The core, instead is whether or not corporations have the same rights as individuals, indeed whether or not corporations are people.
What a gross thought. Unfortunately, the court system has been moving this direction for a number of years, and this decision is essentially the ultimate ratification of that view.
Given that corporate expenditures are now the 800 lb gorilla in all campaigns, one extrapolates a few outcomes:
a) In order to get elected, candidates will be more beholden then ever to whomever underwrites their campaign. We will literally have the R. Kelly campaign for Senate, brought to you by Nabisco and 'Golden Shower' hygenic products.
b) Corporate contributions will far exceed the money that individual citizens can pony up in all but the most extreme circumstances. This will lead to many outcomes, but I'm particularly interested in one or two:
1. Only the most populist democrats will be able to really benefit from citizen contributions, meaning that the democratic party will be even further divided between corprate placators and Grayson like barn-burners. Passing bills with a unified party will be even harder, and
2. Citizens will choose to funnel their contributions in the most direct way possible, meaning unions and other entities other then the DNC could become a more powerful draw for small-donor contributions.
c) The biggest losers here will be tax-funded public institutions. The biggest recievers of corporate support will be candidates with a strong anti-corporate tax stance, meaning that the largest cut of the modern federal budget system begins shrinking with the next election cycle. Schools, transportation infrastructure, libraries, you name it, if it's funded by the public dollar it's days are numbered.
In short, this decision will pave the way for a society that caters to it's mightiest inhabitants, a Chicago School of Economics free-for-all the likes of which Milton Friedman could never have come up with in his wildest dreams. Money is now the biggest arbitor of political power, and the decending spiral of the interaction of the two without any kind of mitigating moral structure restraining the double helix means that the public is now essentially a bystander to the rise of the mega corporation. If you catch yourself thinking that this is where we've been all along, this is far, far more straightforward. The last vestiges of protection are essentially gone.
There are some fixes through legislation that could concievably get around this ruling, but bare minimum everything that's bad about our electoral system just got a whole lot worse. Hard to really see the long band of MLK's arc of Justice going the way he envisioned it right now....
