Since apparently we are going to have to be dealing with corporate influence even more than we already have been, like it or not; I guess it's best to keep talking about them, vs. us - i.e., humans. I believe the Bill of Rights was about human rights, not corporate rights. No mention of corporations in there at at all.
I've been giving this all a great deal of thought One thing I'd like to discuss is the concept of legal entities.
A corporation is always a legal entity. A corporation cannot exist without being a legal entity. As such an entity, the corporation (effectively meaning the people who have power over it) are obligated to follow whatever rules and regulations are currently extant, and will in turn benefit from whatever benefits corporations are currently allowed (neither of which necessarily apply to humans).
A human being may or not be a legal entity. A human being may not have a social security number. A human may be out of the system entirely, but a human being still has certain obligations and benefits under the law.
Human beings do not need to incorporate or register with the government in order to have rights and obligations.
We do not need to register with the government in order to have legal protection, or to be prosecuted for breaking laws. We do not need to do any of that in order to be considered persons.
Corporations accrue capital and thus can become overly powerful in the political debate. This really could be legislated in either direction, since the bottom line is the Constitution doesn't say anything about corporations one way or the other, and that the responsible position is to recognize the harm to the public good allowing them free rein will ensue in.
It strikes me as ironic that this can be argued to be essentially a conservative position (people cannot be trusted in positions of power and thus must be restrained) while the position that argues corporations should have free rein can be argued to be more liberal (people are good deep down and everybody should have the right to start and run their own unleashed corporation and everything will work out in the end).
But what it really is, is an abject surrender to allowing the market to run everything. I think in some ways the more rapacious elements of society do mimic liberal positions to sell their schemes, and this may well be an instance of that. And true conservatism does have its points - the problem is that we have not, for some time now, been dealing with true conservatives; we have been dealing with robber barons.
These are not easy ideas for many to get their heads wrapped around, which does not bode well for the response of the public at large.
This gets us back again to expectations. The more complicated the things we think we need, the harder it is to produce them ourselves. Generally one needs some land to produce anything, unless it's intellectual property. What is considered the best land tends to be expensive. How do you get around that? Gamble on climate change and invest in Canada? Canada isn't for sale to Americans in any kind of useful way. Figure out new and improved ways to work in the desert?
Alternately one works with what is already happening and tries to infiltrate/improve it. But that is not changing the game. We need to change the game.
Back to the decision.
People are entitled to their views that the people whose job it is to say what the Constitution means, should conclude that Corporations should be able to make unlimited political campaign contributions (because that's what the decision says). However, if one is going to disagree with:
Keith Olbermann
Paul Krugman
Barack Obama
Rachel Maddow
Ralph Nader
CalPIRG
Democracy for America
Progressive Democrats of America
and I think nearly every major group in the Democratic Party and all its major spokespeople, not to mention Sotomayor, Breyer, Stevens, and Ginsburg, then one better have one hell of an explanation why everyone who shares our values and studies this thing really hard is wrong, or perhaps one might keep one's opinion to one's self until such a point where one manages to figure out what one is missing, or what everyone else is missing -- because it's pretty damn presumptuous to say all these professors and Nobel laureates and legal experts are wrong.
When I find myself opposed to Krugman alone, let alone Krugman and an army of Progressives, I take SERIOUS PAUSE, and that's because I AM a free thinker and try to get my opinions right, standing on the shoulders of giants when I can, OR...
(crossposted from Right Of Assembly)