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.
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.
Say, a single donor can contribute a maximum of €6,000 per parliament candidate per election.
Yes, that's a real limit.
It's so broken.
To the extent that a pretty big chunk of donations are used to fund very short movies (we call them ads) for or against candidates, I'm not sure how that can be distinguished. I could see how one would distinguish get-out-the-vote or other similar non-speech type activities, but those on the Left seem to not oppose such expenditures.
The Citizen's United case being relevant to the former.
In other words, by your distinction, the decision was about stacks of cash, not movies.
A case regarding a movie was indeed brought to the court. The court decided to make a far more expansive decision. The movie became a footnote, and has effectively no meaningful relationship to the court’s final decision or its impact.
As for getting lost in a discussion about the difference between an ad and a movie, that’s really going down a rabbit hole of deliberately missing the point completely. Some word play is just too divorced from reality to engage with. There are many very short movies, and any rational person would be able to distinguish them from ads to a high degree of accuracy.
Now all that's required is a thin fig leaf that you're not actually directly coordinating with the actual campaign. And even that much is never enforced. It almost completely undoes campaign limits.
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.
Alright then what should it be called, because it's also not democracy.
We used to have some limits on it, but now it's trivial to bypass those limits because the Supreme Court decided that the First Amendment isn't limited (except for all of those other limits.)