Clearly the founding fathers DID intend The First Amendment to apply to CORPORATE entities.

Indeed, much of the speech of the period WAS by other-than-singular-persons. Most newspapers were (even then) corporate entities in some form or fashion - that is, whether formally incorporated or not, they were more than one person with a printing press.

Second, the purchase of amplifiers (in the colonial times) was in fact common too - people posted handbills on trees, which they paid someone (with a printing press) to reproduce so they didn't have to hand-write each one. Again, corporations (in some form or fashion) were involved.

As for business influence in politics, my God, please do some reading. The banksters of the time were a BIG part of how the revolution happened in the first place, and they weren't singular people - they were corporate entities! It was so blatant that not long AFTER the revolution the banksters in fact sent "emissaries" over to the newly-founded USA to BRIBE Congress - literally.

Money and politics are nothing new, and neither is the corrupting influence thereof. It is as old as politics itself. The First Amendment's beauty is that it provides ANYONE with the right to speak.

The Internet has changed much of the corporate hierarchy. If you wanted to run a political piece critical of some candidate 30 years ago and didn't have the COOPERATION of the corporate media you were ****ED. Today you can start a blog, put it on Youtube, or whatever - all for small money compared to what it used to cost.

Youtube videos get hundreds of thousands or even MILLIONS of views and yet the software to produce high-quality professional-grade material suitable for that medium can be bought by anyone for a few hundred dollars and will run (slowly, but it will run) on a few-hundred dollar personal computer. Such capability was limited to those with literal MILLIONS just a few years ago.

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