So, they have money to spend, and don’t mind spending it. They just have a personal issue against taxes.
That’s obscene.
That ruling was one of the nails in the coffin of US democracy, maybe the largest one of all. That alone might be seen as a step from a democracy to an oligarchic autocracy.
How do we not let them. They’re buying both sides and rigging things to exclude everyone else from contention.
Two in the head, one in the back.
General strike
what was the citizens united decision?
"Freedom of speech applies to people, corporations have corporate personhood; therefore, freedom of speech applies to corporations.
Speech can be purchased, as with advertisements, thus, restricting expenditure on political expression is a violation of freedom of speech.
Therefore, corporations can spend as much money as they want on campaigning for political candidates."
It was a disastrous (and narrow 5-4) Supreme Court decision, and rightly condemned by many at the time, including many liberal politicians - and celebrated by conservative politicians.
Can corporations go to jail or be executed?
If only conservative Supreme Court Justices were that consistent.
Chapter 11 and 7 bankruptcies. That’s as the US has to either and I can’t remember the last publicly traded company to chapter 7
They can be traded as slaves, so I guess 13th Amendment is null and void.
omg. what a disaster.
one of the big problems in the US is that they privatize the gain and socialize the loss. if a corporation does something risky and it pays off then the execs make bank. if it results in a disaster with global and environmental consequences, then the execs aren’t held accountable
Friend of mine, already a resident here in Australia, saw that decision and immediately applied for Australian citizenship, because the US could not be anything except fucked after that.
Few years ago, he gave up his US citizenship when he saw that the Dems weren’t going to punish the GOP for their crimes. Because fascism was inevitable after that.
There was a really good video of a news anchor at the time breaking down precisely why it was such a bad idea, and everything he predicted in that video has come true in the years since.
I can’t find it, I can’t remember his name or what station it was. But I saw it on a thread a few months ago and it was really good.
I know this comment is useless without the link, but if anyone knows what I’m talking about feel free to post it
Yeah…a corporation in a collection of people whom have different ideologies. A corporation cannot be given “free speech” because it is comprised of many individuals - let alone treated as a single identity. I believe the constitution says “we the people” not “we the corporations”. This was a bone headed argument and incredibly damaging decision- which we’re now seeing the results from.
It’s also worth noting that the decision explicitly addressed the question of corruption, and concluded that unlimited spending on campaigns could not create corruption, or even “the appearance of corruption.”
There was precedent that even if actual corruption was not happening, just things seeming corrupt could erode faith in our institutions and in democracy. So they had to address this and claim that unlimited campaign contributions in exchange for favorable treatment by the new administration wouldn’t even appear corrupt. They did that by redefining corruption to mean only an explicit quid pro quo, where what each side would do was spelled out, and not just a general “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” arrangement, which under this new definition would be totally fine. So the government could openly cater to the needs of moneyed special interests instead of those of the people, and that definitely wouldn’t make the public feel that government no longer represented their interests.
Talk about “egregiously wrong from the start.”
IIRC, in USA, it was a court case which ended up ruling that restricting donations was a breach of first amendment rights. They basically lobbied so they could lobby.
Financial obesity is an existential threat to any society that tolerates it, and needs to cease being celebrated, rewarded, and positioned as an aspirational goal.
Corporations are the only ‘persons’ which should be subjected to capital punishment, but billionaires should be euthanised through taxation.
Even that 13 million in 2004 is a fairly big sum of money for a single event, that requires practically no funds to run.
So called election spending is just propaganda spending, because all elections need are polling places. In my country they are mostly run by volunteers, making them essentially free. What was that 13 million dollars spent on?
Election spending, in terms of polling places and such, is funded by the states. When US folk say ‘election spending’, they explicitly mean ‘buying ads, air time, etc’, we just don’t say ‘propaganda’ because… it feels bad, I guess.
Yeah, the US is fucked. But maybe we can save some other nations.
Take us as a warning, please.
Deciding that an board of unelected life-time appointed elders should be able to decide what the entire country does was maybe not a great idea.
It’s almost like theories of governance have advanced in the ~250 years since the Constitution was written.
Good thing we’ve ignored them and largely kept the document as-is!
Which is weird because the court and executive authorities have dramatically expanded over the years. The court couldn’t pull shit like this when it was established. Seems like the more apparent it becomes that its a terrible idea the more certain people are into it.
A knock-off effect is probably the DNC, or people in general, thinking they couldn’t primary a candidate after Biden dropped out because a campaign is supposed to be a years-long, billion-dollar affair.
Biden dropped out after the primary… Also anyone who says there wasn’t a primary is lying. There was a primary in 48 states. And Biden had 87% of the votes. Harris lost because she wasn’t a white man. Anyone who thinks if you took 20 Americans and put them in a room that at least 1/20 of them wouldn’t refuse to vote or would vote against someone because they were a woman or because they were black is just plain wrong no matter how they try to mask it. Every time gender comes up on Lemmy you see people claiming how toxic it is against women, and the defense is “reddit is worse”… And these are the more accepting platforms supposedly. So when Lemmy, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, etc users voted… guess what it was in secret, not a public forum that had to explain their vote and face backlash for. No one knew who they voted for. Trump’s backing literally is naming places after and forcing groups into schools to teach children that you can’t trust black people being pilots, because you shouldn’t trust that they were educated.
Why would they do that? Because they know it helped win them an election, and it will help keep them positions of power
lol wut?
What part are you confused about?
The primary? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Democratic_Party_presidential_primaries
The racism?
The sexism?
I guess you missed the part where I said after Biden dropped out.
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