Guno צְבִי (10-13-2021), Matt Dillon (10-13-2021)
The USA is so f*cked over with corruption that unless there is a massive boycott to bring the country to a halt until the money is pulled out of politics, things will only get progressively world. USA USA USA...the only industrialized cesspool to make government bribery, money laundering and insider trading legal. smfh
BLUEXITA Modest Proposal For Separating Blue States From Red
Dear Red-State Trump Voter,
Let’s face it, guys: We’re done.
It is a tragedy that so much of the work that so many men and women toiled at for so long to make this a better country, and a better world, has been thrown away, leaving us all in such needless peril.
This is why our separation in all but name is necessary.
https://newrepublic.com/article/1409...mp-red-america
Guno צְבִי (10-13-2021), Matt Dillon (10-13-2021)
A sad commentary on we, as a people, and our viewpoint of our freedom can be summed up like this. We have liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, yet those very people look at Constitutionalists as radical and extreme.................so those liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans must believe that the constitution is radical and extreme.
christiefan915 (10-15-2021), evince (10-13-2021), Guno צְבִי (10-13-2021), ThatOwlWoman (10-13-2021)
If there is no need for candidates to fundraise from wealthy donors and corporations, the only way they can get elected into office is by appealing to voters with policies and beliefs that they like.
So that's why public campaign financing, with a ban on political donations and lobbying, is the closest we can get to free and fair elections in this country.
With that mechanism in place, political parties will cease holding so much power, and that power is returned to the citizenry, where it belongs.
After all, about 90% of a politician's time is spent fundraising...not working on legislation, not holding hearings, not negotiating....fundraising.
So take fundraising out of the equation, and watch as candidates compete for votes with ideas instead of competing for money with access.
When I die, turn me into a brick and use me to cave in the skull of a fascist
Cinnabar (10-13-2021), Guno צְבִי (10-13-2021)
try getting any of those campaign financing laws passed while you have elected officials benefitting from that money.......
see, this is the one thing most of you tend to intentionally ignore........you keep voting in people who say one thing, then keep doing the same things they have, or that their predecessor did.............it's insane, or as you would call it...incoherent
A sad commentary on we, as a people, and our viewpoint of our freedom can be summed up like this. We have liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, yet those very people look at Constitutionalists as radical and extreme.................so those liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans must believe that the constitution is radical and extreme.
No one said it would be easy.
But if enough of us get on board, we can affect that change.
No, we keep voting for people who inherit wealthy donors and lobbyists from their predecessors, who keep the gravy train running by offering donations for access..you keep voting in people who say one thing, then keep doing the same things they have, or that their predecessor did
If you take that gravy train away, what does a political candidate then have to do to get elected?
And then what does that elected representative have to do in order to be re-elected?
The answer is very, very simple; produce for their constituency.
If their constituency is regular voters like you and me, then isn't that what we want out of our elected representatives? If their constituency are rich people and corporations, because that's who they raise money from, then who do you think they're going to legislate for?
So many of our problems are very easily solved! It's just a matter of will.
When I die, turn me into a brick and use me to cave in the skull of a fascist
Well here is the result of not doing anything...
January 31, 2019
The rich are well placed to bribe our politicians to reduce taxes on the rich. The Koch brothers and other mega-rich troglodytes explicitly told Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan in 2017 that if the Republican Party, controlling all three branches of government, could not lower taxes on its main sponsors, there would be no billionaire backing of the party in the 2018 midterms. This threat of an electoral firing squad made the hundreds of bribe-takers in Congress sit up and take notice, and they duly gave away to the billionaire class $1.5 trillion in government services (that’s what Federal taxes are, folks, services–roads, schools, health inspections, implementation of anti-pollution laws–things that everyone benefits from and which won’t be there any more. To the extent that the government will try to continue to provide those slashed services despite assessing no taxes on the people with the money to pay for them, it will run up an enormous budget deficit and weaken the dollar, which is a form of inflation in the imported goods sector. Inflation hits the poor the worst. As it stands, 3 American billionaires are worth, as much as the bottom 150 million Americans. That kind of wealth inequality hasn’t been seen in the US since the age of the robber barons in the nineteenth century. Both eras are marked by extreme corruption.
One sign of American corruption is the rapidity with which American society has become more unequal since the 1980s Reagan destruction of the progressive income tax. The wealthier the top 1 percent is, the more politicians it can buy to gather up even more of the country’s wealth. In my lifetime the top one percent has gone from holding 25% of the privately held wealth under Eisenhower to over 38% today. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is right that we need to much increase the top marginal tax rate; and we need to tax unearned income, as well.
The US military budget is bloated and enormous, bigger than the military budgets of the next twelve major states. What isn’t usually realized is that perhaps half of it is spent on outsourced services, not on the military. It is corporate welfare on a cosmic scale. I’ve seen with my own eyes how officers in the military get out and then form companies to sell things to their former colleagues still on the inside. Precisely because it is a cesspool of large-scale corruption, Trump’s budget will throw over $100 billion extra taxpayer dollars at it.
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2...-country-world
BLUEXITA Modest Proposal For Separating Blue States From Red
Dear Red-State Trump Voter,
Let’s face it, guys: We’re done.
It is a tragedy that so much of the work that so many men and women toiled at for so long to make this a better country, and a better world, has been thrown away, leaving us all in such needless peril.
This is why our separation in all but name is necessary.
https://newrepublic.com/article/1409...mp-red-america
Guno צְבִי (10-13-2021), LV426 (10-13-2021)
Guno צְבִי (10-13-2021), Phantasmal (10-13-2021)
The republicans destroy the laws we do make to fix this folks
Grassroots funding works when the policies are popular. For example...
Fueled by Teachers and Average Donation of $18, Sanders Raised Record $25.3 Million in Third Quarter
"Bernie is proud to be the only candidate running to defeat Donald Trump who is 100 percent funded by grassroots donations—both in the primary and in the general."
https://www.commondreams.org/news/20...-million-third
BLUEXITA Modest Proposal For Separating Blue States From Red
Dear Red-State Trump Voter,
Let’s face it, guys: We’re done.
It is a tragedy that so much of the work that so many men and women toiled at for so long to make this a better country, and a better world, has been thrown away, leaving us all in such needless peril.
This is why our separation in all but name is necessary.
https://newrepublic.com/article/1409...mp-red-america
Guno צְבִי (10-13-2021)
It should come as no surprise that politicians, who spend 90% of their time around rich people, are going to pass legislation that benefits those people.
If you made those donors irrelevant, suddenly the candidate needs to win over VOTERS instead of DONORS, and they win over voters with popular policies that people want.
This isn't rocket science...it's pretty fuckin' easy, we just need to get over ourselves.
When I die, turn me into a brick and use me to cave in the skull of a fascist
christiefan915 (10-15-2021), Guno צְבִי (10-13-2021)
BLUEXITA Modest Proposal For Separating Blue States From Red
Dear Red-State Trump Voter,
Let’s face it, guys: We’re done.
It is a tragedy that so much of the work that so many men and women toiled at for so long to make this a better country, and a better world, has been thrown away, leaving us all in such needless peril.
This is why our separation in all but name is necessary.
https://newrepublic.com/article/1409...mp-red-america
Guno צְבִי (10-13-2021), LV426 (10-13-2021)
When I die, turn me into a brick and use me to cave in the skull of a fascist
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_money
Legislative and regulatory proposals and debate over dark money Edit
Democrats in the United States Congress have repeatedly introduced the DISCLOSE Act, proposed legislation to require disclosure of election spending by "corporations, labor unions, super-PACs, and, most importantly, politically active nonprofits."[54] The 2014 version of the DISCLOSE Act would require covered groups, including 501(c)(4), to reveal the source of election-spending donations of $10,000 or more.[54] The bill also targets the use of pass-through and shell corporations to evade disclosure by requiring that such groups disclose the origin of contributions.[54] Senate Republicans, led by their leader Mitch McConnell, "have blocked earlier iterations of the DISCLOSE Act since 2010."[54]
According to Columbia Law School's Richard Briffault, disclosure of campaign expenditures, contributions, and donors is intended to deter corruption.[55]
The Federal Election Commission (FEC), which regulates federal elections, has been unable to control dark money. According to the Center for Public Integrity, FEC commissioners are voting on many fewer enforcement matters than in the past because of "an overtaxed staff and commissioner disagreement."[16] The IRS (rather than the FEC) is responsible for oversight of 501(c)(4) groups.[16] The IRS "found itself ill-prepared for the groundswell" of such groups taking and spending unlimited amounts of money for political purposes in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission in 2010.[16] The agency particularly "struggled to identify which organizations appeared to be spending more than the recommended 50 percent of their annual budgets on political activities—and even to define what 'political spending' was."[16] When the IRS began looking at nonprofit spending, it was accused of improper targeting in a 2013 controversy.[16]
"With the FEC and IRS duly sidelined" advocates for disclosure turned to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC); nine academics from universities across the U.S. petitioned the SEC in August 2011 for the agency to "develop rules to require public companies to disclose to shareholders the use of corporate resources for political activities."[16] The petition received over a million comments in the following month, "a record amount for the SEC, with the overwhelming majority of voters asking for better disclosure."[16] According to Lucian Bebchuk, a Harvard professor of law, economics, and finance who helped draft the petition, the request had drawn the support of "nearly a dozen senators and more than 40 members of the House."[16] Under current SEC regulations, public corporations must file a Form 8-K report to publicly announce major events of interest to shareholders.[56] The Sunlight Foundation, a group which advocates for a comprehensive disclosure regime, has proposed that the 8-K rule should be updated to require that aggregate spending of $10,000 on political activities (such as monetary contributions, in-kind contributions, and membership dues or other payments to organizations that engage in political activities) should be disclosed and made publicly available via the 8-K system.[56]
In 2015, Republicans in Congress successfully pushed for a rider in a 2015 omnibus spending bill that bars the IRS from clarifying the social-welfare tax exemption to combat dark money "from advocacy groups that claim to be social welfare organizations rather than political committees."[57] Other provisions in the 2015 bill bar the SEC from requiring corporations to disclose campaign spending to shareholders, and a ban application of the gift tax to nonprofit donors. The Obama administration opposed these provisions, but President Obama eventually acceded to them in December 2015, with the White House declining to comment. The nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center said in a statement that the dark-money provision ensures "that the door to secret foreign dollars in U.S. elections remains wide open through secret contributions to these ostensibly 'nonpolitical' groups that run campaign ads without any disclosure of their donors."[57]
The Center for Competitive Politics (CCP), chaired by former FEC chairman Bradley A. Smith, opposes legislation to require the disclosure of dark-money groups, saying: "Our view is that many people will be driven out of politics if they are forced to disclose their names and their personal information. The purpose of disclosure is to help people monitor the government, not for the government to monitor the people."[16] The Center for Competitive Politics views "dark money" as a pejorative term, stating that the phrase "evokes an emotional, fearful reaction" and contending that "many of the statistics published on the topic aim to mislead rather than enlighten."[58] The CCP maintains that dark money "comprises a very small percentage of total campaign spending," calculating the percent of money spent in federal elections by organizations that did not provide itemized disclosure of their donors as 4.3% in 2012 and 3.7% in 2014.[58]
In May 2019 the Attorney General of New York, Letitia James, filed a lawsuit against the Treasury Department and the IRS for failing to respond to information requests about their guidance reducing donor disclosure requirements for certain tax-exempt groups.[59]
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