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> As a non-American, I find it quite absurd that corporations can "donate money" to change a Congressman's opinion on a law, and then support them in Congress when passing new bills.

Let's be clear: Under US law, a corporation cannot donate money to a candidate under any circumstance. They can, however, spend money independently of a candidate, for example, to produce newspaper or documentary, write and publish a book, hire a billboard, produce and air an ad, etc.

On the other hand, in Australia, Germany, the UK, corporations can make unlimited donations directly to politicians.

My, that does sound absurd.

(Really, I'm not sure what's worse: Your lack of understanding of how US law works, or your lack of understand of how non-US law works. You may understand how your local election laws work, but the world is a big place. Sweeping statements just make you look silly.)

He may look silly and be uninformed but he gets a lot of easy up votes.

What about Citizens United? The US Supreme Court Jesters declared corporations ARE people expressly so they could make unlimited political contributions, saying it is "free speech". We live in a super fucking corrupt nation.

No. Citizen's United merely allowed corporations to air "electioneering communications" independently of the candidate close to the election. It did not do anything regarding direct financial contributions [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._Federal_Elec... (third paragraph)

Uh, no. Citizens United was about actual speech (a political movie), not money. It doesn't allow corporations to make political contributions, it says that they can't be prevented from spending money to present particular points of view.

For example, take the Google, Microsoft, etc, NYT full page ad opposing NSA spying. That's precisely what Citizens United protects.

The idea of corporate personhood was not new in Citizens United.

The question is not whether a corporation has rights similar to a natural person's -- in order to work at all, a corporation must have some of those rights. For example, it must have the right to own property, the right to enter into contracts, the right to bring cases in court, and so on.

The question is which set of rights corporations should have, and to what extent they can be regulated. Which is far from easy to sort out or solve with simple black-and-white rules.

To expand: SCOTUS has consistently ruled that corporations have some of the rights of a natural person _because_ "corporations are merely associations of individuals united for a special purpose" [0]. If I get together with like-minded individuals in order to do something we each have the right to do individually, in most cases, we retain the right to do it as a group (key word "most" -- as you say, which specific rights corporations should have is far from easy to sort out.)

In particular, free speech is a right of "every ... association representing a segment of American life and taking an active part in our political campaigns and discussions" [1] -- unions, guilds, consumer groups, religious groups, newspapers, political parties, and so forth. Those groups are made up of individuals united for a purpose, and their choosing to unite should not penalize them by restricting their ability to speak. Justice Kennedy made a great comment to this effect: "wealthy individuals and unincorporated associations can spend unlimited amounts .... Yet [under the Austin decision] certain disfavored associations of citizens — those that have taken on the corporate form — are penalized for engaging in the same political speech .... When Government seeks to use its full power, including the criminal law, to command where a person may get his or her information or what distrusted source he or she may not hear, it uses censorship to control thought. This is unlawful." [2]

[0] Pembina Consolidated Silver Mining Co. v. Pennsylvania, 1886. Yes, that's eighteen eighty six.

[1] US vs UAW, 1957

[2] Citizens United v FEC, 2010 - page 40 of Justice Kennedy's majority opinion

In Citizens United:

The majority decision did not declare that corporations are people. (Rather, they noted that treating corporations as people protects the real rights of actual people in some situations. If BP was not a legal person, they could not be sued after the Deepwater oil spill. If the New York Times was not a legal person, they would have no free speach rights. If Apple was not a legal person, it would not be illegal to take their cash reserves. We want a world where BP can be sued, the New York Times can publish what they want, and Apple cannot have their assets confiscated at a whim.)

They did not allow corporations to make unlimited political contributions. (Corporations still cannot make unlimited political contributions, and the case wasn't even about that. It was about independent expenditures, such as publishing a book about a candidate, or making a documentary about a political issue.)

They did not say that money is speech. (They said that money facilitates speech, and thus a sufficiently strict restriction on money would be a restriction on speech. Just because money is not speech doesn't mean it would be constitutional to say that politicians from one party can only spend $5 per election cycle on ads. Eqaully, money is not abortion, but under Roe v. Wade a restriction on spending any cash to obtain or perform an abortion would still be an unconstitutional restriction on abortion rights.)

Every specific claim in your comment is factually wrong.

I used to work for BigCorp which had a PAC. Each year they had a campaign to drum up contributions to the PAC. Officers of the company would send emails and make calls, letting everyone know how important it was to contribute to the PAC. The tactics were both carrot and stick. On one phone call I was told that it was important to donate because electing candidates favorable to the company "helped support all of our jobs". On the other hand, the company also would donate money to a charity of our choice for every dollar we gave to the PAC. So not only did they get the PAC funded, they also took a charitable contribution deduction.

The PAC donated certain sums of money to various candidates at the state and federal level each election cycle. Curious, I called the person who ran the PAC and asked how they chose the candidates. He replied simply, "We'll support anyone who will vote consistent with the interests of BigCorp."

And effectively, that's how corporations donate money to political candidates.

You might say this is a minor quibble, but:

> And effectively, that's how corporations donate money to political candidates.

Actually....no. Rules on PACs are different but still quite strict. They can donate a maximum of $5,000 to a candidate. In American politics, $5,000 is fucking nothing. In a contested senate election, that's a rounding error.

The way corporations influence elections is the same way rich individuals influence elections: Not by donating money to politicians (which are heavily capped), but through independent expenditures, which have no caps.

If it was "fucking nothing," I doubt they would bother. Rather, they look at it as a good investment that pays off. I know this to be true because of the intense earnestness with which they encouraged me and so many others to donate. Of course, maybe all they wanted was the charitable contribution deduction, that could be true. But I listened to many talks by officers of BigCorp in which they talked about the importance of these contributions to swerve legislation at the local, state, and federal level to their favor, most often to reduce the cost of doing business in the many states in which this particular BigCorp did business.

You misunderstand. Political financing in the US is very complex; all I'm saying is that the direct donations by corporate PACs to individual candidates is utterly trivial.

Look at this list: http://www.opensecrets.org/pres12/contrib.php?id=N00009638

"This table lists the top donors to this candidate in the 2012 election cycle. The organizations themselves did not donate , rather the money came from the organizations' PACs, their individual members or employees or owners, and those individuals' immediate families."

So if we look at Microsoft, $800k went from Microsoft and related entities to Obama's campaign. That's a lot of money, and I have no doubt it bought real influence with Obama. But out of that $800k, at most $5k was the money that went directly from Microsoft's PAC to the Obama campaign. And that's well...nothing. It is 0.625% of the total amount given by Microsoft, 0.0007% of the total amount given to candidate Obama.

I have no doubt that BigCorp was very insistent about your contributing to the PAC; but they had no intention of using more than the barest fraction of that money to donate to the campaign of individual politicians. They couldn't, even if they wanted to. They would have been intending to spend it on much more effective (and unregulated) channels.

Being wrong on uninformed about a particular subject is not a personal failing. Being wrong publicly is the first step to becoming right, and as a byproduct helps those who are wrong in the same way (often many) but not brave enough to speak. Criticizing and silencing people is only going to result in less informed people.

True, but at least lobbying is transparent and there are rules to it. Those that donate money for an electoral campaign are required to make those donations without strings attached. Of course, there are always strings attached, that's implicit, but if somebody tries to coerce a politician into doing something, that's as illegal as bribery in other countries.

In functional democracies, making bribing illegal works, in theory at least, but in semi-functional democracies like the countries from Eastern Europe where oligarchies happen, dirty politicians are untouchable and mass media is owned by the rich that are part of the ruling parties. Basically, if a politician is bribed, at most you'll only hear rumours and nothing else will happen. And if some big-profile case does indeed happen, those involved will just keep a low profile until the public forgets about it and then you'll see them back in the next elections. There is no real opposition either. They fight against each other only on TV. Note that I was born and still living in Romania. It's not so bad here as I describe it, but not that far either.

The real underlying problem in every country is of course that the public is so freaking stupid, lacking long-term memory and being easily swayed by electoral alms.

sounds like the USA.

> Does that happen in other countries, too?

Yes. Donations from corporations are legal in nearly every country, in mine, in the USA, most likely also in yours. That's really nothing to bash america over.

It is interesting that "make it legal or else we'll break the law and do it illegally at a greater cost to society" works for politicians and not for drug users.