Elections For Sale?

[TheScotsman]

Today the Supreme Court has decided to pull the limits on corporate political donations, calling them a limit on free speech.

It seems like a reallllllyyyyyy bad idea, doesn't it? It would seem to me a corporation is not a person, and thereby not afforded a right to free speech. Moreover, it would seem, at least to me, to end badly, with politicians being completely owned by corporations to a larger extent than they already are. I never believed this case would end in this ruling. It virtually eliminates the reforms under the McCain-Feingold campaign reform act.



http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/09pdf/08-205.pdf <----<< decision

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703699204575016942930090152.html?mod=WSJ_WSJ_US_News_5 <----<< article

Good grief, get ready for the bombardment! the advertisement-money well is bottomless.

[Venger]

[quote name='TheScotsman' date='21 January 2010 - 12:21 PM' timestamp='1264094498' post='446859']
Today the Supreme Court has decided to pull the limits on corporate political donations, calling them a limit on free speech.

It seems like a reallllllyyyyyy bad idea, doesn't it? It would seem to me a corporation is not a person, and thereby not afforded a right to free speech. Moreover, it would seem, at least to me, to end badly, with politicians being completely owned by corporations to a larger extent than they already are. I never believed this case would end in this ruling. It virtually eliminates the reforms under the McCain-Feingold campaign reform act.



[url="http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/09pdf/08-205.pdf"]http://www.supremeco...9pdf/08-205.pdf[/url] <----<< decision

[url="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703699204575016942930090152.html?mod=WSJ_WSJ_US_News_5"]http://online.wsj.co...J_WSJ_US_News_5[/url] <----<< article

Good grief, get ready for the bombardment! the advertisement-money well is bottomless.
[/quote]
honestly its getting to the point where it will never be fixable. I myself am a conservative (kinda) libertarian. You let me alone , I let you alone
if we have to spend money lets think about it really hard first. By taking the rains of corporations and lobbyists you are given them a stronger voice than my one vote should have. Special interest groups don't even care about their cause as much as they care about how much they can make (yes i am talking to you NRA, you should be fighting all gun law not just the stuff that keeps money flowing) Sigh I guess I should take my hookah, while i can still smoke it until another lobby pays to have it voted away from me, and go up in the woods.
ray

[KyleTheJustin]

Elections have been bought out for the past 50+ years. This certainly is not news.

[Sonthert]

Yeah, bad idea.

The solution, of course, is to put strict limits on media and advertising forcing Media to give equal free time and advertising to each political candidate/ballot measure. Intrinsic to that working is enacting remnants of the Fairness Doctrine so that Media has to give equal fair time for any paid political advertisement they broadcast/publish. They'll stop accepting paid political advertising fast and keep it to the minimum free time they're required to give. Big Media doesn't want our public property to be used in this way, so government tried to pass an alternate law. Didn't work.

The Supreme Court has (wrongly in my opinion) held that Corporations have Free Speech powers. This is granted them the equal protection clause enacted after the Civil War. Of course, corporations didn't exist then and the people writing the Amendment had no intention of it applying to companies or corporations, but that doesn't matter. It doesn't matter that corporations were defined outside the Constitution as legal entities and then Constitutional Rights were conferred based on this law. In effect, the Constitution was added to by decree of a law that the Supreme Court wanted to uphold.

[johnp]

I agree with the above.
This is not news. All it does is give some competition to the multi billionaires who are pulling the strings now. After all...SOMEBODY contributed over a trillion to the winning presidential campaign this election. Who? who knows.
At least a corporation would have to report this (publicly) on its taxes and everyone would know who the corporation (if it saw fit) supports.
The foreign billionaires who've been buying US elections for the last decade are unhappy.

[mushrat]

I concur, this just makes for fewer investigations later into campaign finances of a particular candidate.

I think we shoudl revive the Island thing and start really raising some funds.

[LZ22]

I think its important to realize that just because this passed doesn't mean that all of a sudden corporations are going to be dumping every penny of their earnings into politicians. All of their donations would be publicly disclosed, so I doubt they would wan't that heavy of press. Also, as already stated, companies have already been dumping money into lobbying for ages.

I'd rather have companies be dumping their money into promoting campaigns and still have the people vote who they want in (its still YOU AND ME who are voting for people), rather than the politicians we vote in be bought out by lobbying. In my eyes, its the lobbying money that is much much much more harmful than any ad campaign.

Also, 26 states currently allow corporations to spend their money on election campaigning and such. There has been nothing bad that has happened with those states, many of the states who allow this are some of the best governed states their are, and ones who don't allow it are some of the worst.

I think the reaction is extremely overblown to be honest. As if there aren't already a trillion attack-ads, I don't think anything is going to honestly change. I found a quote from Justice Anthony Kennedy from this article I read that I like: "Under our current law and tradition it seems stranger than fiction for our government to make political speech a crime."

[Rani]

Here's the thing...... I've worked in places where my boss, ahem, "strongly campaigned" for a particular candidate. Anyone who didn't like his choice and was open about didn't work there very long. I don't like the fact that this ruling makes it look more acceptable to give out these massive sums of money, but in reality it's been done for years - only just not publicly or obviously. An umbrella or parent corporation may donate billions, but because it was broken up among the sub-corporations it was legal to the letter of the law. Now they'll just write the check from the parent corporations headquarters. So the final effect likely hasn't changed much. But honestly I don't think corporations should be allowed to contribute or become involved period. Corporations aren't individual people and therefore don't get a vote. Only individual people do. Our constitution was not written with any real foreknowledge that corporations would ever become truly as internationally powerful as they are today or how many laws they would intentionally skirt in their own interest against the interest of the general population or the country as a whole. I think our founding fathers would be appalled.

'Rani