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Supreme Court Rolls Back Corporate Campaign Spending Limits
lorenlal writes "The Supreme Court of the United States must have figured that restrictions on corporate support of candidates was a violation of free speech, or something like that." From the AP story linked above:
"By a 5-4 vote, the court on Thursday overturned a 20-year-old ruling that said corporations can be prohibited from using money from their general treasuries to pay for campaign ads. The decision, which almost certainly will also allow labor unions to participate more freely in campaigns, threatens similar limits imposed by 24 states."
welcome our new Disney overlords.
They already have the only vote that matters. If you can choose who the candidates are, you never have to worry about which one wins.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
[Chief Justice] Roberts said he was not prepared to "embrace a theory of the 1st Amendment that would allow censorship not only of television and radio broadcasts, but of pamphlets, posters, the Internet and virtually any other medium that corporations and unions might find useful in expressing their views on matters of public concern."
But [Justice] Stevens and the dissenters said the majority was ignoring the long-understood rule that the government could limit election money from corporations, unions and others, such as foreign governments. "Under today's decision, multinational corporations controlled by foreign governments" would have the same rights as Americans to spend money to tilt U.S. elections. "Corporations are not human beings. They can't vote and can't run for office," Stevens said, and should be subject to restrictions under the election laws.
Maybe China now has something useful to do with the trillion+ dollars they have burning a hole in their pocket.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
then clearly the Constitution is defective.
You're thinking about this the wrong way. The constitution is not defective. Finally, all this anti-corporate ideology is on the wane, and true social equality will soon be reached when we get a corporation as a supreme court justice.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
We need to replace the "conservatives" on the supreme court who don't understand that corporations should not have the constitutional rights of citizens.
The constitution doesn't give you, or a business formed by you and a friend, any rights. The constitution is there to limit the government's ability to take those rights away. Being able to buy a newspaper advertisement or broadcast an advertisement isn't something that the goverment should be able to prevent you (or the company you've formed) from doing. Likewise for labor unions, advocacy groups, churches, scouting troops, bowling leagues, open source code projects, or anyone else.
I'm always amazed at how many misguided people think their rights come from the government. That explains a lot about why statists like Pelosi and Reid think they have so much more traction than they really do. Don't give it to them, now matter how much you want the government to be your Nanny.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
It's not the Constitution that's defective. It's the Supreme Court ruling in 1886 that effectively gave corporations personhood. THAT is what needs to be overturned.
A corp has no real responsibility, no sense of morals, and rarely ever is punished for many of its crimes. ANd yet, we equate it to man. That single warped logic is killing us.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The problem is that corporations are legal fictions which seem to have been given all of the rights of real people, but with NONE of the consequences or responsibilities. Freedom without responsibility is social destruction.
I'm not arguing that SCOTUS's logic is unsound. I'm arguing that even if their logic is sound, the conclusions they've reached have badly damaged the U.S., because it essentially lets rich corporations decide our laws.
And for that reason, the Constitution should perhaps be changed so that corporations cannot do this.
I read up quickly on the methods Canada takes on this, because we actually have - what I would consider - sane laws on this subject.
We limit individuals to a maximum $5000 donation. We limit corporations to a maximum $1000 donation.
Finally, and most importantly, we limit the amount any campaign can spend. For a major federal election, it has to do with the last cycle's vote pull. The major parties generally have gotten around $20 million as a cap for any election.
Contrast this with quotes I remember of saying that the 2008 presidential election in the states ran in excess of a billion dollars.
Just for reference, if you guys down there ever feel like fixing your shit.
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Free speech for individuals is great. The problem is that corporations are not people and money is not speech.
You are correct, but the implications of this get really sticky.
The right of association does not necessarily mean the will of the members of that association will be reflected. It means the will of the LEADERS of that association will be reflected. That may or may not reflect the membership, and the membership may or may not be voluntary unless you like quitting jobs because your boss or union steward does not agree with your political views.
A very large company could basically outright buy an election, any election they wanted, and not just limited to one election at a time. Don't like the way the legislature is writing antitrust law? Find the candidates in each state Senate election that are the least likely to want to have antitrust legislation and spend a few billion dollars on massive ad blitzes attacking their opponents. I think you'd find a very large majority of very large companies that could support such an effort, and they could spend tens of millions of dollars on even local elections without flinching. It wouldn't even match their current spending on Superbowl ads, fercrissake. There would be no opportunity for anyone to hear an opposing credible view, because a sufficiently large coalition of companies can buy ALL of the available airtime for an election.
On the other hand, drawing the line on what constitutes "free" versus "political" speech is difficult.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
That doesn't sound like a complaint against corporations, it sounds like a complaint against the Republican and Democrat political parties. Especially the incumbents.
And there's a reason that the thing was nicknamed the McCain-Feingold Incumbent Protection Act.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
[A U.S.] Supreme Court ruling in 1886 ... arguably set the stage for the full-scale development of the culture of capitalism, by handing to corporations the right to use their economic power in a way they never had before. Relying on the Fourteenth Amendment, added to the Constitution in 1868 to protect the rights of freed slaves, the Court ruled that a private corporation is a natural person under the U.S. Constitution, and consequently has the same rights and protection extended to persons by the Bill of Rights, including the right to free speech. Thus corporations were given the same “rights” to influence the government in their own interests as were extended to individual citizens, paving the way for corporations to use their wealth to dominate public thought and discourse. The debates in the United States in the 1990s over campaign finance reform, in which corporate bodies can “donate” millions of dollars to political candidates stem from this ruling although rarely if ever is that mentioned. Thus, corporations, as “persons,” were free to lobby legislatures, use the mass media, establish educational institutions such as many business schools founded by corporate leaders in the early twentieth century, found charitable organizations to convince the public of their lofty intent, and in general construct an image that they believed would be in their best interests. All of this in the interest of “free speech.”
— Richard Robbins, Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism, (Allyn and Bacon, 1999), p.100
Personally, in my opinion, that's where it went downhill. A corporation doesn't need rights as an individual. If a corporation needs to speak it has many members which can be enabled to speak for it.
The problem is that the voice of a business has no bearing on the amount of individuals it represents but merely by the amount of money it can throw. If a business representing 100,000 employees only has $100,000 to contribute it won't even be registered against a tiny company of 5 people that can contribute $1,000,000,000.
If there were reasonable caps to contributions, say, $1,000 per person (people) and _no_ corporations were allowed to contribute, then the people get the power back. If a large corporation wants to push an issue, they can lobby their own employees to contribute to their cause, but the choice would again be with the individual people.
I mean honestly, if I have $300 to contribute to a politician I support, how in the world is that going to compare to a $10,000,000 contribution from Big Media when they are leaning in the opposite direction on an issue?
I'm not saying "the people" have had any real power for a long time (when compared to big business), but this just skews it even farther away from us.
Sad day to be an American...
Have you ever heard of the AFL CIO? In 2000 they spent 4.1 million on federal campaigns.
In other words, an organization representing FIFTY SIX different unions and 11 million workers, donated about the same as a single large corporation would? I think you just proved the point you were trying to disprove.
If you voluntarily join a group with the intent of having your opinions heard through the voice of others in that group, that is one thing. It seems entirely another thing to have the political leanings off my boss amplified through corporate profits which I help earn, whether I like it or not.
Exactly. That's why it's a violation of my liberty that I can't bribe my way out of traffic tickets. That I can't buy my way into a medical license. That I can't pay a judge to kick you off your home. I've got strip malls to build people. Liberty coming through, peasants!
If I get together with a thousand like-minded individuals, we all retain our rights to free speech, and indeed, we can coordinate our speech into a single consensus message, repeated a thousand times over, significantly multiplying its effect. That was the intent of the two constitutional rights.
The new "corporation is a legal person" doctrine, which the Union got along very well without for nearly 200 years, creates a thousand-and-first "person" and claims it has yet another set of the same civil rights - and a gigantic budget to push them with, a budget that only needs the approval of some fraction of the thousand people associating.
The fraction doesn't have to be 50%, much less 100%. Most corporations are in fact governed by the opinions of a few dozen people that have bonuses dependent on a variation in the corporate income a few percent per year. The million people who have invested in it (900,000 of them involuntarily, they don't control where "their" pension fund puts its money) may not even be aware that "they" have decided to lobby for exporting jobs to Mexico, ripping the tops off mountains in Virginia, or the US purchasing useless, extravagant weapons systems.
Given proper information and some real control over the corporation they "own" 0.00001% of, they would say "Hell, no, I'd rather have my pension be $1050 per month instead of $1100 if it comes at the price of sweatshops, public debt, and my favourite trout stream vanishing". But that can't possibly happen with most modern corporate governance.
Corporations are not people. People have consciences and value other things besides money. Corporations are EXACTLY like machines running a program to maximize profit margins. They only don't run wild and consume all resources because of limiting rules, The Law. (i.e. "No sweatshops or child labour") Otherwise, people would be used up like any other available resource, worked to death.
Giving corporations access to the law-making process is like giving a program supervisory access to the operating system, it introduces positive feedback loops guaranteed to run out of control.
For those of a religious bent, I'd draw your attention to the source of those constitutional rights you just quoted: "They are endowed by their creator..." So, if God created your corporation, I'm OK with it having civil rights of its own. Otherwise, all the members of it still have their freedom of speech, so let them exercise it as citizens, not go inventing a new "citizen" that was not of woman born.
I'm sure many corporations would gladly give up free speech if they were not taxed like individuals.
Corporations are taxed like individuals? That's a good one!
Can an individual deduct all of his/her operating costs from income before tax? If so, expenditure on food, accommodation, and utilities would be deductible just like corporate office rentals and utilities. You'd be declaring only the $20k you can save/invest as taxable instead of most of your $100k gross income. A 40% rate on that "surplus" income would not hurt so much...
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Exactly, each individual in that group can write a personal check and the leader can put them all in the same envelope with a signed letter. We don't need a faceless organization _claiming_ to hold the support of its employees contributing millions of dollars on their "behalf".
If you want to assemble with like minded people, go for it!
If you want to all make a large contribution supporting your ideals, go for it!
Just make sure those contributions are from individuals and not a large organization with self serving interests and a huge coffer.
The power needs to lie with the people, not the organization.
> If you voluntarily join a group with the intent of having your opinions heard through the voice of others in that group, that is one thing.
Curiously enough, this case was about exactly that. A group of people put together a corporation called "Citizens United" and produced a film critical of Her Majesty, Hillary Clinton. It produced the film with the intent of airing it near the election so as to influence it, that is what caused them to run afoul of McCain/Feingold. Though far too late to save this group's efforts at Free Speech the SCOTUS has finally ruled that "Congress shall make no law...." means what it says. This is considered a radical decision in our dark times.
Democrat delenda est
So you mean voters are easily influenced by propaganda and are unable to consider the source?
I think that's exactly what he's saying, and I agree with him 100%.
I like to think of online DRM as something akin to a college -- you pay for lessons until you learn something.
This isn't about campaign contributions. Companies are still banned from doing that; the court upheld that provision. The Supreme Court overturned the part of the law that made it illegal for companies to spend money for their own political ads similar to what PACs do.
So basically, the court said that corporations run by a handful of individuals can spend arbitrary amounts of money on advertisements. The problem with this is that it is almost impossible for any legitimate political organization to achieve the same level of political influence as a result. Groups like PACs are nonprofit organizations. Therefore, they cannot feasibly raise money on the same scale as a public corporation can. Thus, this decision gives the people in charge of corporations the power to spend money on a scale that completely overwhelms the spending that any group of people dedicated to any cause can possibly hope to achieve no matter how well organized, no matter how many people join the group, etc. And because it is almost impossible to pierce the corporate veil, no matter how sleazy, unethical, etc. the ads become, the corporate leaders who put them together cannot be held personally accountable, unlike actual groups of individuals working together for a common cause.
In effect, this change puts control of the government firmly in the hands of the wealthiest individuals with no oversight whatsoever. It's sobering to realize that after years of Congress and the White House wiping their backsides with the Constitution, we now have a judicial branch that is willing to do the same.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Actually your having helped earn the profits is irrelevant, the profits are not yours...
It is actually hugely relevant. Corporations are anti-democratic, semi-feudal domains that assign all ultimate rights to an ownership class. Everyone else is a serf, who either works silently or is evicted from the estate. SCOTUS has decided that this sort of entity is a first-class participant in a modern democracy, which is disgusting, but then again, I'm not an American, so I'm a bit behind the times. In my own admittedly backwards country, the only legitimate participants in a democracy are citizens who can vote.
Corporations, shareholders, and boards of directors do not have democratic interests. The corporation itself is merely a legal proxy for the purposes of sharing property and liability. To the shareholders, the corporation is a money-making investment, like real estate or gold. It doesn't make sense to give your condominium the right to interfere in political debate, so why would you do such a thing for any other piece of investment-grade property? The directors do not share the interests of their corporations; they are duty-bound to ensure that shareholders get proper value from their investments, that is all. They are perfectly capable (in fact, are probably more capable) of ensuring that shareholders don't get defrauded if they treat their corporation like an untrustworthy, slightly dangerous animal, not like their liege lord.
Corporations do, however, have some inherent interests of their own that cannot be projected by proxy onto any of their human servants. For example, they are immortal. They can also reside in many cities and countries simultaneously. They are invulnerable to both conventional and nuclear weapons. They use these attributes to skirt and abuse laws that were designed for humans who have none of these characteristics. You know that these same corporations that are claiming the rights of people in the USA, will also be claiming that they are not governed by US law when it comes time to pay taxes or clean up their environmental messes.
I've got strip malls to build people.
And we love you for that. We are total whores for the lower priced lower quality crap your minimum wage employees will sell to us! And by buying it, we vote for you!