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skfinkel's avatar

Your thoughts on the Supreme Court decision to have no ban on campaign ads for corporations?

Asked by skfinkel (13537points) January 21st, 2010

What does this mean about our political system? Even more will the most money win? Is there anything that can overcome the influence of ads in politics? Are we just plain sunk?

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19 Answers

Dr_Dredd's avatar

I think it’s crazy that a corporation is considered to be a “person” with rights such as free speech. I think they should have upheld the ban. Interesting that Sotomayor sided with the dissent. I wasn’t sure I’d agree with her on a lot of issues, but on this one I do.

lilikoi's avatar

Misguided. Corporations shouldn’t even be able to lobby Congress – they are not people!

Fyrius's avatar

Can you help us non-Americans out by elaborating what you’re talking about?

Qingu's avatar

Insane and may well ruin the political process in this country (beyond its already sorry-assed state).

Corporations are not people. They are not entitled to constitutional rights. Seeing as SCOTUS judges, unlike Blue dog and Republican politicians, don’t get paid off by corporations for spouting shit like this, my only conclusion is that they are insane.

lilikoi's avatar

@Qingu – They are not people yet are law provides them with similar rights of people.

phoenyx's avatar

I was surprised. I think that corporations or other entities should not have political free speech. Free speech should be a right of individuals only.

FrankHebusSmith's avatar

I understand the argument for freedom of speech, but at the same time I see the huge problem this could cause with campaign donations.

Snarp's avatar

I think Justice Stevens said it best: ’‘Essentially, five justices were unhappy with the limited nature of the case before us, so they changed the case to give themselves an opportunity to change the law.’’

dpworkin's avatar

Typical right-wing knee-jerk decision, purely political. The Court knows both Master and Servant, and in this case they wish the servant to be beholden to the master.

Snarp's avatar

If corporations are legal people, with the same right to free speech as any human person, then why not give them the right to vote, too?

dpworkin's avatar

@Snarp Beause we all know it is a fiction to benefit the elite at the cost of the majority, and because they have honed their ability to get us to vote against our own best interests, as was apparent in Boston the other night.

benjaminlevi's avatar

We need to get corporate money out of campaigns altogether.

Dr_Dredd's avatar

Unfortunately, the precedent to consider a corporation as a person has been around since the late 1800’s. (I think the case was Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, from 1886. Any lawyers out there?)

Despite the doctrine of corporate personhood being around for awhile, this was a really big change to campaign finance law. How come it’s only judicial activism when it’s a decision conservatives don’t like?

ratboy's avatar

The market has become the fundamental institution of our society. If our role as citizens is secondary to our role as consumers, then it is not surprising that we see everything, including “free” speech and political representation, as commodities. It appears that all branches of our government have been bought and paid for, and the owners are exercising their right to use their property in the pursuit of their interests.

kidkosmik's avatar

Is it V for Vendetta time?

Dr_Lawrence's avatar

All future candidates for congress, senate and the white house will be bought by corporations to suit their own corporate interests. Human individuals cannot compete with the financial power of the corporate “individuals”.

Any semblance that involved citizens choose their representatives will soon be shown to be a myth. The conservative appointees to the Supreme Court have annulled multiple laws passed by representatives elected by human individuals and decided to give unlimited power to corporate interests to choose and control all levels of government from the town and village level to the Federal levels. The next President will be the President of the Corporate States of America. Any media that at this time can critique the government, politicians or corporations will be subdued by corporate interests until there will be one one “official” view of all news and political events and that will be the one view approved by the politicians they purchased.

Democracy will no longer even be an illusion in the USA. The Constitution, including the Bill of Rights will be ignored or revised to suit the interests of the Corporations.

Forget about minority rights and even human rights. There will be no Left and no Right wing parties. There will be corporation purchased candidates only and they will all work to keep corporations happy and wealthy.

It is the beginning of the end of Democracy blended with Capitalism.

The future of America is Corporate Capitalism as a one party system.

Human Americans will be reduced to customers and bystanders in the political process.

Agree or disagree, it will make no difference. Being a citizen with the right to vote will be irrelevant. You will only get to vote for corporation purchased candidates. What kind of freedom is that?

Zuma's avatar

This decision removes the final impediment to corporations competing directly against natural citizens in the democratic process. Up until now, corporations have not been able to contribute to political campaigns directly. They have had to channel their contributions through industry trade associations, Chamber of Commerce-type interest groups, and Political Action Committees. Forcing corporations to aggregate their money in this way is supposed to blunt the influence of specific corporations, so that no one corporation can use its wealth to buy political influence that gives it a permanent advantage over its competitors.

Now the gloves are off and the race for dominance has begun. One can expect the most rapacious and self-serving corporations to end up on top. So, forget global warming; forget health care; forget debt relief; forget peace; forget government by the people. And say hello to the Corporate State—a nation run by its corporations for the benefit of its corporations and not its people. Say hello to policies driven by the military-industrial-complex and for-profit prisons. Say goodbye to democracy and hello to fascism.

The reason that corporations were not granted full political rights in the first place is because they do not die like natural persons. And because they do not die, there is no natural limit to how rich they can become. Over time the laws of compound interest alone will ensure that corporations own everything. The reason they don’t already is because of the countervailing power of government to break up trusts, monopolies, police unfair, corrupt, and dangerous practices, and generally redistribute wealth through things like the minimum wage, protecting the right to unionized, direct forms of social investment, and stimulus spending.

As corporate power has grown, the power of natural citizens has decreased. Corporations have gotten the usury laws repealed, and they can now legally charge you upward of 30% interest. Despite recent cosmetic “reforms” corporations can still engage in stealth pricing—that is, they can trick and trap you into complicated contracts that slam you with penalties on top of penalties, if you run into hard times and fall behind. The steady erosion of the social safety net, lack of enforcement of labor laws, the manipulation of the economy through pumping up and then bursting speculative bubbles, allows corporations to fleece ordinary citizens on a wholesale basis—and to do so legally—or if not legally, to do so with impunity.

As you may have noticed, just one senator—Joe Lieberman, the Senator from Aetna—was able to veto health care for millions of Americans, at a cost of 47,000 uninsured American lives per year. The Iraq war was instigated by oil corporations who had expected to profit handsomely by forcing the Iraqi’s to sell them their oil fields cheap. When that didn’t work out, they profited from artificially high oil priced due to the war-induced uncertainty over oil supplies. Eventually, they were able to gouge the American consumer to the tune of $4 a gallon, knocking over the first recessionary domino that sent the whole world economy to the brink of collapse. To save the day, the Bush Administration gave the banks $350 billion with no strings attached, and now nobody knows where that money went and the bankers are paying themselves billions of dollars in bonuses again.

Once the corporate state begins to rewrite the nations laws to suit itself, you can expect to see a permanent corporate aristocracy emerge, lording themselves over an increasingly debt-ridden and impoverished citizenry. Freedoms will evaporate as the rich grow richer and the poor grow poorer, because free markets only benefit people who have money. The corporate aristocracy will literally be able to get away with murder, while everyone else will sink into a kind of second-class citizenship subject to the close scrutiny of all the surveillance that money can buy. The technical infrastructure is already in place, and now has a political constituency of its own (everyone who makes a living, directly and indirectly, through the Homeland Security apparatus).

It may already be too late. However, the justices who voted for this are mostly the same ones who voted to steal the 2000 election for George W. Bush. There are ample grounds for impeachment here, but there is no political will.

If you thought my reference to fascism was simply rhetorical hyperbole, think again. An anti-democratic, militarized, corporate state is the very essence of fascism. The tea bag rallies are astroturfed, which is to say, they are corporate funded mass spectacles orchestrated to drum up popular resentment and discontent—in this case, they are tapping into white people’s resentment over having a black president, and the prospect of having to share the nation’s wealth with people they don’t consider real Americans. It is not an accident that the rhetoric is becoming increasingly irrational and violent.

Fascism does not begin with goose-stepping stormtroopers. They come later. First, the legitimacy of democratic government has to be discredited. The whole conservative notion that government is theft and can’t do anything right is part of this propaganda attack. And, then there are the actual attacks when the Republicans rule and bring government into disrepute by staffing it with third-rate people, ideological hacks, and people hostile to the mission of the agencies they work for. During the Bush Administration one watchdog agency phoned in complaints that children were working in meat packing plants during school hours, and none of them were even investigated.

Even science is undermined in order to thwart the development of expertise and competence that might legitimate a technocratic approach to governing. The Republican’s refusal to engage in any sort of bipartisanship is a deliberate attempt to destroy the American people’s confidence in their democratic institutions, by bringing the nation’s business to a screeching halt. In addition, they have engendered cynicism by exposing to the extent to which the Democrats are complicit in all this by being recipients of corporate money and deferential to corporate interests, while pretending to be “for the people.”

Obama has done nothing to dismantle the imperial presidency that he inherited. We have returned to the ways of soft power, but we are still an imperial power, out for ourselves and our corporations.

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