, in the current environment, major news sources are mostly coming from social media these days, that is gamed to hell, and the news sources themselves are bought and paid for by people with corrupt interests. So even getting a fair view of what's actually happening requires work, and a lot of critical thought because there's so much bs out there, that most people just won't bother.

The other thing is that if anyone does push the line a bit and tries to challenge things, if it becomes threatening to the mainstream narrative or people in power, gets squelched, sometimes brutally, by these same systems. A really good example of this is the widespread censorship (explicit censorship, and things like shadow bans/watch lists inducing fear to make people self censor) of the Gaza "conflict" - and this started in the Biden admin, it wasn't really one particular party at all. You can see the same silencing effect happen when any progressive upstart begins threatening the establishment party, they just get outspent. There was one incident in a California senator race, due to it's "top 2" system, where a democrat actually spent money on his likely republican opponent's campaign to push out the progressive, because he felt he would be easier to beat than his progressive challenger.

A system like that cannot possibly function fairly or in the interest of its own people. I do not see how the union is preserved, this is too unstable. I do not want to live through it.