Your post, that I quoted, had a statement that reads "get corporations out of our democracy".

I have friends that are part of small family corporations. Should they lose their right to be involved in our democracy?

They pay the corporate tax, they pay state and local business taxes.

They pay individual income taxes.

But because they are a corporation they should not have the ability to get involved in elections?

This is one of the core tenets of Marxism.

Concoct a sense of bourgeois oppression under capitalism.

Then send out the useful idiots to overwhelm peoples sensibilities and ratchet up the fear of the all powerful all consuming capitalist monster.

You would think that with the hundreds of millions that were butchered under Stalinism, National Socialism and Maoism that somewhat intelligent people would come to the conclusion that this form of socioeconomic theory is a recipe for total destruction.

Maybe that is the goal.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_e2L9_8t8Q
The whole corporation as a person . . . blah.

How uninteresting. This convo went down hill quick.

Does this mean that you are one of those tighty righties?

I'm a Libertarian, which means I favor liberty over tyranny. As such, I favor the Republicans over Democrats. Right and Left don't mean a lot in American politics. Left would traditionally mean "liberal", but Democrats are only liberal on a few issues, otherwise they are authoritarian. Right would indicate a "Conservative", but Libertarians (undeniably the political philosophy that most favors liberty) choose to group themselves with the the Republican party.

I like the Libertarian philosophy a lot. How to get there from here could be a problem.

Not so much. Baby steps and patience will do the job. Once we have the "right amount" of liberty, I'll become a Conservative.

Chrispm84. I enjoyed your post a lot. I think you are wrong in some of your assumptions, and I don't think your solutions are quite right, but your heart is clearly in the right place. There is an ocean of dis-information out there these days. Don't be a stranger.

Firstly... No, it's not. I suggest picking up a copy of Cummunist Manifesto.

Secondly, I think that the subtlety of the situation regarding the Supreme Court's ruling is being overlooked.



Concoct? Are you suggesting that there is no oppression, oh I don't know of say... the right to collectively bargain wages, benefits, and working conditions of the working class by some members of government?



This is asinine. "Butchered"? History shows us that this country has butchered just as many people under capitalism. Not a good argument.

Ratcheting up fear?

Bushido...

What do you think that we can know from that Supreme Court ruling? I mean, it is clear that there are first amendment rights in question and that robust debate concerning the election process is at the heart of it. However, how does this factor in when we consider a few things...

1. Who has the means to buy nationwide political ads which can run into the millions and are known to affect election outcomes
2. How the organized labor unions are having their rights to collectively bargain taken away
3. There can be no clear distinction drawn between a corporations interests and an individual's interest
4. There is no clear line between corporation expenditures and direct contributions advocating political campaigns

By the way, I agree with the Supreme Court's decision but only because the corruption argument was poorly made.

IMO, Citizens United is not the evil case here. It is only the natural outcome when the fruit of the real evil ruling was put in the hands of a group of corrupt, fringe activist politicians in robes.

The real evil ruling was Buckley v valeo, which ruled that money equals speech. That was one of the stupidest, most nonsensical rulings in our history, and made Citizens United possible.

The Supreme Court.

From Buckley...



There's the loophole.

Well the problem with arguing against this, is you have to demonstrate that money is not needed for expression. In the environment of American media, this is sadly not the case.

Money is the only means of expression, even now as I type on this internet forum if the cable bill does not get paid I loose this avenue of expression. I could go get a library card!

The correlate of that is that money is a means of expression. I find it pretty hard to logically counter that.

I find this entire avenue of approach to be wasteful. Instead of trying to take the money out of politics, we should be taking the politics away from the money.

If we want elections to be fair, we need to get the power away from the political parties, all they do is entrench our government in this partisan war.

We should end primaries. We should setup ranked voting. Everyone can vote for anyone, and then for another, and another.

Heck give everyone 50 possible votes, ranked 1-50. They can vote for the person of there choosing, no lesser of two evils and if enough people agree that person becomes president.

No more parties taking ownership of the American political system. If a group of people want to spend there money convincing people to vote for there candidate, I cannot see anything wrong with that.

However having the two party system dictate who I can vote for too me feels like a two party dictatorship.

It is fundamentally true that he who has more resources has more ability to get his "message" out. I cannot see a way to legislate this out of being a fundamental aspect of our society.

I think it is more important to increase freedom, not remove freedom from those with more resources just becuase we may not agree with there motivations. I believe in democracy, and freedom, that means less restrictions, not more, that means making it easier on the small guy to participate, not making it harder on the large fellow.

I really think this is taking it from the wrong angle. Many people are afraid of technology becuase they do not understand it, cannot check it for themselves. You set them down and place a million ballot cards in front of them and they could count them up. But you place a data dump from a program and they do not trust it, they cannot check it with there skills. The fact is that technology can make it possible to have a federal general election without primaries, without lesser of two evils, and really less chance for fraud. More transparency, and more real debate on the actual issues.

We could have a national web site where you can vote early, and decide to change your vote later. We could have anonymous sections where you could read through peoples reasons for voting for a given person, you could explore links to news articles explaining a candidates position.

We already have internet access in public libraries, we already have a tax system which allows online interactions with the federal government.

We already do the things I have mentioned in other aspects of our lives, why not government?

Taking the media down a peg by allowing these interactions to occur without it being on a media owned website takes a lot of wind out of the sails of big money. It allows the political process to be engaged by anyone that can get a library card, or anyone with an internet connection. If someone called into question a particular vote, we could reference it and catch fraud in the act. The data could be public domain, an encrypted hash value could be in place of a name, but every vote would link to a registered voter in the same exact way a physical vote links.

Instead of relying on the media to show polls you could see real time what people where voting for, and if that person felt like leaving a comment, you could read there reasons why.

Each candidate could link to his website for you go over his pledges, and we could archive them for future reference to hold candidates to there promises.

I honestly see no way to avoid something like this happening, it really is just a matter of time from my perspective.

No, it doesn't. Look up Democide, which is "murder by government". The statistics don't lie on that.

http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/WSJ.ART.HTM


Look at that! 36 million total killed in war in the 20th century and Communist dictatorships killed 95,154,000 people OUTSIDE OF WAR.

Brilliant.

Chart reading not your forte I see.

Application is apparently lacking as well. The 20th century does not exhaust all killing by the US. Not even close.

Something else, I tell ya.

If I made a mistake, point it out.

Let me guess, I didn't make a mistake, you just wanted to make an ad hominem attack on me. Good for you. Good for you.

Who is representing who?

If money is vehicle which advertises political candidacy and the poor obviously have little to no money, who is representing the poor. How can the poor be properly represented?

If those who write the laws write them in the best interests of mega corporations, in the best interests of only owners/employers, in the best interests of those who can already afford private education, then we will see laws get written to strip the rights to collectively bargain, to stand together. Wages will go down, and te poorest members will even less say than they have now. We will see laws get written to cut social security, to cut public school funding, to cut all of the means available for poor people to make a decent wage, to pursue a simple happiness, to get a decent education, to be able to pursue the American dream of coming from little means and being financially sulf-sufficient. Laws will be written to deny healthcare to poor people.

We are seeing this. Now, as we speak, this is happening across the state legislatures, as we speak.

In the eyes of the wealthy, the American poor will become no different than the third world. Worse, in fact. Then we'll see the jobs get offered here on third world terms.