Biggest thing wrong with America: corporations being considered citizens

[Gokul43201]

What you are saying is that people cannot plan for retirement without having to make political choices.

Correct, at least so far as investing in the private sector in concerned. Political choices, social choices, philosophical choices, etc. Don't like 'em? Put your money under your mattress. Or else, you have to find a way to learn to live with those choices.

Demanding that a company not make a political choice is similar to demanding that they not make a social choice, or some other kind of choice. The company I've invested in prefers plastic over paper. They choose incineration over recycling. They use cheap foreign labor over patriotic US labor. They plan to expand all over the country instead of staying local. They are capitalists, not socialists! And in the last election, they supported the US Pirates Party over the US Marijuana Party. All the wrong choices.

How can I plan for my retirement without having to be the instrument for all these horrific actions?

 

[nismaratwork]

Correct, at least so far as investing in the private sector in concerned. Political choices, social choices, philosophical choices, etc. Don't like 'em? Put your money under your mattress. Or else, you have to find a way to learn to live with those choices.

Demanding that a company not make a political choice is similar to demanding that they not make a social choice, or some other kind of choice. The company I've invested in prefers plastic over paper. They choose incineration over recycling. They use cheap foreign labor over patriotic US labor. They plan to expand all over the country instead of staying local. They are capitalists, not socialists! And in the last election, they supported the US Pirates Party over the US Marijuana Party. All the wrong choices.

How can I plan for my retirement without having to be the instrument for all these horrific actions?

Well that sounds like the OP title... something very wrong with America.

 

[BobG]

Somewhat related, the US Supreme Court heard oral arguments on a case about using public funds for campaigns.

The case being considered is Arizona's provisions for public funding. If a candidate raises enough small contributions ($5 a pop) to show they're a viable candidate, they can receive public funds for their campaign if they forego taking private campaign donations. They receive a set amount of public money for their campaign unless their opponent is taking private donations and/or using his own money and/or outside organizations are making their own private expenditures on his behalf and the total amount of all that exceeds some threshhold. In that case, the publicly funded candidate gets additional public money to match his opponent's private money up to a new threshhold, at which point the publicly funded candidate is left to do the best he can even if his opponent is outspending him.

Several candidates that have or intend to fund their campaigns using private funds, plus some political action groups are challenging the funding law as unconstitutional, saying it puts the privately funded candidates at a disadvantage.

In other words, the privately funded candidate is at a disadvantage until they raise enough money to match the publicly funded candidate (although there was nothing that prevented them taking public funds instead of private funds). And once the privately funded candidate passes the standard amount made available to publicly funded candidates, then any donation they accept benefits their opponent equally. (For example, in the 2002 Governor's race, Bush spoke at a Republican fundraiser that generated $750,000 for the Republican candidate - and also generated $750,000 for Democratic candidate Janet Napolitano in matching public funds.)

The challengers of the law (Clean Elections Act) won their initial court case, but lost their appeal (MCCOMISH v. BENNETT). It should have come as no surprise, as their supporting evidence was pretty thin:

Rick Murphy ran successfully for House of Representatives as a participating candidate in 2004. He later ran for reelection in 2006 and 2008 as a nonparticipating candidate. He testified that he attempted to not trigger matching funds during his 2006 campaign because, since his opponent would receive additional matching funds once he surpassed the threshold amount, “t didn’t seem like it made a lot of sense for me to do that, so I curtailed my speech and curtailed my fundraising in order to prevent it.” Still, Murphy testified that matching funds have never prevented him from accepting a political
contribution. Murphy’s testimony that he curtailed his fundraising for fear of triggering matching funds was directly contradicted by his own campaign consultant, who testified that he advised Murphy to “raise as much money” as he could from “everywhere,” that he never advised Murphy to stop raising money, and that Murphy never curtailed or stopped his fundraising efforts.

The treasurer of the Freedom Club PAC testified that the PAC has never been prevented from making an independent expenditure for fear of triggering matching funds. He further
stated that he takes into account various campaign finance “reporting requirements, notifications and filings” upon which matching funds disbursement determinations by the Citizens Clean Elections Commission are based, in determining when to spend money.

Arizona Taxpayers stated that it “decided not to speak in opposition to [a] participating candidate . . . in the 2006 primary election because such speech would have triggered matching funds.” However, the groups’s founder admitted that it had never decided against making an expenditure because it would trigger matching funds. Further, the evidence demonstrates that Arizona Taxpayers could not afford to make expenditures during the 2006 primary election, because it had only $52.72 in cash on hand.

Their case before the US Supreme Court (McComish vs Bennett) is better.

If a privately funded candidate running in the primaries has three publicly funded opponents, then for every dollar he raises above the threshhold, he's effectively raising $3 for his opponents (although that's still $1 for each opponent so, unless they're ganging up on him, it's still hard to see how they've gained an advantage over him).

In one primary, there were 3 publicly funded candidates and 3 privately funded candidates. So not only did the privately funded candidates have to contend with the idea that their own efforts would benefit their publicly funded opponents, they also had to worry about their privately funded opponents triggering matching funds for publicly funded candidates.

While campaign spending has increased, spending per candidate has decreased (presumably, the law has increased the number of people able to run?), so it has had an effect on fundraising (whether reducing campaign spending per candidate is good or bad depends on your ability to raise funds).

And at least from initial reports of how the oral arguments went, it appears that there's a very good chance of Arizona's Clean Elections Act being struck down as unconstitutional since it's unfair to candidates that know they can raise large amounts of private donations.

 

[nismaratwork]

Niiiiice... lots of reading to do related to this. Thanks BobG!

 

[talk2glenn]

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):

"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."

 

[nismaratwork]

...And multinationals, with no national alleignece... where do they fit? Only through the carefully constructed (fiscally useful) fiction of personhood does your argument NOT resemble madness.

 

[GRB 080319B]

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