Democracy and The Corporate "Citizen"

I think this last presidential election is indicative of an unfortunate growing trend towards unnecessary spending in the American political machine. According to Bloomberg, Obama alone spent $740.6 million on his race in a record-setting year for campaign expenditures. While I understand the necessity for raising funds for campaign activities, I cannot help but notice the irony in terms of both candidates’ platforms of financial restraint and governmental reform. This is not a partisan issue by any means. It is an issue that spans the whole political landscape.

However, just because I believe that political candidates are spending exorbitant amounts on political races does not mean that I also believe the system is broken. This is a growing trend that does not sit well with my financially conservative roots. As technology lowers the cost of communication, I cannot fathom how such large sums can be spent on one single election. But again, even in the most recent presidential race, both candidates acted within the boundaries of the law, and therefore did no legal wrong.

Because of my underlying political beliefs, I feel uncomfortable criticizing the current political situation. This is because I believe that in the course of history, we as citizens have acted in unison to create a body law under which to abide. On countless occasions throughout our history, if a law goes against popular opinion, it is generally changed in a relatively prompt manner. For this reason, I believe that if current laws regarding the political mechanisms and corporations are deemed unfit, they too will be changed.

Yet, I am not so insulated and single-minded as to believe that the corporation is not a unique citizen. Unlike everybody else, the corporation indeed wields substantial and disproportionate power in terms of political influence. The problem is that we have already gone a very long way in giving corporations legal rights. This means that it will be very difficult to enact any legislative change taking these rights away.

I hold that, because the judicial system gave the corporation rights as a “legal citizen,” we must honor those rights if we are to hold any legitimacy as a democracy. However, if corporations prove to truly undemocratic at their core, legal mechanisms still exist to overthrow or rescind rights previously given to them. At this point in time, I think that the corporation has begun to wield more power than people at first expected, and the ramifications of this fact will be a reevaluation of what role citizens in America want corporations to play.