[Eddy_Viscosity2]

Why would politicians ever pass such a law? Who do you think they work for?

update: Yeah, my bad. The point of this comment was to express my increasing cynicism at how we just keep seeing this kind of corporate behavior over and over again and how even when a tiny win is achieved on things like data collection, right to repair, ease for cancelling subscriptions, privacy, and so on and so on, they are so quickly over taken by new tactics or clawbacks/loopholes/non-enforcement of those laws. HN comments was probably the wrong place to vent and its too late to delete it.

[post-it]

What's the point of this kind of comment? Have pro-citizen anti-corporate laws never been passed in the past?

[guelo]

Very rarely. Most of the consumer protection laws were passed before Reagan in 1980. We did get the CFPB after the 2008 financial meltdown but it's been under attack ever since.

[kevin_thibedeau]

Only when Congress might be embarrassed. The VPPA exists so we can't find out what videos they watch in their spare time between orgies.

[tardedmeme]

So it should be as easy as buying tracking data and searching for Congressmen. We can put up license plate readers around Washington too, since that's legal.

[lovich]

Doesn’t really seem like the environment where the common persons going to get more rights or protections since the POTUS and SCOTUS are currently ripping those up while Congress sits in the cuck chair.

[wilg]

The point of the comment is to spread toxic and deadly cynicism.

[arikrahman]

And also to karma farm. Thankfully the comment is greyed out for what it is.

[traderj0e]

If you never trust anyone, nobody will ever fool you except for yourself.

[TheOtherHobbes]

You never see corporate media doing anything like that.

[anonym29]

"Citizens" United (which allows unlimited corporate political donations by classifying them as "speech", for those out of the loop) has fundamentally changed the core incentive structures of the modern political landscape. To compare a pre-CU world to a post-CU world when it comes to matters at the intersection of corporate interests and government regulatory / legislative power is comparing apples to oranges.

We need to overturn CU if we want to be able to go back to a world where government serves people rather than multinational conglomerates.

[strictnein]

Citizens United has to be the most inaccurately cited case. It did not 'allow unlimited corporate political donations by classifying them as "speech"'.

It ruled that the federal government was wrong to restrict the speech rights of some groups while allowing other very similar groups to still retain their rights. One of the major examples of this was the media industry. A for-profit newspaper company could spend whatever amount of money it wanted to on political speech. An identical company in a different field could not. This, the court ruled, was unconstitutional.

It also did not grant corporations personhood, the other thing people like to state that it did.

[parineum]

> We need to overturn CU

Or we could stop looking at SCOTUS to fix legislation and ask the branch of government who's job it is to fix legislation, Congress.

[anonym29]

That would be nice in principle, yes, but in a CU world, that's asking the fox to vote to lock itself out of the hen house.

In practice most of the foxes that promise to do so never actually will.

What's your proposal to solve this?

[parineum]

Frankly, I think it's much less of an issue than it's made out to be. If money meant so much, Donald Trump wouldn't have beat Jeb Bush on the way to beating Hilary Clinton.

To me, money in politics is the red herring to keep you from looking at the real election reform that needs to happen, some combination of open primaries (to remove the effect of primaries going to more extreme candidates rather than centrists) and an alternative to first past the post elections to allow people to vote for who they like without worrying about throwing away their votes (there are many different systems to do this, they're all major improvements).

The money in politics is used by the parties to back their preferred candidates and the voters go along with it in the general elections because they don't want to waste their votes. The money helps them do the bad thing but it isn't the bad thing.

[anonym29]

You've got my support for switching from FPTP to something like RCV, and for open primaries!

[applfanboysbgon]

They work for the people. In some countries, people actually vote for politicians that benefit the population. In other countries, people repeatedly vote for politicians despite knowing that those politicians are only interested in enriching themselves, with a track record going back decades of doing nothing but that. The problem, then, is the voters in certain countries, not the politicians.

[dexterdog]

And in some countries people are only given a choice of two, neither of which benefit the population.

[roughly]

Many of those countries have mechanisms by which one can express their preferences earlier in the process, ones which have been successfully used to pivot major political parties in new and unexpected directions, although those mechanisms are more complicated than just showing up at the end and whining about the results, so usually it's only motivated individuals and entities which leverage them.

[grassfedgeek]

In some countries a major party has succeeded in convincing a majority of voters to vote against their self interest by leveraging "red meat" topics such as abortion, jesus and guns.

[wat10000]

Ideally because we'd vote in politicians who would do it, and vote out those who didn't.

[nomorewords]

Is that even possible in the US anymore with donations and corporate backing being so important to a campaign?

[wat10000]

It's possible. Ultimately the voters do make the decision, even if they can be swayed. How realistic it might be, I can't say. We certainly need a lot more engagement with the process. There are far too many people ignoring the primaries and then complaining about their lack of choice in the general.

[applfanboysbgon]

I don't believe donations or corporate backing had anything to do with Trump, for example, winning. Trump won because he genuinely appeals to the average voting American. American voters are willingly choosing to support these politicians and all of the consequences that entails.

[fn-mote]

You can believe the latter but the former ignores everything we know about the effectiveness of advertising.

And also about the targeting of swing districts.

[dgellow]

For the president election, maybe, but without corporate backing of the GOP he would have to face an adversarial congress. Or at least, that’s the hope

[triceratops]

Both can be true.

[exe34]

To discount advertising and manipulation in this context amounts to conspiracy theory in my opinion.