6mo ago

Greenland plans to ban foreign political funding over Trump-led election fears

www.theguardian.com

37 comments

Foreign political funding should be banned everywhere by default. It makes no sense to let foreign interests muck about in your domestic policy.
- Even local political funding should be banned. Elections should be funded by the state with each candidate getting the same amount of exposure.
  
  I’m okay with funding from constituents, with strict caps on amounts. That way people who have lots of public support get more funding, but a wealthy person can’t outspend someone else.
  No funding from corporations, and no anonymous funding.
  
  Andrew Yang has a great term for this:
  Democracy Dollars
  Also his term for UBI:
  Freedom Dividend
  Great naming lol. Like who could hate something called "Freedom Dividend" and "Democracy Dollars" 😅 (Magats would hate it, they hate democracy)
  Other Policies, if you're interested: https://2020.yang2020.com/policies/?tab=all
  If ranked choice was a thing, I'd probably rank Yang #1, Bernie #2. (Since Yang would probabky never get elected, so I might as well give him the #1 ranking, his ideas are cool)
  
  That sounds like a system that would be rife for abuse.
- I agree in principle, but in practice it’s tricky. You must have courts that are strong enough to throw out election results if foreign interference can be proven. This has recently happened in Romania, but there are also many examples in which these laws were meaningless. The US is the obvious case where the 2016 election result should have been thrown out, but nothing happened. For the Brexit vote I think some pretty meaningless fines were handed out.
  Another question is what should happen with foreign interference that is not financial in nature. For instance, Musk speaking at AFD, or the Meta algorithms pushing political content.
Both EU and UK should do the same.
- It's not a bad plan in general, really. Maybe the US should look into and rectify issues that may already exist around political funding.
- And Canada
  
  That's already the law in Canada:
  Only individuals who are Canadian citizens or permanent residents can make contributions to registered parties, electoral district associations, candidates, leadership contestants and nomination contestants.
- At least Germany already does it. On the federal level the maximum donation for non-EU citizens/corporations is 1000 Euro, which is why the Bundestag is investigating Musk giving Weidel a platform as if you were to buy that kind of reach you'd pay way more than 1k. It's generally the parties which get fined for accepting. Donations over 10k must be publicised, over I think 35k immediately. State law is generally similar.
This is the best preventative measure they can do for now. Musk and other actors can dump massive amounts of money into elections to sway them and many of these democracies haven’t been challenged from outside like this before.
Good on ya fellas. Don't allow our Orange Idiot fuck with you.
I don’t think tanks, missiles and boots on the ground cares too much about elections! Trump is a facist and he’ll use the American empire military and economic force to bend other nations to his will!
- If he decides to go to war on multiple fronts with no one backing him up, I don't think it will go well for him.
  
  There's always russia and Isreal.
- I really do think that a war of bald faced imperial oligarchic aggression would trigger the collapse of the union.
Foreign and corporate. Anything over $2000 from an entity.
They also should block Xitter altogether.
- Everyone should.
Every country should just make the USA illegal. Nothing specific, just the USA in general.
We need this in Canada
Funny that when Georgia does it, it's anti-democratic.
- Pull your tongue out of Putin's arse.
  Dogs do that.

37 comments