The answer to #2 is clearly yes; those who hold certain civil service or military jobs are explicitly forbidden from engaging in public political debate, as a condition of their jobs. (Keeping publicly neutral regarding political issues is also often a condition of private employment -- a friend of mine had to resign as an officer of the Peninsula Young Democrats when she got promoted to a VP level position at a biotech firm -- and I don't think there's any jurisprudence suggesting employers can't enforce such requirements.)
I would say the answer to #1 and #3 is probably no, though I'd come to a different conclusion if you asked about broadcast television or radio, which use a limited public resource -- bandwidth in the radio spectrum may be getting "larger" as we switch to digital signals that allow more channels in the same "space", but it will always remain fundamentally finite, and ought to be regulated for public benefit.
In any case, nobody is asking that individuals not publish pamphlets, write books, or even buy ad time. The problem with Citizens United is that it equates corporations to people. They are not. They are entities granted a special legal status (originally by European monarchs, and more recently by the governments of democratic secular republics like our own), which allows the actual human beings investing in them to gain protection from liability if their profit making activities go awry. (If you have a sole-proprietorship or basic partnership, and your business does something bad -- say, poisons the local groundwater -- the community can take your house and your retirement savings in restitution. If you incorporate, they can generally only take the money you explicitly invested in the business, unless they can show that you personally engaged in the conduct that caused the problem, or caused it through gross negligence in hiring and monitoring your employees.) This limited liability is the fundamental purpose of the modern corporate form, and has been since it was invented for the East India Company.
Officers and managers of corporations have a duty under law to maximize profit, and they do very well at that job. Corporations control massive stockpiles of cash. If even one of the top dozen corporations wanted to enter politics in a serious way, it could easily deploy enough cash to render everyone else irrelevant. The entire budget for all sides in every federal campaign of 2008 -- Presidential, Senatorial, and House -- is a rounding error relative to the resources of companies like Exxon-Mobil or Goldman-Sachs.
We need to make abstention from politics a new condition of gaining the limited liability that allows people to take major business risks and earn the concomitant rewards. Or, at the very least, we need to apply to corporate shareholders the same kind of logic that the GOP has successfully forced on unions in many states -- unions in many places aren't allowed to spend money on elections unless members explicitly approve the use of their dues for those purposes. They often have to go back for permission for entering each individual campaign, rather than getting blanket permission to do whatever they believe is in the members' interest. Given the degree to which many companies are, in the big picture, screwing over their shareholders, this type of law would make even more sense for the corporate form than it does for the union form.
What is the difference between The New York Times Corporation spending money to print newspapers, at a loss, with editorials, and a corporation spending money to print pamphlets? How about when MSNBC runs editorials on a cable news show? How about when the GE board of directors tells MSNBC what the editorial position is?
I think that if you want to have freedom of the press mean something, that means allowing some corporations to spend their money on advocacy. And I think treating media companies differently from other companies is unsustainable and a bad idea.
The union-corporation analogy is imperfect, because shareholders often have more choices and more control than union members. Selling stock is generally much less painful than quitting your job.
By the way, I believe you are mistaken as a matter of law about fiduciary duty of corporate officers. I can set up a for-profit corporation with any charter I like, and I need not make maximum profit my goal. Certainly, shareholders can and do have other goals that they push management towards via their proxy votes.
There is no difficulty with a corporation having "corporate values", chosen by the shareholders, with compliance supervised by the Board of Directors.
I would say the answer to #1 and #3 is probably no, though I'd come to a different conclusion if you asked about broadcast television or radio, which use a limited public resource -- bandwidth in the radio spectrum may be getting "larger" as we switch to digital signals that allow more channels in the same "space", but it will always remain fundamentally finite, and ought to be regulated for public benefit.
In any case, nobody is asking that individuals not publish pamphlets, write books, or even buy ad time. The problem with Citizens United is that it equates corporations to people. They are not. They are entities granted a special legal status (originally by European monarchs, and more recently by the governments of democratic secular republics like our own), which allows the actual human beings investing in them to gain protection from liability if their profit making activities go awry. (If you have a sole-proprietorship or basic partnership, and your business does something bad -- say, poisons the local groundwater -- the community can take your house and your retirement savings in restitution. If you incorporate, they can generally only take the money you explicitly invested in the business, unless they can show that you personally engaged in the conduct that caused the problem, or caused it through gross negligence in hiring and monitoring your employees.) This limited liability is the fundamental purpose of the modern corporate form, and has been since it was invented for the East India Company.
Officers and managers of corporations have a duty under law to maximize profit, and they do very well at that job. Corporations control massive stockpiles of cash. If even one of the top dozen corporations wanted to enter politics in a serious way, it could easily deploy enough cash to render everyone else irrelevant. The entire budget for all sides in every federal campaign of 2008 -- Presidential, Senatorial, and House -- is a rounding error relative to the resources of companies like Exxon-Mobil or Goldman-Sachs.
We need to make abstention from politics a new condition of gaining the limited liability that allows people to take major business risks and earn the concomitant rewards. Or, at the very least, we need to apply to corporate shareholders the same kind of logic that the GOP has successfully forced on unions in many states -- unions in many places aren't allowed to spend money on elections unless members explicitly approve the use of their dues for those purposes. They often have to go back for permission for entering each individual campaign, rather than getting blanket permission to do whatever they believe is in the members' interest. Given the degree to which many companies are, in the big picture, screwing over their shareholders, this type of law would make even more sense for the corporate form than it does for the union form.
Reply
I think that if you want to have freedom of the press mean something, that means allowing some corporations to spend their money on advocacy. And I think treating media companies differently from other companies is unsustainable and a bad idea.
The union-corporation analogy is imperfect, because shareholders often have more choices and more control than union members. Selling stock is generally much less painful than quitting your job.
Reply
There is no difficulty with a corporation having "corporate values", chosen by the shareholders, with compliance supervised by the Board of Directors.
Reply
Leave a comment