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The real breakdown in the rule of law occurred when the US Supreme Court made the specious decision that amoral business entities (corporations) had the same rights in a democracy as citizens.

All this shit flows downhill from Citizens United.

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You must be very young? These issues predate 2010 by millennia.

Citizens United was just the inevitable outgrowth of Buckley v. Valeo 50 years ago, declaring that money == speech.

That was the wellspring of all this shit.

Supreme Court decisions are not a deterministic process like you get with code. Justices twist and contradict precedents to suit their ideological goals all the time; these days they don't even try to hide it much. The Citizens United decision wasn't something that had to happen, it was a deliberate choice by conservatives.

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