The only thing that you have to determine is which political campaigns are these two companies donating the most to. Then you'll know why this isn't being changed.
Both Republicans on the panel.
I included the 'think of the children' bit to illustrate how easy it is to turn a persuasive argument into a blatantly manipulative one.
[0]http://www.huffingtonpost.com/h-a-goodman/bernie-sanders-wil...
[1]http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/06/politics/bill-clinton-crime-pr...
It does bring moral questions, and it is worthwhile to think about limiting the power of "donations" in politics, but people can hold an opinion that we dislike even before receiving a donation. The question is whether they will change their opinion when confronted with data.
Or, why do you hold her to a higher standard than others? (Yes I think they're all corrupt.)
[0]http://articles.philly.com/2016-06-27/news/74031420_1_house-...
No, fuck that. Corporations should be banned from giving money to political parties. Our politicians are supposed to represent our interests as citizens, not our interests as corporations and their employees.
I'm open to changing my mind on this matter if anyone can provide many strong examples of where corporate donation to political parties has lead to demonstrably better outcomes for people at citizens.
> many strong examples of where corporate donation to political parties has lead to demonstrably better outcomes for people at citizens.
I'd bet you could find many strong examples in both directions. I think we'd need either evidence that its systematically one way or the other, or strong logical arguments as to why it would be inevitable (i.e. evidence lacking).
Corporations are banned from donating to either candidates or national party committees (DNC/RNC).
What they're not banned from doing is spending money independently to promote political causes. And I can give you a good example of why that's not a bad thing: had Citizens United gone the other way, the government could have banned the tech company protests against SOPA/PIPA.
My initial reaction to corporate lobbying was probably too knee-jerk. I suppose what gets in the way (or in my way, at least) is ideology. If a corporation (or any group of people) lobbys for something I'm in favour of then I'll cheer them, if they lobby for something I'm against I'll yell boo.
Biases hey.
Well, considering that private prisons are banned in the state of NY but not VT. Yes.
Also, the 'private prison donations' is very loosely connected.
They were bundlers, who worked for a lobbying firm, a firm that got 0.35% of it's money from private prisons. But, that doesn't matter, as they money they raised came from people outside of the lobbying firm and outside of the private prison industry. As that is what bundlers do. If he called me up, and I sent in a check, how is that "private prison money"? It's not, it'd be tied to my industry/job instead. source: https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/firmsum.php?id=D000032306&...
The only actual money she got from an actual PP lobbyist, was given to a charity, and it totaled something like $8,600.
This is similar to how she was connected to the 'oil and gas' lobbyists. People would say Ben Klein, a bundler, represented "oxbow" an oil company, therefor hillary gets money from oil. What they don't tell you is his firm only did 60k worth of business with oxbow (<0.8% of their revenue). But their #2 business was Brookfield Power, aka Brookfield Renewable Energy Parters. Who do Hydro. Yet, Mr Klein, is an "oil lobbyist". Source: https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/firmsum.php?id=D000034396&...
At the time, black communities were being decimated by crack cocaine and by the violence associated with its trafficking, and getting tough on crime was seen as a way to save black lives. (This is also why the majority of the Black Congressional Caucus had voted a few years earlier for making the sentences for crack cocaine much longer than those for powder cocaine).
Did the crime bill work out as hoped? Perhaps not. But its passage had nothing to do with corruption.