I wonder if my newly-created LLC (not a corporation) has such free-speech rights, too?

Fox News, January 21

In a stunning [Stunning!] reversal of the nation's federal campaign finance laws, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 Thursday that as an exercise of free speech, corporations, labor unions and other groups can directly spend on political campaigns.

Siding with filmmakers of "Hillary: The Movie," who were challenged by the Federal Election Commission on their sources of cash to pay for the film, the court overturned a 20-year-old ruling that banned corporate and labor money. The decision threatens similar limits imposed by 24 states.

The justices also struck down part of the landmark McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill that barred union- and corporate-paid issue ads in the closing days of election campaigns.

Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote the main opinion, which reads in part that there is "no basis for allowing the government to limit corporate independent expenditures."

"There is no basis for the proposition that, in the political speech context, the government may impose restrictions on certain disfavored speakers," he wrote. "The government may regulate corporate speech through disclaimer and disclosure requirements, but it may not suppress that speech altogether."

First corp needs to loose their citizenship and then go back to court. It will never happen. Amerika, what was left of it has been sold to golden sacks and the military complex. The murdocks of the world are toasting this minute, brought to by ?

So this means that now under current campaign law
1. Politicians can lie about themselves, their poisitions, or their opponents and
2. Corporations can sponsor them to do so

Meet Paul(a) McCandidate! S/he values what you value! Mr/Ms/Mrs McCandidate is just like you (and you, and you)!

Oh, yeah, and now McCandidate comes in 27 different flavors and over a dozen new shades of Red, Blue, or Green (whatever you like)!

Pick up your favorite McCandidate action figures in fast-food outlets everywhere!

Everybody should be happy now ...right?

A Corporation contributes? The CEO? The board?... The majority of employees?

EOM

eom

raggedy looking candidates.

This is interesting read if you click on the Powell Report and it looks like everything is on schedule, please move along.

http://www.atlargely.com/
Off to the store

With corporations having these rights, can a corporation run for office?

Or if it can, it won't.

We have the best gov'mit money can buy!

It's no longer your government. It's owned, lock, stock and barrell, by corporate interests:

On reflection, what changed?

Center for Political Accountability:

Even before today’s decision, American corporations spent hundreds of millions of dollars in the political process, both directly and indirectly, through trade associations and other organizations. This corporate spending has gone to finance attack ads in an effort to influence legislators, regulators and elections.

Despite campaign finance reform efforts in recent years, a major portion of corporate political spending is hidden from public view. Companies are not required to report their payments to trade associations that are used for political purposes, or to report their soft money political donations. The recipients of corporate dollars do not disclose the sources of their funds or their political and grassroots lobbying expenditures.

Obama: Supreme Court gives 'green light' to special interest money

USA Today, By David Jackson, January 21

With its ruling today, the Supreme Court has given a green light to a new stampede of special interest money in our politics. It is a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans.

This ruling gives the special interests and their lobbyists even more power in Washington -- while undermining the influence of average Americans who make small contributions to support their preferred candidates.

That's why I am instructing my Administration to get to work immediately with Congress on this issue. We are going to talk with bipartisan Congressional leaders to develop a forceful response to this decision. The public interest requires nothing less.

on what was already the reality. No news here.

I expect that incredibly wealthy foreign corporations and their US corporate entities will certainly find the new rights they have been given by SCOTUS useful. How generous and liberal of SCOTUS. How new world order.
The wingnuts and teabaggers should love this.

Ian Welsh, January 22

I’ve been meaning to write this post for some time and in light of yesterday’s Supreme Court decision allowing unlimited corporate money into the political system, I think it’s time.

Yesterday’s decision makes the US a soft fascist state. Roosevelt’s definition of fascism was control of government by corporate interests. Unlimited money means that private interests can dump billions into elections if they choose. Given that the government can, will, and has rewarded them with trillions, as in the bailouts, or is thinking about doing so in HCR, by forcing millions of Americans to buy their products the return on investment is so good that I would argue that corporations have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to buy out government - after all if you pay a million to get a billion, or a billion to get a trillion, that’s far far better returns than are avaiable anywhere else.

And no politician, no political party, can reasonably expect to win when billions are arrayed against it.

[...]

So, my advice to my readers is this.

If you can leave the US, do. Most of the world is going to suffer over the next decades, but there are places which will suffer less than the US: places that have not settled for soft fascism and a refusal to fix their economic problems. Fighting to the very end is very romantic, and all, but when you’re outnumbered, outgunned, and your odds of winning are miniscule, sometimes the smartest thing to do is book out. Those who came to America understood this, they left countries which were less free or had less economic hope than America, and they came to a place where freedom and opportunity reigned.

That place, that time, is coming to an end. For your own sake, and especially for the sake of your children, I tell you now—it is time to get out.

Salon
January 23
The Supreme Court judge brings insanity to the campaign finance decision,
By Andrew Leonard

In his remarkably undistinguished 20-year stint as a Supreme Court justice, Clarence Thomas has rarely called attention to himself for original jurisprudential thinking. But if Thomas had had his way with Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission, in which the court decided this week to remove critically important limits on campaign financing, an already horrible decision would have been made far, far worse. Crazy worse.

Thomas went along with the majority in agreeing that corporations and unions can once more be permitted to spend freely on political issues, thus driving a stake through the heart of the democratic process in the United States. But he dissented in part, because he didn't think the ruling went far enough. Specifically, he argued that the court was wrong to continue requiring that the sponsors of political advertising disclose who paid for them.

That's right. Thomas came out against the principle of transparency, and for the right of corporations to spend millions of dollars to influence public policy without having to tell anyone what they were up to. It's hard to imagine a less democratic stance.

Thomas did have his reasons, however. He blamed the gays.

The New York Times, By David D. Kirkpatrick, January 24

WASHINGTON — James Bopp Jr. likes to begin speeches by reading the First Amendment. He calls opponents, including President Obama, “socialists.” He runs a national law practice out of a small office in Terre Haute, Ind., because he prefers the city’s conservative culture.

And for most of the last 35 years, he has been a lonely Quixote tilting at the very idea of regulating political donations as an affront to free speech.

Not anymore. Mr. Bopp won his biggest victory last week when the Supreme Court ruled that corporations, unions and nonprofit groups have the right to spend as much as they want supporting or opposing the election of a candidate.

Mr. Bopp was not present in the courtroom. His client — not for the first time — replaced him with a less ideological and more experienced Washington lawyer when the case reached the justices.

But it was Mr. Bopp who had first advised the winning plaintiff, the conservative group Citizens United, about using its campaign-season film “Hillary: The Movie” as a deliberate test of the limits on corporate political spending. And he shepherded the case through appeals to the Supreme Court as part of a long-term legal strategy that he says he has just begun.

“We had a 10-year plan to take all this down,” he said in an interview. “And if we do it right, I think we can pretty well dismantle the entire regulatory regime that is called campaign finance law.”

“We have been awfully successful,” he added, “and we are not done yet.”

[...]

A few years after Mr. Bopp graduated from the University of Florida College of Law in 1973, a friend in Indianapolis, M. Stanton Evans, introduced him to the state’s chapter of the fledgling National Right to Life Committee. By age 29, Mr. Bopp was its first general counsel, overseeing the dissemination of the 1980 “voter guides” that some said helped elect Ronald Reagan president.

[...]

Mr. Bopp said the next step in his 10-year plan is to roll back the disclosure rules.

“Groups have to be relieved of reporting their donors if lifting the prohibition on their political speech is going to have any meaning,” he said. Requiring groups that buy political commercials to report their donors is almost as punitive, he said, “as an outright criminal go-to-jail-time prohibition.”

Truthout, By Chris Hedges, January 24

Corporate forces, long before the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, carried out a coup d’état in slow motion. The coup is over. We lost. The ruling is one more judicial effort to streamline mechanisms for corporate control. It exposes the myth of a functioning democracy and the triumph of corporate power. But it does not significantly alter the political landscape. The corporate state is firmly cemented in place.

The fiction of democracy remains useful, not only for corporations, but for our bankrupt liberal class. If the fiction is seriously challenged, liberals will be forced to consider actual resistance, which will be neither pleasant nor easy. As long as a democratic facade exists, liberals can engage in an empty moral posturing that requires little sacrifice or commitment. They can be the self-appointed scolds of the Democratic Party, acting as if they are part of the debate and feel vindicated by their cries of protest.

Much of the outrage expressed about the court’s ruling is the outrage of those who prefer this choreographed charade. As long as the charade is played, they do not have to consider how to combat what the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls our system of “inverted totalitarianism.”

The Boston Globe, By Alan Wirzbicki, January 30

Washington - US Representative Michael E. Capuano is proposing to limit the impact of a Supreme Court decision on campaign financing by requiring companies to seek shareholder approval for most political donations.

“The money belongs to the shareholders,’’ said Capuano, a Somerville Democrat. “Let them make that decision.’’

The court’s ruling last week struck down decades-old restrictions on corporate money in politics, sparking outrage among advocates for tighter campaign finance rules and a rare rebuke of the court from President Obama during his State of the Union address. Capuano’s legislation would make it more difficult for companies to greatly expand their political activity.

The legislation would apply to any corporate donation of more than $10,000. Executives would have to convene a shareholder vote to get permission to spend such money for any political purposes. It would also require companies to report such expenditures quarterly to shareholders.

The New York Times, By Adam Liptak, February 3

WASHINGTON — In expansive remarks at a law school in Florida, Justice Clarence Thomas on Tuesday vigorously defended the Supreme Court’s recent campaign finance decision.

And Justice Thomas explained that he did not attend State of the Union addresses — he missed the dust-up when President Obama used the occasion last week to criticize the court’s decision — because the gatherings had turned so partisan.

Justice Thomas responded to several questions from students at Stetson University College of Law in Gulfport, Fla., concerning the campaign finance case, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. By a 5-to-4 vote, with Justice Thomas in the majority, the court ruled last month that corporations had a First Amendment right to spend money to support or oppose political candidates.

“I found it fascinating that the people who were editorializing against it were The New York Times Company and The Washington Post Company,” Justice Thomas said. “These are corporations.”