alt Hacker NewsIn actual functioning democracies political donations are capped severely.
Say, a single donor can contribute a maximum of €6,000 per parliament candidate per election.
Yes, that's a real limit.
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We used to have laws like that, but apparently our supreme court believes that bribing politicians is political speech, and curtailing that speech is unconstitutional, so...
It's so broken.
Except for clusters of highly correlated private interest groups. PACs. Which completely circumvent that.
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.
Citizens United assured that will never happen in the US, and everything critics said about it 16 years ago has come into fruition and more.