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US Supreme Court Expected Political Ad Transparency
T Murphy writes "The Supreme Court, when ruling that corporate and union political donations were allowed under free speech, assumed the source of the donation would be disclosed immediately under current donation laws. Due to loopholes, this has not been the case, eliminating the hoped-for transparency the Supreme Court ruled to be vital to democracy. Justice Kennedy, who sided with the majority on the ruling, has been called naive for his expectation that there would be greater transparency. In the meantime, campaign spending for House candidates alone is expected to reach $1.5 billion."
The problem isn't even direct donations to a candidate, really.
It's that, for example, Microsoft could set up a shell group called "Concerned Citizens for Software Freedom" and funnel money into it to buy a million political ads that trashed a candidate running against a candidate they liked.
Yes, actually she did. Start on page 64. She is arguing that the law DOES cover books but you don't need to worry about it because the Government has never tried to regulate books and if it did there would be grounds for a legal challenge. You'll forgive me if I don't find that argument very compelling.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Perhaps you're not aware, but the Supreme Court didn't "make [a law] that depend[s] upon [an]OTHER law". The Supreme Court doesn't make laws, period.
The Court did apparently make assumptions about the implications of a particular interpretation, but that's pretty much unavoidable. It speaks to the excessive complexity of our body of laws that they could not predict the outcome correctly.
While I disagree with the Court's ruling, the I do not find such severe fault as you do with the specific detail of meaning (but apparently failing to say in a binding way) "...following the same rules as everyone else".
ink that the difference is that the constitution also makes no mention of organizations or corporations has have ANY rights.
That's completely irrelevant. Read the plain text of the 1st amendment: "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech"
What part of "shall make no law" is so hard to understand?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
No, it's called corporate oligarchy.
That used to be the case! A corporation, or really any group, was limited in the way it could fund a campaign. It could only give an amount equal to the limits of personal giving of each of its members, and they weren't allowed to give on their own outside of it. This SCOTUS ruling destroyed that!
Agreed, the real problem here is corporate personhood (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood).
Businesses have something approaching the full rights of a human being, except, as the quote goes "They (corporations) have no soul to save and they have no body to incarcerate."
Combine this with the ideas of limited liability, proprietary knowledge, and the common practice of boards of directors being friends with the executives they appoint, and what you have is a class of corporate management run amok with little or no accountability to shareholders. Management has access to billions of dollars to spend towards their own interests, which in many cases are not the interests of the shareholders.
That said, I believe the government does have the authority to dissolve corporations, so a repeat felon corporation could be dissolved or fined into non-existance, although I don't know of any time this has happened before. The US guidelines to sentencing organizations (http://www.ussc.gov/2009guid/CHAP8.htm) mention fining an exclusively criminal organization of all its assets, but I see no mention of dissolving repeat offenders. Maybe someone else can chime in here.
This is what the creators of our government thought about corporations.
God is imaginary
I agree that corporations and unions should be treated the same for the purposes of political donations. However I think you will find that all but one union has revenues of less that $20M/yr and the vast majority can only dream of revenues in excess of $1M/yr. The one union with revenues in exess of $20M/yr rakes in $175M/yr which in the grand scheme of things is peanuts. The notion that they can compete on an equal footing with corporate donations in a $1.5B campaign is laughable, the average US CEO's remuneration of $8.5M dwarfs the yearly revenue of all but a handfull of unions.
Note: The source for the union figures is the US DOL, they have a web app where you can look these things up but I used my fragile memory since I can't be bothered finding the link.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.