[NEWS] Supreme Court Allows Corporations To Support Campaigns

Fascinating...

Thought I'd share this.

Turn unthread!

the Supreme Court’s five-member conservative majority announced that the First Amendment bars Congress from imposing even mild constraints on the ways corporations can employ their vast financial resources to drown out the voices of ordinary people in federal election campaigns

Too biased for me, ick.

To be honest, I skimmed it...I'm just curious as to how people's opinions are now. I was wondering based on what some posters said if I overreacted.

edited 24th Aug '10 4:19:34 PM by occono

"But they'll still have to disclose where they get their funding from, right?" - amarielah

... did anyone answer this question in the thread? I'm just asking, because I haven't looked through it.

If they ever did have to, they still have to.

Necroing the topic again, because I'm curious: How have US Tropers perceived election ads for this year? Have there been more of them, are they flashier, etc.

Oh yeah, there's a lot more ads, especially from the US Chamber of Commerce which is pushing its agenda hard here in California.

I swear I can't go a single commercial break without one of their ads going "Vote Whitman/Fiorina" or "Vote yes on 26 (fees would need a 2/3s voter majority to be implemeted)/no on 25 (if it passed, budgets would need a simple majority to pass)." It's maddening.

Oh, but I thought people said it would only affect D.C. :P

Well, I've seen more ads on TVT for people actually running in my state rather than in New York or something. Not much else though.

I seriously doubt you could have effects that fast. Stuff like this probably takes a decade or two to settle in. It's funny how different the countries in North America are moving.

USA allows corporations to directly make political ads.

Canada bans corporate donations completely and imposes strict spending limits on political parties.

^^^^^I haven't seen much on the satellite channels lately, but the local cable channels have been absolutely swamped with attack ads put out by the local and state officials campaigning.

My mailbox this afternoon had eight campaign ads stuffed in it, one ironically enough attacking some candidate for supposedly supporting environmentally unfriendly policies.

Why not? If you're an oil baron and you a) have billions of dollars and b) don't like environmental regulations, why wouldn't you pump your money into the anti-environmental lobby (Cal's Prop 23) as soon as you could?

Judging by the staggering number of ads even by past election year standards, as well as the bullshit meaningless "this ad payed for by some group you've never heard of and it's not clear who they are at all", yeah, this has had an effect. Also, sure, they have disclosure...but most people wouldn't bother to go look that up, but the ad still has it's intended effect...

Also also, I was just reading an NPR article about how inaccurate/downright false the ads have been this year, as well as being particularly negative. Coincidence?

I meant much more damning effects, as in, direct corporate candidates being elected, corporate agendas being pushed through and so on and so forth. That takes time.

The ad negativity will happen quickly but it's hard to see its exact effects when you live during the transition since it'll be slow enough that it is hard to tell. Plus, like you said, even if they say they funded the ad nobody is going to look it up.

Whoever said there isn't a direct correlation between winning and money in this thread is just being silly. It's just one of the major but not only factors in determining who wins an election. Senate seat and even house seat races are hardly cheap undertakings and the more ads the more splash.

edited 21st Oct '10 3:10:23 PM by breadloaf

Well, if Prop 23 passes... It's sponsored primarily by Valero and Tesoro, who have pumped $5.5 million into it. And it repeals California's greenhouse gas regulations, essentially permanently. That's as direct as you get.

Well I guess I stand corrected in a horrible way.

I meant much more damning effects, as in, direct corporate candidates being elected, corporate agendas being pushed through and so on and so forth.

You're assuming this isn't already happening

In all seriousness though, it will definitely have a huge impact. They don't spend all that money on those ads because they don't work. At the risk of tripping some sort of fallacy, the average person is pretty goddamn credulous and probably doesn't know much about the candidates-so any ad information will probably be accepted as true even when it isn't. Look at how uninformed people were about healthcare, or taxes going down, or Obama not being a Muslim  ^*

The conventional argument is that people can shield themselves from biased information by knowing who's supporting it...but there's so many loopholes and they're vastly overestimating how much people care.

With all of the above factors, there's really no arguing that corporate sponsorship of candidates is going to have a huge (and probably negative) effect on our government in the near future. Very near.

Edit: Well holy shit, I was just being a bit facetious about it already happening, but ^^. 0_0 there you go

edited 21st Oct '10 3:24:42 PM by deathjavu

Related but slightly off-topic:

FiveThirtyEight is a great resource for aggregated poll numbers for candidates. Anyone know of similar resources for initiatives?