By that definition, the US already lacks “free speech” despite the first Amendment, since, as demonstrated above, there exist at least some types of speech which are prohibited, even criminalized.
This being the case, “free speech” in the US is, legally, not absolute; so the question becomes something like ‘what limits on this freedom are reasonable and rational in a democratic society that values freedom and equality, performing an essential public function of promoting these basic values without excessive infringement on liberty’.
This is the case argued by those advocating spending limits.
You may agree or disagree, but claiming that such arguments lack merit in the US context because the US has complete freedom of speech guaranteed by the first amendment won’t work - because it doesn’t.
Whether to allow such things is, ultimately, a political decision, which could easily have gone the other way - simply by defining spending as ‘not speech’. As David Kairys famously put it when describing Citizens United:
There was noting inevitable about that verdict. The result has been widely seen as a disaster for US democracy. Together with Speechnow.org v. Federal Election Commission, it enabled the rise of so-called “Super PACs”. Not good.
“Money isn’t speech and corporations aren’t people”? Pretty much corporations have been persons, legally, since 1886 if not since 1818. Being a “person” allows corporations to enter into contracts, be sued and since they are composed of people- have (some) rights.
Free Speech meant fuck-all under the Wilson administration. Pacifists, pro-Germans, communists, socialists even, all went in under the Caudine yokes.
And then they passed a Sedition Act.
First, the paragraph went from “the right of each citizen to vote” to “voter equality.” I agree that all votes should be equal, but the second term allows for the type of judicial chicanery done in this case and is not the same. Every citizen has the same right to vote whether I spent $1 or $1 trillion in the election. Every citizen’s vote counts as equally no matter how much money is spent.
The “drowning out” language is equally dubious and results oriented. Did the spending turn these people into mindless drones who need a guardian in order to cast votes? If I spout out my nonsense 10 times to your well reasoned thoughts once (and who decides which is which?) are voters incapable of distinguishing between your good statements and my bad ones just because I said them more or on prettier billboards?
If that is the argument, and it is found to hold true, it seems to be an indictment on representative democracy instead of free speech.
And I personally don’t believe that limiting my ability to advocate for something with my own money is reasonable and rational in a democratic society.
I also don’t think “Free Speech Zones” are a good idea either.
But as I said above, this seems to be a tangent. But it seems like other countries just pass laws that limit how much of their own money a person can spend to promote a candidate. Seems wrong to me, that’s all.
I realized that my previous response about Spain wasn’t complete. It refers to giving money to parties, but not to publicity.
AFAIK, getting ads for someone else isn’t banned, simply because it’s the kind of thing that nobody here would think of doing. For starters, no party’s platform will ever align completely with a different organization’s desires - if they do, then what the two should do is merge. And for individuals, if you want so badly to help a party, there are legally-approved ways to do so. The amount of explaining needed for a lot of American political issues (from those ads to gerrymandering to electing judges to bills mixing two completely different things) is very, very big here.
Gotta love how a thread about a specific issue and how it’s dealt with in countries other than the US has ended up having so many of its posts being about how do the US deal with it.
Well, certainly corporations have legal personality, in that they can sue or be sued.
It is a far cry from that fact, to asserting that they are, literally, “people” in that they enjoy what are, usually, credited with ‘human rights’.
In the Declaration of Independence starts off as follows:
Obviously, these days, for “men” read “humans”.
Are paper creations such as corporations among those “humans” or “men” that self-evidently have “inalienable rights”?
I would suggest that they are not. That their “rights” are strictly limited to what they were created for - undertaking certain activities, mostly of a commercial nature; and that extending to them such “rights” as freedom of speech is by no means an obvious or inevitable move. They are not the same thing as actual humans.
On the contrary, it appears to me merely facing reality: that advertising by and large works.
Of course advertising does not absolutely dictate individual reactions. The notion that it is intended to create “mindless drones” is just absurd hyperbole.
However, advertisers aren’t spending millions of dollars for nothing. They spend that cash because they have a reasonable belief that spending it is effective.
Of course representative democracy sucks. As Churchill famously noted (or at least, it was attributed to him), it is a terrible system … unfortunately, every other system invented to date just happens to be even worse.
Pretending that the system doesn’t have flaws that can be exploited, or that admitting and trying to remedy such flaws is an insult to democracy, is just an ostrich strategy - burying one’s head in the sand.
The idea of corporate personhood is a bit tangential to the question of what other countries are doing, which often consists in deeming that prohibitions on corporate and union political donations serve the public interest, irrespective of a corporation’s alleged personhood. I did, however, want to point out an excellent article on the subject. Its title, If Corporations Are People, They Should Act Like It hints at its intriguing premise. If I were to start quoting from it I’d be quoting so much that I’d run into copyright issues – I suggest reading the whole thing would be worthwhile. But to summarize the main things I got out of it, it makes the following basic arguments:
That the idea of corporate personhood is a valid and indeed important concept that is the basis of corporations having a legal identity of their own, separate and distinct from that of their sharholders, and that this separateness is so fundamental to capital markets that it can be regarded as the foundation of capitalist economies.
That some of the rulings or odd principles that have been derived from the dogma of corporate personhood are not the result of the dogma itself but rather of its misapplication in not taking its premise of separateness and corporate autonomy in its logical entirety. A case in point was the Hobby Lobby ruling, where the article argues that it’s highly inconsistent to take a situation where the corporation was so separate and autonomous from its owners that the owners were personally shielded from its financial liabilities, and then at the same time to declare that the corporation must be able to take on the religion of its owners and exercise corporate freedom of religious belief!
Thirdly and most importantly, that declaring that a corporation is a person should in no way be an obstacle to regulating excessively dominant political speech by corporations and individuals alike, when the one-sided dominance of such speech perverts the fundamental integrity of democracy itself. Here is where I’ll offer a brief quote:
Nevertheless, there are myriad reasons why a commitment to free speech rights—even corporate free speech rights—should not bar reasonable limits on independent campaign expenditures from both corporations and the super rich. It is not hyperbole to say that without such limits, our democracy is at risk. The billions of dollars flooding the electoral process skew it toward the monied and well heeled, and pervert the nature of public service. The current Court is so enamored with a simplistic, libertarian theory of free speech doctrine that it is blind to those risks. A sane Court could easily construct exceptions to otherwise applicable doctrine to protect the sanctity and fairness of our elections. In fact, Canada’s supreme court has done that very thing.
But notice something. One can support campaign finance regulation and still acknowledge corporate personhood as well.
In fact, most of the money flooding into the electoral process isn’t coming from corporations. It’s coming from rich individuals like Sheldon Adelson and the Koch brothers. There is a lot of corporate money, to be sure. Chevron, the most politically active public corporation in 2012, spent $2.5 million in that year’s election cycle; the Chamber of Commerce, the largest corporate bundler, funneled over $35 million into various 2012 races. But both were dwarfed by the torrent of individual money. Adelson alone threw almost $93 million into various races during the same period, and the Koch brothers ran a network of shady groups that spent over $400 million.
