US Supreme Court Expected Political Ad Transparency 617
T Murphy writes "The Supreme Court, when ruling that corporate and union political donations were allowed under free speech, assumed the source of the donation would be disclosed immediately under current donation laws. Due to loopholes, this has not been the case, eliminating the hoped-for transparency the Supreme Court ruled to be vital to democracy. Justice Kennedy, who sided with the majority on the ruling, has been called naive for his expectation that there would be greater transparency. In the meantime, campaign spending for House candidates alone is expected to reach $1.5 billion."
Re:Easy fix (Score:4, Informative)
The problem isn't even direct donations to a candidate, really.
It's that, for example, Microsoft could set up a shell group called "Concerned Citizens for Software Freedom" and funnel money into it to buy a million political ads that trashed a candidate running against a candidate they liked.
Re:Kennedy's folly and sad legacy (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, actually she did [supremecourt.gov]. Start on page 64. She is arguing that the law DOES cover books but you don't need to worry about it because the Government has never tried to regulate books and if it did there would be grounds for a legal challenge. You'll forgive me if I don't find that argument very compelling.
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Informative)
Perhaps you're not aware, but the Supreme Court didn't "make [a law] that depend[s] upon [an]OTHER law". The Supreme Court doesn't make laws, period.
The Court did apparently make assumptions about the implications of a particular interpretation, but that's pretty much unavoidable. It speaks to the excessive complexity of our body of laws that they could not predict the outcome correctly.
While I disagree with the Court's ruling, the I do not find such severe fault as you do with the specific detail of meaning (but apparently failing to say in a binding way) "...following the same rules as everyone else".
Re:This was obvious. (Score:3, Informative)
The bigger problem now is backsliding to the natural state collective of human affairs - tyranny by the minority. The rich get richer until they have all the power, individual rights are equated with capitalism so only the rich actually have them, and free enterprise boils down to "choosing" whether to slave away for a monopoly, or starve.
Re:Kennedy's folly and sad legacy (Score:4, Informative)
ink that the difference is that the constitution also makes no mention of organizations or corporations has have ANY rights.
That's completely irrelevant. Read the plain text of the 1st amendment: "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech"
What part of "shall make no law" is so hard to understand?
Re:This was obvious. (Score:4, Informative)
No, it's called corporate oligarchy.
Re:Kennedy's folly and sad legacy (Score:4, Informative)
Corporate personhood (Score:3, Informative)
Agreed, the real problem here is corporate personhood (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood).
Businesses have something approaching the full rights of a human being, except, as the quote goes "They (corporations) have no soul to save and they have no body to incarcerate."
Combine this with the ideas of limited liability, proprietary knowledge, and the common practice of boards of directors being friends with the executives they appoint, and what you have is a class of corporate management run amok with little or no accountability to shareholders. Management has access to billions of dollars to spend towards their own interests, which in many cases are not the interests of the shareholders.
That said, I believe the government does have the authority to dissolve corporations, so a repeat felon corporation could be dissolved or fined into non-existance, although I don't know of any time this has happened before. The US guidelines to sentencing organizations (http://www.ussc.gov/2009guid/CHAP8.htm) mention fining an exclusively criminal organization of all its assets, but I see no mention of dissolving repeat offenders. Maybe someone else can chime in here.
Re:Kennedy's folly and sad legacy (Score:4, Informative)
This [hbr.org] is what the creators of our government thought about corporations.
Re:Kennedy's folly and sad legacy (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, if a corporation commits crimes, the CEO, Officers and the BOARD of Directors should be held criminally responsible. I'm not talking about rogue employees, I'm talking about corporate policy and repeated actions.
Additionally, one MUST remember that Corporations are creations of the State. Giving them any "rights" diminishes the liberties of citizens and the people. THIS is my beef with corporatism (not capitalism) of today.
Until we hold people accountable for their responsibility and fiduciary duties, nothing is going to change.
Re:Kennedy's folly and sad legacy (Score:2, Informative)
The problem here is when a corporation masquerades as a folksy "grass roots" organization when distributing their speech.
Even if they do that, why exactly is it a problem?
Under the current system, you could write a satanist propoganda, and publish under the name of "The Association of Citizens to Elect Mitt Romney". Furthermore, you can do this right before an election, so that the truth of the identity of the author is not revealed until long after the point at which it matters.
So what? We have free speech in this country. That includes anonymous speech. Anonymous political speech has been around in this country since the Federalist papers and has a long history of being upheld by SCOTUS regardless of
Re:Kennedy's folly and sad legacy (Score:3, Informative)
Endorsing a canidate in by DEFINITION transparent. You have the newspaper company saying who it endorses and why.
I dont think anyone here has an issue with say....HP or Microsoft or BP or whomever running a commercial or renting newspaper space saying 'BP endorses this canidate because of X Y and Z. We do not like this other canidate because of A,B, and C.
The problem comes with shadow organizations, who are funded indirectly. The answer to that is fairly simple. If you are a company which is a subsidary of another company, both company names must be exposed.
Now, some people are saying that individuals should have to be exposed as well. This is where it gets sticky. Should a really rich guy have to disclose if he spends 5 million of his own money to create a shadow corp which then buys airtime and runs commercials and is 'issue' based?
My gut instinct is to say no. He has a right to anonmyous free speech. But we already regulate speech somewhat with out election laws, so there has to be some middle ground. The fact that he is hiding behind a corporation instead of buying the advertising directly means he gives up some 1st amendment rights in my mind.
Like all election laws, the best we can hope for is to curb the worst of the abuses. Short of government funded campaigns, you just cant expect money not to influence elections. But if you at least force corporations to be transparent in their actions you give the voter more informaiton on the source of the
Re:Kennedy's folly and sad legacy (Score:3, Informative)
The intent was that Congress would not be in the position of regulating speech.
Why are you so afraid of unfettered speech anyway? Is your opinion of the American electorate so low that you think they need to be shielded from this speech and can't form their own opinions about it?
I see no reason to allow corporations to have the ability to speak on political issues. The individuals of that corporation have that right. The corporation itself is simply a legal shield created by the government for the purpose of facilitating commerce, and as such should not have the rights of a person.
Re:Kennedy's folly and sad legacy (Score:3, Informative)
The argument isn't over what "shall make no law" means, it's over what "freedom of speech" means. The common assumption, and what the 1st Am. almost certainly means, is that freedom of speech is a right of individuals, not corporations.
I don't give a good goddamn what was written over a century ago into a Supreme Court decision about a railroad company by a court clerk (who had, by an astonishing coincidence, a substantial financial interest in that same railroad company.) Corporations are not people, and they have no rights. They are legal fictions created and maintained on the suffrance of the government. Anyone who claims to love liberty but does not acknowledge this is a liar, ready and willing to sell his last shred of freedom and integrity to the highest bidder.
Re:But.. (Score:3, Informative)
So express your support, verbal and material as an individual. If you want to cooperate with a bunch of buddies to do the same, you can do that too. Just don't incorporate. It's not that free speech isn't a right, it's that incorporation isn't a right. Incorporation is a tool the government created for specific purposes, it's not a natural right. Since it's an artificial construct, they get to define the scope, and if it's in the best interest of society for them to be apolitical that's fine. They can do that without infringing on any natural or constitutional rights. Same goes for Unions.
Re:This was obvious. (Score:3, Informative)
I've always wondered how this type of system works. Campaign spending is $20 million, what if the owner of the hockey teams decided to spend their own $20 million outside of that?
They're in violation of the elections act and liable for criminal charges.
Re:Who cares? (Score:1, Informative)
The union is obligated to do so.
"A landmark 1988 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Communications Workers v. Beck, established that union members cannot be forced to pay for activities unrelated to collective bargaining."
Re:Who cares? (Score:3, Informative)
And that's why, at least in most states, unions are required by law to allow you to opt out of paying all union dues except the portion that directly contributes to its expenses in collective bargaining. To the extent that this is the case, any political contributions made by a union are to a large extent determined by the consent of its members, unlike a corporation's contributions, which are only determined by the consent of its board members.
Re:Who cares? (Score:4, Informative)
Note: The source for the union figures is the US DOL, they have a web app where you can look these things up but I used my fragile memory since I can't be bothered finding the link.