Elon Musk’s endorsement of Trump has further driven a split in the Tesla community, with data on Monday showing customers are fleeing the brand in Europe.
No it’s not bribery. He changed his stance for Musk’s endorsement. Musk then exercised his free speech into a Trump PAC. There was no coordination. Besides, even if there was coordination, it was a just a gratuity after the service!
Every ad should be a clip of Trump raging against electric cars, then the Musk tweet, then a clip of him praising electric cars. End with: do you really think he works for you?
I'm sure you can build more ads on this theme with the millions of other things he flip flopped on when someone promised him a bag of cash.
That should be one ad. Another should be about him turning on every one of his supporters that he's turned on. Trump: on your side as long as it's still convenient for him.
"We" aren't going after them for this because they all do it, Trump just said it out loud. Welcome to American politics. This will never get fixed because the people in power stand to lose millions of dollars if it does. People will posture, pander, and pretend, but they will never get a majority willing to take the pay cut and actually fix it. It's the a glitch in a capitalist republic.
Oh it can totally be fixed. People change their tune really quick when they can't put food in their mouths, and others change faster within close proximity to wood chippers.
Which is ridiculous because most manufacturers are building multiple new factories for batteries and EVs. It's a pretty shitty pander all things considered.
Ford recently announced their decision to use their facility built for the purpose of expanding their EV supply to instead manufacturer more ICE pick-up trucks.
I could be wrong, but isn't a blatant quid pro quo basically the only way to wind up on the wrong side of the Citizens United decision? Didn't the Supreme Court rule that, unless a candidate was engaged in open bribery, campaign contributions constitute free speech? I could be misremembering/misinterpretating, and he'll never face any consequences for it anyway, but it would be very funny if there was a Supreme Court ruling that said, "As long as you're not dumb enough to admit it's a bribe it's not illegal," and he still fucked that up.
The Supreme Court ruling splits a very fine hair. If you give a government official money and say "make sure my housing development goes through", that's a bribe and it's illegal. If you show them money and say "I'll give you this if my housing development goes through", that's a gratuity and is perfectly fine.
Didn’t the Supreme Court rule that, unless a candidate was engaged in open bribery, campaign contributions constitute free speech?
The core of the CU decision is that engaging in political speech is not a campaign contribution. Even if you spend money to engage in that speech. Even if you pay some 3rd party organization to engage in that speech on your behalf, unless that 3rd party organization is operating in collusion with the actual campaign.
Or to put it another way, if you run off a bunch of flyers supporting Kamala Harris and pass them out, that's not a campaign contribution despite ink and paper (and your labor) not being free. If Staples agrees to print those flyers free of charge for you, Staples is not making a campaign contribution. Unless the campaign itself is involved with the process. Now, just scale that up to massive corps and political nonprofits.
People try to describe it as "deciding money is speech and corporations are people", but both of those are long held by law - corporations have had 1A rights for a long, long time and likewise arguments that restricting things used to engage in protected expression is in fact restricting protected expression have held for a long, long time (for example you can't just place a $10,000,000/week tax on printing presses to silence newspapers).
But in practice what happens is people/companies make donations directly to a candidate then all of their priorities get fulfilled by the candidate even though the people that voted for the candidate don't support the issue.
For sale: 1 (one) old man with dementia, loose bowels, poor grasp on simple concepts, malignant narcissism, and a massive following of slack-jawed troglodyte voters.
I have seen a couple of them on the highway. They look so ridiculous you have to laugh.
It's just like the ridiculous "future cars" we'd see in many old sci-fi movies from the 70's and 80's. Perhaps their visions of the future were not so wrong after all.
What exactly should be illegal about a politician promising policy changes, that positively affects individuals and those individuals showing their support for that politicians policy? I don't think many of you have thought this through.
Having your position on issues for sale isn't illegal when you're not in office, but it's certainly not normal politics. It's fuckin' the weird for a politician to openly admit they're for sale.