> I find this thread a bit peculiar, in so far as the conversation implicitly
> assumes that the Sanders Amendment might actually become part of the
> Constitution. The result is that the whole discussion becomes purely
> 'academic,' detached from actual political activity.
I'm not in a position to comment on Sanders' proposal, and I didn't mean to be taken as addressing it - I haven't read the book, you could say - but rather to be trying to clarify that the historical issue has been very seriously misunderstood in this thread and elsewhere.
Sanders' proposal is just one move in an ongoing fightback on this issue. It may or may not be a good one, and one factor that might be useful in assessing its potential political value is its responsiveness to the historical issue. (There are other factors as well, yes.)
The broader "campaign" around corporate personhood, properly understood, is at best an opportunity to organise people around a concrete demand that has some popular and possibly growing traction and that, if achieved, would provide some legal basis to push back against the overwhelming dominance of corporate spending on political advertising, although with a far-sighted legal strategy, a reversal of Santa Clara could also provide a basis for taming commercial advertising more generally - an implication Michael's original post correctly noted.
Maybe all any of that gets you is a modestly improved terrain for waging ideological battle. But that would sure be nice.