The Second Half of Watergate Was Bigger, Worse, and Forgotten by the Public

For anyone in top of politics they are likely going to be connected to people who are top in either corporations or organisations.

Theresa May isn't a dictator and can't just decide what she wants to without being in agreement with the rest of her politicians.

Insinuating that there is some causational relationship here is just as much part of the problem.

That said, there definitely are cases where the relationship seems very suspicious, but it's not a rule and I wish people would be more careful to prove their claims rather than just putting them out there. But maybe I am missing something here.

It's all part of the plan, man. Keep 'em distracted with too much info. It's like a law firm burying you with boxes and boxes and boxes of discovery, which has little or nothing to actually do with the case at hand. It's effective, and tiresome.

Most of us aren't able to accept any money where it might impact our decisions on the job.

“Part of” doesn't really capture his status as the sole paid employee.

> Seems he ran around doing radio interviews, not making profits.

The $1.2 million isn't the contribution to the entity that paid expenses and his salary, it's his salary from the entity. So it very much seems like he was running around doing radio interviews and making (rather large) profits.

Apart for the blatant conflict of interest and the excellent scheme to funnel unknown origin money to an attorney general, there isn't...

Steps can't be too small, and in practice that could mean they have to be pretty large. Here the opposite approach - attacking root causes - can become more productive.

Even societies in which most people are barely living at a pure subsistence level have historically had revolutions, and in fact subsistence commoners becoming angry to the point of revolution has repeatedly been one way that nature corrects concentrations of power.

I’d go even further and say that your argument is not just wrong, but dangerously wrong because it offers an excuse for why a person might not cultivate their indignant rage at the corruption. You invite them to self-pity and woe their poverty as an excuse to not direct that rage at social progress, which is unacceptable even if you’re all the way at true subsistence level poverty (most aren’t, even by world standards).

And you also create an excuse for not being upset with other people who fail to act on their indignant rage over this issue too. You can just write it off as someone not “privileged enough” to sacrifice for the sake of acting to stop corruption.

Regarding voting, I completely understand that my stance is not helping the situation at all and is untenable if too many people adopt it, but I truly believe that the perceived value of a vote is so out of whack with its actual value, that I (selfishly, I admit) decide to give it up entirely. Sure, some places are better than others, but I think in all countries that I'm aware of, it's still too bad for me to care about participating.

Reading political biographies will show you the gulf that exists between how politics actually works, and how the general public perceive it and use as their metric for choosing candidates.

It's a pretty good example of the point I'm trying to make that my post is being downvoted, presumably by people of the mindset of the other reply, i. e. "Nope. U STUPID. Burn all politicians". I completely agree that Citizen United is atrocious. But blanket hate and cynicism is the surefire way to populism, and the ensuing wide lurches across the political spectrum.

It just seems far too many people think everything is so bad it's time to get out the guillotines. That proposition strikes me as rather shortsighted, considering today still would seem to be the best time in history to be alive.

A revolution acts a lot like random shuffling. If you consider society as a puzzle, which is not done, but more complete than ever before, throwing it in the air and letting the pieces fall where they may seems unlikely to produce a more perfect arrangement, just by the principles of entropy.

if something is wrong and illegal, you just change the law to make it legal and then it's not wrong, see. so these 'bribes' you are talking about arent really bribes, because they are legal.

obvious. duh.

> Because speech is an essential mechanism of democracy—it is the means to hold officials accountable to the people—political speech must prevail against laws that would suppress it by design or inadvertence. Premised on mistrust of governmental power, the First Amendment stands against attempts to disfavor certain subjects or viewpoints or to distinguish among different speakers, which may be a means to control content. (...) Political speech is indispensable to decision-making in a democracy, and this is no less true because the speech comes from a corporation. (...) All speakers, including individuals and the media, use money amassed from the economic marketplace to fund their speech, and the First Amendment protects the resulting speech.

What Citizens United wanted to do was distribute a documentary film critical of Hillary Clinton.

If someone feels that Citizens United was wrongly decided, then I would encourage that person to read through the case in detail to understand the issues evaluated by the court - specifically, the contradictions in reasoning, chilling effects, and violations of precedent that would result from deciding the case in the alternative. Difficult topics would need to be untangled such as: why should it be unlawful for Citizens United to distribute a political documentary when it's OK for media producers like Fox News or CNN or 60 Minutes or Netflix to do so? They engage in political speech whenever critiquing a policy position or candidate.

One must consider the sweeping consequences of what it would mean to restrain corporations, including the news media, from engaging in political speech. How does journalism and freedom of the press remain in this world, or what bright line distinguishes Citizens United from any other producer of documentaries like e.g. Michael Moore (Fahrenheit 9/11)?

That should stop these murderers and jaywalkers once and for all!

A split-up Google just makes bunch of corporations; abolishing tech corporations entirely and taking them over as a public utility or worker's cooperative is what I'm getting at. "This particular corporation is too big" is a mainstream-but-lefty opinion; "this corporation should be expropriated and owned by the public" is not a mainstream opinion.

Steve Bannon is on record as wanting to dismantle the "administrative state", he held the ear of the President for a while. The head of the CFPB doesn't think the CFPB should exist. Paul Ryan wants to privatise Social Security. "Shrink government enough to drown it in a bathtub" is a Grover Norquist quote. They may not want to roll back the entire government to Independence Day but they do want to take it back to the 19th century if it means they can cut taxes. They don't just want less regulation; they want the feds to get out of the business of regulating industry at all.

Consider the current call on the left to abolish ICE. The right paints this as meaning "abolish the border patrol" but that's not what it actually means. The call is to either pass the responsibilities to other agencies, or create a new agency. That would be like disbanding a corporation.

Now consider the calls on the right to abolish the EPA. The intent is not that the EPA's responsibilities get picked up by other agencies or passed to a new agency. The intent is that those responsibilities cease.

I don't see any movement to disband the industries you mention. The closest would be oil/gas, and even then the movement is not to disband them, but to regulate them so that they actually bear the costs of the damage they cause, and let the market take its natural course from there.

Rep Ron Paul (R-TX) until 2013.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_Ron_Pau...

The idea that there aren't any very lefty Christians is...well, not entirely surprising given the logb-standing “left v religion” media narrative the US right spent so many decades fostering, but also not at all consistent with reality.

Consider, e.g., Liberation Theology.

The more interesting discussion would be about the particular motivations for the creation and proposed dissolution of the department, rather than a cursory dismissal of the idea.

Governments chartering corporations as a widespread practice is older than (and arguably key to) completing the transition to a generally capitalist economic system.

> Some businesses today still operate on these older principals, notably law firms.

Law firms are often professional corporations, and those that aren't are often LLCs or LLPs, which are also creatures of government newer than, and deriving in design (in part) from corporations.

There's no evidence of that ever happening, or even close to it.

Consider the Hunt bros who attempted to corner the silver market. They paid higher and higher prices for it, then were left holding the bag when the market price for silver crashed.

Sure, but you've gotta concentrate it somewhere. Concentrating it entirely in bureaucrats hasn't worked out very well.

> Without some external factor draining wealth from the wealthiest they will eventually soak up the entire monetary system and crash it

Hmm? What?

> Capitalism is a positive feedback loop, like an open mic next to an amplified speaker, and we're pushing the mic closer and closer each year.

That's an interesting metaphor, but is it true? We've had capitalism for quite a while. When does the implosion start?

By definition, this is true of all systems.

Among the highlights are minimum wage increases, OSHA enforcement, transparency requirements for government contractors and a whole lot more.

Appointments to the Labour Board, as well as to the courts, could have rather significant impact on precedent. As but one issue that will be central in the near future is the treatment of Uber drivers and similar, and their classification as contractors/employees. A two-seats swing on the Supreme Court is almost guaranteed to have changed the outcome of that trial when it eventually reaches the court.

As to the "social issues" mentioned by OP, it makes me a bit uneasy to see them commonly referred to as separate from labor law. Workplace anti-discrimination law is obviously labor law as well. It may not affect you or me. But neither does the minimum wage. When the latter is considered "labor law" and the former isn't, I wonder what the reason for this sort of "othering" can be.