Considering how NEW citizens United United is...and how every other democracy seems to be able to handle this somewhat sanely... Why is it so hard to imagine? It wasn't like this even in 1995...
Well, 1995 was seven years before Congress passed the statute that the FEC was misinterpreting in the Citizens United case.
The Citizens United ruling had essentially noting to do with "money
in politics" and was just a bog standard first amendment ruling against a federal agency attempting to read the power to regulate political speech into a statute that had been passed a mere eight years earlier.
Contrary to the misinformation spread through the media, the court did not rule that "money is speech", but ruled almost exactly the opposite: it was the FEC that was attempting to argue that "speech is money" -- that using resources to speak in a way that might persuade voters was equivalent to donating those resources directly to a candidate -- and therefore they had the right to restrict the publication of "electioneering communications". The court ruled that no, speech is not money, and is protected by the first amendment under all circumstances.
So the ruling put things back the way they were in 1995, before the FEC had ever gotten the idea that they had the power to censor speech.
This is just lying by ommision or gaslighting.... Yes citizens United opened the floodgates to money in us politics overturning nearly A CENTURY old precedent and allowing something unlike anything that had happened in that previous century.... And to downplay it as just going back to status quo is absurd .
This is a good point. No matter the intent, we must also focus on the real world outcomes of said policy.
The Citizens United ruling didn’t just clarify the FEC’s authority, it fundamentally reshaped the landscape of American politics by allowing unlimited corporate and union spending on elections, which critics argue disproportionately amplifies the influence of wealth. While the Court didn’t explicitly equate money with speech, its decision enabled the flow of money into the political system in a way that is effectively treated as free speech under the First Amendment. Far from "restoring the status quo," Citizens United created a system where the wealthy can now spend unlimited amounts of money to sway elections, a shift that has drastically altered democratic representation.
> While the Court didn’t explicitly equate money with speech
The court did the exact opposite, and repudiated the attempt by the FEC to equate money with speech.
The FEC were effectively arguing that "speech is money" and that their authority to regulate campaign donations allowed them to censor the direct expression of political opinions by organizations that weren't associated with candidates in any way, under the theory that the expenditure of resources in a way that might influence voters' opinions is equivalent to directly donating the monetary value of those resources to whichever candidates might benefit from shifts in opinion.
Prior to the FEC's attempted enforcement of the 2002 BCRA, this wasn't even an issue at question -- the right of individuals and organizations alike to express their own opinions with their own resources was never in doubt.
No, it didn't. There's gaslighting going on, but I'm afraid you've been gaslit by the media here. CU was not about campaign donations, despite the frenzied attempts by various factions to pretend otherwise. No donations of money to political candidates were involved in the facts of the case or in the ruling in any way whatsoever.
There was no century old precedent at stake at all. The case, and the ruling, was about the FEC attempting to use a 2002 statute to censor the release of a movie in 2008, invoking a concept ("electioneering communication") that did not exist at all prior to the 21st century.
So are you stupid, malicious, or a lawyer? I don't mean the term precedent as in the specifics of this legal case.
What I meant was that before this case ....there were a variety of limits and checks regarding money in politics from a variety of sources... and especially regarding corporate donations.... And after the case was ruled this way... money flowed in a way that it hasnt in 100 years prior. Any attempt to deny this is just criminal.
Citizens United didn't overturn any other precedent apart from Austin (Buckley v. Valeo still holds, for example), didn't alter any rules regarding corporate campaign donations (which are still entirely prohibited!), and everything went back to the way it was pre-2002, before any attempts to censor speech under the guise of regulating campaign donations were made.
Regulation doesn't work. It's usually co-opted by the very parties it's intended to regulate, and used as a means to entrench rather than limit their power. In the worst case, it actually makes things far worse by allowing established interests to manipulate regulation to create barriers to entry for competition, produce collusive outcomes that would otherwise be illegal, and replace common-law liability for the actual consequences of their behavior with prescriptive rules that they can comply with performatively.
Regulation works fine - you can observe it working fine in every other first world country directly mitigating and resolving many of the problems still present in the US.
I'm afraid I can't observe any of that. All I can see is superficial appearances -- I can't see behind-the-scenes corruption or measure superior alternatives that were suppressed in favor of locking in a marginally mitigated version of the status quo ante.
I can, however, see the some of the unintended consequences of regulatory interventions in other countries. For example, Germany's ban on nuclear power made them dependent on Russian oil imports, inadvertently propping up Putin's regime.
> I'm afraid I can't observe any of that. All I can see is superficial appearances
This sounds like you are observing much of that, and then dismissing the results as superficial appearances.
Dismissing regulation here would be like dismissing a comparison of a correlation between laws against murder and a low murder rate and a correlation between no laws against murder and a high murder rate.
>Dismissing regulation here would be like dismissing a comparison of a correlation between laws against murder and a low murder rate and a correlation between no laws against murder and a high murder rate.
The reality is there is a hint of truth in everything. We must be careful to assign cause where correlation exists.
Let's use Vermont's gun laws for example. Over the last 40 years, the state's approach to firearms has been quite permissive, with relatively few restrictions, but it still maintains a reputation for having one of the lowest gun violence rates in the country. Vermont is one of the few states in the U.S. where people can carry a concealed weapon without a permit. So is it regulation that prevents the gun violence, as many would lead you to believe, or is it a combination of factors. Factors like social stability, cultural attitudes toward guns, and the state's strong focus on community engagement. Those all contribute to the relative lack of gun violence, rather than simply the laws themselves.
But speaking from experience, when we are deep into ego development years (think teens), I would have absolutely killed someone if it wasn't for murder laws. But today, what holds me back is empathy, and not the law.
> Vermont is one of the few states in the U.S. where people can carry a concealed weapon without a permit
That was true for decades, but over the past 15 years, 28 more states have adopted Vermont-style permitless concealed carry laws, so it's now a majority of states that allow this.
"Capitalist society" can have many different meanings. Pure 100% capitalism does not exist and has never existed, and no serious capitalist thinker has ever argued for it.
I'd argue that what critics of "capitalism" use the term to describe is essentially a straw man that has never accurately represented any real-life economy.
