Sonya Sotomayer, the newest supreme court justice, brought the issue up in her first session. Now, with the Court we have today it is difficult to see that challenged but not impossible. Another route would be through a constitutional amendment, which is even more challenging and basically impossible given the current environment.
The other option we have to address the issue is the one I find more salient. That is addressing the conflation of "money" with "speech." I think the matching of these two concepts is at the root of many of our problems. In case you haven't noticed, the right to "get rich" (at any cost) seems to have become synonomous with the right to "happiness." This is why most people who would historically have been more attracted to the left are consolidating on the far-right of our political spectrum. They vote for whomever best secures their ability to "make money" and see it as a fundamental, Constitutional right.
I don't think that it's difficult to decouple these concepts as ultimately most people aren't comfortable with the idea on its face. The reason it continues and gains strength and fervent backing is that people view money as the ONLY option for political speech. If you take it away, there is no way at all to achieve representation.
Any effort to develop non-monetary channels for political representation will chip away at the money/speech connection. Fortunately there are many channels through which political ideas can be communciated that don't really cost anything. The trick is getting people to listen through the noise.
I see the modern noise as mostly a function of commerce. With the decline in commerce, which is very pronounced in the US, I find that the noise levels are coming down signficantly. People are looking for something other than advertising, marketing, the next gadget, in part because they can't afford to buy anything and are pessimistic about pursuing greater wealth, thereby dampening the appeal of aspirational purchasing and information. When the pursuit of wealth loses its appeal the pursuit of spiritual wellbeing, work/life balance and all that tends to become more appealing, in part because it's inexpensive.
Politics is a reflection of society. Obama was elected because people wanted to believe something different was possible. The door is open, we need to all walk through it. I honestly believe that repackaging most of the good ideas of the left over the past 100 years will go over like a rocket in this climate. Tailor your message to the times, leave out the identity-politics and gender wars, spiritual pacifism for its own sake, etc. Many ideas of the 70's, for example green tech, have already caught on with the power of thirty more years of reflection. The economic ideals of the 70's can come back as well, now the added hindsight of the disastrous alternative, which succeeded in gaining power in part because it was new and untested in the popular view and was thus harder to prove wrong through experience. You see the way "communism" was discredited entirely over the past 20 years, Reagansim should suffer the same fate.
But the Constitution confers the national government the right to regulate interstate commerce, and that would include a power to tax the sale of corporate shares when the transaction crosses state boundaries.
There is some tax rate at which corporations will incorporate with national charters, no matter how lax the charter requirements of Delaware or North Dakota. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
However, even if corporations have the rights of an individual, they are still bound by their charter.
If under their charter they cannot make political contributions, its off the table. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
Given that any political contribution to any candidate will piss somebody off enough to search for somebody who held that company's stock at the time of the action and is willing to sue, it seems as if getting the prohibition into the charter would have a lot of impact even in the fact of later government passivity. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
MR. OLSON: What the Court has said in the First Amendment context, New York Times v. Sullivan, Rose Jean v. Associated Press, and over and over again, is that corporations are persons entitled to protection under the First Amendment. JUSTICE GINSBURG: Would that include - MR. OLSON: Now, Justice - JUSTICE GINSBURG: Would that include today's mega-corporations, where many of the investors may be foreign individuals or entities?
JUSTICE GINSBURG: Would that include -
MR. OLSON: Now, Justice -
JUSTICE GINSBURG: Would that include today's mega-corporations, where many of the investors may be foreign individuals or entities?
Justice Ginsburg created a poison pill by putting on notice any Supreme Court majority that overturns the lower court decision: your actions will allow foreign funding for U.S. campaigns. Any foreign entity could simply exercise an existing or newly acquired ownership position in a U.S. corporation to demand services from that corporation's latest wholly owned candidate.
