10 business honchos about to flood Congress with money

Hatuey said:

http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/the-...t-to-flood-congress-with-money-140020944.html



The best part about this entire ****ty decision is that there were members of SCOTUS who didn't think it went far enough. Some actually were in support of what is essentially buying your own congressman. The RNCs complicity in this is what's most shocking. The same people complaining about the influence of rich left wingers like George Soros have now effectively given those rich left wingers the power to put large amounts of cash in Democratic coffers. This, along the Senate's recent decision to approve the nuclear option mean we are headed down an EXTREMELY dangerous path of undemocratic election policies.

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Politics is a filthy corrupt business. The bill for that corruption doesn't change a thing. The only thing that can clean it up is the voters and the voters are pretty corrupt too for the most part. In other words, this decision is meaningless.

spud_meister said:

So you believe it's ok for organisations to exert influence over politicians? That the rich and powerful deserve more of a voice in the running of the nation?

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Well, honestly spud to a point I'm conflict on this.

I mean, let's be honest here...those who devote more resources to ANYTHING generally have a greater voice in that thing.

Take a boycott of A&E because some crazy bearded guy said he doesn't like gay marriage. A person devoting the resource of his time to think "man, I don't like that, I'm not watching that show anymore" has significantly less impact...or "voice"...than someone who takes that a step further and tries to be a facebook activist encouraging others on their feed to boycott as well. And THAT person is probably having a lesser voice than a person whose devoting time and money to actually going out and getting signatures on a petition and mailing them to a bunch of the corporate sponsors. And so on.

Even with politics....we're lying to ourselves if we're saying each person has, or "deserves" the same "voice" in running of the nation. To say that would suggest that we should all be as active as the least active person within the nation.

Someone who just goes out to vote on Presidential elections has less of a voice in the running of the country than someone who votes in every election. That person has less of a voice than someone who votes every time and encourages friends to vote. That person has less than the person who does all that and actively puts signs around. Or perhaps donates money to a group running a political ad. Or a local business owner who runs an add in the community paper. Or volunteers out front of a polling place. The people running ground games for candidates in various towns and cities have a much greater voice than most average votes.

We're fooling ourselves if we're suggesting all people have the same voice in how the government is run; we don't. Nor do I think should we. There's a discussion perhaps to be had in terms of a matter of degree....but the kumbaya, "no one deserves more", notion is just a bit unrealistic and ridiculous to me.

Hatuey said:

What a nice way to :spin: all of this. You do realize that those who don't have a lot of money don't make large contributions to many candidates. Correct? And that by being able to contribute to many candidates it'll simply mean more backdoor deals with our elected officials and wider influence. Yes? Did you even read the link?



The minute there are no longer limits on the amount which can be donated, we'll see the door wide opened for politicians who are quite literally owned by corporations.

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They already are owned by the corporations and the rich. This means that in order to maintain what influence, "they" being corporation and wealthy people have, they are going to have to open their pocket books much more. Its going to be a spiral. Eventually they will come to a self imposed limit on how much money they can send or the ROI does not make sense. Politicians are going to still need more money still as the money gets used up. The previous limits actually help preserve the capital of the wealthy. Basically there is going to be a race to gain or most likely maintain influence, which will become more difficult because of the amount of money required to play the game. It becomes an exponential curve in difficulty as politicians compete to get as much money as they can. As we all know there is never enough money in a politicians pocket.