Corporate Money Will Reshape Politics

[gvidas]

I think for me the biggest issue is that it's relatively easy to create a corporation. It's much harder to create a new person and then obscure the fact that you're giving them money to give to someone.

It seems like this just opened a huge loophole. If you have a for-profit religious group, can you donate to political causes? Or do you just have to go through whoever already happens to own a business?


I'm curious, though, about the "spending is a protected form of expression" concept. It seems as though that would invalidate, or raise amusing counterarguments, against prohibited forms of commerce. Suddenly complicating those situations where something is legal to own and legal to produce, but not legal to buy or sell, by making the transaction a first amendment issue. "I'm sorry officer, I was just exercising my right to financially express my support of drug dealers."


Also, from the "maybe there's a silver lining" dept.: we live in a very, very media-saturated world. This is a recent change (100 years or so? exponentially since radio.). Saying "corporate-backed advertising will control the country" is predicated on people staying as media-literate as we are today: being consistently passive and fairly trusting. This is probably not true, and in fact maybe a huge influx of corporate-backed politicking will form the impetus for us to become critical of advertising.