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Data Miners Liken Obama Voters To Caesars Gamblers
theodp writes "As Steve Wozniak publicly laments how government used new technologies he introduced in unintended ways to monitor people, the NY Times reports how the digital masterminds behind the Obama Presidential campaign are cashing in by bringing the secret, technologically advanced formulas used for reaching voters to commercial advertisers. 'The plan is to bring the same Big Data expertise that guided the most expensive presidential campaign in history to companies and nonprofits,' explains Civis Analytics, which is backed by Google Chairman and Obama advisor Eric Schmidt. Also boasting senior members of Obama's campaign team is Analytics Media Group (A.M.G.), which pitched that 'keeping gamblers loyal to Caesars was not all that different from keeping onetime Obama voters from straying to Mitt Romney.' The extent to which the Obama campaign used the newest tech tools to look into people's lives was largely shrouded, the Times reports, but included data mining efforts that triggered Facebook's internal safeguard alarms. ... 'We asked to see [voter's Facebook] photos but really we were looking for who were tagged in photos with you, which was a really great way to dredge up old college friends — and ex-girlfriends.' The Times also explains how the Obama campaign was able to out-optimize the Romney campaign on TV buys by obtaining set-top box TV show viewing information from cable companies for voters on the Obama campaign's 'persuadable voters' list. "
People who vote for either of the two main parties are incredibly idiotic, so this isn't much of a surprise.
Is it a problem now? Is it the kind of problem we didn't have in the past?
When Netflix furor broke out about being able to identify a person by the ratings they gave, it turns out that it was only possible when a person had rated an obscure movie (and had cross rated the same movie over different websites).
When Target furor broke out out predicting pregnancy, it was based largely on if you bought a certain type of cream.
I know data mining and such is an attractive but most times it just boils down to some obscure identifier over all the data. Optimizing this and balancing hundreds of factors, does that even work?
'keeping gamblers loyal to Caesars was not all that different from keeping onetime Obama voters from straying to Mitt Romney.'
The day the computer AI become totally unpredictable is the day we human kiss our ass goodbye
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
You get the "leaders" you deserve.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
The real reason people are scared of big data is because the more and more we study it, the more and more it is proven that most people are very, very predictable. It's gotten to the point that companies optimize the color placement of objects in the background of their advertising to appeal to people they are targetting.
The thing that amazes me however is how some companies can still get things so outstandingly wrong/backwards in this day and age. Take the recent Microsoft Xbox One fiasco. I find it hard to believe that a company like Microsoft would not have known this reaction was coming. Any trivial study of online sentiment data would have shown this in advance.
Somehow we talk about campaign donations being the be all and end all, but we are obviously missing something:
pro-bono work done by media and technology experts that other canidates would have to pay for. This by-passes all donation contributions. In an ideal system you wouldn't need campaign finance reform, because people would make informed decisions, and no amount of money spent could change that. Thats not true. Money can buy votes. We all know this, but HOW is rarely discussed, because the people taking the money are the same people reporting the donations.
They buy you, by buying the "favorite celebrities" they already sold you previously. They overhype their strengths, and they downplay the really creepy and criminal things they do. They then go out of their way to let you know what bad guys the people who don't like celebrities are, and how you'll be social outcast if you give up on your favorite celebrities.
In the new digital age, there is also facebook. Once they know everything about you, it makes it easier to push your buttons. What if they find some dark sexual secret? Find out your weaknesses, exploit them. Since they already know who your friends are, they can tell them, or let them know subtly.
They can manipulate the girl you always had a crush on into sleeping with you, or dating you, because now they know. They can do all kinds of things to her as well.(mabey she spies on you?).
Since they know all your personal informaiton they can pretend to be an old long lost friend and use their credibility to bombard you with propaganda.
Speaking of propaganda, they can easily bypass your intellectual guards by finding out what pushes your buttongs and tailoring propaganda specificly to you.
All this is done pro-bono. This is what we know their capabilities are because they BRAG about them. Now it gets better, what if they want information about the opposition? What if they want to target organizers, donors, and leading voices opposing canidate XZY? What if they used the information to conduct smears of the opposition?
What if they targeted and harrassed campaign organizers and leaders. with information like this they'd be able to do with almost without being known about.
They aren't going to tell you that. Its not beyond their capabilities. Your a fool to think they never considered it.
They had the "candidate" (read: meaningless distraction puppet) who was better at LYING.
Post-election, they are EXACTLY the same, since they are "electoral property" owned by the exact same abusive feudalistic companies.
INB4 gullible believers in the system (= the opposite but just as crazy extreme to conspiracy theorists) being in denial.
No, no we cannot. People can be predictable, a person not so much. It's the aggregate that they are working with and using large numbers to make the return acceptable. The reason it works is that the decisions made by the majority of a given grouping, in a known situation, will be similar to the decision made by their peers if you get the grouping right. This averages out over a large enough population. A single person will deviate from the norm in wildly unpredictable ways, medical conditions, past traumas, formative experiences, familial connections and many more unknowns will cause a person who seems outwardly to fit the grouping, to suddenly veer off the predicted course of action for no known reason.
Sometimes people just don't realize the full implications of their own analogies...
Ceasar's Palace exists for one reason and one reason only - to extract as much of money out of their customers^h^h^h^h^h^h suckers as possible. They (and all of the other modern casino/resorts) pioneered "Big Data" techniques to figure out just how much they could squeeze out of every person that comes into contact with them. They've got official policies on paper to deny it. but they are happy to manipulate and exploit addiction to get all of the money.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
put it all on red for another spin.
No, the last two times they put it on black.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
People who vote for either of the two main parties are incredibly idiotic, so this isn't much of a surprise.
We don't have good choices because the ultra rich and powerful game the system so that the people that take care of them end up in the primaries. Then they just let the rabble choose who they "want" because regardless of who wins, they will be the One Percenters bitch - case in point: Obama - Hope and Change indeed.
Mitt Romney made one gaffe after another during the primary season, all showing how out of touch he was[...]
I'm pretty sure that all politicians make this kind of "gaffe": they tailor their message to the audience they are speaking to, and tell that audience what the audience wants to hear.
The actual difference in this last election was infiltration and filming of Romney's messages to nominally conservative groups so that theoretically select group messages were surreptitiously recorded, and then those recordings were made public at strategic points during the campaign.
This was a technologically enhanced smear tactic, and it worked. If the Republicans had thought of it, and used it too, then it would have worked against Obama as well.
So far, with 24 comments, nothing has those two arguments. Some justify voting for Obama otherwise, but not this tactic of the campaign.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Oh, pleeeeeeeeeease.....
"The Democrats had the better candidate, in the sense of being able to connect with voters on the campaign trail. Mitt Romney made one gaffe after another during the primary season,"
Obama is a gaffe machine... he said he thought he'd been to 57 states and had one more to visit... he clearly did not know what a navy medic was... he has repeatedly gone to ceremonies honoring dead people and announced that he saw many of those he was there to honor in the audience... on and on and on.... but if you get your news from the mainstream media or comedy central you do not know this stuff because they hide his gaffes just like they hid JFK's numerous affairs and his drug use and just like they hid Bill Clinton's proclivities when he was a candidate (something Chris Matthews admitted on TV during the Lewinski affair). Democrats ridiculed VP candidate Palin for writing a couple words on her hand as a reminder prior to a speech, but there have been repeated events proving Obama cannot give a speech w/o the full text on a teleprompter or on paper in his hands (Reminder: Palins entire 2008 convention speech was off-the-cuff and w/o notes... the teleprompters failed as she walked onto the stage)
"the "we had binders full of women" boast during the second debate..."
Democrat politicians all over the country also have binders full of women, and blacks, and hispanics, etc (people they have pre-screened to some degree to have a head-start on political appointments should they win an election to an executive office... one of the biggest jokes of the 2012 campaign is that democrats twisted that comment into fake outrage and cheerfully implied the comment was somehow related to placing women in bondage
"Immigration. Romney made a tactical decision (not personal) before the 2008 election to pander to the Republican base on the issue, as a way of answering any doubts about whether he was a conservative. He stuck to that course in 2012. He lost the pretty close to the entire Hispanic vote in the general election;"
Republicans have a long tradition (all the way back to Abraham Lincoln) as a party (though admittedly not all of their candidates) that does not have different policies for different groups of people based on their skin color. Democrats, who for their entire history back to and including the KKK and slavery have always been fixated on skin color. Over the past few decades, Democrats have twisted this into all-out pandering to racial groups and they claim that Republicans who refuse to pander are racists. No matter how hard a Republican candidate tries to break-out from his party tradition by race-pandering, he can never out-pander a Democrat (Even when George W offered Amnesty, 60% of the hispanic vote went to the Democrats who offered amnesty with more hand-outs
"the fact that the housing and banking crisis and collapse of the economy occurred during Bush's watch with Bush's tax policies and Treasury/SEC administration."
Ahhh yes... The congress went to the Democrats in 2006 and they used their power to block the Bush admin attempt to stop the risky home loan activity at Govt-run FannieMae and FreddieMac. Leading Democrats like Senator Chris Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank ridiculed the idea that anything bad was happening and that there was any danger in the home loan marketplace. Then Democrat senators Joe Biden and Barack Obama both voted along with ALL democrats in the senate to stop Bush from preventing the disaster (Bush himself had no vote and, without senate approval, had no legal authority to intervene) Bush was FAR from perfect... but he was less to blame for the meltdown than the Democrat congress (and the Clintons... who during the 90's had kicked all the risky home loans into overdrive as a national policy that "everyone deserves" to own a home...)
"Obama certainly had better IT, but that was far down on the list of factors."
Actually, Obama HAD competent IT... Romney had none... a
And the ball landed in Zero.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
which will sound a bit familiar IOKWMSDI It's OK when my side does it.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
'keeping gamblers loyal to Caesars was not all that different from keeping onetime Obama voters from straying to Mitt Romney.'
yes. there could be no other possible explanation than brand loyalty and marketing, because as we all know, the only humans in this country capable of thought and self-determination are marketing hacks and the algorithmic wonderboys which they employ.
what a condescending load of horsecrap.
Some politicians believe today they can speak privately to groups of supporters and those words will not be recorded and released to the world, or their secrets revealed by well-connected insiders. In the past this was true; either there was no cheap easy method to record their words and deeds (phone cameras, fifty-buck video recorders etc.) or the gatekeeper press would simply not report what they knew (FDR in a wheelchair, JFK's medical problems, Reagan's Alzheimers etc.) The world has changed and successful politicians are aware of this. If you don't want what you say made public then don't say it to anyone.
Governor Romney deluded himself that his supposedly private fundraising speech would never be revealed to the rest of the world. That's part of the reason he lost the election. His own campaign's efforts in data collection and analysis and Get Out The Vote was as big and as complex as President Obama's but it was incompetently implemented (first live-fire test of a complex multilevel data delivery system involving thousands of operators on the day of the election? Really?) The only good thing that came out of that expensive fiasco was that several of his friends and colleagues made a lot of money out of it.
There was a study where they asked people if they could put small signs in their yards for something innocuous. After awhile, they came back and asked if they could put a slightly larger sign in. Most said yes. Then they brought in larger and larger signs, until eventually these giant, obnoxious signs were in peoples' yards, signs that nobody accepted if approached with them to begin with.
This was people making an "emotional investment" in something, and refusing to give up on it. This is heavily involved in casinos and gambling, too. People will continue to throw good money after bad.
Now take this and put it in the context of getting people to support a guy who's petered along with a terrible economy for 4 years.
Magnificent job by his people. I suppose. Umm, congrats?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
put it all on red for another spin.
No, the last two times they put it on black.
Don't you mean blue?
In other words, shut up or I'll replace you with a very small script!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Dude, if the founding fathers could see what came out of their dream, they'd probably go "why bother" too.
And you better don't ask "What would Jesus do". I'm pretty sure it would be along the lines of "get nailed up there for THOSE idiots's sins? Dude, I'm Jesus, but there's even limits to my compassion!"
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The Obama concern was never that 2008 Obama voters would "stray" to Romney. The Republicans moved so far to the right that even Romney was having trouble following his base (and that was one reason he lost: he showed clearly that he would follow the conservative base, not lead the country).
The Obama concern was that 2008 Obama voters *wouldn't show up at the polls*. Turnout was key. If those that disliked Obama (but disliked Romney more) just decided to stay home, he would have lost. In fact, in some regions he DID lose vs. his 2008 wins for that very reason, such as Lynchburg, VA.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
You don't seem to be much a roulette guy.
None. But the amount of times we get zero I'd somehow feel like that table is rigged somehow.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Gamblers were loyal to Caesar? I must have missed that part in my sttidies of ancient Rome.
(Or is this about a later Roman Emperor rather than Julius, Augustus or Tiberius...
BTW I remember John Hurt's acting as Caligula in the British miniseries I Claudius - I am sure he will make an excellent Doctor.
Comment 3 is probably going to take the cake: Dems, Reps, what's the difference?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
So, essentially, business as usual?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Owned by the exact same abusive feudalistic companies... it's not true, and you know it ain't true. The parties are owned by very different abusive feudalistic companies, you have the free choice which corporations you want to rule you and rip you off.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
off the top of my head:
- to a heckler at a campaign rally: "Corporations are people too, my friend." (Apparently in reference to a Supreme Court ruling)
- while visiting the London Olympics: "I must say that the lack of a security infrastructure here is very disconcerting." He became the London tabloids' clown boy for a week.
- he told voters in Maryland that "I remember back in the days when I worried about getting a pink slip".
- in New Hampshire he pretended to have been pinched in the butt by two middle aged ladies standing behind him. Then he explained that "everyone thought it was a great joke". The two ladies were offended by it, so I guess Mitt's buddy in prep school pulled it off better
- after eating one of the baked cookies laid out on table by his staff in Pennsylvania, he told the crowd "We should be able to do better than this. These are the kinds of cookies you'd get at the 7-Eleven, not the home made kind, right ladies?" Turns out they were from a well-liked local bakery
- in the infield of the Daytona 500, he tried joshing with racing fans who were wearing ponchos, saying "looks like everyone brought out their high end rain gear"
- responding to a question, he said that he didn't get a chance to watch many NFL games, but he's good friends with some of the team owners
And this isn't counting the famous "dog on the car roof" incident and the two times in the early 2000's he was busted by local newspaper reporters for having undocumented immigrants tending his lawn and tennis courts (!) in Belmont MA.
If you were following the primaries you would have noticed a trend: ten days before each primary, with Romney outspending his opponents 5 to 1 with radio ads, Mitt would be up by double digits. Then as voting drew nearer, Santorum would narrow the gap and ended up winning many of them.
Quite to the contrary: being able to tell each audience the lies that audience was vulnerable to, and being able to discredit Romney with just the right accusations for each segment of voters, was why Obama managed to get a second term. Objectively, based on his record and the contradictions between his promises and policies, he should have been kicked out and lost badly.
Romney wasn't as good as Obama at lying, that's why he lost. (It might also have made him a slightly better president.)
Well, people laughed at me when I complained in 1990 about how we're losing something important when the USSR crumbled and how it protected our freedom by proxy.
Because as long as there have been those evil commies with their lack of freedom, our leaders needed to keep their white hats shiny so we knew who were the bad guys. Today, why bother with it, it's not like you have any other system you could run for.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Yeah, because we're so much better off with him in office.
Face it, the US politics is a bit like AvP. Whoever wins, we lose.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
but its hard when your opponents technology campaign is run pro-bono by the nation's biggest tech companies
Governor Romney deluded himself that his supposedly private fundraising speech would never be revealed to the rest of the world.
Also, an overwhelming percentage of Big Media (meaning not just 'media bosses' but the rank-and-file reporters, etc.) were out and out Obama supporters. So any gaffe that Romney committed was instantly in play and out there. Whereas there are huge holes in the public's understanding of Obama and his private life and past yet today. There are even polished and well-recognized slur-names to refer to those who point this fact out.
Democrats are more likely (according to that study) to go with their party than Republicans... BUT... that's not even the best part...
This effect is under-reported by the paper's (false) pretense that the spying by the two administrations was the same. During the Bush years, Democrats were rabid over the typically mis-named (by politicians) "Patriot Act" which enable warrantless wiretaps and such on Americans if they were on one end of a conversation and the party on the other end was a terror suspect outside the US ..... But in the era of Obama, the federal government is spying on every single American (without a warrant, AND without probable cause in clear conflict with the plain text of the Constitution) and monitoring communications where the parties on both ends are NOT terror suspects and are INSIDE the US. In the era of Bush, companies like Google who were collecting data on everybody in exchange for use of their services (nothing in life is free) were in a separate realm from the government... but in this shiny new era of growing National Socialism, Google and the federal government are in bed together with employees regularly moving back-and-forth between them, unknown data exchanges between them, Google working to elect them (in exchange for power? money? regulatory "wiggle room"? help suppressing competitors via government oversight/regulation?) and no transparency. This government/big-business/one-party-allegience "partnership" experiment was run in the 1930's... it does not end well for the little guy (and the technology available for oppression now is far more powerful
My liberal friends who were shrieking expletives at Bush are now responding to Obama with {insert sound of crickets chirping}
TOTAL, unabashed, Hypocrisy
at the same time, they had the USSR to make an excuse on why they need to get their hands dirty, and the realpolitik took over with regards to restricting rights.
like it did with terrorism, and goth kids, and every other cooked up threat.
The Obama campaign treated voters as consumers, because the vast majority of voters treat democracy as a supermarket. Instead of being informed, listen to each other, actively voice their position in petitions and protests, and generally be involved in governance, modern voters just switch to the other brand of soap. To carry on with the metaphor, some of them abandon soap altogether and choose not to shower. This "exit" strategy has reached particularity absurd level in the United States where a number of voters (the so called "independents") bounce as ping-pong balls between the two parties every four years. These voters are never satisfied with the government they just elected, yet they cannot be bothered to actively push this government to fulfill promises or address their grievances. So, if you approach democracy as market, the politicians will treat you as shoppers. You got what you asked for, why are you complaining? (Disclosure: These are not my ideas, I stole them from a book called "In Mistrust We Trust: Can Democracy Survive When We Don't Trust Our Leaders?".)
I could see this backfiring for the entities that are trying to play us with it.
'Conservatives' (capital-C, sadly, but that's how it works) have a pretty well-organized network. They should actively oppose and boycott businesses that choose to work with Analytics Media Group. Everybody already says 'fuck Google. fuck Big Data' in private to all their friends. It's just a matter of helping people figure out what's going on and making it a public thing.
Did you vote in your last local, state, and federal elections? Did you vote for a third party candidate? If not, don't complain about "candidates being owned by anyone".
So you're saying Obama didn't win on the issues or his record, he won because he had a better organization.
In American (and most western) politics today organisation of the electoral effort is key, moreso than the candidates especially in the US where heredity and family money usually play the greater part. For example Jeb Bush's son George Prescott Bush is starting his run at the Presidency although he has not yet been elected to any public office -- he is being referred to as "47" among his family's consiglieres. The fact that Hillary Rodham Clinton is even being considered as Presidential material is amazing to non-USians. She'll need a better organisation than the one that fronted her up for the 2008 primaries though.
It's early days yet but I'd not be surprised to see one of the Romney sons step forward as a candidate for elected office and eventually, with the aid of his father's billions make a run for the White House. It's the American Way, after all.
WOOSH!
+1, Insightful.
As I was saying: the issues apparently didn't play much of a role in Obama's reelection.
You really don't know much about either US or European politics, do you.
The last Prime Minister of the UK who "inherited" the post from his father was William Pitt the Younger who took on the role in 1783. Since then we've had women, socialists (really real socialists, not right-wing conservatives like Clinton and Obama), liberals (who are not socialists) and deep-down conservatives as Prime Minister and few if any of them had much in the way of a family history in the role (Winston Churchill may have been an exception but his father never made it to high office). The US has had a number of Presidents in the past century whose dynastic relationships through blood and marriage into money are only exceeded by traditionally hereditary Senators (like the Kennedys), Governors and Congressmen (like the Bushes). It's why there was so much shock and disbelief about President Obama winning the last two elections since he's not filthy rich and he's not the product of a plutocratic political dynasty like George W. Bush or Senator Jay Rockefeller IV.
Oh, please keep going! It is fascinating to see what kinds of bizarre rationalizations Europeans come up with for their anti-American bigotry, and how blind they are to how their own political systems work.
Objectively, based on his record and the contradictions between his promises and policies, he should have been kicked out and lost badly.
What does that say about all of the people who voted for him, especially the young idealists with stars in their eyes and rocks in the heads? They were fooled twice by the same smooth talker and his bag of dirty tricks.
It says that they are young idealists who got taken in by a marketing machine. I dunno, what are you trying to get at?
I mean, we live in a democracy, so anybody from closet-Marxists to closet-fascists, from illiterate to Nobel prize winners, from homeless to Bill Gates votes. So to change their votes, we need to talk. Isn't that what we are doing?
So to change their votes, we need to talk. Isn't that what we are doing?
The people who need to hear it aren't listening. Maybe a few more years of mounting debt and underemployment (or unemployment) will help convince them that the welfare state is not the utopia that they were promised. Maybe then they won't be taken in quite so easily next time by politicians offering them fiscal candy in exchange for their votes. The Millennials like to think of themselves as being smart, but their choice of political leadership thus far has been anything but. At this rate we will inherit the country just in time to spend the rest of our lives paying off the debts rung up by our parents and grandparents and all in exchange a few percentage points less on student loans. Young voters are chumps and they proved it by voting for four more years of Obama. If they have any sense left at all now they will think very carefully about whom they vote for in 2016. They will have already lost nearly a decade to Obama by then and their careers won't be able to wait any longer to get started. Maybe then they'll finally vote with their heads and pocketbooks instead of their hearts. That would be a welcome change, but for now it's just a dim hope.
Seems to me like there are plenty of Obama supporters here. Change one vote at a time, where you actually happen to be.
I think there is another reason this community is particularly important: Europeans keep misrepresenting the success of progressive policies in Europe (mostly out of ignorance, partly out of nationalism and anti-Americanism), and Obama's policies are mostly just warmed over European progressive policies. People need to stand up and speak out so that we don't repeat Europe's mistakes.
Yes I did and yes I did.
I'm not US American, but don't think it's any better in Europe. Yes, "my" party didn't make it into the parliament, but at the very least my message was "yes I was there, yes I voted, but NONE of you deserve my vote, I'd rather hand it to someone who has no chance of winning."
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
How are European politicians "owned by the exact same abusive feudalistic companies"? Many European nations have public campaign financing and little corporate money in their elections.
Time to re-read Asimov's Foundation Trilogy it would seem
PaulW, IT Consultant
I recognized back in the early days of the Obama administration that there was a key quid pro quo for bailing out the large banking firms that were caught in the real-estate crisis trap of their own making.
Each one of those firms had its own synthetic model of the economy, probably researched in fine detail and hyperlinked in clever ways. I thought that part of the 'price' for a Government bailout would be the sharing of the code, architectural details, etc. of these various programs, which could then be set up somewhere like Bay St. Louis to be run for the advantage of... well, ultimately, the American taxpayer.
I suspect we are now seeing the results of exactly why that technology wasn't demanded.. publically, at least... and perhaps how we can expect to see it used in future...
In French the word "nul" means both zero and idiot. *Cough* Dubya, *ahem* twice.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
That's even worse! It means they're owned by the public, which is tender mound to commanissum.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Thats what they seem to say about prime numbers.
The problem is many people could be modeled on an abacus.
Yes, but you really think they go "noooo, we got enough money, no need to" when offered some more?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
What I think is that it should be obvious that parties that are 95% financed from public sources, individual donations, and government matching funds are not "owned by the exact same abusive feudalistic companies". Since they behave in many ways like US parties, therefore there is something wrong with attributing US political behavior to big money.
No, they aren't "owned by the public", they are owned by a small political elite.
It's more greed that drives the whole matter. Politicians in Europe need some place to go after they messed up the political landscape and get kicked out by the voters, so what they do, essentially, is to create laws that please their corporate masters and where they can later end up in boards where they don't even bother to show up and yet get some nice paycheck for ... well, for services prior.
You think politicians that fucked up a country's finances get board positions for their economic genus? C'mon.
The problem with European campaigning reimbursement is that parties get the money but politicians have to struggle with pensions around 5k a month, they need some way to compensate.
Personally, I think paying for their housing would be nice. Like, say, how they did with Berlusconi.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Be that as it may, the important conclusion is that limiting campaign contributions or publicly financed campaigns isn't addressing the problem.