Comments

1

See, I think this is exactly what is needed.

The only people who benefit from campaign limits are the skinflints who can buy offices for a song, because their opponent can't escalate.

This way the elite have to empty their bankbooks to buy an office...and who will they spend it on? Yeah, us.
2
Its no coincidence that this is occurring at a time when one political party has been made permanently obsolete by demographics. These rulings along with redistricting and disenfranchisement in the name of preventing election fraud are all the Republicans have left. Frankly, they are clobbering the dems on all 3 fronts. They have gerrymandered the crap out of the electorate, destroyed campaign finance law and are getting restrictive voting policies passed all over the country. This is a battle the left is losing, badly.
3
I suppose it all depends on your perspective... one man's corruption is another man's liberty. The 1 percenters and their sycophants in the media and the political ruling class very much have a plantation-owner perspective on the world. Their 'liberty' is to own whatever they can purchase: land, people, whatever. And liberty means doing whatever you want with or to your property - use, exploit, discard, or destroy, regardless of the suffering caused or the destruction entailed. They will (if they haven't already) destroy our country and our planet. They can't help themselves because their avarice has turned them into sociopaths, if not actual psychopaths. The south may have lost the Civil War, but in the long epic struggle against fear and ignorance, that was just a battle. The plantation owners are winning the war and the 1 percenters' version of Sherman's March to the sea is just beginning.

I despair for my country and I despair for my planet and I despair for my infant child for the future he will have to endure, if there is any future left for him at all.
4
The New Dark Ages, this has been my thesis concept for a decade now, and I shiver to see it all coming true in ways I couldn't even imagine ten years ago. :\
5
The clean-governance ship has sailed and sunk already. America has no real tradition of it in the first place at the federal level, nor in most states.

Even if life gets much, much worse for currently-comfortable Americans, it's hard to imagine a meaningful and coherent political movement emerging to counter the current system of legalized bribery and regulatory capture. (Well, it's hard to imagine one that doesn't involve a descent into flag-waving autocracy anyhow.)

The US is a country where a significant fraction of the population will tell you with a straight face that money is how society keeps score of the worth of its people and thus the rich are better and deserving of their platform for advocacy. I used to hear this all the time growing up in the South, from folks deadly in earnest, few of whom actually stood to benefit from the descent of American society into neo-feudalism, and several of whom were smart enough to know better. One of the few things less popular than a politician is the idea of paying for that politician's campaign out of tax dollars.

Absent public financing (which appears to be a nonstarter) and, even better, a shift away from winner-take-all legislative elections (not gonna happen in America as presently Constituted,) there's no reason to expect any meaningful change.

On the bright side, for the moment there's no public appetite for foreign wars, and the excesses of the drug war are beginning to be questioned at least if not meaningfully pared back.
6
I think one of the problems is that we only have 435 representatives. The number shall not exceed one per 30,000 which would put the potential max in the neighborhood of 10,000 representatives. Smaller districts would make it more likely a representative actually served their constituents, would decrease the power of individual representatives, would make it possible for third party candidates to compete, and would it make it that much more complex to gerrymander or to contribute to every campaign. We have not lived up to the founder's vision by allowing districts to swell to 20 times their imagined size.

Anyhoo, I think things will continue to get worse until people start burning stuff down. C'mon tea partiers. Don't you know that Hobby Lobby invests in abortion pills!
7
"Unless someone takes action"? Just what would you suggest that would overcome a f*cking Supreme Court decision?
8
I'm a little confused about the 'transparent' part of this tweet. Haven't the Republicans done everything they can to make the process of buying legislators as opaque as possible? And has not the right-wing majority on the Supreme Court done everything they can to avoid disrupting this opacity?
9
@7 - Constitutional Amendment. Senators Sanders and Warren must take point.
10
Empires arise decline and die.
11
@6 is really onto something. This would help, substantially.

The upside of huge donors and donor networks is that we might, just might, pry a few of our congressmen free from fundraising and somewhat back to governing. There are limits to the use of money for saturation media and alternate messaging/organizing systems exist.

It's gonna get worse before it gets better - but that's because people have to be woken up from their slumber. Women have to actually lose reproductive rights in a few places before they wake the hell up and get busy on this issue. Workers will have to do the same for labor rights. The last Guilded Age ended in part because of WW-II, but more because of the excesses of the Guilded Age, when TR set in motion - well before the GD and New Deal - the modern progressive national regulatory state. Yes, it took a good 40 years and the War for that shift to really start showing up in people's lives, but it came.

Right now people don't feel the threat. They take too much for granted. Another decade of underemployment, esp. of youth, and that complacency will start to disappear.
12
The worst "democracy" money can buy!
13
"The next twenty years will bring the worst political corruption this country has ever seen."

The next twenty years will also decide the fate of our planet, and I'm afraid the two will be inextricably linked.
14
I'm too old for this. Having grown up during the hopeful early post-War period, I've always had a certain cheerfulness about the eventual outcomes of political BS, but the Supremes' decision wiped that smile off my face. The Right has been furiously announcing the decline of America for the last decade, if not longer, and is completely oblivious to the fact that they are actually the cause of the decline. By the time a corrective pendulum swing happens, I'll be worm food. Ai yi yi.
15
@8 - "[W]ords, unless defined by law, are in the public domain and have the stability of soap bubbles.."
- Edward Bernays, the so-called "Father of Pubic Relations"

In other, I think political districts should be affixed to watersheds. Fuck all this goddamn gerrymandering BS.
16
With this ruling among others why would the Koch brothers or any other billionaire boys club still need the Republican or Democratic party when they can simply fund a politician or an entire political entity of their own into existence with virtually no transparency whatsoever whenever they so desire.

Please wait...

Comments are closed.

Commenting on this item is available only to members of the site. You can sign in here or create an account here.


Add a comment
Preview

By posting this comment, you are agreeing to our Terms of Use.