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The aim of this paper is to provide some insights for a normative theory of corporate political activities (CPAs). Such a theory aims to provide theoretical tools to investigate the legitimacy of corporate political involvement and allows us to determine which political activities and relations with government regulators are appropriate or inappropriate, permissible or impermissible, obligatory or forbidden for corporations. After having explored what I call the \"normative presumption of legitimacy\" of CPAs, this paper identifies three different plausible strategies to criticize and object to corporate political involvement: the \"egalitarian\" strategy, the \"corporate citizenship\" strategy, and the \"market failures\" strategy. It constitutes an attempt to develop the market failures approach to reflect on CPAs. My main claim is that within such an account, the idea that corporations have a license to operate considerably limits their right to engage in political activities.

The central ingredient in the process, widely studied, of Americanization may well be the power of American mass culture to turn everything into spectacle and entertainment. If well over a hundred years ago the appeal of William Cody/Buffalo Bill lay in his power to turn recent real-life events on America’s frontier into the mass entertainment offered by his Wild West Show, today we witness the further development where spectacle and entertainment have in fact taken the place of real-life events. No more need of fine distinctions between reality and its entertainment version; spectacle and entertainment are the new reality. America’s president now seems simply to continue performing his reality-TV persona, which had already turned him into the simulacrum of an authentic American hero. This paper will analyze current trends and give recent examples where the virtual world of mass entertainment has come to set the parameters for our sense of what is reality and what its fake version. It also analyzes the effects on political life and political traditions.

In the wake ofCitizens United v. Federal Election Commission(2010), the case that allowed corporate and union spending in elections, many Americans despaired over the corrosive influence that private and often anonymous money can have on political platforms, campaigns, and outcomes at the federal and state level. InMcComish v. Bennett(2011), the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional the matching funds feature of so-called \"Clean Elections\" public financing laws, but there has been no strong challenge to the constitutionality of public funding as such. InSubsidizing Democracy, Michael G. Miller considers the impact of state-level public election financing on political campaigns through the eyes of candidates. Miller's insights are drawn from survey data obtained from more than 1,000 candidates, elite interview testimony, and twenty years of election data. This book is therefore not only an effort to judge the effects of existing public election funding but also a study of elite behavior, campaign effects, and the structural factors that influence campaigns and voters. The presence of publicly funded candidates in elections, Miller reports, results in broad changes to the electoral system, including more interaction between candidates and the voting public and significantly higher voter participation. He presents evidence that by providing neophytes with resources that would have been unobtainable otherwise, subsidies effectively manufacture quality challengers. Miller describes how matching-funds provisions of Clean Elections laws were pervasively manipulated by candidates and parties and were ultimately struck down by the Supreme Court. A revealing book that will change the way we think about campaign funding,Subsidizing Democracyconcludes with an evaluation of existing proposals for future election policy in light of Miller's findings.

Currently, campaign finance law in the United States is governed by the Supreme Court's 2010 decision in Citizens United v. FEC, but the debate surrounding the case has grown tired. In order to reinvigorate public discourse on this consequential topic, this article proposes an interdisciplinary conversation between theology and law, relying on Reinhold Niebuhr's notion of collective egotism to shed new light on the decision. The comparison with Niebuhr highlights the Court's problematic reliance on unexamined empirical claims, pinpointing areas of the case in need of further critical assessment and suggesting viable alternatives. The result is a more precise diagnosis of the problems in contemporary campaign finance law and a more practical way forward for the public debate.