this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2026
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How would that work? Nobody is allowed to talk to a sitting Congress? They just go into seclusion every two years?
We don't even have proper candidate run elections anymore. It's all dark money running influence campaigns 24/7/365 from private think tanks and media companies.
Like, what are you going to do with FOX News or MSNBC during election season? What are you going to do with Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson? With Twitter and Facebook?
That's before we even get into the paradox of asking politicians to regulate themselves.
I agree with you with the fact that lobbying is protected by the first amendment.
You get money out of politics by repealing Citizens United and putting a severe cap on the amount of money that can be donated.
I mean, I'd point you to Steve Balmer and the scandal with the Clippers in the NBA right now if you want to talk about ways to evade spending limits.
The fundamental problem with "getting money out of politics" is that you're dealing with a multi-trillion dollar annual budget running out of a country that prints the global reserve currency (for now). You cannot do politics in this country without moving around enormous volumes of money. It's comically easy for that kind of money to spill into your back pocket, either directly (self-dealing) or through kickbacks and bribes or through insider trading or through second or third order machinations (Dick Cheney getting rich off a ballooning Halliburton stock price because he'd accrued millions in stock compensation during his time as CEO).
CU and private donations are the tiny little tip of the iceberg. Underneath that, you've got the sprawling network of public-private partnerships that administer our bureaucratic state. And then you've got the massive private real estate holdings and capital improvements that benefit from spending decisions. And then you've got the bones of the public sector economy - the public sector amenities and security spending - that any government needs to preserve its legitimacy. All of these operate at the scale of billions and trillions of dollars. It's such that a seemingly banal decision - national standardized testing for public schools, shifts in regulation/subsidy for different kinds of energy infrastructure, where bureaucrats choose to build a highway exit or a train depot or an airport - can generate obscene fortunes downstream.
The problem isn't "money in politics", it's "consolidation of wealth in a bourgeois class".
Steve Balmer was busted. (But only because he broke the rules the other billionaires made.)
Money in politics and the billionaire class go hand in hand.
CU is not the tip of the iceberg, it was the opening of the floodgates.
The ability to form PACs is the vehicle that allows the uber wealthy to use their vast wealth to influence government/legislation.
Public/Private partnerships can be good, but I agree that they are heavily abused.
I had to look up bourgeois and now know that Marxists use it to reference the capitalist exploiters and not the middle class. I agree with you completely there.
Their very existence is proof that unfettered capitalism is not a functional or fair system. America's system has been routinely exploited by those with money and it is so fucking heinous now.
We just need to start eating some billionaires. Or at least feeding them to the pigs. Feed the pigs to the pigs too.
It took eight years, during several of which the facts of the case were known but Ballmer was treated as a victim of slander rather than a man guilty of massive fraud.
Figuratively or literally. But a one year suspension from slapping cheeks in the Congressional locker room and a sternly worded letter from the FEC isn't going to cut it.
The notion that you can just put up a sign that says "Tipping your elected representatives is against the rules" and leave it at that is a fantasy. And the notion that anyone from Kash Patel to James Comey is actually going after the rich and powerful is even more of a fantasy.
"Ah, but if the OWS movement had just People's Mic'd the correct words, elections would work properly by now" is just magical thinking. It isn't materialistic. You're not looking at the networks of social influence or the feedback loops of wealth aggregation that have produced people like Trump, Thiel, Dimon, and Epstein.
Oh here we go, another "expert" who has it figured out.
You are needlessly making this sound so much more complicated than it is.
But I'm done, I was agreeing with you and trying to de-escalate and you are still condescending and pedantic.
How's that working out for you?
Communication is fine. All voters have the equal opportunity to talk to their representative (lottery system if too much demand).
Companies don't get the right to talk to representatives, except indirectly via voters.
Capped, controlled benefits are passed from voters to representative (mainly time Volunteered). No financial benefits from corporations. Election funding is centralised and limited.
I'm saying we make this illegal.
Ban election opinion pieces. Enforce only facts reported. Full speeches, not soundbites.
Anyone with over X followers has their political opinions censored unless they are registered as running for election.
Certainly not. Enforced by an independent judge.
I'm reminded of the national media having a meltdown because Bill Clinton traded a few words with Loretta Lynch on the tarmac in Phoenix. Now I'm imagining this kind of scandal every time a Congressman trades words with a next-door neighbor.
You're going to cap the number of hours a voter can volunteer for a political campaign? Even setting aside how that could possibly be policed, I can't imagine how such a policy would be popular enough for anyone to endorse. Imagine a sitting AG ordering the state sheriffs to drag some little old lady out of a campaign office for overshooting her campaign volunteering hour cap and how that would play in the national news.
We already have an abundance of illegality committed by these private institutions. Nobody is enforcing any of it, precisely because the judicial system is in the pocket of billionaire special interests.
Compare this to drug criminalization. Who gets busted more often? The corporate lawyer doing a line of coke in the Penthouse suite? Or the homeless vagrant melting spoons under the freeway?
Hell, compare it to the TikTok Ban that got advanced under Biden and implemented under Trump. Did TikTok become apolitical after it's American assets were divorced from ByteDance? Or did it become even more political in the hands of a domestic set of oligarchs?
Blatant First Amendment Violation.
As impractical as it is unconstitutional.
By whom? You're going to tell the FCC to censor Elon Musk? You're going to tell the FCC to censor Sitting President Donald Trump? Before or after the head of the agency is fired and the organization is gutted by angry partisans?
No such judge exists.
Talking to politicians is fine. Buying them coffee is not.
Yep. 24h.
I'm not worried about individual work. I'm trying to remove the effect of money.
Sort out paying off politicians and this will change.
Ok, I'll withdraw these. I can't see how these rules wouldn't be abused by fascist dictatorship. Maybe the media is less important with modern technologies.
Remove the money (except for high salary), enforce disbarment for violation. It will take a decade or two but they will be independent.