[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!