So, I conclude that your a liberal.

And finally, ‘then’ is not the same as ‘than’ and ‘your’ does not mean ‘you are.’

I don’t believe unions or corporations should be allowed unlimited spending; but the threat to our democracy comes from large multi-nationals, that are often controlled by foreign nationals. This ruling clears the way for companies controlled by avowed enemies of this country to control the outcome of our elections. This truly is a disaster for our democratic process.

The potential corruption that this decision nurtures is almost beside the point. What is outrageous here is that artificial legal creations are being treated the same as American citizens.

Arguing about which political party benefits more from this ruling is unbelievably myopic. The American PEOPLE are the ones who will suffer.

It is indeed arrogant to assume that Americans do not have the ability to make up their minds with or without political campaigning by corporations. This is essentially the root of progressivism, that they know what is better for you. So just bend over and take it.

Furthermore, this writer is completely disingenious because Obama took numerous donations from corporations, including Exxon-Mobil.

Because a certain group of individuals makes more money should never ban them from the ability to send messages about their interests. Absurd. Quite frankly, politicians are the only ones who hold the gun…they are the only ones who can use force. Therefore maybe we should do exactly the opposite of what this writer says, ban politicians from speaking. Their interests are tainted with the ability to force, corporations can only ask for their interests to be represented.

This is yet another individual who needs to get over his resentment of the rich and start think in terms of us rather than a “fight”. The rich are not, and never have been your enemy.

The ruling is not about contributions at all. It instead means that corporations cannot be limited in their ability to “speak” using their money. We’re not even talking about collusion here between corporations and candidates. There need not be any connection at all in fact. As a result of this ruling corporations can advocate for or against a candidate ON THEIR OWN BEHALF. In other words, corporations and union can now make as many political commercials as they can afford without a campaign even knowing.

In any case, Damian, you miss the point (likely thanks to the Lobo’s editorial deciosn for a title to my letter).

I am not saying corporations should have 1st amendment protection because they’re rich, I’, saying they shouldn’t because THEY ARE NOT PEOPLE.

If you’re incorrect, Obama’s economic advantage during the campaign permitted him to more effectively convey his message and persuade more voters. It’s simple: money allows for better ads in more places, more often.

Americans certainly excercise their right and their faculty to make their own decisons based on the information they have. How they get that information and where it comes from are different questions all together.

Free speech is the right to say what you would like, write what you would like or advocate what you would like, regardless on who supports it. If you don’t like it, don’t listen.

If the dictator wants to support a cap and trade bill that would force energy companies to raise costs on their customers, shouldn’t we know why our bills are getting higher? If the dictator wants to enforce a tax on medical device companies causing medical device companies to raise costs to their consumers, shouldn’t we know?

I suppose that we are supposed to get all our information from the slanted news corporations…but wait, they couldn’t function either because it could be viewed as a “political interest”.

Free speech is free speech, regardless of where it comes from. It is your duty to siphon through the bs and come up with your own rational decision. We don’t need your help in our decisions.

Legal creations consist of individuals, just like political campaigns do. YOu think that all the decisions made in a campaign comes solely from Obama…even if that were true, the same standard can be applied to a CEO.

Get it? Good…the spin on whether or not a corp is an indivdual is a meek point. They consist of individuals who collectively decide what to broadcast.

I think that your problem resides in the power of government. Take them out of the equation, you don’t have to worry about the money going into it.

Also, I was talking about shareholders- not employees, not CEOs- but If I OWN a minority share at ExxonMobil you think I get a seat at board meetings and that they’re going to listen to me when I suggest how they should spend money to elect or defeat a candidate? If a CEO wants to spend HIS money to elect or defeat a candidate on the basis that he thinks it’ss help his company, that’s his right as a person. CEOs and board members should not be allowed to spend shareholder money on a political agenda.

It’s interesting to me how neat and tidy your worldview is. In your realm it seems it’s only dictators and governments that can distort information and generate propaganda. You also insinuate that only taxes cause prices to go up, and that corporations can now be champions of truth and expose the governemnt’s agenda to make life more difficult for you and me by rasing taxes.

The point you missed is that corporations now enjoy a super status as non-voting, 1st amendment protected, pseudo-people. Voting human citizens of the United States are aubject to numerous restrictions and conditions in the political process. We must be registered where we live, we must be free of felony convictions, we must be US citizens, we must be over 18. Again, we can also spend as much money as we like on “independent expenditures for speech,” but a) the number of individuals in this country who can afford a single, basic political ad during primetime is miniscule, and b) the discrepancy between the average citizen’s “general treasury funds” and that of a corporation is, no pun indtended, inhuman.

I think your middle-of-the-road is precisely what’s wrong. The answer to this is one direction or the other. Corporations, insofar as they are citizens, should be afforded the exact same rights and held to the exact same conditions as regular, human citizens. Or, they should be banned from the process altogether. As it stands, they have the best of both worlds.

The enemy of freedom is the self serving organization that demands government control of whatever to advance their agenda. Liberty demands the least intrusive government control be it gambling, ranching, education or the thousand other areas of life where the government has no legitimate need to intrude. But those who cannot persuade their neighbor to do it differently get some bureaucrat to pass a rule or law. Reagan was right, “government is the problem.”

Demand transparency and less government. Preserve your freedom.

The president’s reactions betray a profound ignorance of campaign finance. If democracy is to be safeguarded by regulating campaign spending, then America’s virtue is impregnable. Justice Kennedy’s opinion noted that campaign finance laws apply to seventy-one distinct entities, cover some thirty-three types of political speech, and the Federal Election Commission supplies some 568 pages of regulation, together with 1,278 pages of explanations and 1,771 advisory opinions offered since 1975 (states also have their own dense compendiums to protect our democratic virtue). Masochists are invited to visit FEC.gov and see for themselves. Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion also noted that one hundred thousand pages of legal evidence failed to cite a single case of corporate donations purchasing a legislative vote. Indeed, these complicated laws require candidates to hire election law experts, and if anything, these requirements undermine electoral access by hindering those on shoestring budgets.

Obliviousness was compounded by amnesia and denial. If excessive spending hurts democracy, President Obama is the Grim Reaper. In 2008, Obama outspent Senator McCain more than two to one ($720 million to $333 million), and, of the utmost relevance, he declined public matching funds (a keystone of campaign finance reform) so as to spend without limit. That much of this money was raised from “special interests,” notably Wall Street, that Obama now excoriates only adds to the irony. Nor has his election cooled his thirst for fundraising, including incessant Air Force One travel, to promote his agenda. A cynic might suggest that Obama condemns “big oil” but forgets about big, well-oiled, White House-organized public relations machine.

The president is also misinformed about evil “special interests” being some GOP auxiliary. According to OpenSecrets.org, which tracks campaign donations, between 1998 and 2009, corporations and unions overwhelmingly favored the Democratic Party. Somebody should tell the president that six of the top ten givers are unions, and these will now be allowed to explicitly endorse candidates without restrictions! Of the leading hundred donors in terms of contribution size, the first one that even leans toward the GOP is the American Medical Association, and it is ranked number fifteen. The first solid GOP benefactor (more than 90% to the GOP) is Amway at number 87. This is not to say that big business actually adores Democrats; rather, they are savvy political players who donate opportunistically. Even the far-left Barney Frank receives corporate contributions — an excellent investment, given his influence and safe seat.

One can only wonder if this Ivy League-educated president, who majored in political science at Columbia, ever took a course about elections. If he had, he would have learned that all the efforts to reduce the flow of money into elections have failed miserably. The bill for all federal elections in 2000 was $3.1 billion, $4.1 billion in 2004, and $5.4 billion in 2008. This upward trend is probably irreversible for reasons that such a course would make clear. Moreover, political money is governed by the hydraulics principle: Ban it in one place and it pops up elsewhere. So if Congress restricts what an individual can personally donate (current law), then he might give in another person’s name, donate to a state organization outside federal supervision, or just create an “independent” organization to promote his favored candidate. George Soros, among countless others, is a brilliant hydraulic engineer. Moreover, if Obama had taken a course on elections, he surely would have learned that the link between campaign donations and legislative reciprocity is not nearly as clear-cut as agitated idealist reformers insist.

Obama’s hypothetical election course would also reveal that money is only one of many factors predicting victory, and many of these other elements are beyond regulation. To take a random example, consider mobilizing the politically lethargic. One costly but largely ineffective tactic is to use call centers to hector the stay-at-homes. There are also media campaigns like the ill-fated “Vote or Die.” These will, however, require FEC reporting and thus catch the regulator’s eye. Much cheaper and under the regulatory radar is to direct government-funded community organizers to coral voters on Election Day. Better yet, and equally invisible to the FEC, permit fellow community activists to challenge an opponent’s petition signatures or go over registration rolls with a fine-tooth comb to expunge hostile voters.

Perhaps the all-time winner for running a cheap campaign that escapes regulatory scrutiny is to use celebrities. Celebrities are worth their weight in gold and count for zero in publicly financed campaigns. Want widespread free TV coverage and huge crowds? Easy — just appear with Oprah Winfrey. Need a fundraiser with top-drawer donors but can’t afford to hire an expensive events coordinator? No problem if Barbra Streisand will host it. More generally, having Hollywood on your side is worth millions in free-of-charge media coverage and glamor-seeking donors. And guess which political party has the edge here. Imagine President Obama saying, “The impact of Hollywood celebrities on American elections is pernicious, and I demand Congress pass legislation that treats this assistance as a cash equivalency donation and thus limited to $2400, the same as ordinary citizens.” According to my calculations, Oprah could help a candidate for exactly 1.9 seconds before the meter hit $2400. This would be a bonanza for the GOP, given that its celebrities have lower hourly rates.

“Excessive” campaign money hardly corrupts democracy, but even if it did, far better ways exist to cut campaign costs besides futile micro-regulation. Better to remove government from our lives: “Special interests” give only if they can receive some benefit, and if nothing is to be gained, then why give?

Attack the incentives; don’t micromanage campaign finance to protect some illusive public interest. It is hardly accidental that as Washington has aggressively inserted itself into health care, automobile safety, home mortgages, education and countless other policy domains once ignored or left to the states, campaign contributions, have exploded. Why has UPS spent some $24 million in political donations between 1989 and 2009 if not to fend off federal government intervention in their workplace? What if Washington ignored UPS and let the market judge its business practices? In fact, politicians know full well that if the coffers are running low, just propose some legislation that will adversely affect an industry, and the cash will come. “Shakedown” is a bit harsh, but that’s the idea.

President Obama’s reaction can be viewed from two perspectives. The first is his decision to “go populist” and condemn the usual populist targets — Wall Street, Big Oil, and all the rest. That this attack is factually incorrect makes no difference. It’s the public image that counts. A second interpretation is that the president (and his advisers) has genuinely failed to understand a fairly straightforward Supreme Court decision. That he majored in political science, graduated from Harvard Law, and even taught “Con Law” makes this latter interpretation particularly disturbing.

Zac,

I appreciate your response. And as mad as it makes me to see anyone attempting to restrict free speech, I will try to be civil…so please take my tone as from one friend to another.

While the constitution is indeed constructed around individualism. I think that we should also look at the language of the first amendment “Congress Shall Make No Law…”
Which is a prohibition on Congress, not an acception on individuals— granting liberty to the public to speak freely in any form.

As far as your points on the differences between individuals and corporations: They are indeed well taken points but are lacking a little clarity.

First, one is not obligated to own any shares of any company that they do not want to. The board of members can oust any CEO that they determine is not looking out for the best interests of the company. However, the decision to speak out against a politician for fear of they not serving the interests of that organization (or the like) comes down to the ultimate decision of one person…or the votes of several people collaborating. It makes little difference really if that individual is working for a corporation or not…and it is up to the members of that organization to determine whether or not they want that speech expressed.

Noone gets to say that because you are a part of a “corporation” that you cannot speak. “Congress shall make no law…”

Corporations consist of individuals that DO vote.

Quite honestly, I do not support Big Business, it is corrupt. However we can not sacrifice the 1st amendment because multiple individuals want to express a certain point of view.
I support the restrictions on the separation between government and the economy for the same reasons I support the separation of church and state. So we should be restricting politicians, not a free society. Only then will it start to clean up.

We need to win this battle between government and corporate interests. But restricting free speech is not the way to do it.

One other thing. Two people have made the argument that the political influence and corruption we are talking about are products of the government itself. They contend that if the government wasn’t there interfering in the first place, corps would have no incentive to meddle in politics because they wouldn’t need anything in return from the government or from politicians.

Unfortunately, the ‘interference’ they speak of often takes the form of laws that protect things like the environment and human rights. Contrary to the assertions above, laws enacted by elected officials that prohibit a company from dumping chemicals in a river are not designed to be a nuisance to business, rasie costs and ultimately garner kick backs. They are designed to protect the environment. It is absurd to suggest that the only laws (and the candidates and incumbents that support them) that corporations would aggressively campign against are those “where the government has no legitimate need to intrude.” I would wager that the VAST MAJORITY of laws that “interfere” with business and are targeted for elimination by those businesses are the DIRECT RESULT of malfeasance on a particular industry’s part. Again, our government doesn’t step in to legally protect the environment because it wants to screw with business and individual liberties, it does so because businesses were trashing the environment to begin with.

It is unbelievably naive to suggest that corporations are so altruistic that they will not use the disproportionate influence this ruling gives them to target legislators who defend or promote longstanding principles of environmental protection, among other things. If ANY sort of law or regulation stands in the way of a fatter bottom line a corporation has an incentive to eliminate it. By any means necessary.

Yet, ironically, the federal government grew to record size – with record budget deficits – during his two terms. Later surpassed by G.W. Bush, of course.

have a nice day!

Corporations cannot pollute rivers (within reason of a judiciary as to what “pollution” is) and poison other individuals no matter how many commercials they make promoting it or even how much money they dump into political campaigns. Private property laws prevent them from doing so, endorsed by the U.S. constitution. That is the protection of the minority against any laws that Congress can enact. However, they still do circumvent this by using eminent domain. This is again a distortion of what should be understood as an individual rights. Cap and trade and global warming is a completely different issue that is a little more hazy.

Environmentalists will not be satisfied until we are again living in the stone age. Right now they are fighting over the idea that wind farms and solar panels are environmental. So it is a collapsing ideology in that they cannot seem to come to a consensus on human progress (value) with “intrinsic value”. But that is another story. Hence, any malfeasence is now at the discretion of the judiciary.

Like I said, no money or campaigning should ever interfere with individual rights, and that includes the right to free speech.

Your portrayal of a corporation is painfully simplified. If Exxon Mobil decides to spend 100 million dollars on propaganda (not a derogatory word) to keep or defeat a candidate, it’s not because the employees, shareholders and executives got together to “collaborate” and decided in unison to use company money to do so. The decision to spend the money of many for a political purpose is left to the few.

It seems like we’re making the same point about environmental laws. There are laws that prevent corporations from polluting. Congressmen and Senators make those laws. A company that wants to see those laws abolished or upheld can use their money without limits to persuade voters to back candidates who will do so. Why is this wrong? Becuase corporations are not people, and to maintain that they are and give them 1st amendment protection per US Corporate Law is to ignore the fundamental and inherent qualities of a human being.

And do not for one minute suggest that this would be done in debate club fashion- by presenting facts and letting voters decide. Advocates go to extreme and nefarious lengths to paint candidates in a particular color and alter public perception.

It is also regrettable that you liken environmentalists to cavemen. Sustainability and progress are not mutually exclusive- otherwise the difference between humans and lemmings in insubstantial. Is it really progress if we pay no mind to where and how long we can go just as long as we’re going?

Is health care a legitimate need — or not? What say you, Howell? Is the federal Medicare program a legitimate need?

“Demand transparency and less government.”

Do you demand that senior citizens take care of their own health insurance, Howell?

Just curious. I only ask because you have stated in other threads that you are 68 years old and thus eligible for this federal program.

Forgive me if you have already answered this question, but I did pose this question in another thread last semester and several days went by and I don’t remember seeing a reply from you.

Just wondering if you – as the old saying goes – “practice what you preach.”

We independents and republicans rebelled against the wasteful spending supported by Heather Wilson, that is why she lost in the 2008 primary, a scenario repeated across the country.

The tea party movement is about finding people who understand the need to be fiscally responsible regardless of party. I was appalled at the reckless spending under Bush, supported by the Republican Party. Had you been at the KKOB 12/08 breakfast meeting you would have heard me explain to Heather Wilson the reason she was tossed out of office: Support for reckless spending, failure to work on legislation that will provide the environment that allows for real job creation.

Lawrence, spending at the state level under Richardson has increased by $1.4/billion, wiping out the near $1/billion surplus left by Johnson. How is NM better for this reckless spending? Where is the money to come from to invest in growing a business, expanding a farm, explore for oil and gas, the 3 ways that we grow wealth when government consumes larger chunks of income?

You have held up Reagan/Bush, are you ready to demand responsibility from Obama and the democrats? Can you afford this spending?

Lincoln said it well: “The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly.” The Court has done it’s job.

You ask this: “Is health care a legitimate need — or not?” That is an inane question because it is self answering. Why not ask “is food a legitimate need?” Same result.

I suspect your intent is to discuss the government’s role in providing health care. Yes I am 68 years of age. YES I take advantage of the health care paid for with YOUR tax dollars! You do pay taxes, yes? Are you happy that I benefit from your labor?

5 Justices of the Court understand the Constitution, hence their ruling. This pattern of 5-4 is troubling because there is a lack of understanding of the Constitution as it is written and it’s explanation as given to us in the debate in Congress and articulated in the Federalist Papers. The willingness of those who seek and accept office to substitute their ideas- demands- for the only document ever created to protect us from government abuse is cause for concern.