Simple test:

XXX

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Looks much stronger to me (though the perception of area vs. perception of length differs wildly amongst individuals)

The First Amendment does not protect only speech that’s not for profit.  It does not protect speech that’s only in the public interest (What the heck would that even mean, anyway?  Once upon a time it was somehow in the public interest to lock up and confiscate the property of large numbers of American citizens who happened to have Japanese ancestry; if a business were to object to that sort of thing on the grounds that its employees would find it harder to make it to work on time if they were commuting from a prison camp, would that be counter to the public?)

“Giving corporations unlimited ability to use their money to influence the outcome of elections (without even having to expose their involvement until post-election) in this country via 501c/super-pacs is a Bad Thing.”

Then find a way to regulate that which doesn’t violate the First Amendment.  McCain-Feingold clearly isn’t it. 

It would be interesting to see how it all shakes out for the 2012 election. I think the numbers are going to be much closer. IIRC Obama out spend McCain by quite a bit.

You know why corporations exist, right?  They exist to shield the assets of investors from the liabilities of the corporations.

Actually, that’s not the original purpose of corporations.

Originally, corporations were created to perform a service for the public good (the public good being the most important consideration). That corporate shareholders could profit from them was simply the incentive to invest.

Corporations could only exist for a limited time, had one very specific purpose (and could not do anything outside of that purpose, such as raise funds for political campaigns), and if they did do anything illegal or worked toward public harm, the corporation would be dissolved immediately. And of course, the owners were legally responsible for the crimes committed by their corporation.

What we have now is a complete bastardization of the original intent of corporations. Rather than the public good being the foremost concern, it’s virtually off the list. Rather than dissolving criminal corporations, we slap a paltry fine on them and let them carry on. Rather than charging owners for directing their corporation into criminal activity, we say it was the corporation’s fault and you can’t haul that to jail.

The only thing corporations care about is profitability, no matter the harm, no matter the cost to society. They can use their extreme wealth however they choose. It was never meant to be like this. And the furtherance of their power grab is only eroding society, not helping it.

Funnily, though, since installing the extension I think I’ve only needed it once – I’m paranoid about form submissions since it’s happened to me so often, and usually do a select-all and copy if I suspect I may have a problem.

Disqus did eat my comment once recently, in the same way you describe, but I somehow got it back without using Lazarus (don’t remember how, sorry).

Since wealth inequality can be (and is) astronomical, classifying money as speech means that a small group of people can speak much louder than everyone else. So loudly, in fact, that they, quite intentionally, make sure that the vast majority of people would never be able to be heard above them. 

When the First Amendment was passed, the Founding Fathers likely assumed that no one but the government could ever acquire the power to unilaterally stifle and control the national public discourse. The events of the past few decades have clearly demonstrated this assumption to be wrong. We need to re-conceptualise our approach to free speech to ensure that this right remains protected from all impediments – public and private. Some minimum right to free speech must defined and guaranteed for each individual in relative proportion to the maximum amount of free speech that the most powerful individual can exercise. I should not be able to use my free speech rights to stifle your free speech rights. In a democracy, political power should not have to depend on wealth.

Thank you, Phanatic. Exactly. I find it bizarre that anyone thinks that speech rights somehow evaporate once people form a company to make a movie. Do those rights evaporate when people publish a newspaper or a website? How is the Citizens United corporation essentially different from the New York Times corporation or Happy Mutants LLC? Anyone who says “corporations shouldn’t have free speech” is suggesting that the NY Times and Boing Boing can be forbidden to criticize candidates before an election. Well, screw that.

The biggest beneficiaries of CU are the unions, especially public-sector unions.  Union expenditures will overwhelm business expenditures.

Union spending didn’t overwhelm business spending in 2010, and as you can see from the chart above, total union spending is less than spending by even one business organization, the Chamber of Commerce.

Reality does not seem to match your perception of it.

The list of all-time donors from 1989 to 2012 is overwhelmingly dominated by unions.

That’s interesting, but irrelevant: businesses outspend unions by an order of magnitude in every election cycle:

http://www.opensecrets.org/bigpicture/blio.php?cycle=2010

I agree with Greenwald that there’s something to be said for watching out for the 1st/4th amendment rights of non-profits if corporate personhood went away. But public for-profit  corporations, which put everything else below enriching their shareholders and face lawsuit if they do not, have interests that run counter to the public much of the time. Unions at least favor some things that help all workers which are a good portion of the public.  Giving corporations unlimited ability to use their money to influence the outcome of elections (without even having to expose their involvement until post-election) in this country via 501c/super-pacs is a Bad Thing.

Finally, percentage of workers who are union has been going down in the U.S. for a long time. A trend that isn’t likely to change and one will tend to make unions poorer with less money to contribute in the decades to come.

Second, what is freedom of the press if not freedom of speech applied to a corporation?

As to your link, those are dollar amounts from 1989 to 2012 (which hasn’t actually occurred yet).  The relevant dollar donation amounts would be donations by entity prior to the CU decision, and post CU.

The easiest way to control the masses is divide and conquer.  By getting people to argue with each other the washington elite is laughing all the way to the bank.  Both sides, Reid, Obama, Pelosi, Gingrich, etc etc etc….

I’ll provide the link a second time, since you obviously didn’t follow it the first time:

http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/list.php

The list of all-time donors from 1989 to 2012 is overwhelmingly dominated by unions.  In the Top 20, there are three of those awful evil corporations, and they actually split their donations pretty evenly between Democratic and Republican recipients (Goldman-Sachs leans more DNC, but it’s only a 60:40 split).   You don’t even find a Republican-leaning enterprise until #19, the National Auto Dealers Association.  The SEIU’s “muffled squeak” comes in at a total of $37.8 million, 76% of which went to Democrats.  That’s more than Goldman Sachs spent, that’s more than JP Morgan spent, that’s more than Citigroup spent. 

Like I said: the real influence-peddling is in lobbying, which isn’t affected by the CU decision in the slightest, because lobbying wasn’t what McCain-Feingold was about.

Justice Steven’s dissent was literally incoherent.  It was a mass of depraved rambling.  Greenwald did a great job of explaining what was so awfully wrong with it.   I mean, Stevens was engaged in errors of fact and logic that would get you marked down on PHL101 papers.  For example: “The conceit that corporations must be treated identically to natural
persons in the political sphere is not only inaccurate but also inadequate to justify the Court’s disposition of this case. “  That’s a giant strawman; nobody, not the plaintiffs nor the majority justices maintained that corporations must be treated identically to natural persons in the political sphere, Stevens is doing nothing but tilting at windmills by attacking this position which was adopted by no party to the case.  Another example: “Under the majority’s view, I suppose it may be a First Amendment problem that corporations are not permitted to vote, given that voting is, among other things, a form of speech.”  Again, this is arrant nonsense, the privilege of voting isn’t taken by *anyone* as being protected by the First Amendment; convicted felons lose their right to vote, but not their right to express themselves freely.  It’s unable for a disinterested party to read Stevens’s dissent and not conclude that there might perhaps be something fundamentally flawed about allowing Supreme Court justices to serve until they willfully retire. 

 And even *Stevens* said that corporations have at least some first amendment protections, so even *he’s* not of the “corporations should have no rights!” school of thought.

“The sheer tidal wave of concentrated, and now unaccountable corporate money that this decision has unleashed into the political process is unconscionable. ”

This is simply histrionics. CU said that McCain-Feingold was unconstitutional. That’s it. McCain-Feingold was enacted in 2002. The CU decision simply eliminates the government’s ability to ban ads (and movies, and books, and pamphlets, and television shows) paid for by corporations, or which aren’t paid for by corporations but which mention a Federal candidate by name within 30 days of a primary or 60 days of election, which is a power *it didn’t have until the law was passed in 2002 in the first place*. The suggestion that we’re heading into some vast, unregulated wilderness of new and unexplored territory is risible.

“What is the difference between that, and money laundering?”