Is Citizen's United the only thing that allowed one person to donate $150 million? This is the obvious flaw. We would need a RICO type framework to identify the basket of vectors that one person/organization can use to funnel money to a candidate. This is a bipartisan issue but I don't know how we can surface the narrative so more people can talk about it.

I think you are confusing Citizens United v FEC (2010) with Buckley v. Valeo (1976). (CU is largely “corporations are people applies in the application of Buckley”.)

Though, also, neither decision impacts limitations on donations to candidates, both address limitations on expenditures (in Buckley’s case by non-candidate persons independent of campaigns, by candidates from personal funds, and by candidates in aggregate; CU mostly deals with the first of those where the legal person is a corporation and not a natural person.)

I agree that allowing elections to be influenced by spending money was a mistake. Campaign spending is way out of control and it reduces our leaders and politicians into desperately begging for donations.

Citizens United has no impact on what an individual can do with his money. It’s purely about corporate spending by entities like IBM, the Sierra Club, or the New York Times Company.

It does because a rich individual can just start a proxy corp and do whatever.

They don’t need to because a rich individual already can use their money for whatever speech they like.

No one private citizen should be able to hold that much influence

> In the long run, unions can be blamed for this whole Trump Presidency.

Yeah, how dare they do the things that make reactionaries be... reactionary.

I think there was a lot of pressure on Tesla/Elon to donate and participate more, and higher ups turned pretty hard on him when he didn't. They were pulling the tax credit from Tesla while holding EV summits with everyone but him. I don't think he was being reactionary, I think his hand was forced.

Further he really isn't a conservative. He's still running around on X talking about how we need to double the number of H1-B's and other social-left causes. Cutting spending through DOGE is something every Republican has talked about for decades, and I don't think it's a major flip for him to want to do that.

I don't think H1-Bs are really a "social-left cause". They're something that big tech companies like because they get to cherry-pick skilled workers and keep them locked in. On the main political spectrum, I think they're pretty centrist. The right dislikes them because they're immigration in disguise, the left dislikes them because they're indentured servitude in disguise.

With all due respect, I don't think you have any idea what you're talking about

The democrats also tried to pass legislation in 2021 that excludes Tesla from an EV credit due to it being not built by unions, even though Tesla has by far the largest share of electric vehicles and is the most productive and innovative company in this sector.

Yeah we wouldn't want the people making the product having representation and getting a larger share of the take on the sale of said product.

For guys like that, being pro-union is personal dislike.

They see themselves as the smartest, strongest, most clever people in history. They don't need some group moderating their plans, much less one made of people they hired. Any suggestion to the contrary is a strike against the natural order that they perceive reality through.