Republicans in Congress will try to pass a stopgap spending bill this week to avert a partial government shutdown and keep the government running through September, though they’ll need Democrats’ help to do it.
The 99-page stopgap spending bill, which House Republicans released over the weekend, is required since lawmakers haven’t made any progress conferencing the dozen annual government funding bills that were supposed to become law by Oct. 1.
The continuing resolution, the third since October, would fund the federal government for the rest of fiscal year 2025 — marking the first time since fiscal 2013 that Congress has leaned on stopgap spending bills for the entire year, according to a report from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
I think your concerns are valid assuming you stop there, but there’s definitely a lot more that can be done on top of campaign finance reform to make politics more egalitarian and protected from corporate interests.
Once upon a time in the US, the FCC enforced the Fairness Doctrine, which required any radio or TV broadcaster to represent bipartisan or nonpartisan views on given topics if they wanted to discuss politics. Not to say that it didn’t come with its own set of problems, but Reagan did away with that in the 80’s and we’ve seen a right-leaning slant in radio and TV ever since.
Just spitballing here, but a similar model with campaign finance in mind could do a lot to level the playing field. First, do away with corporate personhood. Then make it so that if a broadcaster or advertiser wants to show political ads, they must obtain a special designation which comes with its own stipulations: limit the quantity/duration of ads any one campaign can purchase, require that they distribute any qualifying candidate’s ads without bias, charge a flat rate for ads for all candidates, and all political ads must be divided up along regular intervals throughout the day.
Despite corporate personhood, it is possible—common, even—for corporations to be limited in what they can or cannot say. Limiting corporate speech for public good (HIPAA in the US, for example) shouldn’t be something objectionable.
Probably not perfect, but also probably much much better than how things are today with so much corporate-controlled politics.
deleted by creator
Yeah, definitely an additional dimension that would need some sort of out of the box thinking to address, and I don’t think it could ever be done perfectly given that the internet is an international community not beholden to any single country’s laws.
In one sense though I don’t think it’s necessarily an issue of people posting whatever opinions and endorsements on social media, but more to do with the algorithm. No idea what could be done about that, but can’t say I’d be against some sweeping reforms hitting social media platforms anyways to address user privacy, which might at least address the algorithm problem somewhat.
That, or, we hope decentralized social media like this catches on at a larger scale, haha.
deleted by creator