Citizens United equates corporate speech with money, worsening access inequality.

Evidence

In recent years, the conflation of corporation and person—and the move to place the rights of a corporation above those of an individual human—ends up provoking questions about scale and financial exposure. In the Citizens United case, one of the main “ends” that emerged from the Supreme Court’s ruling was a conflation of the right to free speech—the right codified in the First Amendment—with spending on advertising. Because a corporation cannot “speak” as such, if it is to be given the rights of a “person,” then its ability to buy ads, to distribute media content, must be considered the medium through which the corporation can participate in public discourse. Justice John Paul Stevens’s dissent to Citizens United makes it obvious that this provokes problems of access: everyday citizens do not have the financial access to multimillion-dollar ad buys that well-funded corporate entities have; the conflation of money with speech limits the potential of individuals from participating in public debate. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 385

Categorization

• QUESTION: The full dissent’s own argumentative moves about access would be worth pulling for the Corpocene framework—does Stevens offer any remedy, or only diagnosis?
• XREF: Connects to First Amendment law scholarship and Horkheimer/Adorno’s treatment of speech-as-expression under capitalism. — connects to: Citizens United let Koch money convert Republicans to climate denial within years — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New…, 251