The way I see it this will need yo be a new amendment to the constitution because the judiciary is poisoned for a while.

Corporations are people, my friend.

Its crazy that they even have to. The laws that prohibited this exist already, but in one of the most disastrous bad faith court rulings in modern history, "artificial persons" came into being as a legal term about 100 years ago.

Sane and good faith people know there is no such thing.

Thing is, California has way more billionaires than any other state, even when you account for total population.

Add the fact that the corporatist conservative wing of the Dem party has a lock on all facets of state government, and it becomes a real uphill climb to make those corrupt fuckers carry out the will if the people 😮‍💨🤬

Idk about disciplining billionaires, I'm no lawyer but it seems they're only prohibiting "artificial persons" from donating to political campaigns. Elon musk a "real person" can still donate all he wants.

It's a step, but trying to limit how money itself is spent will always create loopholes your opponent has better lawyers than you to exploit. Imho the better way to discipline billionaires would be to change tax code such that borrowing money against securities or anything like it (such as stock) is counted as realizing their value, which would trigger capital gains tax obligations.

It'd have somewhat similar effects to a wealth tax with way less administrative load for the state. The only exception I would grant is when you're buying a single-person/single-family residential property you're going to be living in yourself.

A giant wealth tax would have been better than a thin veneer of campaign finance reform.

What will happen is that the corporation will whine all the way to the Supreme Court about free speech. Awww, it thinks its people!

Cattle is also legal tender there.

Sometimes to better understand things you have to go back to the basics. The word “politics” consists of the Greek root “poli” meaning “many” and “tics” meaning “blood-sucking parasites”.

But more seriously it’s because your local senator was probably not up for reelection this year but flipping the senate was still to your advantage.

if you give any $ at all even once before at any level your going to be donor lists for everyone on your side, that's just how this whole system works. only way to curb that would probably be properly publicly funded political campaigns (as various other countries have, canidates get x set amount of $/set % of airtime alotted to them etc.).

and well...in the US, due to the various levels of disenfranchisement, on average for most their national level politics is basically a non-choice. if you live in a state where practically nothing past the local/city level actually matters but you still want to support non-lizard canidates...best thing you can do is either donate $ or time, and $ is generally easier to come by

in a capitlistic hellhole like the US though...you can't reach 8-900k (average rseat/pop ratio now iirc) without alot of $. was actually part of the reasoning for capping House seats, to curb a previous rise of populism that threatened US political establishment. make campaigning expensive and then you need approval of wider party/corporate (or lots and lots of volunteers, for upsets) interests to even have a shot.