Hey everybody, welcome to my substack again, and we’re gonna be talking about the, yesterday was the anniversary of Citizens United, and I’m gonna try to possibly come up with a few ideas on how to solve this problem. These things kind of start in a strange place. And it had a lot to do with, Hillary Clinton’s election and who could donate, to political campaigns and how corporations became human.
but you know, it’s kind of now created an unfair playing field for elections and democracy. right now it’s crazy, but. you know, it’s like billions and billions of dollars being spent on elections and most of it is coming from the upper 1% corporations, faceless entities out there who are now using this system basically to own democracy
Individual donations, probably account for. One third of all of the Don political donations. Now, the other two thirds are coming from these entities that are part of a brand new architecture that’s only been around for 13 years. But anyway, so, you know, we can talk about these things, but you know, pacs are, you know, where, where they kind of bundle all of their influence together anonymously.
And anybody can basically start a pack. And with the right amount of marketing, they can bring a drove of money, a pile of money, droves of money into the political system. Charlie Kirk had a pact, you know, PAC and, yeah. So what are we gonna do about our elections and democracy when it’s all about the money?
How do we change that? Well, we can consider. Trying to get people on the Supreme Court trying to pass a law in the Republican Congress, or in, the November newly elected Congress. Hopefully it’s the, Democrats and Senate and try to get it passed. But we we’re gonna have to wait two, three years in order to try to overturn Citizens United and to get the filthy Lura.
Luca, get it out of. Our political system, if we can’t do that well, democracy is ruined and finished regardless of what you think of Donald Trump. So, you know, and, and what’s crazy is these Super pacs and all the branding that went into them, and you know what that crazy thing is, is that the media certainly has no interest in doing away with these Super pacs and Citizen United.
They’re not interested in losing all of that campaign money that comes into their advertising department. and so they’re complicit in this stealing of democracy. so just remember that your vote counts as one third of all the political influence that it could. it’s not necessarily the one vote counts as an equal vote, and expecting the public to be better educated on who’s funding these elections and who’s influencing them in, in the way they vote.
that’s a big expectation. Also trying to get people to vote their own best interest. When you have the internet that is blowing things up and you have people much like myself who just have an opinion, persuing people just to get views and just to get hits on their pages, guiding them into the voting booth, many, online.
Influencers are funded by these pacs. Even they receive money from these pacs just to spew, the corporate line. There’s a reason why Americans don’t have national healthcare. There’s a reason why we spend most of our money on bombs and planes. So, yeah. his stuff is, and it’s only gotten worse under.
Thanks to the internet and thanks to Citizens United Corporate United, they, and, and this is verbiage man, it drives me nuts every time I see some, you know, the save act and all of this nonsense that we have to put up through the media. It’s not the Save act, it’s the marginalized, the Voter Act, which is.
Funded by pacs, which is funded by, you know, elected officials. Elected officials in the media have no interest in overturning Citizen United. So what if the only answer is never, ever donate again individually or to a pac? Any money? I get emails all the time. I get phone calls. Please donate. Please donate.
Do this, donate, do that. What if we let the, the money system, at least one third of it dry up, wonder what the impact would be? I think it would probably, you know, hurt the Democratic party’s chances. You know more, but there’s some answers. If, if, if, if we could, if we wait three years and if the Dems can take power, they can have some sort of stipend to make up the two thirds difference, so that if I donated, say, $25, the government would match it up to 75, so then we would be equal to.
Corporate funding for these elections if we wanted to bring back, capitalist democracy, if there’s even such a thing anymore. Or we could just give candidates stipends to run for office and everyone’s on an equal field and you can, you don’t have to donate anymore. And it’s part of the. Tax code where yeah, every Senate candidate gets a billion, every house candidate gets a million, and so on and so forth.
So yeah. that’s one answer. Another answer is we could just cap pack influence It sure would be hard though. Super PACS exists because of court rulings and you know, the idea that they get free speech just like you. Free speech. Come on. We, in a past life, I worked at a community access television channel.
Our budget was slightly over a million dollars a year. rush Limbaugh was paid $60 million a year to run his show every day. So both were built on. The fun notion of free speech is, I mean, I don’t know how free 60 million compared to 1 million is, but yeah, that’s the story. I’d love to be able to, you know, have pure free speech, but when you have, you know, so much money influencing the platforms that propose free speech, I don’t know how you’re gonna do it.
And, and these platforms, in order to make them shine, they have to put on lighting and then they run their advertising. So it’s, it’s a very, very monetized democracy that it seems there is no end to it, but possibly the end could be through law or we just stopped donating to all candidates individually, let the PACS dominate the scene and.
Eventually the law will say, whoa, wait a minute, this is warped. We didn’t mean for, for democracy to die at the feet of corporate America, but that’s, you know, that’s extreme. And I just don’t know if it’ll work because quite frankly, corporations, they’ll never give up their foothold. They’ll never get up, give up their tax [00:09:00] evasion status.
Well, never’s a hard word, but let’s just hope that they do. but you know, your vote should matter more, but the PAC is dominating the voting scene. And you know, the concentration of wealth in this country really has made the battle battlefield ridiculously lopsided, but. The system is still built by law, and if we get a few politicians willing to basically give up their stipends and fundraising, and they go through this fundraising rigamarole without ever mentioning that, well, the fundraising system and money for votes is corrupt in its essence.
Nobody says it. Everybody asks for money. Nobody wants to shout down. The elephant and the donkey in the room, they just want to raise money. And you know, everybody knows that the House of Representatives just a money machine powerless. They come out and start begging for money immediately upon election.
‘cause it’s every two years. it’s really sad, but we can still believe in the myth that people have the final say. my name is Carl and this is my mind chime and I’m trying a new way of doing it and creating podcasts as well as my substack post. And if you like what you hear, please subscribe, and share this with your friends and you know, I’ll be here.
Hopefully more often now. we had a little issue health wise that was kind of disturbing, but it’s actually given me more perspective on the, how important it is for people to speak up and people to try to have the final say. But anyway, yeah, let’s not celebrate the, anniversary of Citizens United.
Let’s change it. Let’s change the law. Let’s get the money out of the politics. And let’s get nationalized healthcare. Let’s pull down on these, war machines and the industrial, military, industrial complex. Let’s shut ‘em down. We don’t need ‘em. and let’s stop with the gosh darn fear, mon mongering. I mean, they, they use fear to raise money.
you gotta stop. You gotta stop. And we have to stop them somehow, some way through laws. Let’s get the last honest people, elected people who say, I’m not interested in raising money to get into this office. I’m interested in Stop getting the money out of politics. Until then, we will basically be tools of capitalism and our democracy is gone already and it will be lost until these rules change.
So anyway, like and share this. Thanks for listening. Thanks for reading. I’m Carl, and until next time.
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