EquALLity wrote:1) It's not speech when you give billions of dollars to people who make our laws.
You don't have to give it to the politicians. Many don't. Did you read my example?
YOU, on your own make a radio commercial giving your argument for Hillary. Hillary never knows about it, or supports you. You did that by yourself, because you believed in it.
Whenever you see these attack ads or promotional ads and they say "paid for by citizens for whatever", that's an independent group. The politician never saw or touched that money.
You can stop direct political contributions if you want, it will do nothing to address the problem. All you did was make another law, and add another layer of pointless bureaucracy.
You can BAN political speech entirely, not let ANYBODY run commercials or advertisement on it, or talk about it in a public venue. Then all we'd have are the debates, and we'd never have a third party, and we'd never have anything beyond the current establishment.
EquALLity wrote:2) Even if it was speech, we have reasonable limits to certain kinds of speech that are harmful.
Yes, which is why we should ban all religions promoting themselves or talking about their beliefs. That's harmful.
And we should also ban Republicans from speaking. And the anti-science Democrats.
Any anybody who supports eating meat, definitely.
I agree, we should ban all speech that might be harmful.
No reason to draw the line at Imminent lawless action:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imminent_lawless_action
No reason to even draw the line at clear and present danger:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clear_and_present_danger
Let's go all the way back to before British common law, and ban anything that in our assessment is harmful.
EquALLity wrote:3) Again, even if it was speech, corporations aren't people and don't have rights.
Is the law only banning corporate contributions to political speech, or is it limiting personal contributions too?
Republicans support stopping corporate contributions. If you limit it to that, you may find bipartisan support. Even Trump supports that.
EquALLity wrote:
What you're saying is like saying that homework is unconstitutional, because homework takes my time away from talking to people and forces me to do work instead, and that's restricting my right to free speech.
It's not that, it's more like slavery. It is unconstitutional to give homework to adults.
Minors are not free citizens yet. Once you turn 18, if anybody tries to force you to go to school or do work for free (or forcefully do work for money you don't want to do), that person is violating the law.
Minors are kind of slaves to their parents and the state. You're a ward of your parents and of the state, not a free citizen.
The same happens if by due process of law you are deprived of your freedom for committing a criminal offense, or are ruled incompetent.
EquALLity wrote:
How can you possibly maintain that a corporation or wealthy individual giving millions of dollars to a political campaign (indirectly, but still) won't influence the politicians?
Why do you think they're giving the money in the first place?
You speaking against Trump influences politics too. You're allowed to influence politics, by speaking and advertising. You aren't allowed to make an explicit back-room deal of "you pass this law and I'll give you a billion dollars", but you are allowed to say "I really want this law passed" and when they advocate for it "I want to support your campaign with a billion dollars."
I know you think that's a loophole, but it doesn't fit the letter of the law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bribery
Wikipedia wrote:Bribery is the act of giving money, goods or other forms of recompense to a recipient in exchange for an alteration of their behavior (to the benefit/interest of the giver) that the recipient would otherwise not alter.
You have to PROVE the person would otherwise not have done it. You need a smoking gun. Not all such exchanges are bribery, and you can't call them all bribery. That's like calling all sex rape or prostitution.
A man buys a woman dinner and later they have sex. Prostitution!
No, maybe she just liked him and wanted to have sex with him. She might have done it if they split the bill too. You don't know that, and you can't impose your assumptions as a broad accusation against everything that might be that.
People are innocent until PROVEN guilty. And that includes politicians. You're asking for draconian laws that assume guilt.
Politicians are human beings too, they are citizens, and they have rights. And so do their donors.
EquALLity wrote:
It's an argument, and you didn't really address it.
It was a bald assertion which is alienating and divisive.
EquALLity wrote:
No way, of course I'm not against transparency, but transparency doesn't completely solve the problem.
If you want a complete solution all of the time, you'll never get anywhere. That's like the people who hate vegetarians because they aren't vegan yet.
You need to push for any step in the right direction. The smaller the step and the more people can generally agree on it, the better the chances of success for less effort.
EquALLity wrote:
By the way, like I said, even most republicans want to get money out of politics. The country isn't divided on that at all; it's only not well supported in Congress (for obvious reasons).
According to the popular conspiracy theory it's obvious. But you're wrong.
Ending political contributions entirely is like ending cigarette advertising -- the big cigarette companies supported it, because it locked in their market shares. Now they don't have competition from smaller brands anymore.
You have no idea how good this would be for politicians. They wouldn't have to spend so much time and effort trying to raise money anymore, they could pretty much just rely on being elected because people already know their names and nobody can effectively challenge them since nobody can advertise against them and gain any significant part of the vote.
Politicians would love that, it keeps them in power, and then they can be as lazy as they want.
The reason politicians oppose these efforts despite how much they'd benefit from them personally is because they don't make sense. They'd cause a bureaucratic nightmare, they don't fix the problem, and they're a major imposition upon freedom of speech. It would be the death of any democratic process in the republic, and politicians for all of their flaws do generally respect the system and value 'democracy' to some extent.
EquALLity wrote:
Many local politicians will be on our side as well. In fact, bills like this one have already passed in five states (after we get around 2/3 states, we can propose an Amendment to the Constitution).
Which states?
EquALLity wrote:
The bill in Rhode Island passed unanimously in the state Senate. That's how bi-partisan this is outside of elite circles.
Rhode Island is a tiny state, and it's very blue. Out of 38, there are only five Republicans and one independent. One of those republicans is actually 25 years old and in college right now. It's a safe bet that they're not so much red as purple.
Here's anther (random) republican there:
https://ballotpedia.org/Christopher_Ottiano
Look at their track records. These Republicans are extremely liberal. In a red state they'd be Democrats. Political alignment isn't some absolute metric; it's relative. That's something important to keep in mind when you try to extrapolate like that.
Both the small size, and how extremely blue the state is, makes that low hanging fruit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_states_and_blue_states#Table_by_year_since_1984
You can not extrapolate those results to more conservative states.
EquALLity wrote:
Why should corporations get all of that influence because they have a lot of money?
You might manage to ban corporate contributions if you leave individual contributions alone.
EquALLity wrote:
They're not a legitimate representation of our country. Corporate influence is unfairly shifting the direction of the country due to their political power.
They contribute to both sides, and I've discussed this before. There's no reason to believe what you're saying is true.
EquALLity wrote:
Transparency would be great too, but it doesn't fix the problem completely.
If you aren't against it, then advocate for that first. It will get more traction, and that can pass in red states too.
EquALLity wrote:
Really, NO reason to believe it's true? Not a single reason?
Only if you cherry pick the variables that support it and ignore the unknowns that confound it.
If you consider the whole system, no, there's no reason to think it's true.
If I give a dollar to Hillary, and a dollar to Trump, who did I help more? Think about it.
EquALLity wrote:
You don't think that there's even a single reason to be suspect when a corporation gives a politician a billion dollars? Come on.
You can suspect if you want, but that's just speculation. Do not accuse and condemn.
When you're advocating for legislation, you haven't just said "maybe there's a problem, let's look into it", you've pointed the finger, rendered judgement, and passed a sentence.
EquALLity wrote:
brimstoneSalad wrote:Then find a way to identify actual, literal, corporate bribery and distinguish it from legitimate speech. And find a way to do that completely without the possibility of bias or mistake.
Republicans will support it as soon as you can do that.
On the federal level? I really doubt it.
They're not that different at any level, if you find a strong conservative (rather than a liberal purple hued Republican). Talk to them. Talk to the young Republicans at your school. Find a compromise with THEM, and then you can start extrapolating.
You'll really learn politics if the Young Democrats and Young Republicans at your school can all agree on a bill proposal. And that may make some real change.
EquALLity wrote:
Yeah, it's definitely going to take awhile. But I think it's worth it.
In terms of the consequences and all of the harm in the mean time? No. That's ego being put ahead of doing actual good.
That's like the vegan-or-bust message. More animals will suffer if we don't compromise a little and put out more moderate messages people can accept.
EquALLity wrote:
I think climate change is the most important issue (aside from getting money out of politics, because that impacts almost everything). Because politicians are heavily funded by the oil and coal industries, they deny the reality of climate change.
Why do Republicans support Nuclear, then? Your conspiracy theory makes no sense.
If the oil lobby bought them off, they'd be fear mongering about Nuclear too. Maybe they're just religious morons who believe God wouldn't let the Earth be destroyed again because of his magical rainbow promise after the flood. Which is exactly what they say if you ask them.
They're pro-power. Consistently. And they don't believe that man can affect God's creation. Consistently.
EquALLity wrote:
Climate change is already a massive crisis, and one party is still denying it exists.
And the other party denies the solution. Are the Democrats bribed by big oil to fear monger over nuclear power? Or are they just honestly stupid too?
You're cherry picking to support this conspiracy theory.
EquALLity wrote:
They are intelligent people, many of them went to Ivy League Colleges- they know climate change is real. They're just indebted to their donors, who they need support from to win elections.[...]
The only way to stop that kind of blatant corruption is to get money out of politics.
Conspiracy theory.
No evidence for any of this.
EquALLity wrote:
brimstoneSalad wrote: Functionally banning all political speech is not the answer.
Nobody is banning any political speech.
That's the only way to really get money out of politics. Speech can always be bought. Even grass roots. Money can be converted into time which can be converted back into money at the individual level if necessary.
EquALLity wrote:
I do political speech, activism. They should play by the same rules as everybody else.
They can play by those rules too. You can't stop their money from influencing politics without banning political speech. They'll find a way.
EquALLity wrote:
Why should the wills of corporations be amplified because they have a lot of money?
It's not that they should, it's that they will be and you can't stop it. It's like the anarchism thing. The vision of a world without money in politics doesn't really make sense as long as we rely on an elected representative government structure.
EquALLity wrote:
Bernie Sanders got a lot more donations then Hillary Clinton (in fact, a literal record-breaking amount of campaign donations). However, despite the huge gap in amount of people giving, Hillary Clinton often raised more money because she got a few huge donations. Why should those few donors have more political say then millions of people?
We talked about why I didn't support Sanders. Others felt the same way.
