This story has been all over the place, but Gawker's as good a place as any. 

http://gawker.com/5454563/supreme-court-puts-american-politics-out-of-its-misery

This story broke yesterday? Day before?

Do you think corporations are people and therefore have free speech rights? How do you think this will affect our political system and individual rights? How do you see the current conditions in the sky bringing this topic to the foreground?

Discuss. Or not.  

Thanks for bringing this up neva, it's been blowing up all over on facebook, people saying we're going to live in a corporatocracy. Which is eerily similar to the movie "Idiocracy" which in itself is an awful movie, but it portrays a fascinating concept--that corporations took over, people got dumber because of technological innovations, and no one knew how to run the country.

Anyway...I'm pretty sure that most politicians are already in bed with big business as it is...but now they can get their money legally.

This is a horrible decision.  It lifted the limits on corporate speech BUT kept them in place for individuals, actual people.

I'm not sure that the "person" classification actually makes much of a difference, BTW.  If corporations aren't people, one could argue that it is still a proxy for corporate officers/shareholders, which themselves have the free speech right.

I.e., at the end of the day, in way or another, our courts will have to wrestle with the same policy considerations when they decide how free corporate speech may be.  Whether they couch it in terms of corporations being people is actually incidental.  Personally I'm surprised how much popular discourse has fixated so much on whether "corporation = people", and shame on those who know better for falsely framing the issue.

Having gotten that out of the way--the reason corporations are less deserving of free speech protection is that they crowd out speech from less affluent people.

Our founding ideals are great, but you can't presume to import them wholesale into contemporary culture.  This ain't your founding fathers' America, and you can't apply the 1st amendment verbatim and claim you are upholding their values.

Case in point--free speech was much freer than it is now.  Sure, you can shout from a street corner (though courts are increasingly holding private, usually corporate, property owner rights above free speech rights).  But to reach a lot of people, you really need mass media.  And as great as some blogs are, TV advertising still has the most powerful reach.

So... given our technological institutions, who is best equipped to speak "freely"?  Should our right to speak fail to account for the vastly different role of economic capital in our country?  If so, how is that different from the aristocracy our founding fathers rebelled against?

*phew!* But that's my 2 cents.