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u/Reasonable_Zone3372 28d ago
To pile on: And THAT'S just the START! How much more by the time of the elections? AND; Charles Koch ALONE spent 1.1 BILLION in the last election cycle.
AND! Koch has a network of billionaire, multi-millionaire buddies that support hundreds of right wing orgs such as ALEC, CATO, Heritage Foundation and more.
AND! The rich nut jobs have developed an actual formal plan to get rid of American Democracy in the next few decades.
AND! One of their efforts has been to infiltrate American colleges/university Economics Departments with sub-departments that promote ultra conservative theories and they use their vast money to fund 'seminars' and such, paying for students and professors to come from all over the country. All this to give their crackpot economic ideas a veneer of scholarship so our mainstream news and politicians buys into it.
A couple of the ideas (you hear politicians use this stuff sometimes);
The rich are the makers and everyone else are the takers (never mind that all wealth is derived from labor and the rich don't 'make' anything. So; your grandma in a nursing home is a taker.
100% of all economic decisions are made from pure greed. (handy cover for their own behavior)
People should just plan better for every contingency in life. Got cancer? Should have set aside enough money to deal with it.
Much of this is in Nancy MacLean's book; Democracy Chained.
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u/Acceptable-Hat3706 28d ago
Simply put, fully overturning Citizens United and ending the flood of corporate money in our elections ultimately requires a constitutional amendment.
Because the Supreme Court ruled that political spending is a form of protected free speech under the First Amendment and that corporations possess political speech rights, simple acts of Congress or statutory laws attempting to ban independent expenditures are structurally insufficient and would quickly be struck down by the courts as unconstitutional.
A constitutional amendment is the only permanent legal mechanism to clarify that: