• workerONE@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    edit-2
    20 days ago

    What can you spend 2.5 billion in campaign contributions on? Sure you can get a few nice cars and a nice office with drinks and food. You can hire drivers and assistants and chefs and live like a king all day while you’re at work. But you can’t take that money home and use it personally. So what is the other 2.4 billion used for? Running shitty ads?

    Also, I thought the limit on federal campaign donations was like $104,000

    • thatKamGuy@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      20 days ago

      $104K is the cap on donations directly to a candidate’s campaign - that they can spend on staffing costs, rent for a headquarters, ads etc.

      The work-around is for people like Ken to instead donate unlimited funds to a technically* non-affiliated Political Action Committees whose sole existence just so happens to be supporting your preferred candidate and is usually run by their ex-staffers or affiliates and legally* can not directly collude in messaging.

    • FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      7
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      20 days ago

      Unfortunately, at least here in the US, you can.

      All you have to do is loan your campaign money at interest, and basically every federal legislator does it. Hillary Clinton famously did this during her 2016 campaign, back when this sort of thing actually drummed up reporting in the news.

      And you can get people to bribe you even more (and Donald loves this) by having your billionaire buddies buy thousands of copies of your book, or stay at your hotels, or whatever. Mitch McConnell got his own businesses federal contracts and avoided an ethics probe by putting his wife in charge of said businesses.

      Nancy Pelosi has famously built a 100+ million dollar stock portfolio by insider trading legally.

      There are so many ways to grift legally as a federal legislator.

    • bluegreenpurplepink@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      20 days ago

      Billion or million, your point is well taken. I assume that a lot of these super high dollar campaigns are just plausible deniability for when they cheat on election day. Once they’ve collected enough money and they’ve let everybody know how much money they’ve collected, people are much more willing to believe that they actually won the election. And people won’t really think or consider that they might have cheated.

      We literally have a billionaire who has put over 10,000 satellites around the earth. Do you really think he’s not using those on the voting machines that can be hacked? That’s just one possibility. I hope i’m wrong I really do.