Citizes United Unlimited Corporate/ Money in Elections

Of course we aren't talking about corporations as individual persons with the full panoply of rights. I think Scalia answers your contention best:

Once again, your conclusions would allow for a ban of incorporated newspapers from, in its logical full extent, saying anything at all.

 

Very limited? . The recognition of basically inalienable first amendment rights being extended to non-existent artificial "persons" in the realm of political speech is huge. If it were a narrow decision, it could have been narrowly limited to the facts of the case & 441 could have been declared unconst. as applied to Citizens United - but that's not what happened at all. Instead Congress is basically screwed on this issue forevermore unless a constitutional amendment is passed, which has no chance of passing. Or if somebody applying John Roberts loose interpretation of stare decisis decides to revisit the issue.

When Unions can be outspent by their opponents many time over. That's why they vehmently opposed this decision. Please take this stock trope and erase it from your head despite it having been drummed into your head for 20 years that corporations & unions are comparable campaign spenders - it's not your fault but it is your problem.

 

He really doesn't at all. He has a bunch of mishmash about framers and doesn't mention state corporation codes at all (mostly because modernn corporation law hadn't really been invented at that time).

Just because something doesn't mention legally fictitious entities and artificial speakers doesn't mean that his de facto implication that they're covered is correct or practical or even consistent And I haven't even broached the incredibly ridiculously complications that comes from this when you try to apply it the real world, where most corporations exist as manila folders.

Once we've conceded that corporations don't get all rights, then why can't we pick and choose which rights they should have based on practicality ? We already DO IT.

No it wouldn't - McCain Feingold existed for years without this happening. Again, see above, that's a minor complication that pales in comparison with assigning free speech rights to manila folders.

 

Fine...

Allow corporations free speech and to make political ads.

But.

Make sure they disclose who they are so at least people know the source. If an Insurance company wants to rip apart insurance policy and politicians against it's views - great. But the beginning of the ad should be required to say, "Brought to you by xxxx, an insurance company"

They get their free speech, and people get the fair shakedown.

Transparency is a really good thing.

 

There are so many ways to get around this it's not even funny. Of course, bills are pending in the house & senate that say the same thing, but guess who is blocking them, and guess who they are getting $$$ from in order to block them. It's a rigged game, the realities of which Anthony Kennedy is too naive and out of touch to understand.

 

I brought up unions in the original discussion too point out that this isn't a matter of which party it favors, for practical purposes it does favor the GOP far more than the Democrats, but in regard to the principle. I think the discussion of the political implications while important are tangential to the issue principle of whether corporations essentially have the same rights as humans.

 

I, along with many legal scholars far far more learned than me, would disagree with Scalia's contention in regard to corporate personhood as just being the voice of a group of people. Yes a corporation is a group of people but in terms of why we legally charter corporations under law that is not the case. For instance my business even though it is just a handful of people is a corporation and in the law it is a separate entity from me, my partner and the others who have ownership stake. So if the corporation gets sued I am not personally liable.

Now if Scalia's argument is correct that the corporation is just an amalgamation of people then the legal fiction of corporate personhood shouldn't apply to things like lawsuits and contracts. When Best Buy gets sued I as a shareholder of Best Buy then should also be at risk since the corporation isn't a separate entity from me.

 

Oh, who's being naive, twhy77?

 

Ideological equivocations aside, the result of this decision allows a corporate entity, or an individual acting through a corporate shell, to buy the election of a "friendly" official in thousands of small towns across the country. Not that this practice has not existed all along, but now it has been given full, unfettered Supreme Court sanction.

In Rockdale, Texas where Alcoa is the dominant employer and driver of all things economic, do you think a candidate elected by "anonymous" Alcoa money is not in some way beholden to them? Even if they are already ideologically in bed together?

What about Diboll, Texas and the Temple family? Do you think Temple-Inland, Inc. might have a shot at electing a candidate that is going to benefit their interests?

Now, this elected official could be as honest as Lincoln, but does that even matter by this point?

More money has been spent in these mid-term elections than was spent in all of the 2008 presidential election.

I will repeat:

More money has been spent in these mid-term elections than was spent in all of the 2008 presidential election.

 

Real quick because I have class. I think Scalia is talking about what Justice Powell elucidated in Begotti:

 

Then how do you fix it? The USSC just made it legal for corporations to spend money supporting politicians. That will and can not be changed now.

 

So Justice Powell was thinking that speech "by" fictional entities existing only in manila folders is the type of speech that the 1st amendment was meant to protect?

That doesn't pass the laugh test. Try as you (they) might, you simply can't divorce the speech from the speaker here, and there's no need to - the reason why the entity exists is to be a separate type and nature of entity with a limited amount of rights and obligations. It is a bright line, easy test to distinguish between artificial and natural entities. So incredibly simple.

 

Oh. My. God.

I could put this in the AZ bill thread, but it really belongs here...

And here in my cynicism, I thought it was an attempt to inflame the winger base... I was not even close to cynical enough to think it was really a handout to an industry that makes money off of locking people up.

Wow.

And this is the danger of having so much corporate money in the system. By the time the truth gets out, if it ever does, the harm is done.

 

i've reported all of you.

 

I think your insistence on the fact that a corporation can exist in a manila folder is overlooking the issue as framed by Powell and Scalia. Those coporations, small companies and individuals, aren't really engaging in the speech in question here, and if they were to engage in it, Citizens would protect the speech they produce. You are tasked with the harder hypotheticals, why Congress can target some corporations but not all, i.e. why media corporations are let off the hook.

 

Kentucky...

 

How Much Does It Cost To Buy a Vote? Somewhere between $5 and $175.
By Brian Palmer, Posted Wednesday, Oct. 27, 2010, at 5:49 PM ET
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Three wealthy candidates have poured a collective $243 million into their campaigns this season, according to Politico. Meg Whitman of California, Linda McMahon of Connecticut, and Rick Scott of Florida have together outspent the biggest advocacy groups in the country, yet none of the three has a commanding lead in the polls.* How much does a candidate have to spend to buy a vote?

Somewhere between $5 and $175. In the contested 2008 House races, the average winner spent $1.3 million and received about 185,000 votes, for a total cost of about $7 per vote. Losers spent an average of $493,000 for 91,000 votes, at a unit cost of $5.42. Neither of those gives an accurate picture of the true cost of a vote, however, since so many people fill in their ballots along party lines, regardless of campaign spending. For politicians (and political scientists), the real question is how much it costs to convince an undecided voter to break in your direction.

In 1994, Freakonomist Steven Levitt used election rematches—congressional races that featured the same two candidates in more than one election cycle—to argue that increased spending has virtually no impact on the outcome of elections. Levitt found that doubling campaign spending brings only about 1 percent of the voting pool into a candidate's column. If we go back to the numbers from the 2008 election, that means the average loser could have netted just a few thousand additional votes by doubling his spending to $986,000, for a cost of about $175 for each one.

There are many ways to do this sort of calculation, and economists have come up with a wide range of results. In a 2009 study, George Mason University economist Thomas Stratmann estimated that an average candidate could secure 1,686 votes by spending an additional $100,000. That comes out to $59 per vote.

Candidates should also consider that some forms of spending are more efficient than others. Just before the 2004 election, Yale political scientist Donald P. Green calculated that $50 directed toward voter mobilization could produce one vote, suggesting that door-to-door canvassing, rather than pricey television commercials, is the thriftiest way to scrounge up a few extra votes.

In practice, the candidate who spends the most money in an election almost always wins: The bigger spender has been the victor in 95 percent of all House races since 2004, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. But that doesn't prove that vote-buying is economical or effective. It might also be that the leading candidate had more momentum and racked up more contributions—which in turn allowed for more spending. When a candidate spends his or her own money (independent of fundraising success), the return is negligible. In 2008, about 50 congressional candidates pitched in more than $500,000 from private bank accounts. Just 11 of them won their elections.

Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.

http://www.slate.com/id/2272630/

 

One more step on the path to violent revolution ...