This question is about whether you agree with the majority finding in the famous Citizens United case of the US Supreme Court.

Background to the case:
Citizens United, a conservative non-profit group (funded by the Koch brothers among others), challenged campaign finance rules after the FEC stopped it from promoting an attack film too close to the presidential primaries. The promotion of the film was in breach was in breach of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, which prohibited corporations from making an "electioneering communication" within 30 days of a primary or 60 days of an election, or making any expenditure advocating the election or defeat of a candidate .

Majority ruling:
A slim majority (5-4) of the Court sided with Citizens United, ruling that corporations and other outside groups can spend unlimited money on elections. They held that restricting "independent political spending" from corporations violates the First Amendment's right to free speech.

They ruled that the Freedom of the Press clause of the First Amendment protects associations of individuals in addition to individual speakers. Corporations, as "associations of individuals", therefore have free speech rights under the First Amendment. Because spending money is essential to disseminating speech, limiting a corporation's ability to spend money is unconstitutional because it limits the ability of its members to associate effectively and to speak on political issues.

Minority ruling:
The minority pointed out that this decision overturned election spending restrictions that dated back more than 100 years, and that had previously been upheld by the court. Justice Stevens argued that the prevention of corruption was a sufficient reason for regulating corporate independent expenditures. He argued that "A democracy cannot function effectively when its constituent members believe laws are being bought and sold".

He also argued that legal entities are not "We the People" for whom the US Constitution was established, and therefore should not be given speech protections under the First Amendment. He suggested that corporations and other artificial legal entities have unique qualities that made them dangerous to democratic elections, including: perpetual life, the ability to amass large sums of money, limited liability, no ability to vote, no morality, no purpose outside profit-making, and no loyalty. Corporate spending on politics, Stevens argued, was not "political expression" protected by the Constitution, but rather a business transaction designed by the corporation for no purpose other than profit-making.

There should be more restrictions on several aspects of corporations including this and how much they can take. Idk what it's called but there needs to be something to prevent monopolies and things like how Disney owns like everything. Like Disney shouldn't be allowed to own that many things.

The decision remains highly controversial, generating much public discussion and receiving strong support and opposition from various groups.

Just copy/pasting some shit from the link here but -

Support
Senator Mitch McConnell commended the decision, stating "For too long, some in this country have been deprived of full participation in the political process. With today’s monumental decision, the Supreme Court took an important step in the direction of restoring the First Amendment rights of these groups"

Right-libertarian Cato Institute analysts wrote that restrictions on advertising were based on the idea "that corporations had so much money that their spending would create vast inequalities in speech that would undermine democracy". They continued, "To make campaign spending equal or nearly so, the government would have to force some people or groups to spend less than they wished. And equality of speech is inherently contrary to protecting speech from government restraint, which is ultimately the heart of American conceptions of free speech."

Opposition
President Barack Obama stated that the decision "gives the special interests and their lobbyists even more power in Washington". Republican Senator John McCain said he was "disappointed" by the decision. In 2014, former President Jimmy Carter called the United States "an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery".

Michael Waldman, director of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, opined that the decision "matches or exceeds Bush v. Gore in ideological or partisan overreaching by the court", explaining how "Exxon or any other firm could spend Bloomberg-level sums in any congressional district in the country against, say, any congressman who supports climate change legislation, or health care, etc."

The New York Times stated in an editorial, "The Supreme Court has handed lobbyists a new weapon. A lobbyist can now tell any elected official: if you vote wrong, my company, labor union or interest group will spend unlimited sums explicitly advertising against your re-election"

Political impact
The ruling had a major impact on campaign finance, allowing unlimited election spending by corporations and creating "Super PACs". Critics point out that large expenditures have come from a "small group of billionaires", as enabled by these Super PACS. This has shifted power "away from the political parties and toward the... donors themselves" (link

In an August 2015 essay, Markus Feldkirchen wrote that the decision was "now becoming visible for the first time" in federal elections as the super-rich have "radically" increased donations to support their candidates and positions. He opined that super-rich donating more than ever before to individual campaigns plus the "enormous" chasm in wealth has given the super-rich the power to steer the economic and political direction of the United States and undermine its democracy (link)

Studies have shown that the Citizens United ruling gave Republicans an advantage in subsequent elections. link found that it "increased the GOP's average seat share in the state legislature by five percentage points. That is a large effect—large enough that, were it applied to the past twelve Congresses, partisan control of the House would have switched eight times"

"there needs to be something to prevent monopolies" this is called anti-trust laws and unfortunately they've been chipped away. Was gonna make a poll on this too lol

Honestly, I think lobbyists and corporations have way too much power here in the United States.

^^ Yeah I feel like Disney is proof enough that these measures are being ignored.

On the "First Amendment right to free speech": I was just listening to link about Nestle's marketing of baby formula. Holy shit.

Background: The 1970s Nestle Baby Formula Scandal
When birth rates in the western world declined, baby formula companies had to find a new market for their product. Some companies, like Nestle, turned to developing countries, churning out propaganda to trick impoverished women into thinking that formula would make their babies healthier and smarter. Tactics included:
- Providing free samples upon birth, which were designed to last long enough such that a woman would become unable to produce milk. So they were locked into formula-feeding forever, despite not having enough money to afford it.
- Saleswomen dressed as nurses knocking on the doors of any home with a diaper hanging on the clothesline. They also spent time in maternity wards, selling the benefits of formula (disguised as actual medical advice) to new mothers.
- Targeting woman even in the poorest and illiterate neighbourhoods
- Barraging women with the message that formula-feeding was "modern", "western" and would lead their family out of poverty.
- Bribing doctors and hospitals with millions of dollars

Once mothers were dependent on formula to feed their children, they couldn't get any more free samples and had to purchase it instead. Many woman relied on watering down the milk in order to make it last longer, adding two or three times the correct amount of water and severely lowering its nutritional value. Some mothers were having to stretch one can (which was supposed to last three days for one child) for two weeks while feeding two children with its contents.

Also, many mothers in developing countries only had access to contaminated water.

Malnutrition and disease from formula-feeding killed approximately one million children per year in the 1970s.

Relevance to this topic?
The marketing strategy was first uncovered by the New Internationalist magazine (who Nestle later sued) and the cause was then taken up by human rights groups. Eventually the WHO introduced "the International Code of Marketing of Breast-milk Substitutes", which limited the ability of corporations to provide untrue information about breast milk substitutes, banned free samples, and set forth better labelling requirements.

The only country to vote against the resolution? The US under the Reagan administration, which claimed that it infringed corporations' "First Amendment Right to free speech"

Cursed shit

Further reading link

Their dodgy shit still continues to this day btw

In 1988, the Nestle boycott was relaunched when it was found that the corporation was still flooding hospitals with free samples.

In 2018, an investigation by Save the Children found that formula companies systematically violate the Milk Code. Formula companies are spending 36 pounds on marketing per every baby born worldwide, mainly targeting East Asia and Latin America. In the Philippines, for example, doctors are bribed to recommend formula, marketing pamphlets which look like medical advice are handed out in hospitals, and corporations still run on ads on TV that claim that formula-fed infants end up with higher IQs. Some mothers are spending 75% of their income on formula. Only 34% of women breast-feed their children in the first 6 months of their life.

In Mexico, 50% of mothers report having formula recommended by doctors.

In Chile, 75% of hospital staff said they'd been visited by formula representatives

But yeah FrEe SpEeCh I guess

I think there should definitely be campaign finance reform, and I think we also need to be careful not to let lobbying become a way for large companies to influence government policy. It's already becoming a huge problem now since all that money these companies are spending is also having an effect on smaller businesses who can't compete with the giants and will ultimately have to shut their doors.

Lobbying is a huge problem. The influence of the rich and powerful is bad for everyone else, especially the working class and the little guy.
The government is supposed to serve the people, not the other way around.

"I think there should definitely be campaign finance reform" yeah and honestly I think lobbying should be entirely illegal. Unfortunately corporations will find ways around such laws though (eg. "if you pass/repeal so-and-so law, we will build a factory in your state which will create 800 new jobs") or just do it under-handedly

(The real solution is that no one corporation should have so much power in the first place)

"The government is supposed to serve the people" yep. Unfortunately not gonna happen anytime soon lmao

Idk what it's called but there needs to be something to prevent monopolies and things like how Disney owns like everything Also just wanna add something belatedly to this

We can and should have better anti-trust laws to prevent massive monopolies. HOWEVER, saying that, monopolies are the inevitable end-result of prolonged capitalism.

Company A produces (however it manages it) a better quality and/or lower price than Company B. So most consumers go to Company A. Company B can't find any buyers because it's not competitive. In other words, Company A outcompetes Company B.

Company B collapses because it can't sell its goods, and sooner or later, declares bankruptcy. It lays off its workers, sells its physical capital (trucks, computers, etc) and stops buying inputs. Some of workers and capital are taken up by Company A.

So where there were two companies before, there's now one larger A, while B has disappeared. That is: A (the winner of the competitive struggle) eats / absorbs into itself what's left of Company B. And this process is repeated over and over until 30 or 300 companies have become one, or two, or three.

That's the result of competition. That's how competition is supposed to work. That's how competition does work. It's important to understand that monopoly is where competition leads.

To understand this from a business point of view: It is the great dream of every entrepreneur to become the last one standing in the competition, to win the competition. Not just because it makes you feel good, you out-maneuvered your competitors, but because if you're the last one standing, you're the monopolist. The reward for having out-competed the others is that you're now in a position to jack up the profits and the prices way beyond what you could have done before.

So we have a system that produces monopoly, and all the incentives for every entrepreneur in competition to work as hard as possible to become the monopolist. So why are we surprised that monopolies keep happening? They're the whole point and purpose of capitalist competition.

That's why we've gone from a myriad of different companies / individual traders / local shops in the 19th - 20th century to link basically owning everything in the 21st.

Credit: I summarised this from a great link on it by Prof. Richard Wolff.

That's the simple explanation. It's exacerbated even more by other features:

- Capitalism produces crises of overproduction. It produces so much that stuff can't be sold for a profit and the system collapses periodically. When it does, some businesses go out of business and their physical capital is bought up by the ones that survive. Do that enough and eventually you have just a few big guys for each industry. This means that ironically, economic crashes are the best time to be a big capitalist: stocks are cheap, real estate is being sold up, that mum-and-pop shop goes under and Walmart faces even less competition than before.

- As human technology increases, some fields have such a large amount of investment required before one can earn a profit that only established capitalists with money can go in. The classic example is utilities, where the amount of infrastructure required (cables, telephone poles, crews to maintain them, buying energy from a power plant, etc) is so high you have to be wealthy already. You can’t start an electricity company or internet service provider out of your garage or with a bank loan.

Monopoly capitalism ("late-stage capitalism") also necessitates imperialism, but that's a whole 'nother kettle of fish.