Kasz216 said:
Mr Khan said:
badgenome said:
Soleron said:
As an hardcore free speech supporter: Corporations should not be natural persons or have rights. Individuals in the corporation should be able to say what they like. There IS a big difference.
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The practical problem with Citizens United is that billions of dollars were wasted on the election and the nation/news attention was sucked away for a year and a half out of a four year cycle. That's not grounds for reversing it (the Constitution not protecting corporations is) but from the outside it looks like insanity. Our elections are low-key and dull.
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The constitution does protect corporations... that whole freedom of the press thing. The government has no business deciding that this corporation (News Corp) is guaranteed a right to speak freely while that one (Wal-Mart) is not because of some arbitrary decision of what does and does not constitute "the press".
And I don't think Citizens United had anything to do with the ridiculously overblown nature of this election. The election was talked about nonstop for two fucking years straight because the media (i.e., those magical corporations whose right to free speech would be sacrosanct with or without Citizens United) decided to talk about it nonstop for two years straight.
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See, i've always interpreted those freedoms as being political freedoms more than full-fledged freedoms. Freedom of the press merely means that the state can't single out one viewpoint and pass laws like "you can't run stories that portray trickle-down economics in a negative light" or something like that, laws that would impact a political viewpoint, but if the law was politically content-neutral, it would be allowed to go forward (such as the old Fairness Doctrine. So long as it regulates everything equally, it's fair).
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A) That's almost impossible to actually do. Outside the fact that you'd need to find a completely unbiased judge, inherently pretty much any law will negativly impact some viewpoints over others.
All you are making is the "Marriage is already equal, gay people are free to marry straight people as much as they want" arguement.
For a quick and crude example, say a law was passed outlawing the reporting of scientific studies.
Hurts the viewpoint of evolution a bit more then creationism right? Even though it's a law that applies to both equally.
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In my mind it would stand a simple, two-step test:
1. Were the regulations passed in good faith? If its obvious that a law was passed to shut up one group of people, then it's unconstitutional.
2. Would the lack of regulation be detrimental to public safety or public discourse? In the case of citizen's united, limitless donations with no rules on who the donors actually are creating a lack of transparency and promoting dishonesty.
For instance of something that we already have, legislation against companies making claims that their products do something that they haven't been proven to do or straight-up don't do. If we were to take Badgenome's broad definition of "the press" there'd be nothing to stop companies from loading their advertising with even more fallacious claims than they already do (if anything, standards need to be stricter here than they already are. Great Britain, for instance, banned certain "I'm a Mac and I'm a PC" ads because of the blatant lies employed by Apple.)
