Citizes United Unlimited Corporate/ Money in Elections

Mario Elie just sunk a three pointer to beat the Suns!!!!

 

Couldn't you have just revived this thread?
http://bbs.clutchfans.net/showthread.php?t=180726&highlight=citizens+united

 

Dude, I don't like Limbaugh and I'm at work so I can't watch Fox right now. I also never expressed an opinion CU.

That said, why did you feel the need to make a new thread to make your points instead of going to the one that went on when this decision occurred. Do you think the BBS didn't know about this yet?

 

Sorry if you find the common BBS meme of "Old news is exciting!" to be nasty. Actually come to think of it I'm not sorry. There are a few people here I couldn't care less about upsetting and you are one of them.

 

I don't think it is a "yes" or "no" answer. I don't agree with the Citzens United decision but at the same time I don't sit on the USSC and support it in terms that it is the law of the land.

 

Elections should be publicly financed with any candidate presenting a petition with 10% of the population represented by the office qualifying. The amounts for each candidate should be equal and the effectiveness with which they spend it indicative of their administrative skill.

Free speech should be held to a greatly expanded editorial component of the public airwaves and news outlets and routinely subject to non-partisan fact checking.

The idea of buying influence over regulation in the public interest is abhorrent.
Quite simply and demonstrably it is a recipe for continued economic disaster as exploiters out run the regulators.

So ... prepare yourself for recurring economic disasters. I can't even guess at what is next after the banks foreclose on all the housing in the country.

 

I've given a cursory reading to Citizen's United, but I know one of the things Kennedy (who I would not classify as a super conservative) was upset about was the large exceptions for corporations involved in the media, who could say whatever they want or donate however much money they wanted to corporations.

Still, Scalia's reasoning seems pretty valid to me about freedom of speech, and why would you lose that when you are in an association with other people?

 

Wasn't this brought up on either the Colbert Report or the Daily Show this week?

Anyway, no, I think it's bulls**t. If we're going to continue allowing basically unlimited campaign financing, we should at least know exactly who is doing the financing. Personally, I'd be in favor of campaign contribution limits (net limits, not per financier limits). I think they have them in England, don't they? There'd then be a lot more focus on getting the best message across instead of volume attack ads that may land successfully on a few mouth-breathers out there.

There was $3 billion dollars spent on campaigns this election season. $3 billion. This is just money to spend in order to get some guy a job in office and potentially have him work as a puppet for you. It's a disgusting use of money (hey, how about using it on your employees?), but is perfectly reasonable from a capitalism perspective. Sickening.

 

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So you’re okay with foreign companies donating thousands, possibly millions of dollars anonymously to sway the outcome of our elections?

 

Um, yeah.

And even if I was against this, the campaign finance act did way more than just that.

 

So what's the point of you or my involvement in the electoral process anymore? Why should we even bother? Why should I donate my measly $25 - $50 every now and then to a candidate I like knowing that it won’t make a bit of difference?

 

You seem to equate money with winning. I think the Democrats have far outspent the Republicans this cycle, and everyone is predicting massive Republican winnings.

Nevertheless, your argument still doesn't hold that donating to a candidate you want to support is worthless. I think that was one of the neat thing about the Obama campaign was the amount of money they raised from everyday folks just chipping in 5 or 10 bucks. With the right candidate, there's no reason that couldn't happen again under the current structure.

 

Nope, and this is just what we know that's been disclosed.

For the week ending October 24, groups spent a total of $96,843,111, with $52,917,911 on behalf of Republicans and $43,784,367 on behalf of Democrats.