What you are saying is that people cannot plan for retirement without having to make political choices.
It's odd to me that anyone would find this surprising. Especially when the surprised is the same party typically found advocating additional government involvement in personal affairs, including financial affairs, elsewhere. Government today not only heavily regulates the entire financial sector, it is also the sole provider of a principle share of the entire populations retirement income through social security.
Ergo, yes, one cannot effectively "plan for retirement" without making political choices. My investment strategy is heavily complicated by the state, both directly (regulatory and tax compliance) and indirectly (the political environment of the comapnies I invest in; I'd be an idiot not to consider federal energy policy when weighing Chevron stock, for example). This can hurt me or help me. Certainly if you've owned shares or debt of a company in, say, solar energy, you owe a significant portion (if not the sum) of your returns to the government.
By definition: government regulations significantly impact the ability of individuals and companies to make money. This is a fact above dispute. Given that, a company has a duty to its investors to attempt to influence public policy so that it helps, rather than hurts, their ability to make a profit. We can argue until we are blue in the face about who or what is right, but we can't really argue with the affected entities right to make his case. This is insane, philosophically and, given the 1st amendment, legally.
To repeat: the only problem I can see with incorporated groups of individuals having a protected voice in politics is that some people don't like what they have to say. Nobody has made a convincing case that anything bad is going on here, independent of content. It boils down to "I disagree, therefore get the muzzle". This is insane, and grants the government carte blanche to decide what is an is not "acceptable speech" during election seasons just because it happened to be published by a corporation - a ridiculous standard grounded not in any objective, principled distinction between the rights of individuals and groups, but in the worst kind of political pandering to popular discontent about eeevil corporations.
Even the dissent by the courts liberal wing makes no sense. Justice Stevens wrote, "While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics."
Even if this is true, what in the hell does it have to do with the constitutional merits of banning the entry of that money?? This would be like saying "...few outside this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of racist speech in bookstores" in a case finding that the government can shut down book stores that sell Mein Kemf, for example. The whole point of the Constitution is to enumerate and restrict the powers of popular government so that the many cannot dominate the few. The courts' role is to protect these supreme laws when the many, through their elected representatives, attempt to overstep their legal bounds. Just because most people don't think corporations should be allowed to speak (the opinion of Justice Stevens; I don't know that this is an accurate statement - it probably has a lot to do with how the question is worded in a poll) doesn't mean we should make it the law of the land. To quote Justice Kennedy for the majority (again; emphasis mine):
Justice Kennedy said:
"If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech."
