> This was not a significant concern prior to the Citizens United decision, because corporations had been largely barred from spending money on federal election

> This was not a significant concern prior to the Citizens United decision, because corporations had been largely barred from spending money on federal elections In a certain sense, that's technically kind of true. However, here's something else that's true: Prior to Citizens United, any corporation (including a foreign corporations) could contribute unlimited funds to an American front-group which could then spend the funds on lobbying and massive advertising blitzes, subject to almost zero restrictions (and without disclosing the source of the funds!). Basically: You couldn't run an ad that says "vote against Obama!", but you could run an ad that says "Obama is ruining America!", as long as it was more than 60 days prior to an election. Even within the 60 day window you could run ads that criticized his policies in detail so long as you avoided mentioning him by name. The main impact of Citizens United was removing the 60 day window where you could run a massive shadowy ad campaign against, eg, health care reform or gun control so long as you didn't mention the name of the politician advocating for those policies. Now you can run the same ads, but actually say the politicians name. Of course, under the law, a foreign company spending $50m on political ads hammering Obama (or Romney, or whatever) 61 days before the election wasn't "spending money on a federal election", they were just spending money on issue advocacy which happened to mention a candidate and just happened to be 61 days before an election due to a mysterious coincidence. But if the same ad ran two days later it would be a banned "electioneering communication", unless the same content runs without the name, in which case it's fine again. In the real world, all those examples are 99.99% the same. Source: A million places, but this article sums it up nicely: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/magazine/how-much-has-citizens-united-changed-the-political-game.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/magazine/how-much-has-citi...