Corporations can buy elections even more easily now... - Page 3

They will never do anything to sabotage their happy little coalition of The Dumb and The Cynical. Otherwise the whole thing falls apart like a house of cards.

Trust me, you don't want to live in Detroit.

Times like this just make me of Ned Beaty's speech in Network. Jesus Christ, sign the petitions people.

Passing Bills won't do any good, because eventually they'll be deemed unconstitutional as set by this precedent. The only thing Congress can do is try to amend the constitution. That takes 2/3 in each House, and 3/4 of States to ratify. Good luck.

But the problem is the Government is no longer the people, but is now corporations.

But that's a snake eating its own tail, Eenin. Our only defense against corporations is government. But as long as we allow ourselves to be brainwashed by corporate-backed "news" and "opinion," we are being led away from the central American tenet that government is by the people and can be changed by our will, not by the monarchistic decree of a CEO or a cabal of multinational corporations. The way to make our country better is to work within the framework of a brilliant form of government laid down by the founders and framers, not turn into nihilists at the direction of corporate propagandists to allow them to more easily steal our country from us.

It's sort of a false choice, no? If government is corrupt, your options aren't to only have less government, it's also to fix it and make it work better. Like yt says, the only real defense we have against a corporate regime in this country is government, its certainly not more corporate control.

But that would mean that doctrinaire conservatives would have to do something other than pray at the altar of the private sector, and invest in ways to make the public sector function. The tragedy is that who better to do that then the people who are inherently skeptical of government? (Nixon opening up China and all that...) But sadly we don't get altruism by conservatives in power, whether it's because of partisan politics or ideological blindness we get deep cynicism that reinforces their fundamental beliefs that all (or most) government is bad. The result is a hole dug further deep.

Right now though the system is so broken the only way to fix it is to start over again from scratch. The constitutional need to be fix, limits on patents and copyright times need to be written in. Better definition of citizen need to be written in and corporations exuded. Make it so rights only apply to said citizens. Ban all corporations including unions, non profits, and political parties, from giving money or any other form of influence ot elected officials at any level of government.

Remember how I get prone to hyperbole in the politics forum and throw around comments like "this is what an empire imploding looks like" and "looks like the US is going the way of the Romans" and shit like that? And ya know how some people tell me to can it and that I'm over-reacting and getting overly emotional and losing perspective and that it's not necessarily that bad (which I usually freely concede)?

I gotta say, the terrible feeling in the pit of my stomach and the hint of vomit at the back of my throat tells me this time it's really that bad.

Fucking hell guys.

Faaark-ing hell.

Also, corporations can own one another. What about corporate slavery?

I fear the government more then I fear corporations. What to keep the government from crushing us? what is our defense against our own government? The government seem to ignore constitutional when ever it want to at this point in time.

Yes, and corporations are all about upholding the Constitution.

That's IRONIC!

You someone's dellusional when he trust corporations more than his goverment.

Step one. Stop watching FOX.

Goddamn it, Martin.

I don't trust corporations they are just easier to get around then the government.

So, for services like EMS, or environmental or financial regulation you want to rely on ... self-regulation by the private sector?

The government is us, Eenin. If enough of us give two &^%s, we can change it. We can't change corporations. We can't vote on what they do. We can't vote the CEOs out of office. We can't control what they fill the airwaves with when it serves their agenda. We can't stop them from poisoning the air and water. We can't do $%# about their private armies. We can't prevent them from pressuring their bought and paid for politicians from keeping the war machine going because it's good for their profit margin. We can't prevent them from stealing our money through the taxes we pay and the tax breaks they get.

I think you are right not to trust the government but only insofar as the government right now is controlled by corporations that were allowed to mushroom from Reagan until now.

At its heart, the government is not the problem. The corporations are the problem and we are the problem. Either we take it back, or they take it all. You can't start a government from scratch--that's what the founders did and it cost a lot of blood and treasure. And considering how well they shaped it, with checks & balances, look what has happened to it? So, even if you did start from scratch, if you didn't constantly monitor it, constantly learn from history and make adjustments through time, it would end up in this same place.

The fact of the matter is that democracy is not a system where you press a button and everything just stays the same. If you want that, that's called a dictatorship. Democracy is messy.

What a healthy democracy needs to survive is a strong middle class (destroyed by Reagan - Bush - Clinton - Bush II), quality education for all (decimated by Reagan + Bush II) and a free press (destroyed by Reagan, who dumped the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. This wasn't accidental. Big business has been fighting this war for a LONG time and will continue to fight it. But we could start the process of fixing it by trust-busting, fixing education and, most importantly, getting corporate money out out politics.

Of course, this decision just set us back by a mile. We're like maggots facing off against the tripods from War of the Worlds. If we don't support Alan Grayson and others who are trying to pedal this stuff back -- and, most of all, be aware of and supportive of public financing of elections -- we could soon see a government by and for the corporations and the corporations alone. There is no distinction under this ruling between a Chinese-owned corporation and a US-owned corporation, btw.

How so? What do you mean?

<3 <3 <3

Man that list of proposed bills is great.

I don't trust people in general, the bigger the group they less I trust them. The biggest group is the government.

you mean it was destroyed by the two party system. It was not the Presidents, as they don't have any real power, but both parties.

That's fine, but you and your family and everyone you know with be subjected to their decisions, whether you like it or not. At least with government there is the possibility of changing what you and your relatives are subjected to. If you want to go off and live by yourself, that will be fine until the energy companies boil over the earth or manipulate us into more overseas imperialism that creates enough blowback to affect you where you live. You can opt out but it's selfish if you have children (which I do).

The two party system is a disaster. We need public financing of elections and instant run-off voting like a lot of European nations have.

The Presidents have leadership. That's the point of a President.

And things could be getting even worse.

So we've been told that corporations have the right to spend whatever they want on political causes. Now this could open the way for a group of billionaires to get together and spend as much as they want.

Douglas Rushkoff had one of the best pieces about this decision that I've seen:
http://rushkoff.com/2010/01/22/corpo...uber-citizens/