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The Future of Campaign Finance
By Laura Knoy on Monday, February 1, 2010.
A major US Supreme Court decision earlier this month reversed two decades of legal precedent and relaxed restrictions on how corporations can get involved in political campaigns. We’ll look at this decision, what it means and how it may affect the country’s political landscape and New Hampshire's elections.
Guests
- Dan Weeks, president of Americans for Campaign Reform
- John Samples, director of the Center for Representative Government at the Cato Institute in Washington, DC
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can we send it to jail? Surely corporations have acted in ways that would send me to jail. Their spreadsheets show that it's cheaper than a recall to pay for the deaths caused by their product they don't recall. Those deaths become a civil matter rather than a criminal one. If a real person is sent to jail they are out a job while incarcerated; justice demands the corporation would be unable to conduct business while incarcerated as well. One may argue that corporations don't commit crimes; their agents do; I don't mind their agents making political contributions. And why do they have their own privileged tax code? We need a modern day Thomas Paine to say "They're not people, it's Common Sense.
I think your guests are missing the main point. When the supreme court gave corporations the same rights as individuals this opened up the avenue for these abuses. Corporations were given these rights but none of the responsibilities that individuals have. Who in America really thinks that corporations should have these rights
What precisely is the holding of the majority decision in Citizens United v. FEC?
Can someone provide a summary of the the dispute about the century long precedent that was/was not overturned?
The public discussion about this case seems a better example of people picking teams than focused public discourse.
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=11176
The Cato Institute favored the decision and the article above is a good summary why.
Otherwise you can go to the Supreme Court's web site and read the decision in its entirety, along with the concurring and dissenting opinions.