Corporate political donations shatter record at $646M so far for US midterms
reuters.com
reuters.com
I have a pet theory about political ads that I would love to find data to be able to confirm/deny. My theory is that those political ads don’t actually convince anyone about who to vote for, and aren’t intended to. Instead, it’s about convincing the people who already support you and your party to show up and vote. If that’s true, then the root cause of all of this money being injected into politics is really a symptom of low voter turnout. And so anything we can do to improve voter turnout will lessen the influence of money in politics.
My justification for this theory is that I see all of these political ads and really don’t find them convincing or liable to change my vote. I actually find attack ads often have the opposite effect on me, where I am immediately skeptical of whatever claim they advance and feel sure there’s important context they are leaving out. Of course I know I’m not the average voter, and other people may see it differently, but I’d love to see some data on this.
Third-party candidates are almost always unknown and remain unknown to the public, because they have no money to advertise and achieve name recognition, get their message out. The pay-to-play nature of elections preserves the duopoly of the major parties.
Consider also primary campaigns: typically an incumbent has vastly more money to spend than challengers, who are again usually unknown.
When it comes to general election campaigns between two duopolist candidates, there is usually less of a difference in fundraising ability, so it may seem like money doesn't matter a lot. I see campaign donations as more of an entrance fee than a guarantee of victory. It's gatekeeping, where the gates are closed to any politician who can't be purchased by wealthy interests.
Low voter turnout is much more of a problem in the US where voting isn't compulsory.
Damn, I can't think of a better argument for wealth tax if one dude alone is willing to spend $100m to fight it. He clearly has too much.
If someone is willing to spend money above some spendable threshold, then they will never become a trillionaire. Because they will start giving away sooner.
Good!! No one needs or deserves to be a trillionaire!
So, yes, it applies equally at lower levels, until it doesn’t.
That money did go somewhere, so it probably did “help” quite a number of people less rich than Sergey Brin.
(That’s just a side comment, not an argument that any single person should own that much money.)
The US has now in one decade nearly doubled its military budget from ~$630 Billion to ~$1.2 Trillion.
ICE alone has received tens of billions in funds in the past year.
It’s been turtles all the way down since the Citizens United decision.
The idea is that legislator don't have the full context and don't know the impact of their work - so they welcome industry or matter experts. Which is quite reasonable. I would argue that the job of the legislator is to know what they are doing, but I can see it being hard for specific technical issues that really benefits from first hand experience.
I am not even particularly against the idea of donating money to make sure a particular issue is known to the public, so that the public can make an effective voting decision.
But all of this seems quite too much.
Companies have disproportionate amount of money to donate and much less synchronization issue that citizen.
You want to hire a lobbyist to show up and educate a senator on soybean production, more power to you, but it shouldn't come with a check.
Combine that with these megacorps with infinitely deep pockets, it becomes extremely hard to hear both sides of an issue, and we end up in the opposite of the original issue, where the only context legislators get is the context paid for by monied interests.
It's blatant bribery. I come from a 3rd world country where bribery takes the form of slipping a cop or judge some cash to let you off the hook, and in my mind this is in no way different. Hell, it's maybe even worse because we pretend it isn't blatant corruption and is somehow recognized as okay!
Interestingly, the NASDAQ over the same time has also grown 40%.
It feels like they discovered in 2008 that you just never let the stock market go down. Then corporations have endless funds and excess can flow freely into politics.
They just have to convince everyone the market going up is good for the average person. The big problem is most people can't afford to invest so they don't give a shit what it does.
Fortunately they are creating a $1000 investment account for all newborns so everyone will be addicted to the market remaining green from birth.
There is an argument to be made that quantitative easing produces more asset-price inflation than consumer-price inflation in economies where wealth is concentrated at the top (and the new money also mostly goes there).
That could help explain why the massive QE programs after 2008 in both the US and Europe coincided with unexpectedly low consumer-price inflation but large increases in stock, bond, and property prices.
In a way, stocks and property are just consumer products for (relatively) rich people.
It must be overturned. It was a bogus ruling.
Don't I have a right to buy a $10 yard sign? A $100 bard sign? A $1000 billboard? A $10K radio ad? A $50K book printing?
Why should I lose any of these rights because I join with others to help me afford it?
What would be most democratic is if tax money funded campaigns. Every candidate gets the same amount for that office. Take money out of the equation. It should not be a reason someone gets elected. That's corrupting and makes candidates beholden to monied interests.
The 1st amendment freedom of the press is by nature disproportionate!
Most citizens do not own a printing press. Most presses aren't upstream of a national distribution network. Not all twitter accounts have millions of followers. "Evenness of influence" is not constitutionally guaranteed or even a natural outcome, even in a democracy.
The 1st amendment doesn't guarantee you access to the most power communications equipment and audience, only that that the Government won't suppress what you manage to obtain.
Makes me wonder if LLM's are going to be granted citizenship by this court.
And then, individual transistors.
Besides your premise is flawed to begin with, you most certainly cannot freely rent out a billboard and put anything you want on there, or a radio ad, or a book printing. Restrictions on content already exist, and I see no reason why an exception should be made for political parties.
As the heir apparent of the republican party, Jeb Bush raised a half-billion dollars from donors. He was politically connected, with a history of winning elections. His significantly outspent the other candidates -- and still lost. This isn't especially uncommon, money's influence alone doesn't determine elections.
There isn't a chance in hell with the current system that anyone who doesn't come from a wealthy background, or at the very least has the backing of a rich sponsor, would make it anywhere near the top of the list, which is the entire issue.
Corporations are people, my friend.
Should the president of the US (regardless of party) be able to restrict your ability to spend money on a web server because it hosts a forum about humanrights/guns/birthcontrol/etc? Or to run a news channel/blog that focuses on a particular perspective?
If not, little prevents the most endowed campaigns from changing their form factor from ads to propoganda platforms. And buying out news platforms becomes more enticing.
Whatever line you think is reasonable to draw here, would you trust a bad president with it? And would it actually solve the problem?
I don't think this is a good argument, because it's oddly specific. You can't trust a bad President to properly enforce any law. That much should be clear right now. A bad President is a general danger to the country and to the world. Among other powers, the President is the commander-in-chief!
Of course Congress has the power to impeach and remove a bad President, so you don't get a bad President without also having a bad Congress. In other words, we'd have much bigger problems than campaign finance. And I would claim that we get a bad President and a bad Congress precisely because we have no campaign finance limitations anymore.
We want to ban independent political expenditure past a certain dollar threshold. Great. How do we do that without torching legitimate civic and commercial participation, and without accidentally entrenching rich participants even more? I'm unconvinced you can do that, and unconvinced that ads are a worthy enough evil to be worth the try, particularly if it requires amending over the First Amendment. ("If" is an operative word.)
But more than that, among the organizations on the side of citizens united and against the government in that case were the ACLU and the AFL-CIO. When the civil liberties people and the unions are all on the same side of an issue as the conservative pundits against the federal government, there’s a very good chance the government is very much in the wrong.
the ACLU may have been right about the particulars they were arguing but they missed the bigger picture of how this would open the floodgates of campaign financing
you're right that CU didn't directly open the floodgates, though it did immediately unlock the option for companies to spend from their general funds without limit
But the bigger problem was SCOTUS' decision provided the reasoning that downstream courts could rely on in their decisions, and _those_ opened the floodgates (Speechnow.org vs FEC specifically)
Then maybe we should start taxing them like people...
File the 1040 take only the standard deduction no matter your income. Revenue, not profit, is your income. Etc.
If this was implemented, it would destroy almost all companies. Grocery store net profit margins are 2-4%, if they sell $1B and make $40M and you tax them on 25% of $1B, their loss for the year would be $210M.
Apple and NVidia might survive, but any company with profit margins less than 25% or so would lose money simply by operating.
Liquidating everything or selling the business outright is the only move if you lose money by operating your business, only everyone else is trying to liquidate their assets since operating a business is guaranteed to lose money so there are no buyers.
You do have a point here. Corporate shareholders do have special protections based on the legal principle of "corporate veil", meaning that corporate owners are usually not personally responsible for the corporation’s debts or legal misdeeds.
But they do get to influence elections from behind the veil, as to further grow their privileges, it's a slippery slope indeed.