Quote Originally Posted by EyeKhan View Post
Employees of corporations have the same right to speech as anyone else. What they should not have is the right to take the resources of that corporation and use them to blare their speech to drown out the speech of most other citizens who don't have access to those resources. And you also make the mistake of conflating the speech of the employee or the stock holder with that of the corporation itself. The people within a corporation are very diverse and have a variety of opinions. That freedom of association is interesting but doesn't apply here - nobody is saying you can't form a corporation, just that you can't use its resources to abuse the political system.
Employees aren't necessarily stakeholders. But anyways, most of the rest of your argument here is irrelevant - it simply doesn't matter if all the stakeholders agree with everything, as long as they all agree to be associated with the corporation knowing how decisions are made by it. I take issue with your implicit assertion that you're more fit to judge whether stakeholders interests are being served by a corporation than they are.

(edit: I should define my terms. I'm using stakeholders to roughly mean shareholders (in public companies), owners, or anyone else who has actually bought into the company somehow. More than just being paid by them, for the same reason that the garbage man doesn't count as part of your household.)

For the public good. If a media outlet reaches millions of people it has a responsiblity not to undermine our system of government. One sided political propaganda does that. If your're advocating policy or candidates, you're making political speech.
It's just as easily turned against the common good. Doing this is one of the hallmarks of a modern fascist state.

No, you're enhancing protest. AFAIK its not legitimate protest to silence the opposition. It might be an effective way to win an election, good for one party or one candidate, but its not good for a democratic political process.
Aren't you trying to silence, or at least quiet down the opposition with this idea?

No, I'm saying the opposite. Air time has to be granted to the opposition.
...equal to the support, is what you've been saying. In the current system the government can't do shit if the opposition wants to start screaming about things, whatever those things are. In your proposal, any side with control could just say "We won't talk, so you don't get to either."

Minimum time maybe? Then who decides what's worth time, to keep the noise from drowning out the signal? Petitions are way too easy to fill up with however many names you want (see: internet). Money's a good way, since people won't just give that out unless they really do give a shit. But, that's the system you're opposing now, no?

No, I'm advocating granting all sides equal speech. This is about expanding speech. The recent court ruling will limit speech.
You're advocating squelching those you don't like and promoting those you do, you're just calling it equal speech. If it were truly equal, the government would just back off as long as nobody's actually silencing anyone else. And no, refusing to help propogate other peoples messages is not silencing them.