Citizens United is just the latest in a long string of corporate-led nonsense. Corporations themselves were started as groups of investors that would group their investments together, with public money or public backing from municipalities, to build needed infrastructure. Our bridges and railroads built in the late 1800's are an example of that.
These Corporations were allowed to charge tolls and fares to help recover their investments. Strangely, corporations were not needed for this, public bond measures were, and still are, the primary way for citizens to vote on whether they want to fund something from their own pockets. But the heads of early corporations, and board members, were powerful people of their day. They realized early on, the easiest way to make a ton of money, was to institute themselves as a 3rd party in these taxpayer funded infrastructure programs, then quickly become so important to the job market and economy that they were to big or vital to fail.
As a business owner, a person is liable for any damages or illegal activity conducted by their business. A corporation has no such personal liabilities. A corporation is just a group of shareholders who own the business. The board and CEO really have no personal liability, except to the shareholders and government regulatory agencies. The corporate standard has always been that the decision makers must look to increasing the company's value for the shareholders. That means corporate leaders are in a never-ending quest to acquire or produce things as cheaply as possible, and sell them for as much as possible. Most of us would agree that principle makes good business sense.
The problems arise when corporations get so large they basically have their specific market monopolized. This monopolization doesn't happen because the company produces superior goods or services. When companies get this big, it's because they have gone to war with their competitors and won.
What do I mean by "war"? There are many moves in the monopolizing playbook. You buy out or threaten not to do business with small companies that provide materials or assistance to your rival companies, and finally, buy them out when their stock price hits rock-bottom. You engage in propaganda, spreading false or mostly false stories about your competitors. Or create a bad story that is true. Think rat skulls in cereal, syringes in soda, or roaches in foods here. You have friends and business partners buy up stock in your competition until cumulatively, you have a majority share. Then you can wreak havoc at board meetings and shareholder meetings. You can even decide to sell the company, you guessed it, to your own company.
There are so many ways to wage this war, but only the most despicable and unscrupulous will win the day. And if a company's leaders don't do this, they are in violation of the shareholders trust, and they are fired and even fined by regulatory agencies. And the same goes with general business practices. If it is cheaper to pollute the environment and pay an occasional fine when caught, corporate leaders are actually obligated to do so.
When it comes down to the inevitable crimes perpetrated in this corporate system, it is not at all similar to a regular business owned by 1 or a small group of people. No one person in a corporation is rarely ever held accountable for anything.
For example, if I owned a mechanics shop, and I got caught paying someone to dump used oil into the city storm drains, I would be fined and sent to prison for a long, long time. But a large corporation can get caught paying folks to dump superfund-grade toxic substances by the billions of gallons, and no person is actually charged with a crime. It falls on the corporation as a whole in issuing responsibility, but hardly ever on those specific individuals who made the decisions personally. The corporation's army of lawyers and ex-employees in all the regulatory and oversight bodies make sure of that.
Now, when it comes to Citizens United, these corporations successfully claimed that donating money to political campaigns is a form of free speech, and is protected under the first amendment. This argument does imply that a corporation, as an entity made up of citizens, should have the same first amendment rights as any individual citizen. Strangely, a lot of American corporations are ran by individuals who are NOT citizens of this country, and have never had a first amendment right to begin with. Then there are the multinational corporations, who have offices around the world, who, just because they have an office in the US, think that qualifies them to those same constitutional protections that all US citizens are supposed to have. If I were to suggest that an illegal alien had full constitutional rights as a citizen here, I would be laughed out of this forum. Even tar and feathered. But somehow the corporate version seems just fine with those same people.
So Citizens United has nothing to do with an individual's campaign contributions as a form of free speech, but everything to do with large wealthy groups of political donors, similar to PAC's, and legitimizing their use of money towards political candidates friendly to their corporate causes. And also legalizing and expanding corruption of elected officials. It isn't called bribery anymore, it's lobbying. And instead of being treasonous, it's called being an American patriot who supports a free market economy.
Citizens United wrongly takes the liberties retained by individual citizens of the US, and assigns those same rights to corporations, the same corporations who share none of our values and respect for other citizen's rights. In fact, those corporations, as laid out above, thrive and profit from doing things most of the citizens would consider irresponsible, reprehensible, and would be locked up for.
I think the court reached too far on this decision. But I think it was predicated upon bad past decisions as well. I can see how the court has deemed that a corporation should be considered a "person" for the purposes of having a body to seek damages and legal recourses from. But I think this would have been more effectively done by just being able to personally sue the offenders making decisions for the corporation. No need to arbitrarily label corporations "persons" for that. Those decisions laid a terrible foundation for Citizens United to emerge, probably on purpose, as part of an ongoing process to replace the voices of the people with corporate one's. And they are still not done, guaranteed.
Further, individual citizens who are shareholders, board members, or other leaders of these corporations, can all donate money out of their own pockets to the political picks of their own choosing, on their own time. They do not need, and it is ridiculously anti-constitutional, for their or any other corporation to speak on their behalf in the form of political donations or lobbying. The same could be said of PAC's, non-profit groups, labor unions, etc. Any one citizen who is a member of those groups can easily donate and contribute on their own.
For those that would balk at my use of the term anti-constitutional, think about it. The constitution lays out civil liberties that cannot ever be violated for any citizen. Corporations are just groups of people, and those individual people were never meant to be afforded a second form of citizenship as a collective. Let me emphasize this, If an American citizen has rights, then has rights again through a corporation as an investor, is he twice the citizen as someone not invested? Nothing in the Constitution mentions different levels of citizenship. Under this court ruling, the corporations, by default, also have the other rights afforded to the people, like the right to bear arms and the right to assemble. Technically, they can all have their own standing armies, many of them foreign and mercenary in nature, right on our soil. Again, the same forum members that protest vehemently against unarmed caravans of migrants trying to "invade" our nation, would probably think nothing of some Saudi Government-owned corporation having not just the same constitutional rights as American citizens, but a fully armed foreign force in our country. The sense I get, is forum members would say if they could afford it, and it creates some jobs or helps our economy, we should allow it. I say it is utter nonsense, and it flies in the face of what the Constitution was for, preserving the rights of citizens, and collectively protecting the nation from foreign invaders.
And lastly, and specifically, on freedom of speech in this country. Citizens United has made the actual individual citizens right to free speech secondary in nature to the corporation's. As individuals, we might be able to spare $10 or even $1,000 for a candidate who shares our values and sentiments. But corporations, and PAC's, non-profits, and labor unions, collectively spend several hundreds of billions on politics every year. Who's voice matters in the halls of congress and in the regulatory bodies of our government? Hint- it isn't the people's voices.
If money is free speech, then those with the most money have the voices with the most authority and political persuasion. It turn over the reigns of our nation to those with the worst morality, the worst criminal and pathological elements of our society, and secures all of the resources and manpower of our nation of citizens, and directs it, laser-focused, towards complete and total domination of the world, and even beyond when that becomes feasible. That is the end-goal of any corporation, whether they know it or not, because in the corporate model, no amount is ever enough, and no power and influence is ever enough.
For some interesting reading, check out the first corporation in America, not counting some earlier post-revolutionary banking groups. It looks like, from the beginning, the story starts off with some good old-fashioned corporate espionage. He stole plans for a power loom from an English business and other trade secrets from a Massachussetts company.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston...turing_Company
Wiki on Corporations:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation
"A corporation is a company, a group of people or an organization authorized to act as a single entity (legally a person) and recognized as such in law."
6 Minute video for those with ADD:
Longer video for the educated, or those that wish to be: