Here in full gush is our friend Johann Hari, this time bewailing the end of democracy in the USA:

For more than a century, the US has slowly put some limits – too few, too feeble – on how much corporations can bribe, bully or intimidate politicians. On Tuesday, they were burned away in one whoosh… 

It is this corruption that has prevented Barack Obama from achieving anything substantial in his first year in office. How do you re-regulate the banks, if the Senate is owned by Wall Street? How do you launch a rapid transition away from oil and coal to wind and solar, if the fossil fuel industry owns Congress? How do you break with a grab-the-oil foreign policy if Big Oil provides the invitation that gets you into the party of American politics?

… Yet the corporations that caused this crisis are now being given yet more power. Bizarrely, the Supreme Court has decided that corporations are "persons", so they have the "right" to speak during elections.

But corporations are not people. Should they have the right to bear arms, or to vote? It would make as much sense. They are a legal fiction, invented by the state – and they can be fairly regulated to stop them devouring their creator.

Our hero, you recall, is the person who wrote a long review of Atlas Shrugged and got a key passage completely wrong. It seems that here again he has not done his minimal homework.

Mind you, in interpreting the Supreme Court’s decision President Obama too (a lawyer withal) likewise erred on the side of inaccurate populist exaggeration in his SOTU speech, and has had to be corrected at Huffington Post no less:

There is "a century of law" restricting direct corporate contributions to candidates. Last week’s decision didn’t address that law.

While the logic of the opinion — which says corporate speech is entitled to the same protection as individual speech — calls into question the corporate contribution ban, it doesn’t overturn it. And the Court has traditionally treated direct contributions differently from so-called "independent expenditures" — ads that discuss candidates but financed by private parties without the candidate’s help.

Those who oppose the Supreme Court’s decision would make themselves a tad more credible if they acknowledged that the law the Court struck aside was oppressive and odious, and a threat to free speech as any normal person would understand it:

“Our argument in the case wasn’t complicated,” says Bossie. “It was about freedom, and it ended up hinging on a very simple question: If the FEC is comfortable banning political films, like Citizens United’s Hillary: The Movie, around election time, would it also be fine with banning political books financed by corporations? The Justice Department’s attorney answered yes, the government did have the power to prohibit the publication of a book. When they admitted that, everything changed.”

“I think that answer sent a chill through the Court,” says Bossie. “It was that moment that was a catalyst for us, and gave us the opportunity to win on much bigger constitutional grounds than we anticipated. It became apparent that the government believed that they could ban anything: movies, books, pamphlets, the Kindle, you name it. It was a shocking revelation.”

Roger Pilon at Cato:

Relax.  Half of our states, states like Virginia, have minimal campaign finance laws, and there’s no more corruption in those states than in states that strictly regulate.  And that’s because the real reason we have this campaign finance law is not, and never has been, to prevent corruption.  The dirty little secret — the real impetus for this law — is incumbency protection. 

Sounds plausible to me.