Are corporations individuals? If so, what does this say about the type of government we have?

The individual U.S. citizen is guaranteed rights under the constitution. Rights to freedom of speech and the ability to vote are crucial to our modern day understanding of America. These rights are guaranteed as individual citizens, with the belief that such rights are unalienable. However, recent court decisions have made these individual rights available for corporations. Corporations, being a collective group of employees and stock holders, now have similar rights as individuals to participate in campaigns and thus the elections of our most important government leaders. Citizens v FEC asserted the right of corporations to make independent expenditures from their general treasuries for the avocation for election or defeat of specific candidates. This has

unleashed a general criticism from the general public and even the president in his state of the Union address. The issue is freedom of speech, which can serve the interest in political equity, but at the same time serve as a means for a kind of affirmative action. This court case invalidates the conditions for the individual to speak out on finical issues. A long line of previous American speech, expressing the poorly financed cause of the little people, now has equality underscored as the well financed causes of the big corporations. The once maintained method of political regulation as being the dominant factor in the controlling of political speech is now gone and is replaced by the view of equality. Further, free speech is now seen as in the interest of political liberty, and is a negative check on government tyranny. The privatization of free speech rights, has thus met all government attempts to suppress the rights of this expression with large scale skepticism. Thus,

after Citizens v FEC members of the public are trusted to make their own evaluations of speech and government intervention, whether for redistributive or paternal means, it is not viewed as correct. Therefore, government intervention into the spending for campaigns is relegated to the correcting of inefficiencies in the way speech transactions take place, but all other ideas on this matter have been left to the competitive ideological market within which business operates. However, the dissenters of this opinion, such as Justice Stevens, believe that speech rights must be protected to the extent that they serve the end of political equality. They stipulate that campaign financing law must be governed under the paradigm of equal protection under the law. These dissenters do not see free speech law as a means of protecting those speakers who occupy positions of relative wealth within the private sector, i.e. corporations. Thus, regulation that is redistributive in nature is defensible and needed according to dissenters of the outcome of Citizens v FEC.