So the Supreme Court ruled that corporations can spend as much as they want to influence elections. I've been watching with exasperation as various lefties tie themselves in knots over perceived conflict between the First Amendment and the destruction of what little remains of our democracy. It's not that complicated, people!

There's free speech, and then there's money you can spend to advertise that speech. Under campaign finance laws, corporations are still free to say whatever stupid thing they want, no matter how boneheaded or contrary to the public good. They just can't flood the airwaves -- the public airwaves -- with paid propaganda that most ordinary Americans can't afford themselves. (Yes, I know the law also affects labor unions and groups like Planned Parenthood, whose vast war chests simply crush those of giant multinationals, no?)

Using the court's logic, those without money to advance their viewpoint have, de facto, limited free speech. It all goes back to Isaiah Berlin's (and others') concept of positive and negative liberty: corporations' "freedom" to dominate the media (thus intimidating politicians in the process) takes away your freedom to be heard; or freedom from having your voice effectively censored.

Addendum: As an example of the conflicted lefties mentioned above, there's Glenn Greenwald, who takes an abstract, libertarian view of free speech (as opposed to empirical). He messily tries to argue against making a distinction between money and speech here. But he uses a bunch of ridiculously extreme counterexamples no one is proposing. In the 21st-century mass media age, a legal entity with millions and millions of dollars to purchase and distort reality is a little different from the piddling amounts of money spent in citizens' political activism.