Corporate “free speech”

Are we headed for a world where corporations spend freely on the candidates of their choice?  Strange and ominous murmurs from the Supreme Court suggest that the rules which prohibit corporations from directly spending millions of dollars in elections are about to be tossed aside.

According to the New York Times, corporations and unions have been prohibited from spending their money on federal campaigns since 1947, and corporate contributions have been barred since 1907.   States have barred corporate expenditures since the late 1800s.

These rules may be set to change, dramatically so.  While the Supreme Court has affirmed as late as 2003 that Congress may curb corporate political contributions, the Roberts Court appears eager and even impatient to strike down these rules and permit a flood of corporate money into state and federal elections.

It is all too easy to bemoan the sad state of corporate influence in American politics; yet the politics of the present may seem like child’s play in a future where corporations are permitted to spend as much as they want, on whoever they want.  Today, a corporation must engage in indirect donations by having its employees donate to “political action committees”; but we may not be too far from a world where a member of the board can simply write a check to the candidate of choice.

For more business-friendly members of the Supreme Court, the issue boils down to “corporate free speech.”  Since the late 1800s, corporations have been defined as “persons” under the law, which has entitled them to legal protections normally entitled only to flesh-and-blood individuals.  Thus, corporations can own property and are entitled to due process.

According to some legal minds, corporations should also be entitled to the full range of free speech protections given to breathing, thinking human beings.  For purposes of election laws, full free speech for corporations would mean the ability to spend money in elections just as a regular person.

Beyond the absurdity of this doctrine, which treats fictitious legal entities that exist only on paper as real life human beings, is also the dramatic and serious consequence of de facto corporate ownership of elections.  A world where corporations can spend freely on elections is a world where corporations purchase their policies in Congress.  It is a world where individual voices would simply be drowned out by the same corporate machinery that promotes the endless torrent of consumerist drivel that we are all exposed to every waking moment of life.

The real problem here is the fiction that a corporation is a “person” under the law.  Why the corporation — a legal entity that exists only on paper, can live forever, and is designed only for profit — is treated the same way as a normal, breathing individual is a rule that makes little common sense.  However, it is a doctrine that has certainly benefited the corporate model.  Even with current restrictions in place, corporations possess frightening levels of influence in government.  Is it really a good idea to give them even more power and control over Congress?

If corporations are “people” for purposes of the law, what we’re really talking about is a social order with two levels of citizenship:  first-class citizenship, given to corporations, and second-class citizenship, given to flesh-and-blood humans.   After all, a corporation can live forever (so long as it is making a profit) and can amass an obscene fortune that would be difficult if not impossible for any one individual to make on his or her own.  And since money talks, and money is equated with speech, this perpetually existing “person” would be able to spend hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars at every election, engaging in the same marketing and public relations brainwashing that we are all so accustomed to in the marketplace, only this time directed towards political policy.  In a world where corporations can “speak” as much as they want, it is clear that laws would be written for the corporations themselves.

This is a matter of constitutional law; if the Supreme Court overturns these rules, Congress could not overturn the Supreme Court.  Only an amendment to the Constitution would prohibit corporations from engaging in the wholesale buying and selling of political candidates, which is really what is at stake here.  This would be a frightening era of American politics:  Halliburton, Wal-Mart, Exxon Mobil and Citi Group engaging in non-stop political campaigning for their darling of the hour, purchasing laws at their leisure, and crushing alternative candidacies wherever they may sprout.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 7th, 2009 at 10:19 pm and is filed under Content, Government Accountability, Structure and System and tagged with america, corporate control, equality, free speech, rich versus poor, the constitution. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.