As I stated in my post about the recent Supreme Court decisions regarding “campaign finance reform”, IMO there is entirely too much focus on what is said to influence elections rather than how the elected are influenced after the fact. Well, here’s disagreement on that front from somewhere I didn’t expect:
The Supreme Court loosened restrictions on campaign financing this week by ruling that corporations and unions are entitled to run a wider variety of political ads in the final weeks of federal elections.
This was good news for corporations and unions. And bad news for Shannon Tracey.
Tracey is local projects director of Democracy Unlimited of Humboldt County, a grassroots group dedicated to repealing the notion of corporate personhood — a legal distinction that grants constitutional rights to businesses and other organizations.
“It’s awful that the court is continuing to uphold the idea that companies have what should be rights for human beings,” Tracey said of Monday’s decision, in which the justices backed a lower-court ruling that a Wisconsin anti-abortion group should have been allowed to air ads during a 2004 Senate race.
In case anyone who reads this site hasn’t figured it out by now, I also oppose corporate personhood. The sooner it gets realized that a corporation is merely a group of people & not some mythical immortal creature, the better. So, in spirit, I sympathize. Where I think this group goes wrong is in blurring the distinction between the favors corporations get and political speech. Besides, ads are just about the worst way of extracting anything out of the political arena, precisely because it’s so easy to follow the money anyway. The real corruption happens AFTER election day, and due to its roots in the inherent inability of central government to be truly representative, it can only be solved by anti-state means.
