My guess is that the courts would appoint somebody, like they did with whatsisname back in 2000.

Those kooky founders. If only they had said something, or maybe codified it in a document, or maybe as an amendment to that document, we wouldn’t be in this mess.

A bad day for America, one of the worst ever.

No PACS. No Corps. No groups.

It is the business of the electorate. Anyone who rises to speak is identified.

And as private citizens, we can only vote for one candidate at a time, in the jurisdiction we live in. Corporations suffer no such limitation.

If we’ve had a nakedly undemocratic political process before, this should remove all doubt: congress does not represent the voters.

My federal government is hemorrhaging its legitimacy. It’s still an open question in my mind if my state wants to bleed out as well.

Always fun to watch US commentators Fisking each other over issues like these, but it’s a global problem. Corporate ethics and Political ethics ought to be orthogonal. Political ethics ought to be a control and limitation on the excesses of Corporate ethics since “the benefit of the shareholders” is not necessarily good for society as a whole. This is one of the reasons most countries have laws to stop corporations bribing foreign governments to obtain contracts. But increasingly politicians are dependent on corporations for personal funding and the lobby system means that the wealthiest corporations have the most influence over political change. It’s reached a point where there’s no difference between Corporate and Political ethics and many among us see this as a bad thing for Society. So it’s distressing to see the US make moves to ratify this. We all know the Military-Corporate-Political is a seamless Pigopoly and runs everything but it’s quite another thing to see it formally ratified.

I too am an absolutist when it comes to the 1st amendment and most of the others, but only for individual citizens. I have absolutely no problem with placing severe limits on what collectives can and cannot do, and neither does the constitution.

Why? Because collectives wield disproportionate power with disproportionate stupidity. Both the power (and stupidity) is much greater than the sum of its members, making collectives with political rights and power anti-democratic.

How ironic that the same court (and the same votes) established that the second amendment is in fact an individual right, and not the right of a collective (militia) as specified in the original document.

What’s the difference between 50 people pooling some money so they can send 1 person to beg for their favorite cause and a rich person or corporation doing the same thing. How will some new law distinguish between one or the other?

It is interesting to see how in a small group setting (friends, neighborhood, company) it is intuitive that contribution and exchanges should necessarily and morally stay voluntary (ie. not stealing their property).
Yet, when we consider larger groups the notion of “we” becomes more abstract and individuals loose this inhibition and start thinking that it is morally justifiable to tax other people’s resources.

Now, we wonder what to do about politicians not spending that money on what we intend to.
Talk about creating a problem, to then try and fixing it…

Also, to say that corporations are corrupting government is only half of the picture. The power of the government is corrupting corporations (and politicians too, btw) in the first place.

If you keep a powerful government, there is a lot of incentives to still try and workaround the anti-corruption safeguards, using sneakier loopholes and darker corners to make shady deals.
The current estimated ROI on lobbying spending provides huge incentives, which explains why lobbying efforts have multiplied.
It is only natural, and in a sense you can’t blame them for trying. The solution is not to wish that people would be better people, but to fix the incentives by removing the un-necessary temptation.

In the United States, the government may not abridge freedom of speech, nor decide which speech is correct and which is not.

Um, no, that’s quite wrong. Incitement, for one. Yelling “theater” at a crowded fire, that’s another. Libel’s a third. Etc. And your terminology is wrong: the law doesn’t decide correctness, it decides legality. If inciting a riot, threatening murder, etc. are forbidden under the law–and they are–then it stands to reason that other forms of speech are too. This is rather simple.

Given the massive abuse of the doctrine of corporate personhood, from its origin as an obiter dicta possibly misrepresented by a court reporter to today’s wholesale enfranchisement of corporations over people, it’s the contention of many that allowing a huge influx of corporate money into the political process is unconstitutional and illegal: a corporate-sponsored incitement to riot, if you will. It also, speaking plainly, is unfair: the amount of capital and resources available to many corporations dwarfs that available to other parties as to render notions of fairness, participation, speech meaningless. One can’t reasonably be heard over the Mighty Wurlitzer.

I’d also love to know what was going through John Roberts’s head during his confirmation hearings when he was asked about stare decisis, which precedent (one might say law of the land) he quite overturned today. A lovelier case of a stealth activist judge there never was.

Pragmatically, too, you’ve just got to wonder what the deleterious effects of billions of corporate dollars would be in a given race. Game out what Exxon Mobil would do in any race in which environmental issues or clean energy is a factor. Etc., etc. The idea that a government for and of the people can’t reasonably, lawfully, and Constitutionally curtail such influence is madness.

I would love to hear what corporations have to say. Keep ‘em honest. I want to know if megacorp X is going to be destroyed by legislation Y. What I don’t want is for these conversations to be happening behind closed doors.

I’m less certain about preventing corporations from donating; it’s probably a good idea (currently p>=65%) but I’d need to consider it more before getting behind it.

Eh, I think it says more about the value of democracy and the voters than it does about the people trying to influence it.

If campaign contributions = free speech, some of us are about to become a whole helluva lot more equal than others.

Can anyone offer up a better way to go forward? Am I really going to be stuck with voting for *anyone* other than the incumbent as my only effective way of trying to enact some meaningful change? Because that other party doesn’t seem to like my reproductive organs a whole lot unless they can control what those organs are doing.

Corporate personhood is a fcuked up metaphor. And for the argument of groups of people – when Republicans are in power they always try to make it illegal for unions to give money unless every member votes. They would never suggest this for employees or shareholders of a corporation.

On a small scale, externalities are clearly visible. Generally, you can identify who caused what and there is sufficient social pressure and repercussions to influence that person to take responsibility. Consider the case of roommates sharing a house. The general state of the house is an externality: one person leaving a plate on the table does little damage and they have little personal motivation to clean it up. However, if they all leave there stuff laying around all the time, eventually the house will be a mess and they will all be affected by it. Even if only one person leaves a mess, it will eventually affect them all.

In this small-scale situation, the other roommates can work together to determine who is causing the problem. Then they can apply social pressures to cajole the troublemaker into cleaning up after himself. In a small group, there is no need for an overseer to take care of things.

On a larger scale, this becomes entirely impractical. Consider billions of people dumping CO2 into the atmosphere. How would they all work together to determine who is responsible for fixing it? No single person wants to take responsibility, and all the others are hoping somebody else will step up so that they don’t have to. Because each person has very little contact with every other person, there are no social pressures one can apply to convince the other to fix the problem. In total, we all stand around waiting for somebody else to fix the problem: the tragedy of the commons.

Historically, the large-scale solution is government. We all agree to appoint a body to handle it and we all chip in a fair share to make it happen. The governing body is given special privileges in order to influence each person to abide by their decisions. As long as the body is appointed by the people, and does what the people appointed it to do, this works.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of assumptions in that model. One is that everybody can agree on who to appoint and what the body’s goal is. Getting everybody to agree is practically impossible. So instead, we use democracy: as long as the majority agrees, it applies to all. This is only an approximation of the ideal, but it makes sense how this could work: if we do what the majority wants, then the most people are made happy. Unfortunately, this could happen at the cost of the minority, but what alternatives do we have? Any other case involves the minority getting what they want at the cost of the majority, which seems unreasonable, since it benefits fewer people and costs more. Taken to its extreme, one person gets what they want at the expense of all others: totalitarianism.

This would be fine if we had democracy, but what we have now is not democracy. In democracy, the majority rule, but our current system is ruled by those with the loudest voice. This may be corporations with a lot of money, or interested minorities who speak louder than the uninterested majority. Whatever the case, decisions are not based on what the majority wants, but on what a specific minority wants, making it essentially an oligopoly (whether an aristocracy, corporatocracy, or another body who gains control).

To make matters worse, we’ve all along been assuming that the majority knows what’s best for it. This has been shown many times to be false. With the wildly varying levels and areas of education, it’s unlikely that the majority knows enough about any given subject to make a reasoned decision about it. For example, how many people know what long-term effects excessive CO2 production has on the planet and what a reasonable limit would be to that production? There are probably less than a thousand people in the world who could make a reasonable judgment about this.

That’s why, instead of a direct democracy, modern-day democracies are representative democracies. A small group of experts is appointed to make decisions which will affect the entire populous. Now we have another problem: how do we know who is an expert? Many people claim they are experts, but even these experts don’t agree on what qualifications it takes to be an expert. We have “solved” this by appointing a group of self-proclaimed experts with the duty of determining who is and isn’t an expert. It’s turtles all the way down.

If nothing else, take away this: the problem is very complicated. What seems simple in a small group quickly becomes impractically complicated on a larger scale. Truth, fairness, ethics and morality all come into play, and it’s impossible to make everybody happy with the result. But it’s necessary, because without coordinated action, we couldn’t accomplish anything that requires a large group of people. Just think of all the infrastructure that we have now. Those things that affect us all can only exist if we all find a way to work together, but getting everybody to work together is hard and man has spent thousands of years trying to find better ways to work together.

By placing a limit on the amount of money that a person can contribute, and by not allowing corporations to add to that (since they are just groups of the aforementioned people), it assures that no person can have any greater monetary influence over the government than any other person. People like Donald Trump or corporations like Halliburton that have political aims and money to spare, couldn’t use their money to influence a politician’s decision any more than the average person could.

Why is this important? Because democracy is based on the idea of equal representation. Our government’s mandate is supposed to be based on what the majority of people want, not what the richest or loudest minority wants. Allowing rich individuals or corporations to have a much larger influence than any average individual means that decisions will favor the rich and the corporations over the individual. Is what Google wants more important than what the state of California wants?

To make matters worse, though a corporation is a group of people, it’s not run by the individuals in that group. Corporations are driven by a board of directors, whose mandate is to do the best for their shareholders, and whose shareholders have disproportionate say in the company’s direction. The organization of a corporation doesn’t reflect democracy at all. So, for a corporation to have significant political influence means that the primary shareholders (those with a lot of money) get a disproportionate amount of influence over government.

That’s not to say that a company can’t have policies and even political stances — that’s fine. What’s not fine is when they can use their abundance of capital to influence political decisions; when political decisions are based on money, not on merits. Laws should be adopted and investments should be made because they are good for the people and the country, not because they make any politician or their campaign more profitable.

And the “limited liability” of a corporation means only that the shareholders of the corporation are not responsible for its debts, and therefore stand to lose no more than the value of their shares should the corporation default on what it owes. Without limited liability investment would come to a standstill because no investor would take the chance of having creditors come after him for the debts of the corporation – any investment could lead to unlimited liability, wiping the investor out completely.

Well put.

I’ve never understood our society’s obsession with Democracy as the Greatest Good as opposed to Republic/Constitutional Monarchy. A truly democratic Afghanistan woud have women wearing veils and denied higher education (probably) – hell, most decisions over here that The Majority make are pretty bloody awful. The Canadian and American systems were designed to put the brakes on Democracy, and yet we’re all taught the opposite during our formative years.

The solution to a monopoly isn’t to have bureaucrats monitor it; we tear it down with antitrust laws.

Followup to Antinous:

My essay-length comment got moderated, so I’ll just provide some quick ones: Gutenberg press, and Martin Luther. Democratization of knowledge benefits truth and Classical Liberal values. As Sal said, when has censorship ever benefitted liberity?