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Comment by venomsnake | Hacker News Reader

They do get the internet. But the future income of the top brass depends on not getting it right for the consumers.

Maybe the general public can gofundme Tom Wheeler 40 or 50 million dollars to compensate him for for the bribe we're asking him to sacrifice.

Bribe is a dirty word. I think consultancy contracts are the appropriate terms lately.

I've had this thought before. I feel like if you changed the mechanism of donating to PACs to only be drawn if a goal is reached (like kickstarter) you'd have much more engagement. No one wants to donate a dollar if they feel like it is going to be alone.

But I imagine something like this already exists?

Like Lessig's Super-PAC? https://mayday.us/

You have to actively prevent money getting from those with it to the politicians they want to bribe. Simply having other funding sources won't stop the cartels from installing their own puppets.

*edit, this was actually directed @rectang

"You have to actively prevent money getting from those with it to the politicians they want to bribe. Simply having other funding sources won't stop the cartels from installing their own puppets."

Exactly wrong. The solution to lies is not censorship, it is more truth. If censorship -- or prohibition of campaign money -- is the law, only the interested liars will control the machinery of censorship and they're not going to use it to promote truth.

If all personal campaign donations were illegal, the telecom monopolies would be even more powerful and unaccountable. They have armies of employees, ex-employees, influential executives, relationships with regulators, no-show jobs for pols' shiftless cousins, charitable foundations for networking paid for with your fees, and everything it takes to exercise influence without campaign cash. Only the existence of public spirited and ideologically motivated and unrelated agenda private donations can empower the leaders that do question the insider power of the telecoms.

I agree, in part. Politicians do need to have a glass bank account. It was a metaphorical prevention, like not getting a job in an industry you just regulated. Corruption is American politics runs so deep, I don't know of an acceptable way to handle it.

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