New Rules

If corporations used to owe it to their shareholders to lie low, staying out of politics, in other words, they now owe it to their shareholders to speak up, defending themselves.  Board members and executives will still feel squeamish about political activity, but at annual meetings from now on shareholders will rise to challenge them. I mean, you can just see it, can’t you?  “The proposed cap-and-trade legislation is going to raise our cost of doing business,” some cranky, dyspeptic shareholder will now almost certainly argue before the executives of, let us say, the Massey Energy Company.  "Mr. CEO, members of the board, the Supreme Court has already told you that you have a constitutional right to fight back.  What I’m telling you now is that you have a fiduciary duty to do so.” The Corner

The supreme court says corporations can spend money from their general funds, not just what they raise for the specific purpose, on political influence as in ads and such. Before, corps had to rais the money from people and make sure that money was very tightly tied to the one purpose of dealing out shovels of influence and not for anything else. Now, that rule has gone.

In theory, Microsoft, a company with billions of cash lying around, can guarantee a billion dollar campaign of smack down on any governor or representative who gets between them and the laws that let them bundle what ever the hell they want with their OS or define what is an OS or get in their way at all.

The RIAA will have free rein to define copyright because any one who says something they don't like will simply be run over by a bulldozer of unflattering ads and mud slinging. Copy rights will be extended to the infinite. People who copy a song will go to prison for the rest of their lives.

You will have to take out a mortgage to break a mobile phone contract.

Broadband will be metered, dissected, and sold to the highest bidder ... online.

Wal-Mart will charge a tax, yes, a tax on small business that compete in their area of business, which, is everything. Wal-Mart will also win the right to immanent domain, because, who is going to stand in their way?

Only corporations will be able to file patents. The eminent domain that Wal-Mart won will also apply to patents.

I predict that one corporation will higher Xe and declare war on another, only to find that Xe works for them too. The battle will rage for years and no one in government will lift a finger because, hey, Xe is a corporation too. They have rights.