Comment by coldtea
8 hours ago
>A lot of things that people call "bribery" is really just ensuring that your preferred candidate gets in office.
Having a preferred candidate you give money to is already bribery - whatever the law says. You fund your favorite pony to get the power. They then scratch your back or lend a sympathetic ear.
Simply spending money to get someone you like elected isn’t bribery.
To the degree great inequality leads to this being decisive in elections, it is a corrupting influence, but the term for it is still not “bribery”.
But when a presidential candidate tells oil companies they should donate because he is going to help them, that’s solid bribery.
When companies pay to “settle” ridiculous accusations, or “donate” to a president’s causes, while their mergers or other business legal issues depend on an openly pay-for-play president’s goodwill, that’s solid bribery.
The country’s policies, discipline, reputation and competence (economic, diplomatic and political) are being sold off for a tiny fraction of what their future adjusted value is worth.
In actual functioning democracies political donations are capped severely.
Say, a single donor can contribute a maximum of €6,000 per parliament candidate per election.
Yes, that's a real limit.
Citizens United assured that will never happen in the US, and everything critics said about it 16 years ago has come into fruition and more.
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Except for clusters of highly correlated private interest groups. PACs. Which completely circumvent that.
Ideally they "shouldn't". But in practice they do.
Because the Supreme Court determined that money is free speech, its use in elections cannot be limited in general.
And where coordination between purportedly independent groups isn't supposed to happen, there is a strong "don't ask, don't tell" code, and a mountain of lawyers ready to scream "political oppression!" on the dime of the rich.
We used to have laws like that, but apparently our supreme court believes that bribing politicians is political speech, and curtailing that speech is unconstitutional, so...
It's so broken.