Does the First Amendment apply to The New York Times? The AFL-CIO? The ACLU? Why shouldn’t these corporations be allowed to engage in political advocacy?
Money is not speech per se, but there is an intrinsic relationship, and limiting money that can be spent on advocacy limits the advocacy itself.
Here’s a thought experiment: say the government passed a law banning protesters from paying for protest signs with credit cards. Do you think this law would violate the First Amendment? I do, but according to the “money-isn’t-speech” logic, it wouldn’t, because the law does not limit the actual speech, just the way it’s paid for.
Actually, you can see a shift in the scholarship to reflect what you’re talking about since the end of the Cold War. Very few people are still hanging onto the whole “one is better than the other” mode of thought to really start thinking far more constructively about the Cold War and what is has meant historically and for how the world is today. Books like Odd Arne Westad’s The Global Cold War have really illustrated that well:
Shopping was more of a sport in the old Soviet bloc than it is now. Everyone used to carry a folding net bag called a “perhaps” bag in case they happened across some desirable consumer good. After scoring a purchase one would often call one’s friends and share the good news. One common complaint after the collapse of the system was that it was easier to find a sweater in a store, but there was no sense in sharing the good feelings it engendered.
P.S. For a hilarious take on this, watch the movie ‘Goodbye Lenin’. It’s set in East Germany, but the idea is similar.
P.P.S. You haven’t been in a Walmart lately, have you? They’ve been having almost as much trouble stocking the place as GUM.
Ah, yes. Emma Goldman, what a philosopher. “Forget voting, let’s just kill the president instead!”
How humane
Of course they did, but you’re taking the argument out of context. I said writers in the US may have negative consequences based on what they publish, but they won’t be sent to a labor camp like a Soviet dissident, and @shaddack said no, the government will just disappear them like they did in Latin America.
I’m not saying Latin American death squads didn’t disappear people all the time, by the dozens, I’m saying the United States doesn’t do that to dissident writers, which is what @shaddack implied.
The First Amendment protects you from interference by the state, not private actors.
I said he’s (arguably) the most influential journalist in the world, and I base that on the reaction to his Snowden reporting.
But, you know what, given the importance of the topics he covers, I’ll go ahead and say he’s probably the most important journalist in the world as well.
That, and the pervasive DIY ethos. Things were difficult to find, there was more motivation to use what you could find to make what you wanted. The result was a population with lots of well-honed skills.
Now, much stuff is in stores and the abilities to hack and mod and tinker are disappearing, replaced with passive consumption.
The Soviets learned that from the Balkans because that was what the English and French were pushing in the 19th century. A republic, especially one that rests on ethno-nationalism, is not necessarily a freer place. The ethnic-based nation-state caused a huge crisis in the region, which resulted in masses of refugees being sent to their “proper” place. when the Soviet State picked that up under Stalin, it already had a long history, which had often been resisted by people on the ground. see for example:
And how that functioned in the Soviet Union can be found here:
I don’t know about you, but I find this incredibly sad. That we have to create a term for human beings to satisfy some legal BS. As Karl Polyani said in the wake of the second world war (or at the end of the war), anything that isn’t inherently people centered is going to lead to brutality:
And he (and Hannah Arendt, writing in the Origins of Totalitarianism) was correct. It doesn’t matter if it’s the brutality of the Gulag or the violence of the segregated south. Anything that decenters human beings is going to lead to violence and mass death.
So, in other words, corporations have more first amendment rights than we as individual citizens do.
She actually rejected violence by the time of the McKinley assasination, in part because the attempt to assasinate Fricke went so wrong, but that didn’t stop them from deporting her later on, under laws passed specifically to silence her and other anarchists/pacifists who were against the war. Also, the laws in part used to arrest her for her activism are still on the books, as far as I know:
I’m inclined to agree, but that doesn’t mean he’s the most influential. We know about everything Snowden released, but really, what has that materially changed and influenced? Is the Patriot Act overturned and is it likely to be? Are we still being watched and tracked, by both the government AND corporations? As important as we all know these things to be, not everyone agrees that what Snowden did and Greenwald’s facilitation of that was a good thing - some would have him arrested. But fair enough, he hasn’t been.
I don’t see how that’s true. Speech has consequences all the time, for both individuals and groups. I just don’t think the government should impose those consequences, or engage in prior restraint.
It doesn’t happen overnight; it’s a process.
So far, his reporting galvanized Silicon Valley companies to actively fight government surveillance instead of passively acquiescing. Foreign governments like Brazil and Germany have started to put pressure on the U.S. to end its surveillance of innocent civilians.
It’s even saturated goofy pop culture: there’s a scene in Horrible Bosses 2 where the main characters are gathering their supplies and they joke that they shouldn’t use cell phones because “Obama and the NSA will be listening in.”
(Please, please, please don’t take this as a recommendation of Horrible Bosses 2.)
You’ve never seen a newspaper or union endorse a candidate?
So maybe representation should be proportionate with taxation? Or should speech not scale with wealth, even if a minimal amount of money is required for effective communication? Campaign finance laws that established per-donor limits would seem to be a way to allow for enough spending to have effective communication without allowing the most monied to drown out all others.
So you were aware of this even when you were talking about racial and ethnic oppression in the US, as though the Soviets were immune to this sort of discrimination?
Yes they have and absolutely should. Your previous comment implied that the First Amendment should be limited to individuals, and I was pointing out that corporations already exercise First Amendment protections.
I think nearly any regulation that targets money earmarked for advocacy is ill-advised, and ends up chilling free speech. Remember the first five words of the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law…”
No, it implied that individuals do not need unlimited corporate speech in order to communicate, and that regulating how corporations use money to communicate is not the same as depriving individuals of speech.
It’s somewhat incorrect to say “corporations already exercise First Amendment protections” as they don’t enjoy protection so much as there’s never been an attempt to regulate them. McConnell would not apply to them because they’re not using general corporate funds in the name of political advocacy.
Well, we already know you’re way out in left field on a lot of speech restriction, and that the Court has consistently upheld restrictions that you disagree with. It’s possible that the Court might feel that the integrity of elections and freedom from corruption are competing interests that mitigate against the free-speech implications of financial contributions.
Do you think that the Citizens United anti-Hillary movie should have been banned? That’s the type of action these regulations lead to. I can’t fathom the mind that thinks this speech is wrong, just because of who makes it and how it’s paid for.
This kind of nonsense drives me crazy. Please tell me how more speech “corrupts” the “integrity of elections,” or, indeed, freedom itself.
Hey, I’ll let the Supreme Court tell you, as they did in Buckley v. Valeo:
According to the parties and amici, the primary interest served by the limitations and, indeed, by the Act as a whole, is the prevention of corruption and the appearance of corruption spawned by the real or imagined coercive influence of large financial contributions on candidates’ positions and on their actions if elected to office. Two “ancillary” interests underlying the Act are also allegedly furthered by the $1,000 limits on contributions. First, the limits serve to mute the voices of affluent persons and groups in the election process and thereby to equalize the relative ability of all citizens to affect the outcome of elections. Second, it is argued, the ceilings may to some extent act as a brake on the skyrocketing cost of political campaigns and thereby serve to open the political system more widely to candidates without access to sources of large amounts of money.
It is unnecessary to look beyond the Act’s primary purpose – to limit the actuality and appearance of corruption resulting from large individual financial contributions – in order to find a constitutionally sufficient justification for the $1,000 contribution limitation. Under a system of private financing of elections, a candidate lacking immense personal or family wealth must depend on financial contributions from others to provide the resources necessary to conduct a successful campaign. The increasing importance of the communications media and sophisticated mass-mailing and polling operations to effective campaigning make the raising of large sums of money an ever more essential ingredient of an effective candidacy. To the extent that large contributions are given to secure a political quid pro quo from current and potential office holders, the integrity of our system of representative democracy is undermined. Although the scope of such pernicious practices can never be reliably ascertained, the deeply disturbing examples surfacing after the 1972 election demonstrate that the problem is not an illusory one.
Of almost equal concern as the danger of actual quid pro quo arrangements is the impact of the appearance of corruption stemming from public awareness of the opportunities for abuse inherent in a regime of large individual financial contributions. In CSC v. Letter Carriers, supra, the Court found that the danger to “fair and effective government” posed by partisan political conduct on the part of federal employees charged with administering the law was a sufficiently important concern to justify broad restrictions on the employees’ right of partisan political association. Here, as there, Congress could legitimately conclude that the avoidance of the appearance of improper influence “is also critical . . . if confidence in the system of representative Government is not to be eroded to a disastrous extent.” 413 U.S. at 565.
Oh, no, I’m not saying the Soviets were “immune” to it, but it was of a different nature. The Soviets also consistently pointed to the American system of segregation as proof of Capitalist evils, often ignoring their own problems with ethnic difference in the process, because they had an official stance against discrimination by race/ethnicity/etc. In fjact many African Americans did end up in the Soviet Union in the 30s, and some were deeply ambivalent about their good treatment compared to some Soviet citizens - see for example this book on black radicals in the interwar period:
Look at what point have I been defending the Soviet system, rather than trying to point out that the modern system is oppressive, but is manifest in different ways? The categorization of supposedly “pure ethnicities” was all an exercise in crafting a stronger central state, and that was true whether it was employed by the Soviets or the US and in both cases had consequences for the people that were being categorized. As Hirsch points out, in that case, it had varying degrees of impact, depending on which group you identified with or were categorized into.
This is all the building of the modern state and it happened right across the world. The US and the Soviets were fighting over who had the “end of history” correct. Turns out that history marches on without them…
