You guys are making a mountain out of a molehill.

This decision only applies to independent expenditures, uncoordinated with candidate campaigns. Corporations and unions will still be unable to contribute to candidate campaigns, PAC's and parties.

There is every opportunity now for legal requirements to be put in place that would require shareholder approval of corporate decisions and membership approval of untion decisions to back candidates. Disclosure laws would easily identify for voters who is running ads. Information is key, and if it's available to voters they will take note of it.

There are very powerful reasons that large, prominent corporations who have access to loads of cash will not get involved in candidate advocacy - PR, their customers' reactions and the political consequences of backing a candidate who loses. This decision actually benefits unions who will now have the same opportunity for independent expenditures and whose membership approval for those expenditures will be much more easily achieved. The corporations you're going to see take advantage of this decision are most likely going to be relatively small, closely-held corporations rather than any larger public corporation.

There is every opportunity now for legal requirements to be put in place that would require shareholder approval of corporate decisions and membership approval of untion decisions to back candidates. Disclosure laws would easily identify for voters who is running ads.

Would that such laws had a chance in hell of being enacted.

The corporation is a legal artifice, an artificial person, created to absolve actual persons of legal and financial liability beyond the risk of losing their investment. The people who debated and voted on the Constitution would not have been keen on having the British East India Company or The Hudson Bay Company pumping a million dollars into the presidential campaigns of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams.

In a saner world, the First Amendment would guarantee your freedom of speech, providing you were born with lungs, larynx, tongue and lips. And the corporation's personhood would involve taxation under the same rules as apply to any other person..

I am using the word "lobbyist" more generally than you are, gop ~ which is why I included "special interest" ~ now, instead of paying registered lobbyists to promote/buy their causes, corporations can do the work themselves ~

Sooz

in Jefferson's day, corporations were temporary agencies that were created to fulfill larger social purposes. the idea of a corporation with unlimited lifespan, goals that are often in direct competition with the public interest, and rights which exceed that of flesh and blood citizens was an unthinkable horror.

As far as I'm concerned, the "rights which exceed that of flesh and blood citizens" REMAIN AN UNTHINKABLE HORROR today ~

Sooz