AOC told a story about how a pro Israel person offered her a huge campaign donation, which she declined. One of the reasons she could easily decline it was that she already had enough money. By that time, her seat wasn’t in that much danger.
I’m not saying that AOC would have taken the money if she had a smaller campaign fund. There’s no way to know that.
But you can be sure that if we did proper campaign finance reform, and stopped every instance where a single source of money can create undue influence, then a lot more politicians would be able to afford to be honest.
Our current system nearly guarantees that honest politicians will be forced out by corrupt politicians who can easily accept huge donations.
Thats why I dont understand conservatives at all when they tell me their values. For one, they do worship their politicians. They get all their positions from what those politicians tell them they should think, and all those politicians only hold those positions and evangelize them because they’ve been paid millions of dollars by a lobbying firm to do exactly that.
They’re like three degrees removed from having any actual personal convictions about anything. It’s why anytime you argue with a conservative and they say something that just inherently doesn’t make sense you cant ask them to expand on what they mean. You can’t dig in to any of their beliefs because the extent of their knowledge is the canned responses they’ve learned from fox news.
I’ve gone through my adulthood deconstructing all different manner of beliefs I held and tracing them back to the think tanks that came up with them. Odds are SOMETHING you believe and hold as a conviction was carefully crafted by a policy institute some time in the 80s or 90s. It’s not inherently bad to hold positions that were developed by people hired to craft a specific outcome, but to do so uncritically and without regard for whether the position is factual and based in reality is bad. If you unironically go around saying climate change is unsettled science without knowing that an oil company created the lab that made the report saying climate science was unsettled then you are a bad person lol
Back on topic: lobbying creates this cognitive dissonance field around american politics that I dont think exists anywhere else in the world. People are identifying themselves with politicians and then becoming walking ambassadors for israel because the guy they identify with got 10 million dollars from a zionist lobby. Nobody in real life is walking around having the original thought of “mass murder of children is good actually, for reasons I can explain” because its an insane position you’d have to be paid millions of dollars to hold. Idk how people don’t realize how badly this distortion has affected our actual lives.
It’s beyond what AOC did or didnt take from which lobby. The entire monetary superstructure around our government needs to be dismantled. We cant let the government just make decisions based on who is paying the most money for any given law. We cant actually fix any of the problems facing our society if the entity responsible for the problem is also the only one wealthy enough to impact legislation that will stop the problem. That’s how we end up with climate legislation that has oil subsidies and healthcare laws but no Healthcare. We’ve built a society by and for corporations that no human being (or planet) could survive.
AOC told a story about how a pro Israel person offered her a huge campaign donation, which she declined. One of the reasons she could easily decline it was that she already had enough money. By that time, her seat wasn’t in that much danger.
I’m not saying that AOC would have taken the money if she had a smaller campaign fund. There’s no way to know that.
But you can be sure that if we did proper campaign finance reform, and stopped every instance where a single source of money can create undue influence, then a lot more politicians would be able to afford to be honest.
Our current system nearly guarantees that honest politicians will be forced out by corrupt politicians who can easily accept huge donations.
Yeah, I’ve seen a few stories like that about her. She’s still not rich IIRC, her net worth is below a mil. I respect that.
Thats why I dont understand conservatives at all when they tell me their values. For one, they do worship their politicians. They get all their positions from what those politicians tell them they should think, and all those politicians only hold those positions and evangelize them because they’ve been paid millions of dollars by a lobbying firm to do exactly that.
They’re like three degrees removed from having any actual personal convictions about anything. It’s why anytime you argue with a conservative and they say something that just inherently doesn’t make sense you cant ask them to expand on what they mean. You can’t dig in to any of their beliefs because the extent of their knowledge is the canned responses they’ve learned from fox news.
I’ve gone through my adulthood deconstructing all different manner of beliefs I held and tracing them back to the think tanks that came up with them. Odds are SOMETHING you believe and hold as a conviction was carefully crafted by a policy institute some time in the 80s or 90s. It’s not inherently bad to hold positions that were developed by people hired to craft a specific outcome, but to do so uncritically and without regard for whether the position is factual and based in reality is bad. If you unironically go around saying climate change is unsettled science without knowing that an oil company created the lab that made the report saying climate science was unsettled then you are a bad person lol
Back on topic: lobbying creates this cognitive dissonance field around american politics that I dont think exists anywhere else in the world. People are identifying themselves with politicians and then becoming walking ambassadors for israel because the guy they identify with got 10 million dollars from a zionist lobby. Nobody in real life is walking around having the original thought of “mass murder of children is good actually, for reasons I can explain” because its an insane position you’d have to be paid millions of dollars to hold. Idk how people don’t realize how badly this distortion has affected our actual lives.
It’s beyond what AOC did or didnt take from which lobby. The entire monetary superstructure around our government needs to be dismantled. We cant let the government just make decisions based on who is paying the most money for any given law. We cant actually fix any of the problems facing our society if the entity responsible for the problem is also the only one wealthy enough to impact legislation that will stop the problem. That’s how we end up with climate legislation that has oil subsidies and healthcare laws but no Healthcare. We’ve built a society by and for corporations that no human being (or planet) could survive.