If only it were that simple
If only it were that simple
It presents a slight problem when the ones they're bringing in to deal with the shitty politicians are the people who paid them to be shitty in the first place.
There is a truism as old as civilization itself. I subscribe to it.
If you want to know who is most responsible, you need only find the one who profited most.
There may be rare exceptions, but they are rare exceptions. Our elected officials are just the owner's revolving door, well bribed middle managers. The vast majority of them never rise to the level of oligarch.
You mean like HR 1 For the People Act which passed the house twice but got filibustered and 30 years of campaign finance reform starting with a 1995 bill outlawing large donations (which was passed in 2002 but stricken down by the scotus 5:4 as the basis for Citizens United) that
*checks notes
Republicans refuse to pass?
This is a partisan issue, bothsidesing this is pure ignorance. Get 60 Dem senators and watch it get fixed.
So here's the deal. Republicans are objectively worse. Full stop. Anyone that thinks otherwise is just wrong.
But that doesn't absolve Democrats. Why did they never enshrine abortion rights into law in the decades since Roe v Wade? Why is it every time they have control suddenly they are helpless to actually deliver on their promises? Why do they refuse to do anything beyond lip service for unions? Why won't they get rid of the filibuster? Why didn't Biden even try to expand the supreme court as soon as it was clear it was corrupted?
Democrats are controlled opposition, that's it. When the plebs start getting rowdy they jump in to control the movement and bring it back in line.
Neither Democrats nor Republicans are going to go against the wealthy who own them. And the sooner we all start working in that reality the better.
Doesn't matter. Everything is a conspiracy. Everything is the fault of some mysterious cabal.
Sir, excuse me, sir, pardon me you almost left behind this very important /s. These things are mandatory, wouldn't want to lose it.
with a 1995 bill outlawing large donations (which was passed in 2002
That only went thru due to Enron crashing, and was a bipartisan effort from McCain and Feingold that was already in the works, they just didn't have the numbers till Enron's checks stopped...
And it directly led to PACs....
Two senators, Republican John McCain and Democrat Russell Feingold, had a bill to ban soft money. When Enron collapsed in scandal in 2001, McCain and Feingold had enough support to make the bill law.
Feingold addressed the Senate just before the vote on final passage. "In this moment, we can show the American people that we are the Senate that they want us to be," he said.
McCain-Feingold pushed soft money out of the national parties, and a lot of it landed in new bank accounts at small nonprofit groups. These were groups that couldn't coordinate with candidates or party committees, but that shared the same partisan agenda.
https://www.npr.org/2009/12/25/121872329/decade-brought-change-to-campaign-finance
And the wealthy immediately struck back.
In 2004, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth crippled the campaign of Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry. And in 2008 groups challenged the integrity of both presidential contenders and plenty of congressional candidates. The attacks are meaner, but these groups — unlike the political parties — aren't accountable to anyone.
That is widely recognized as when Republicans went off the deep end.
Get 60 Dem senators and watch it get fixed.
Don't assume everyone with a D by their name is on your side just because at the national level these days everyone with an R is on the other side.
If we need 60 votes to fix this, and we have 60+, expect just as many to act like Manchin as needed to bring that number down to 59.
We need to treat primaries serious so that if the day comes and we have 60, it gets done.
Because if we have 60 and it doesn't get done, it'll crash turnout.
Just like it did when we were told Biden and 50 senators could get shit done.
This was a riskily bad meme.
Been happening since Watergate and the right decided instead of running good politicians, they'd make a propaganda machine to convince their voters that down is really up.
This allowed them to dive even further into corruption, and take a bunch of dirty money that helped them in elections.
The wealthy elites quickly realized political bribes were so cheap, there was no reason to bribe only one of the only two options.
That brought the rise of neoliberalism, and both parties only caring about the wealthy and deregulating campaign finance and journalistic integrity because both allows them to take more bribes.
Kamala had a ~$1,500,000,000 campaign in like a month and a half.
There is zero reason a campaign (much less one against a candidate as bad as trump) should ever cost that much. The money and time of modern campaigns isn't spent on getting votes, it's spent on raising more donations from the rich. They never reach a point where they meet the fundraising goal, even after the election I was getting spam asking to donate to Kamala/DNC. Because the "victory fund" nonsense gets rolled over to the next candidate chosen by the party before primaries even start.
Whoever the party backs in 2028 will be able to use that to compete in the Dem primary.
The whole thing is completely fucked, and it's a game we literally can't win with the DNC if they just keep doubling down. Their chair election is in about a month. Depending on how they vote we'll see if the party reinvents itself, or if it's truly a lost cause and we need a new party. One who's focus is on getting votes and not as much money as possible
Well put. It blows me away how many people think that problems are straight forward when in reality, they're all intertwined together
It blows me away how many people think that problems are straight forward when in reality, they’re all intertwined together
I mean, it shouldn't be surprising...
It's the result of decades of propaganda, most people don't notice anything political until at most a teenager. So most under retirement age don't know anything else. And the ones who are old enough, can't remember and are the main propaganda targets.
For most Americans we've spent our entire politically active lives where both parties bow to the wealthy and instead focus on wedge issues and pressured to vote for their "team" even tho they don't want them, just to stop the other "team".
Hell, I know all about this, have for a while. But I've still voted straight party D for decades because I legitimately don't have a choice. The problem is conservative voters are by nature more likely to motivated by fear of "them". There's actual brain differences that can predict party affiliation with like ~70% accuracy, which is fucking huge when you consider ~1/3 of voters don't vote or waffle between the two options.
Larger/more active amygdala? You're a conservative and fear is a huge motivater.
Larger/more active prefrontal cortex? You're a "bleeding heart liberal" who wants everyone to be taken care of.
It's not like it's set at birth, even well into adulthood your brain can change. But without completely going on another tangent, for decades now the part of our education system that develops the prefrontal cortex has been getting sliced off. So I don't understand why people were surprised the people coming out of that system are more conservative.
We aren't born well adjusted humans, it takes work to socialize us like any other animal. And we just stopped putting in the work.
A few things because this take is so cynical I think it hurts political engagement overall. A campaign donation is not a bribe. There is nothing wrong with spending money to help your party win in a system where that's legal.
Also i might have misunderstood but it seems like you were implying Kamala didn't spend her campaign money on her campaign. You can find a breakdown of her campaign on open secrets and 80% was spent on advertising and marketing the rest went to admin, salariers etc. You can find a list of expenses to scrutinize them further.
There is no carry over fund, the fund raising that was done after is due to campaign spending more than the funds and trying to cover the debt.
The DNCs problem is the right wing propaganda machine. They have the policy that appeals to majority of the voters. They have the politicians that appeal to the majority. They just need to make people realize it.
A campaign donation is not a bribe. There is nothing wrong with spending money to help your party win in a system where that’s legal.
...
Legal is not "right", especially when I explicitly stated that both parties are deregulating campaign finance.
Do you have any idea what the "victory fund" is? It's bankrupting Dem state parties and the first election states received less than 1% of the funds they were supposed to.
See it works by "bundling" the max to a candidate and the max to a bunch of state parties, then the lump sum is sent straight to the DNC/candidate in a joint access account. Prior to this grift someone had to actually send that money to the state party for them to use.
But I mean....
Even just knowing what a PAC (let alone a super PAC) is should show you that political.bribery has been legalized.
Nothing wrong with an individual giving the ~3k candidate max, but Elong Musk just paid a quarter of a billion to get trump elected.
I didn't read any of your comment past that first sentence, because it is such a fundamental misunderstanding that explaining anything else would change drastically after you get that. Before anything else is covered you need to accept the current reality that the only two political options in America are actively working to legalize political bribery
And it's clearly effective, because it's working on you....