I am one of those liberals who did not like this decision at all, but the points made in this video do leave me wanting to participate in further debate to improve my understanding of the issue.
Paraphrasing:
Such corporate contributions are already allowed in 26 states, including mine (CA).
Media corporations have a long history of endorsing candidates and the world has not ended.
More speech is not bad, it catalyzes conversations, especially just prior to an election.
My rebuttals:
Status quo != the best way and I’d rather see campaign reform in those states than less reform everywhere.
A whole debate in and of itself, but I do trust the media companies to be more diplomatic and balanced than say, an oil company who wants to drill in Alaska (to stick with the film’s Exxon/Palin hypothetical).
This is the most difficult for rebuttal, but it comes down to resources and the laziness of the average citizen. In order to balance the free speech of corporate special interests, time and money must be spent to organize and distribute differing opinions. The deck is stacked in the corporations favor in that regard.
Corporations are not people. Those who think they are, have now made them super people. They have access to huge amounts of money. They already can lobby politicians like crazy. They write the legislation that concerns them. They can create programs slanted to their interests and put them on TV.
Soon we will have senators on cspan with Nascar jackets on. That will show who sponsors them.
It was a terrible ruling . Right now the corporations are transferring their money back to the repubs in anticipation of what is ahead. They were giving more than usual to the dems because they were in power. It worked to sell people on stopping badly needed heath care reform. It always works. We are screwed.
None of this prevents regulating corporate contributions - this will have to be done in a way that preserves First Amendment rights, however.
And it is certainly true that corporations have First Amendment rights - those countless newspapers that editorialized against this decision were all owned by corporations. We are posting on message boards provided by a corporation that does at times control the content here. Nothing controversial about that.
If you’re not going to trust the citizenry to do the work of informing themselves when all the information they can realistically get is already out there, you might as well write democracy off altogether. Having “equal time” won’t make a lick of difference, they’ll just vote for whoever had the handsomest news presenter or tallest candidate. Anyway, is someone supposed to control all the information that somehow finds it to the ear of a voter? Why would you trust them more than a corporate goon? What if these guys are voters themself and therefore probably brainless automatons?
And what if we go through all that effort and they STILL vote wrong!
This argument falls apart, frankly, since the restrictions were not solely on corporations but also affected advocacy organizations and labor unions. This ruling frees them all to produce election related and advocacy ads and other material.
That is so not fair. Unions are under 7 percent of the work force. They do not have a sliver of the wealth at hand that corporations do. This is a boon to one group, corporations.
I’m far less concerned about what is fair in this regard than what is constitutional. Lots of things I dislike are perfectly legal, and some things I wish would happen just happen to be against the rules.
This decision is what it is - necessary. Without it we would have more and more encroachments on freedom of speech in the guise of plugging loopholes. Better to start over and look for better ways to reform campaigns.
A lot of politicians have attempted to pass laws on campaign financing to limit the effects of the corporations. When we tried to get legislation to reign in the banks it failed .When asked why, Durbin replied" they own the place". This ruling will make it worse, much worse.
The health insurance companies sicced 1500 lobbyists on the politicians Does that sound like their opinions were being suppressed? This will exacerbate a serious problem. Our pols will have to be bigger money whores than they already are.
It did. Actually, the ruling wasn’t about a for profit corporation. It was about a not for profit public interest group that made a documentary about a candidate.
“Corporations aren’t people” is weak. Corporations are tools created by people to do stuff, and you can’t argue that limiting them won’t inhibit the ability of people to do stuff. (You can say that maybe we should inhibit certain abilities, but painting corporations as faceless monoliths is inaccurate. Also remember that nonprofits also count as corporations.)
2. I agree with Volokh that politics, at least a politics as expansive as ours, is a zero-sum game. If corporations lose, then other folks gain. What sort of folks? Lobbyists, academics, journalists, celebrities, and the individually extremely rich. Taking the broad view, then, nixing corporate speech will increase, not decrease, individual inequality in political influence.
3. All that said, I’m concerned about the practical effect of increased corporate political influence. By and large, profit-seeking corporations only have one reason to get involved with politics, and that is rent-seeking. Google will want subsidized free broadband, GM will want protectionism, and Goldman Sachs will want implicit government guarantees against collapse. Of course, even if corporate speech is muzzled there’s nothing to stop them from hiring lobbyists, so the marginal effect of this decision may not be that great. A longer-term solution would be to limit the government’s ability to grant economic rents, whether by drawing back its powers to begin with or by agitating voter sentiment against corporate welfare.
4. This really shouldn’t be a partisan issue. Corporations regularly donate to both parties, and in 2008 Obama received more corporate donations than McCain.
Here’s the best rebuttal I’ve yet seen, in terms of both public policy and constitutional-law reasoning: From [url=Amazon.com]The Next American Nation,](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUdFaIYzNwU) 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.
Well, that makes it even worse, doesn’t it? The way things stand now, no matter who wins an election, he’s beholden to the coroporations. That’s plutocracy, not democracy.
Democracy has a big problem: you let half the population, with an IQ of under 100, have an equal vote to the smartest guy in the country.
Extremists on both sides have always wanted to manage the idiot voter under the assumption that he or she is too stupid to make an independent decision.
I am disappointed in the demonization and distrust of “corporations.” I work in the corporate world and I think the typical negative characterization of large corporations is both naive and wrong. In any case, as pointed out in the video, what corporations have more control over public opinion than the media, much of which is liberal? And as a second to having the most control, higher education which is also heavily biased toward a liberal bent? I am personally far more disappointed in legislators and bureaucrats, on average, than I am in corporations bending public will.
We get who we vote for and most of the time we vote for whoever is going to line our local pockets, be it Mr Murtha or Ms Landrieu. To pretend that legislators are pawns of large corporations and voters are too stupid to understand issues for themselves is just silly. And in this age of instant information distribution, the idea of controlling information is even sillier.
We have turned lately to electing legislators willing to allow us to line our pockets with the tax money from future generations. The battle over liberal v conservative and free speech will all be meaningless when we no longer have anything but service on the debt itself. And the fault for that lies not in SCOTUS but in ourselves.
But, until campaign finance is reformed to eliminate money’s influence in elections, nothing like that can even be on the table, because the corporations don’t want it to be, and when it comes down to it, it’s the elected officials or those with a financially-realistic shot at being such who get to set the outer limits of the agenda.
That was just hedging their bets. They have put their money on the likely winner, not because of their neutrality but because they want to have influence with the in party. The repubs have been their party for generations. That has not changed. But they continue to back repubs all the time. You know who they work for. Since the ruling ,money has been moving back to the repubs. That should not be a surprise.