Comment by woodruffw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by woodruffw | Hacker News Reader

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> Corporation is, after all, just a form of organization of natural persons, and cannot do anything on its own.

A corporation is a synthetic legal object: beyond basic restrictions on its form, it's allowed to legislate itself internally according to whatever bylaws and structure it pleases. There is no requirement (and no particular precedent) for them having a democratic structure.

This produces a fundamental tension between the people who comprise the corporation and the decisions that the corporation makes: the corporation can choose to do things that are overwhelmingly unpopular with its employees without significant recourse, since the corporation does not operate according to the will of its members.

In other words: corporations are naturally susceptible to undemocratic power concentrations, where a small number of executives or board members use the financial heft of the corporate body to achieve their personal goals. Allowing those concentrations to then seep into our democratic system is fundamentally corrosive.

> Are you also supporting this position, that government can suppress your speech if any at any point corporate funds are used?

No. I'm not obliged to defend whatever argument the USG's lawyers presented during the particulars of the CU case.

> This produces a fundamental tension between the people who comprise the corporation and the decisions that the corporation makes: the corporation can choose to do things that are overwhelmingly unpopular with its employees without significant recourse, since the corporation does not operate according to the will of its members.

Sure, but it’s still natural persons who are actually making those decisions, no? After all, a “synthetic legal object” cannot actually make any decision. You seem to be conceding that the Citizen United did in fact protect the speech right of natural persons, you just complain about the technical aspects of how this speech act was performed.

> In other words: corporations are naturally susceptible to undemocratic power concentrations, where a small number of executives or board members use the financial heft of the corporate body to achieve their personal goals. Allowing those concentrations to then seep into our democratic system is fundamentally corrosive.

So you are only against Citizens United as applied to big and powerful corporations, but are totally fine with it with less powerful corporations? Say, you totally support the actual plaintiff, the Citizens United organization, in its right to publish the movie that was the subject matter in the case?

Also, given that you seem to believe that the government should be allowed to block speech by powerful corporations, what about speech by powerful and rich individuals? Should government also have a right to restrict speech of individuals if they are rich and powerful enough?

If it's a natural person, then they can do it with their own time and money. This is not what we've seen in the post-CU political financing world: we've increasingly seen opaque corporate structures where unknown individuals ply unknown amounts of money (collected from the labor of people who almost certainly wouldn't approve it directly) into races.

CU does nothing to protect the free expression of individuals; it has markedly diminished the expressive power of individuals in the political sphere in favor of opaque and legally established (rather than natural) entities.

> So you are only against Citizens United as applied to big and powerful corporations, but are totally fine with it with less powerful corporations? Say, you totally support the actual plaintiff, the Citizens United organization, in its right to publish the movie that was the subject matter in the case?

I don't know if this is intentional on your part, but you're dropping a key piece of context: Citizens United (the organization) is a PAC, with extraordinarily wealthy corporate financiers. It's not some kind of scrappy outfit with a handful of unpaid undergraduate interns, and it would not exist independent of the corporate interests that use it as a more palatable front for political influence ("Koch Interests Action Campaign" just doesn't have quite the same ring to it, I think).

> Should government also have a right to restrict speech of individuals if they are rich and powerful enough?

Frankly, there should be no private financing of elections at all. But that's not realistic.

Realistically: rich and powerful people have the exact same right to engage in electoral politics as everyone else, and there is no immediately feasible way to stop them from dominating those politics via their wealth and power. What we can do is make those attempts at domination as transparent as possible. Rulings like CU directly stand in the way of electoral transparency.

> If it's a natural person, then they can do it with their own time and money.

> (...)

> Citizens United (the organization) is a PAC, with extraordinarily wealthy corporate financiers.

So what is your complaint here, exactly? That wealthy corporate financiers can do everything that Citizens United tried to do, as long as at no point any of the funds pass through any corporation or a non-profit? Seems like you're just trying to make the speech of the wealthy corporate financiers difficult. I don't think people should lose their rights just because they are wealthy.

Nobody is talking about anybody losing any rights. To paraphase Anatole France: the law, in its majestic equality, permits the rich as well as the poor to express and petition as private individuals.

My "complaint" is about civic integrity and transparency: you are (presumably) a member of the same society as me, so you should have an intuitive (and civically gained) understanding that sunlight is the best disinfectant. Our country is better off when those who engage in our political processes, especially disproportionately, cannot hide behind corporate structures.

Agreed. This is why we insist on campaign finance limits and public lists of donors. See new article just today from the UK where someone wanted to donate $300k to a US election, and did so by funneling it through a lobbying group to obfuscate the foreign source.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/no-10-chief-of-staff-in-f...

The key point being made is that corporations give both an opaque knowledge of their funding and also a multiplier effect of that funding in a way that a wealthy individual cannot. You saw this immediately with astroturfing on candidates and issues all neatly hidden behind the PAC facade, with no way to discern who funded it.

No, because they can't actually do everything that Citizens United tried to do.

Here's a structure that I think would be fairly unobjectionable: Citizens United works collectively to raise funds for political causes. Once funds are raised, the money -- in its entirety, minus administrative and other overhead costs -- is distributed to all the employees of Citizens United itself. That money is taxed, as it should be. Then the employees are free to voluntarily choose to contribute that money -- up to individual contribution limits -- to whatever candidates they so choose.

The same should be the case if an ordinary corporation (one that doesn't exist for political purposes) wants to donate to political causes: they should be forced to distribute the sum total of that desired contribution as salary to employees, who could then choose to make (or not make) those contributions.

Obviously there are flaws to this plan, and it needs more scrutiny and fleshing out, but I think it is much more democracy-preserving and -- critically -- transparent than just allowing corporations to act as "people" and fund political campaigns directly, or via shadowy means.

Is CU allowed to pay people a nominal fee to be on-paper employees, whose only responsibility is to, a few times a year, sign a release form that allows CU to make a bundle of political donations on their behalf, with the fee paid out to the individual.

Or on the personal level, I can't actually tell if it's illegal for me to pay you $3000 to sign a contract saying you will donate $2600 to a particular candidate. And if it's legal for me and you do to that, why shouldn't it be legal for a corporate entity to do that at scale?

And it's certainly legal for you to hire me to handle the minutia of donating money to a political candidate.

> Sure, but it’s still natural persons who are actually making those decisions, no?

It is a small handful of natural persons (or corporate board or executive team) deciding for the entire corporation full of people who have zero say that the fruits of their economic output (under the auspices of the corporation) are being used to support a particular political party or candidate.

If we look at individual political campaign contributions, then it's one person deciding that some of their hard-earned cash should go to support a particular candidate or cause. But with a corporate structure, it's five people deciding that the collectively-earned cash of thousands of people should go to support a particular candidate or cause.

To put it another way, an individual campaign contribution is "one person, one vote". A corporate contribution is "one person, many votes".

And no, most people do not have the realistic option to quit their job because they don't agree with the political contributions the executives have decided the company will make.

> Should government also have a right to restrict speech of individuals if they are rich and powerful enough?

Governments already do this: individuals are subject to political campaign contribution limits[0]. This unfortunately gets muddied by PACs and the like, which was the issue at hand in Citizens United.

[0] https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/candidate...

How do monetary donations translate into votes? Whether I give a candidate $1 or $1million, I still get only one vote; the only merit of donating money is to help my candidate make their views better known to more people, each of whom can now make a better-informed decision.

There are many cases of well funded candidates (be they self-funded or funded by small donors) failing to win elections; e.g. Michael Bloomberg and Bernie Sanders on the national stage. Despite tremendous advertising, these candidates were deemed inferior by enough voters to lose.

> How do monetary donations translate into votes?

For precisely the same reason that advertising works: people in general are susceptible to psychological manipulation, subtle or otherwise.

Are you suggesting that you cannot actually make any decision, only your decision-making part of your brain can ? ;)

Also, I think that one of our mistakes was to not require limits on the duration of a company (because they used to be shut down once their goal was accomplished?). In comparison, even the richest human has a well-limited lifespan...

> you seem to believe that the government should be allowed to block speech by powerful corporations, what about speech by powerful and rich individuals?

It's like speed-limits. You can only drive so fast. Similarly we should limit how many dollars any single person can spend on manipulating public opinion.

With corporations I guess we should divide the amount they spend on political adds by the number of share-holders, and put a limit on that.

> It's like speed-limits. You can only drive so fast. Similarly we should limit how many dollars any single person can spend on manipulating public opinion.

Does this apply to all advertising, or just "political" advertising? Is "Enjoy Coca Cola" the acceptable kind of "manipulating public opinion", or the bad kind that is limited? Who draws the distinction?

Is Shell or Exxon allowed to advertise their products? Are they allowed to advertise their products in a positive light? Are there spending limits on their just, like, normal product advertising?

Can I air anti-oil and pro-clean-air advertisements? Are these "political" even if Shell's aren't?

Good questions. I think companies should be allowed to advertise their products.

But advertising for who should be elected to run the government is a different ball-game. Why? Because government is not just a product you could refuse to "buy".

Government should represent us. But it should not represent rich people more than anybody else, which is what happens if the rich can choose the government based on political advertising and misinformation.

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