this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
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This is referring to campaign finance, many believe that corporations have too much influence on American politics and their influence should be limited. The constitution guarantees free and open elections, doesn’t the heavy influence of corporations soil that? Many think so. When challenged in court, the courts ruled that corporations are people so limiting or eliminating their ability to donate and influence campaigns violates their first amendment rights (the right to free speech). It’s complete bullshit, in my opinion, and it’s the reason in many cases that we don’t have regulations limiting corporations in general…even utilities. Agree or disagree…
That is highly convoluted but it sheds some light into a few questions I had regarding your country and its corporations. Thank you.
We circumvented that here by making sure all recognized political parties have equal access to divulge their message in TV and radio, by granting through force of law a fixed time slot for campaigning. Its usually just before the evening news and in ten minutes they need to fit a lot parties, so things are very boiled down.
Besides that, the state itself grants a stipend to political parties to spend on campaign; their support base can chip in and usually does but every single donation must be accounted for and is handed to the partie, not a given individual.
On their side, companies tend to keep their mittens off politics. It can prove very bad if a given company associates with a given political figure. Recently we had string of figures, some still in office, involved in a serious case of "gifts" from companies, which led to very serious accusations of abuse of power and corruption. That tends to backlash.
What companies do, in a more or less public way, is vent their concern about certain policies being drafted or put in place. They're social actors and can put forward their view but little more. Companies handle their business, government creates laws and reviews it as necessary.
Funny thing? Nobody really knows how this country actually works and moves forward but it does and has been doing it for a long time.
In my opinion the way you do things is how they should be done in order to actually have free and fair elections but impossible to dismantle the power structure now since they run things. They buy the politicians and in some cases literally write the laws.
That's horrible.
Can't a good grass roots movement pierce that? A small local party, with iron clad rules for supporting and funding candidates?
I know primaries are important in the US but when one candidate can slander another of the same party something is very wrong.
Our parties rarely run primaries here as what is important is the votes cast to one party not one individual. This has a downside to it, obviously, but we skip the internal drama on who will be the next candidate to run for office.
For a long time, the US actually had something called the "Fairness Doctrine" which required broadcasters to present matters of public interest in a way that was fair. So if you had a guy on a show that said the president was a lizard person, that show also had to have someone on to refute that opinion, or the media company could lose their broadcasting license.
The Fairness Doctrine was repealed by the Reagan Administration in 1987, which immediately resulted in the rise of conservative talk radio, who could say whatever they wanted without having to present the opposing viewpoint, and they didn't have to worry about losing their license.
The rise of conservative talk radio led to Fox News, which led to the election of Trump.
Interestingly, less than a year after the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, a conservative political nonprofit corporation was formed called Citizens United, led by a man named David Bossie. The goal of this organization was (and remains) the creation of media that supports their goals of restoring "traditional American values", which consists entirely of right-wing documentaries and attack ads.
In 2008, Citizens United made a documentary called "Hillary: The Movie", which was basically a movie-length attack on Hillary Clinton, who had announced in 2007 that she was going to run for president in 2008.
At the time, there was a law called the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, which essentially banned any attack ads that name a federal candidate from running within 30 days of a primary election or 60 days from a federal election, if the ad was funded with money from a corporation (including a nonprofit) or union.
The Citizens United nonprofit corporation knew this, and sued the Federal Election Commission, arguing that not being able to show their attack ad was a violation of their constitutional right to free speech, which, very importantly, had only ever been interpreted to apply to human individuals, not corporations.
The Supreme Court was dominated by conservatives in 2010 (and still is), and they ruled that corporations did in fact have free speech protection, that not allowing attack ads funded by corporations that were not required to disclose the source of their funding before elections was a violation of the constitutional rights of corporations, and subsequently nullified the part of the law that prevented Citizens United from showing their attack ad, while also removing almost all limits on the "speech" that corporations could engage in without repercussions and also happened to confer legal "personhood" to corporate entities.
Incidentally, David Bossie (President of Citizens United) resigned from Citizens United in 2016 to take a job as deputy campaign manager for Donald Trump's presidential campaign.