Supreme Court Enables Corporate Corruption

The Supreme Court of the US (SCOTUS), in its alleged wisdom, has decided that corporations may use essentially unlimited money to influence candidates' elections under the First Amendment of the US Constitution.

The legal issue here is that US law treats corporations as if they were individual people. This is ludicrous. People create corporations as devices to make money. For-profit corporations, by law, serve the sole purpose of increasing the wealth of shareholders. They cannot have any sort of moral values above greed. None. Thus, treating a corporate entity as if it should have concern for its customers, neighbors or environment, as most individual people do, makes no sense. Such concern, carried out in action, could bring about shareholder lawsuits.

Corporations differ from persons in another important way. Most corporations have money, and thus power, that only an elite few individuals can even imagine. They can invest in politicians freely, and the return on those investments far exceeds any honest way of making a living. It is the sole duty of corporations to make money, and using politicians is the easiest way of doing so in many cases. A wealthy individual might invest in politicians in order to benefit the town where he lives, to forward a personal cause he favors or for the feeling of power. Corporations do it strictly for the money.

Two appropriate responses to this decision come to mind. The first and the more obvious, lies in making the status of corporations better fitted to their function. We need to recognize that companies cannot be responsible for their own ethical behavior; too many conficting factors inhibit that. Regulation obviously fits the bill here, but with additions such as a "death penalty" (dissolution) for those corporate entities that repeatedly violate the laws affecting them. Another good idea is to hold directors and/or executives criminally responsible for the behavior of the corporate entities they control.

The more important response to the Supreme Court decision is to change our election financing system. In this, we already lag behind most of the developed world. Put simply, the politicians will respond to the people only to the degree that the people hold the power over their election. So long as elections are financed by corporations and wealthy donors, the odds of that remain as slim under the Democrats as they were under the Republicans. The chances of third parties gaining power under the current system and being able to change it are even smaller. Implementing one form or another of public financing will result in major government budget savings as contributors lose the power to buy pork barrel projects worth orders of magnitude more than the contributions, to block reforms aimed at making them pay taxes and to commit various other acts of greed. Other special interests would also find themselves less favored by the politicians they currently elect. For one example, a variety of conservative Christian organizations recieved $206 for providing "abstinence-only" sex education in 2006. They would probably would have to recognize the abundant evidence that their product does not serve any of its stated purposes. They would lose that money unless they can produce believable progress. Results would begin to count. All in all, public election financing is both cheaper and a far better investment than bridges to nowhere, oil industry subsidies or "abstinence only" sex education ever have been.