Real campaign-finance reform: Ban all paid political advertising in the U.S.

[KingOrfeo]

i'd be more in favor of taking campaign funding out of individual's and corporation's hands altogether, and lettting the fed gov't provide a limited amount for each party candidate, period.

if people want to contribute money it can go to the political party they choose, and not any particular candidate directly.

That would change a lot more about our political system than you seem to realize. At present, every candidacy more or less goes it alone, it's an entrepreneurial model, the parties are merely brand-labels. No elected official owes any obedience to his party organization as such. Putting the parties in charge of distributing campaign funds would give the party officials, as distinct from the government/elected officials, a lot more power than they have now, might even eventually transform American political parties into European-style cadre parties, with membership cards and membership dues and mechanisms for expulsion from the party. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing.

 

[Sean]

Over here, each political party is given air time on TV called a Party Political Broadcast. They're usually about five minutes long and the number you get is in direct proportion to the number of seats you are standing for. Parties can not buy advertising spots on TV, radio or newspapers. They can, however, buy billboards. It makes our election season less mind numbingly tedious. As for free speech, that argument is a pile of crap. No-one is stopping anyone saying what the fuck they like, as usual, the righties equate the almighty dollar with freedom.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Over here, each political party is given air time on TV called a Party Political Broadcast. They're usually about five minutes long and the number you get is in direct proportion to the number of seats you are standing for. Parties can not buy advertising spots on TV, radio or newspapers. They can, however, buy billboards. It makes our election season less mind numbingly tedious. As for free speech, that argument is a pile of crap. No-one is stopping anyone saying what the fuck they like, as usual, the righties equate the almighty dollar with freedom.

Hm. And I thought the UK was a free country . . . .

 

[KingOrfeo]

From The Nation:

Republican Spending on Dishonest Ads Increases

Ben Adler on June 15, 2012 - 12:18 PM ET

Every week brings more news of the growing Republican advantage in raising money and spending it on advertising.

The most widely discussed donation this week was the $10 million gift from casino mogul Sheldon Adelson to the pro-Romney Super PAC Restore Our Future. As The New Republic’s Alec MacGillis notes, “for Barack Obama's campaign to match the $10 million, it would need to get checks from 181,818 donors giving at the average Obama donation amount of $55.” The scary thing about Adelson’s donation is not even its massive size; it’s the fact that Adelson could give much more. Adelson had said he was willing to give his initial favored candidate, Newt Gingrich, up to $100 million. He could easily afford to give Romney far more than that. As Forbes pointed out, “Adelson is worth $24.9 billion.... Given that he’s one of the 15 richest people in the world, the Sands chairman could personally bankroll the equivalent of entire presidential campaign–say, $1 billion or so–and not even notice. (The $10 million donation he just made to Romney is equivalent to $40 for an American family with a net worth of $100,000.)” Indeed, since he has said that this is the most important presidential election of his lifetime, it makes sense that he would.

Democrats have little power to combat this disproportionate influence given to the very wealthy. The best they can do is try to explain to the public that Republicans receiving such generosity from individuals like Adelson are effectively in their pockets. “Instead of United States of America, maybe he wants it to be ‘United States of Adelson,’ ” said Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Steve Israel (N.Y.) on MSNBC. It’s better than nothing, but it’s not better than $10 million.

Meanwhile, continuing a trend I first reported on back in December, Wall Street is investing heavily in the Romney campaign. In 2008 Wall Street finally came to realize that the Republican Party’s habit of irresponsibly mismanaging the economy and budget--and the unwillingness of much of their coalition to do logical things to prevent global economic meltdown, such as lending banks money to boost liquidity--means they are better off with Democrats. They overcame their historical affinity for the GOP and gave more to Obama than McCain. Obama has rewarded them with more bailouts, soft regulation, no prosecution of the malefactors behind the mortgage backed securities crisis, and extension of the Bush tax cuts. Their way of thanking him has been to donate far more to his opponent, who says he would not have voted to raise the debt ceiling, and thus forced the U.S. to default on its debts and send the bond markets into a tailspin. Politico reports, “Mitt Romney's presidential campaign and the super PAC supporting it are outraising Obama among financial-sector donors $37.1 million to $4.8 million. Near the front of the pack are 19 Obama donors from 2008 who are giving big to Romney. The 19 have already given $4.8 million to Romney’s presidential campaign and the super PAC supporting it through the end of April, according to a POLITICO analysis of Federal Election Commission filings. Four years ago, they gave Obama $213,700.”

Most of this money is being quickly spent on television commercials. As The Washington reports, “Romney’s campaign is spending $3.3 million to run television ads this week in seven general election battleground states. The ads began running Wednesday and will continue through the week in Colorado, Iowa, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Nevada, Ohio and Virginia, according to officials who track ad purchases.”

While there is no question that swing state voters will be inundated with ads that inaccurately portray President Obama’s record, the more significant Republican spending advantage may ultimately be in down ballot races. While Obama will be outspent by his opponents, he will certainly have enough money to get his message out as well. But in House and Senate races, where spending levels tend to be much lower, an infusion of outside money can give a candidate a real leg up.

And Republicans are already working on giving their candidates that advantage. The Post reports, “The National Republican Congressional Committee has reserved $18 million worth of ad space in 17 media markets spanning 25 competitive districts — one of the first windows into which districts the committee plans to pursue and defend this fall as they seek to retain control of the House.”

Now, thanks to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United v FEC, there will be a whole other national source of ad spending for Republican congressional candidates besides the NRCC and its counterpart for Senate races. As Politico reports, “The GOP independent spending goliath American Crossroads and its affiliate group Crossroads GPS are launching a new barrage of attack ads in six competitive Senate races, assailing a range of Democratic candidates.”

The ad attacking Tim Kaine in Virginia is a good example of the kind of dishonesty that pervades ads from Karl Rove’s Crossroads empire. It is based on the bizarre premise that Kaine, a former Governor of Virginia, “went to Washington,” when he served as chair of the Democratic National Committee. (Strangely it shows footage of someone flying to illustrate the point, even though Richmond and Washington are just a few hours apart by car or train.) Kaine was not in a national elected office, and yet the ad blames Kaine for what it considers to be unpopular actions taken by President Obama and Congress. The specific examples? “Medicare spending cuts” and “a huge energy tax.”

The complaint that Democrats cut spending on Medicare is a particularly disingenuous piece of Republican partisan hackery. What they are referring to is the removal of wasteful subsidies to private insurers through the Medicare advantage program. No cuts in actual benefits to Medicare recipients have been enacted. Moreover, it is Republicans, not Democrats, who advocate drastically cutting spending on Medicare, even privatizing it.

It is also not true that Democrats proposed an energy tax. That presumably refers to the cap and trade legislation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. That was not a tax, but a system for buying credits, and it would have fallen equally on all sources of greenhouse gases, not merely energy.

In a perversely hilarious twist, Rove himself went on Sean Hannity’s radio show on Tuesday to accuse President Obama of trying to buy the election. As Media Matters writes, “Rove said that the Obama campaign will attempt to win the election by ‘trying to take their wallet and buying it.’” The election may indeed be bought, but not by Obama.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Here's why we need this. (Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, testifies before/is fellated by the Senate Banking Committee; see the second link for a breakdown of JPMC's campaign contributions to committee members, Pubs and Dems.)

 

[Wok]

North Korea is not accepting new immigrants, by the way. The borders are a Minuteman's wet dream.

 

[koalabear]

You should spend more time trying to understand why a candidate should need your money in the first place.

So you agree Oblamer shouldn't be holding all those campaign dinners.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

What we need to do is make it not merely difficult but impossible for anybody (including the candidates themselves) to affect the outcome of any election by spending money on it. Our only alternatives are that and a de facto plutocracy, which is what we've got now. The 1% have more than enough economic power, without allowing them to wield political power out of proportion to their numbers on top of that.

And I say we do not need to scrap or even amend the First Amendment to do it (though I might well support a constitutional amendment to effect this, if strictly necessary, and depending on the wording). We need only get a SCOTUS in place that will accept the plain fact that money is not speech and will overturn such contrary decisions as Buckley v. Valeo.

From The Next American Nation, by Michael Lind (The Free Press, 1995), pp. 256-259 (from before the McCain-Feingold Bill, but I don't think the picture has changed all that much since it passed):



They don't come much more libertarian than Goldwater, and even he was appalled at this state of affairs.

From the same book, pp. 311-313:



N.B.: This relates only to advertising, not editorializing. Media outlets would remain free to editorialize, Fox News and MSNBC would be free to continue politicizing the news each in its own way, etc. The Equal-Time Rule and the Fairness Doctrine are topics for a different debate; in any case, their scope is limited to airwave-broadcast media, not print, cable, or Internet media.

Bear in mind that there are other democracies, such as France, where every candidate in an election gets an equal ration of free air time and no other political advertising is allowed, and we over here still tend to think of those countries as "free countries."

"Wall of separation between check and state" is, at least, something you can get on a bumper-sticker.

FWIW, some Wikiquotes on campaign-finance reform:

Today's political campaigns function as collection agencies for broadcasters. You simply transfer money from contributors to television stations. Senator Bill Bradley, 2000.

We've got a real irony here. We have politicians selling access to something we all own -our government. And then we have broadcasters selling access to something we all own — our airwaves. It's a terrible system. Newton Minow, former Federal Communications Commission chairman (2000).

You're more likely to see Elvis again than to see this bill pass the Senate. Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) (1999) on the McCain-Feingold Bill on Campaign Reform

Unless we fundamentally change this system, ultimately campaign finance will consume our democracy. Representative Lloyd Doggett (D-TX) (1996).

[Buckley v. Valeo is] one of the most weakly reasoned, poorly written, initially contradictory court opinions I've ever read. Senator (and former federal district court judge) George J. Mitchell (D-ME) (1990).

We don't buy votes. What we do is we buy a candidate's stance on an issue. Allen Pross, executive director, California Medical Association's PAC (1989).

Political action committees and moneyed interests are setting the nation's political agenda. Are we saying that only the rich have brains in this country? Or only people who have influential friends who have money can be in the Senate? Senator Barry Goldwater (R-AZ) (1988).

The day may come when we'll reject the money of the rich as tainted, but it hadn't come when I left Tammany Hall at 11:25 today. George Washington Plunkett (1905).

Who are to be the electors of the federal representatives? Not the rich, more than the poor, not the haughty heirs of distinguished names, more than the humble sons of obscure and propitious fortune. James Madison, Federalist 57 (1788).

I kept telling Laurel, back in 2000-01 that it was HER side more wiling to ban free speech than the Republicans...

 

[run_silent]

Thank goodness Obama isn't accepting any pac, superpac, union, lobbyist, special interest, hollywood, citizens for (what ever the hell ever), millionaires, billionaires otherwise he couldn't hold the high moral ground. I'll bet his campaign only has 27 cents because he only takes money from people with no interest in influencing anything in government.

 

[bra_man69]

I kept telling Laurel, back in 2000-01 that it was HER side more wiling to ban free speech than the Republicans...

Did you really
September 2011
2000 - 2001

O well just pointing shit out

 

[Phelia]

KO:

1. I think you are probably intelligent and interesting, but you C&P/link wayyyyyy too much for me to take you seriously. Assume that I am smart enough to understand your point if you make it pithily, and assume that you are smart enough to do so.

2. If you want to separate money from politics, it's not just advertising. Lobbying, too.

3. There are more nefarious aspects of advertising than political cheerleading; the first that comes to mind is direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising in the US. Abbbbsolutely no reason that should exist.

4. Advertising vs. editorializing: people don't trust the media. And to be perfectly honest, I don't either. Eyeballs = $$$.

Those points addressed, every campaign spot I've ever seen was boring and puerile and awful. We should ban them from TV for being a waste of mind-space, sure, BUT I would sooner agree to making voting compulsory. Money doesn't always win elections. Look at Meg Whitman. Ell oh ell @ her!!

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Did you really
September 2011
2000 - 2001

O well just pointing shit out

Yeah. I started submitting stories winter '99.

Laurel went crazy over Bush claiming the rw Republican Evangelicals were going to censor Lit.

THEN she wanted him impeached over the missing W's!

If they weren't missing, it was a lie, and if they were missing, his failure to go after the thieves was a coverup and since the time of Nixon, we know that the cover-up is worse than the crime, unless you're a black attorney general, then it's whistling Dixie.

Satisfied?

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

KO:

1. I think you are probably intelligent and interesting, but you C&P/link wayyyyyy too much for me to take you seriously. Assume that I am smart enough to understand your point if you make it pithily, and assume that you are smart enough to do so.

2. If you want to separate money from politics, it's not just advertising. Lobbying, too.

3. There are more nefarious aspects of advertising than political cheerleading; the first that comes to mind is direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising in the US. Abbbbsolutely no reason that should exist.

4. Advertising vs. editorializing: people don't trust the media. And to be perfectly honest, I don't either. Eyeballs = $$$.

Those points addressed, every campaign spot I've ever seen was boring and puerile and awful. We should ban them from TV for being a waste of mind-space, sure, BUT I would sooner agree to making voting compulsory. Money doesn't always win elections. Look at Meg Whitman. Ell oh ell @ her!!

Lobbying is not the problem; the government so large, powerful and intrusive that it NEEDS to be lobbied is the problem...

When Government gets so powerful that its purchase price is cost effective, even imperative, to business, then business will purchase government indulgences.
A_J, the Stupid

When the government gets powerful enough to fight over, the people will fight over it, and to the victors go the spoils, thus setting up the next fight.
A_J, the Stupid

The more government does on your behalf, the less you can do on your own behalf.
A_J, the Stupid

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Thank goodness Obama isn't accepting any pac, superpac, union, lobbyist, special interest, hollywood, citizens for (what ever the hell ever), millionaires, billionaires otherwise he couldn't hold the high moral ground. I'll bet his campaign only has 27 cents because he only takes money from people with no interest in influencing anything in government.

Oh for those heady halcyon days when he was better than everyone else, the new fresh prince of DC, and was going to run only on public funds...



~sigh~

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

Notice how the Usual Suspects ignore the benefits of incumbency. When the President flies to LA to tour the National Abortion Museum, then party all night with LiLo and Stephen Spielberg, the taxpayers pay the freight, and the President's mug is on the tv news everywhere. Meanwhile King Oreo sues the socks off the Presidents opponent, cuz the man wrote his name on his boxer waistband, and an illegal saw it when she did the laundry.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Notice how the Usual Suspects ignore the benefits of incumbency. When the President flies to LA to tour the National Abortion Museum, then party all night with LiLo and Stephen Spielberg, the taxpayers pay the freight, and the President's mug is on the tv news everywhere. Meanwhile King Oreo sues the socks off the Presidents opponent, cuz the man wrote his name on his boxer waistband, and an illegal saw it when she did the laundry.

*chuckle*

 

[Liar]

Let's say a tentative hello to the John McCain of old. Is he trying to wrap up his political career with some shreds of dignity after all?

McCain: Adelson funding Romney Super PAC with 'foreign money'


Senator and Romney presidential campaign surrogate John McCain (R-AZ) said Thursday that casino magnate Sheldon Adelson is indirectly injecting millions of dollars in Chinese "foreign money" into Mitt Romney's presidential election effort.

"Much of Mr. Adelson's casino profits that go to him come from his casino in Macau, which says that obviously, maybe in a roundabout way foreign money is coming into an American political campaign," McCain said in an interview on PBS's News Hour.

"That is a great deal of money, and we need a level playing field and we need to go back to the realization... that we have to have a limit on the flow of money and corporations are not people," he said.

Adelson announced Thursday he would be giving $10 million to the pro-Romney Super PAC Restore Our Future, and reports stated his future contributions to pro-Romney groups could be "limitless."

The issue of foreign money finding its way into presidential politics comes up each cycle. In 1996, the Clinton administration was engulfed in a huge Chinese political funding controversy known at the time as "Chinagate," whereby agents of China funded Democratic political organizations. 22 were convicted of felonies and many were associates of Bill Clinton and Al Gore.

Romney has also come under criticism for his former corporation Bain Capital's business ties to Chinese state-owned firms, some of which are linked to the Chinese military and simultaneously seek to acquire U.S. technology firms.

But McCain's comments appear to be the first criticism by a Republican of a Republican donor for earning his fortune in China and then spending some of that money on a Republican political organization.

McCain's comments came in the context of a rant against the unfettered private donations that are now flowing into the political arena due to the 2010 Supreme Court decision in the case Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission, which opened the doors to unlimited political spending by corporations and invalidated parts of the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law.

McCain called the decision "the most misguided, naïve, uninformed, egregious decision of the United States Supreme Court in the 21st Century," and money would be playing a dominant role in American politics for the foreseeable future.

"There will be scandals, there's just too much money washing around Washington today... I'm afraid we're for a very bleak period in American politics," he said. "To somehow view money as not having a corrupting effect on elections flies in the face of reality."

 

[NeverEndingMe]

how else can the obama buy an election?

but then again, we all know that KingofTards supports double standards

 

[KingOrfeo]

From In These Times:

Why ‘Chicago-Style Politics’ is America’s New Normal

“Chicago-Style Politics” Is Simply Business As Usual in D.C.
BY Theo Anderson

It took a while, but Republicans finally put two and two together.

Chicago is known for political corruption. President Obama’s home base is Chicago. So accusing him of “Chicago-style politics” is a surefire winner, right?

Not really, as it turns out. Republicans have thrown the insult around a lot over the past few months, but it hasn’t added up to much of an advantage. That’s in part because Obama doesn’t have any significant scandals in his record. It’s also because Republicans’ use of the phrase doesn’t make any sense.

When Clint Eastwood appeared in a Super Bowl ad for Chrysler, for example, and talked about Detroit’s comeback, Republicans complained that the ad had a thinly veiled pro-Obama slant. It was Obama, after all, who pressed ahead with the successful government bailouts of GM and Chrysler.

GOP strategist Karl Rove pretended to be “frankly offended” by the ad and called it “a sign of what happens when you have Chicago-style politics.”

Right. A car ad. Really rough stuff.

It got even rougher. When Senate Republicans filibustered Obama’s nomination of Richard Cordray to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Obama bypassed the GOP and made Cordray a recess appointment. Mitt Romney said this was “Chicago-style politics at its worst.”

Has Chicago’s reputation as a cesspool of corruption really fallen so far, so fast? It must be an embarrassment to actual practitioners of Chicago-style politics.

For the record, here are some real examples of that art. During Prohibition in the 1920s, Mayor William “Big Bill” Thompson – who couldn’t be “bought, bossed, or bluffed,” according to one of his campaign posters – made re-opening the city’s speakeasies one of his priorities. The mobster Al Capone, who stood to benefit from that plan, donated a quarter of a million dollars to his campaign. When Thompson won the election, Capone set up a gambling operation near the mayor’s office.

In 2009, Chicago Alderwoman Arenda Troutman was convicted and sentenced to four years in prison for tax and mail fraud. During her “five-year crime spree,” as the prosecution put it, she demanded payoffs for everything from zoning changes to land-use requests to alley access.

“The thing is,” she once explained in a secretly taped conversation, “most aldermen, most politicians, are hos.”

“Most” might be an exaggeration. But 31 aldermen in Chicago have been convicted of corruption since 1973. In addition to bribery, their crimes include embezzlement, tax evasion, extortion, racketeering, insurance fraud, and mail and wire fraud.

Corruption is no less a problem at the state level. You’ve heard of Rod Blagojevich? The former governor of Illinois is now serving the first year of a 14-year prison sentence, having been convicted last year on 18 counts of corruption. He tried to sell the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Barack Obama, most notably, but that was just the beginning. If the campaign contribution was large enough, nearly everything was up for sale in his administration – state jobs, contracts and appointments.

As a result, Blagojevich became the fourth governor of Illinois since the 1970s to spend time in prison. His predecessor, George Ryan, is still serving a sentence for corruption during his tenure as Secretary of State, when unqualified truckers could pay a bribe to get a license. Eventually, one of the drivers was involved in a horrific accident in which six children, all from the same family, burned to death in a minivan.

Blagojevich actually won his first election in the immediate wake of Ryan’s disgrace, promising to be a reformer. He obviously didn’t live up to his promise.

But here’s an interesting twist. The embarrassments of the Ryan and Blagojevich administrations have actually inspired the passage of serious reform legislation in Illinois. In 2009 the current governor, Pat Quinn, signed into law a bill that sets limits on contributions and unions.

That legislation goes to the heart of Chicago-style politics, which isn’t really about hardball tactics and ruthlessness, as Karl Rove and Mitt Romney seem to suggest. What connects virtually all of the corruption cases in Chicago and Illinois is money – “the mother’s milk of politics,” as Jesse “Big Daddy” Unruh famously put it.

Politicians and government officials have the power to grant favors and tilt the playing field this way or that. Individuals and corporations trade money in return for these favors and unfair advantages. Politicians take the money and pocket it, or use it to advance their careers. The more money in play, the more corruption there will be. It isn’t that complicated.

All the rest of it – the ruthlessness and sleaziness that Chicago and Illinois are famous for – is just a symptom of the money disease at the heart of system.

So it’s curious that, while Illinois has been embarrassed into action and is actually trying to reduce the influence of money in its politics, we’ve embarked as a nation on an experiment in virtually uncontrolled political spending. And the people who stand to benefit know a good investment when they see one.

An analysis of the American Jobs Creation Act, passed in 2004, found that corporations saved $220 in taxes for every dollar they spent on lobbying for the bill. That return on investment may be exceptionally high, but there’s a good reason that the lobbying expenses of politically active organizations by one estimate from nearly $1.5 billion to nearly $3.5 billion between 1999 and 2009. The reason is that lobbying works. It’s a classic win-win.

Special interests get their tax breaks and other favors. Politicians get their campaign contributions and whatever under-the-table payoffs they can wangle. The only loser is the American public.

The Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling takes that process of corruption to a whole new level. Unaccountable super PACs, funded largely by corporations and the wealthy, will invest hundreds of millions of dollars in the election process over the next several months. You can bet that the returns on their investments will be substantial.

That’s what “Chicago-style politics at its worst” actually looks like. Except that in Chicago and Illinois, corruption is still illegal. People are actually put on trial and convicted for it. Then they go to prison.

In Washington, D.C., the corruption is called free speech, and it’s business as usual. And business these days is very, very good.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

...

But in our last two presidential elections and apparently in this one, the smart money going to the party in power has been outweighed by “angry money” going to the party out of power.

The billionaires and the many, many others fueling the anti-Bush coffers in 2004 believed that the 43rd president had lied America into an unjustified and probably unwinnable war. I didn’t agree, but, hey, it’s a free country — and people should be free to try to elect the candidate of their choice.

In 2008, Barack Obama raised a lot of “hope” money and, since it looked like a Democratic year, a lot of smart money as well. But angry money from Bush-haters helped propel his total take to record levels.

This year, there’s no doubt that the billionaires and the many, many others contributing to the Romney campaign and pro-Romney super PACs are angry about the Obama Democrats’ policies and believe they will be harmful to the nation.

In sum, angry money seems to be trumping smart money in American politics these days.

Which leads one to wonder whether the increasingly Sisyphean project of restricting campaign contributions is worth pursuing any longer.

The Supreme Court in Citizens United and other cases appears to be edging toward a reversal of Buckley v. Valeo. There may be five votes in favor of giving political speech the same First Amendment treatment as student armbands, nude dancing, and flag burning.

That would restore the priorities of the framers, who were surely interested in protecting political speech much more than dancing and such.

American voter turnout has been rising, and so has Americans’ willingness to contribute money to political causes they think important. These are not negative trends, although incumbents targeted in attack ads tend to think so.

The apparent Republican edge in spending this year, like the Democratic edge in 2004, was evidence of widespread and heartfelt opposition to an incumbent president. It’s a sign of civic health, not sickness.

Michael Barone, NRO

 

[VaticanAssassin]

OMG...I agree with you!

 

[Cade Is Here]

Thant means obama wouldn't be able to spend his millions of advertising money then!!!

Poor Obama

 

[badbabysitter]

Thant means obama wouldn't be able to spend his millions of advertising money then!!!

Poor Obama

this coming from a guy that thinks Obama was President in 2006

 

[jonjonz68]

Yep this America, you don't like it move to North Korea and listen to the state drone on about the wonders of Iron Hand Leader For Life. You won't have to worry about minor technicalities like freedom.

No. You move to Saudi Arabia, where the House of Saud buys off its citizens with misogyny, intolerance, and religious fanaticism.

 

[KingOrfeo]

No. You move to Saudi Arabia, where the House of Saud buys off its citizens with misogyny, intolerance, and religious fanaticism.

But it won't buy you off with nuttin' -- it's just about impossible for an immigrant or guest-worker to become a Saudi citizen.