united NATIONAL independent Tea Party polite just to a point
Freedom of $peech
This entry was posted on 2/23/2010 9:30 AM and is filed under Added Articles.
I Monetocracy – The monopoly by money of a democracy
How have we come to this? It’s like a horror film where from the tiniest mistake in the lab a monster slowly grows to menace all of life as we know it.
It began innocuously enough with Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad. The year was 1886. 1. Corporations are people too?!! Or words to that effect were uttered by a chief justice in an aside which, though never published in the decision mysteriously became precedent, and… 2. Individuals (within certain set limits) may spend money on political activities in support of particular candidates, but… 3. Wealthy individuals, because they are special, may spend as much of their money as they choose not on specific political candidates but on all other political and lobbying activities far beyond what others may spend. As well as spend as much as they desire on their own candidacies if they should choose to run themselves, which… 4. Means wealthier and wealthier candidates are encouraged to run and utilize their inbred advantage for seeking public office, since… 5. Most people, middle class and poor haven’t enough money to spend on either other candidates or themselves even if they wanted to and are increasingly being priced out of democracy altogether because… 6. In Buckley v. Valeo the court ruled that money has really been cleverly disguised as free speech all along and therefore… 7. Corporations (that, rather I mean who, because remember, they are really just people like you and me) are really just very, very, very wealthy and neighborly individuals (even when rapacious multinationals) with rights to spend millions if not billions more than any individual may reasonably be expected to be able to spend in promoting their favorite political candidates and causes. Ergo: 8. Corporations should just be thought of as big fuzzy friendly helpful giants who stride across our political landscape like colossi with few of the same aspirations or limits on their power that naturally limit the rest of us, devouring the remains of our democracy whole while trying to milk us of our blood…er, money as they go.
Yikes, Igor something really has gone amiss in the laboratory!
After their latest decision in this ongoing horror show, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, Justice Kennedy wittily wrote: “a court would be remiss in performing its duties were it to accept an unsound principle merely to avoid the necessity of making a broader ruling…” Or mightn’t a court also be remiss in its duties to the nation if it accepted a whole series of unsound rulings whole merely to make an unnecessarily broad and wrong ruling necessary? Because let’s be blunt here, as clear as we can be, so even a child can understand, corporations are not and never can be individuals and speech is not and never will be money. Does the court even own a dictionary? Can they not differentiate anything to any degree any more, not even one noun from another when they mean two entirely separate and unique things? Not only is money not the same as speech, in most instances it is completely dissimilar and nearly always opposite in meaning and intention to speech. Corporations actually prey on individuals rather than altruistically serve them and are far more likely to be dictatorships than democracies. Because a human has two legs and so do horses and millipedes and birds and tigers it does not follow that we are all one species and we should then be required by law to be treated the same. That would let tigers live freely amongst us in our homes and attend the same schools as our children. To focus on a few minuscule areas of concurrence between things while ignoring the huge and countless differences between people and corporations must have given these poor justices eyestrain. To say that speech is money and corporations are individuals is reminiscent of the mental gyrations rife in Lincoln’s time in support of slavery when he pointed to those who would try to turn a horse chestnut into a chestnut horse. Because houseflies and elephants both have feet it does not follow that elephants can fly. The leaps and lapses in logic in the court’s reasoning in this case are really rather startling. There is no question that money may in some instances help facilitate free speech. Although even this argument immediately begins to sour when you ponder the concept of the word “free” in connection to money, since something which requires money is by definition not free. As speech is the essence of free and spontaneous expression, money is the very soul of unfree, contrived, commercialized exchanges and propaganda and cannot easily be given freely much less found without cost. It nearly always is given in expectation of receiving something in return. It is at the heart of the definition of the principle of quid pro quo, as either quid or quo, which makes calling money spent for political activity, “free speech” an oxymoron from the start. Certainly this is the general rule of thumb in political expenditures where large campaign contributions are involved. To suggest there are no quid pro quos in these political donations is naïve at best, at worst disingenuous. Free speech is a temporary passenger on the money train the same way a hobo may be a unwelcome passenger on a freight train. Yet no one has ever been tempted for even the brief duration of the most intense period of their partnership to confuse the two and consider a train a hobo or a hobo a train. Why is it necessary to conjoin two disparate things together as one that only have an acquaintanceship in passing? This is the sort of symbiosis which exists between money and free speech in politics. Money is not the causal agent of speech after all, it is merely an expediency as speech doesn’t require the money for its existence only for its special, narrow, temporary, occasional propagation. Meanwhile you can listen to a dollar bill as long as you want and never receive an ounce of wisdom from it, try as you may. I know, I know, it’s a ridiculous analogy, calling a train a hobo and a hobo a train. But how much worse would it be to suggest that the presumed needs, and hopes and moral consciousness of the poor hobo are identical and inextricable from those of the corporation that owns the railroad? Because that is precisely what the court is suggesting as fact when it claims a corporation is in essence merely a very large individual. Because at some point in its deliberations the court has gone one (or many) steps too far off the rails and said that for some unknown reason the facilitator of free speech must become the same thing it facilitates. Therefore the expenditure of money for free speech becomes free speech too, not just specifically for the duration of their time together but for all time. And the source (a corporation) of the facilitating agent (money) must have the same rights as the source (a human being) of the thing facilitated (speech). Neat. Wrong, but neat. As has been pointed out, however, in the real world, earth, I mean, just because one thing may have one or more things in common with another temporarily hardly leads to a perfect congruency between them. Such complexity of differentiation and analysis as this seems lost on the court, and one can only wonder how long it may be before corporations are given the right to bear arms, keep private militias, run their own candidates for public office (as opposed to controlling the ones already there). Yes, and even promoting themselves to sit on our courts in place of the jurists who first proffered them the rights of citizenship and personhood to do so. So intellectually supine is the court to the moneyed interests that they claim in order to not disadvantage corporate interests vis a vis we bullying ordinary American citizens, that they must equal the playing field by allowing the very wealthy and the corporations the same rights as the poor, the working class and middle class to spend as much money as they want on politicization. Of course, this conveniently overlooks the fact that no one else but wealthy individuals and corporations have that kind of money to spend on political discourse in the first place. It’s a fine thing when justice is blind but not quite so edifying if it is stupid, too. In their zeal to level the playing field with the common man, in effect, the court has caved and carved out an exclusive right of unfettered, continuous and debilitating influence over our political system for the very wealthiest Americans and corporations which is as a matter of fact available to no one else in the country. Two quotes from Justice Scalia’s opinion in the Citizen’s United v. Federal Election Commission ruling illustrate this thinking superbly. “And the notion which follows from the dissent’s view, that modern newspapers, since they are incorporated, have free speech rights only at the sufferance of Congress, boggles the mind.” Apparently he has a mind that is easily boggled because of course newspapers, since they deal in words about facts and ideas have sufferance to operate not by congress but by the constitution, which protects freedom of speech. No one disputes this. He is actually trying to compare newspapers to a general corporation which it is also but which doesn’t deal in words, facts or ideas primarily but rather is constituted solely as an engine of personal profit rather than a progenitor of democratic ideals. Again the vehicle is always treated separately from things it may carry. Automobiles are not confused with the people they carry so money should not be treated the same as the speech it promotes. So ordinary corporations, and this includes those which operate media, have never in and of themselves as corporations been protected as organs of political free speech, primarily because these businesses as businesses don’t deal in political free speech at all. If they deal in politics it is only for profit. This is separate from the business they perform which, since it often deals in speech, is protected by the first amendment. Nor, by the way, do newspapers generally spend their corporate profits to promote specific candidacies which, of course, is what we were talking about in regard to other, non speech producing corporations. So what the heck is Justice Scalia talking about? This comes clearer in the second quote. “It is hard to see how this (corruption in politics) has anything to do with what sort of corruption can be combated by restrictions on political speech.” See what he did there? To understand what he means you must simply substitute the final word “speech” with “campaign money.” How quaint, he merely substituted one word for another and changed the meaning of the new word to the one he replaced to create a much deeper, though completely erroneous, legal confusion of the situation. Seriously, could someone just get this man a dictionary? A simple Webster’s Collegiate should be adequate. Sorry, you can’t change the law simply by changing the language to suit your purposes, and altering the well established meaning of one word to another and then pretending they’ve been the same all along. In both these quotations Justice Scalia merely treats the meaning of the words "money" and "speech" as if they were interchangeable thus ceding himself his point prior to his ever having been successful in making the point he is trying to make. It is not only presumptuous, it is just bad form to assume your conclusion as a part of your explanation as to why your solution is needed. This is circular logic. Elsewhere he accuses his critics of being simplistic for not agreeing with him. But actually it is simplistic beyond belief, in fact it is downright childish, to take two completely different tenants and pretend they’re identical when the whole world knows they are not and never have been considered as such before.
II Untruth or Consequentialism
It also seems to be another layer of this court’s peculiar myopia of logic that something that may be valuable, necessary and appropriate at one level of application must be uniform as to scale in every other instance. Therefore if no limits can be applied to an object or exercise in one instance they cannot be applied in other. There are too many exemptions to this theory to list. The posted speed limit on an interstate highway is different than that posted in a school zone on a narrow street in a populated area, for instance. So campaign funding limited to small sums, balanced among many others equally endowed and in limited conditions, cannot carry with it undo influence or pressure on the recipient. Yet if a few donors may spend very large sums of money that others can’t, even outside of directly contributing to them, as if the recipient of the favor wouldn’t hear of or be aware of this very generous support, then this special access must fatally diminish the equal access mandated by law. Now these super contributors, these golden calves and idols, are elevated to a higher pedestal of political access and idolatry at which our elected officials have shown themselves only to willing to stoop to worship. Yet, to be equal according to this court, no limits can be applied to these outside expenditures though in every way they are far more valuable, rare, critical and therefore more legislatively appreciated by the politician who is helped by them than the much smaller, direct contributions which may still be regulated. How does it make sense to allow regulation of small contributions and disallow regulation of much larger donations, even if of a different type, when the intention is precisely the same? So because someone goes out and buys a very high performance automobile the court believes it would be a shame if they weren’t able to drive as fast as they wanted out in front of your children’s school. Therefore speed limits are only applicable to slower cars. Let the pupil beware. To give another example how more money doesn’t necessarily lead to more and better free speech imagine this. Let’s say money is used to buy a bullhorn to attend a political rally. Superficially it may be said that this money is being spent to enhance free speech. But in reality this will merely drown out the ability of all but one voice to be heard at the rally. Some might validly propose that if they were given advance notice others could buy bullhorns which would allow their voices to be heard as well, presumably devolving into a sort of shouting match of who could yell louder into a bullhorn. But this would immediately exclude many in the crowd who haven’t money in their pockets to buy expensive bullhorns from ever having their opinions heard at all. And still this amplification would do nothing to ensure that the speech would be better, freer or more reasonable or more balanced, only that it would be a lot louder. Past a certain basic necessity, more money in politics is more about increasing amplification than it is quality or equality of access. In fact, the more money that flows into our political debate means fewer and fewer voices are able to be heard above the din of the big money boys and their big money buys. Therefore, ironically but irrefutably, the very variety of speech that money may advance in small sums is by large sums invariably limited and suppressed. Meanwhile the louder the debate gets the more simplified, cruder and personalized the speech tends to become, often merely devolving into charges and countercharges shouted back and forth above the head of the electorate, leaving the real issues unilluminated and ignored as the debate continues to deteriorate into a mere shouting match. And if one side should manage to monopolize the supply of bullhorns for an election cycle or two, the debate may easily become even more one-sided, predatory and exclusionary. In this way money in politics is free speech the same way as, to continue an earlier allusion, tigers are children – if you overlook for a moment the fact that tigers often eat children. In sum then, the court’s mainspring argument that the more money (which they persist in mindlessly and erroneously calling speech) present in our political discourse, the better, is demonstrably wrong. Conversely, how much better in the instance just stated would it be merely to ban all bullhorns at political rallies so that everyone, at least nominally, would have a far better chance of being heard in their normal, rational voice? No system will ensure perfection, of course, but some systems certainly may achieve political inclusion to a higher degree than others. And in effect this is just exactly what campaign finance reform attempts have always tried to do, at least before a meddlesome and politicized court intervenes to try to destroy their efforts. And this bullhorn metaphor only illustrates part of the problem that money plays in politics. It doesn’t even mention the corollary corruptive moral danger of the politicians who court easy financial success by offering favors to the people who possess the largest political bullhorns (i.e. the most money). Needless to say, this entirely anti-democratic tendency is rampant and well documented in our politics today. And so to the exclusionary propensity of money in politics must be added its overwhelming corrosive and morally corrupting influences. Both of these negative tendencies have been unsatisfactorily dismissed and minimized by the court even though they are transparently obvious and well known to all. So the court plays it coy and humble. They say they are just not qualified to judge the nuances of how free speech is employed and to whose advantage money works and to whose it doesn’t. The court would pretend to believe in a fantasy utopian world where more is always better and all these profoundly unequal strains between national good and evil always magically sort themselves out to the national good. Clearly where money is unregulated and power is for sale and politicians are on the pad this has never been the case and can never be the case in the future. Letting open the floodgates of money wide doesn’t enhance political debate it narrows it. It doesn’t widen its reach but diminishes its access. It doesn’t make it more valuable but cheapens it. With a long history of usurpations by the courts our democracy has been turned away from the marketplace of ideas and ideals toward just another marketplace where our politicians sell themselves like cattle to the highest bidders gathering conflicts of interest as they go. Along the way, every year now it seems, they apparently feel themselves beholden to fewer and fewer Americans as their campaign coffers grow exponentially larger. After all, why work to serve the complicated many with their pittances when you can pander to just a few of the well heeled and make as much or more money for your campaign with half the work and in a fraction of the time; get to go on free junkets to exotic locales and have offers of a lucrative jobs from the same people you have long been secretly working for waiting for you after your political career ends? It is this system which we see unfolding before us more and more clearly by the day, as the spoils go to the well connected and the winners take not just their fair share but all of ours as well. This systemic undoing of democracy, of course, is nearly the perfect antithesis of what we are told is happening, starkly inimical to our historic way of life and more and more debilitating to the future of our country. We see new signs every day as we progress further down this dead end road with the red warning lights flashing and the alarm bells sounding danger. Unfortunately this concern does not extend to our public servants nor to the court which instead of finding ways to help turn us back from disaster have decided our decline needed some further encouragement, full speed ahead. The remarkable thing is that everyone with a brain and ounce of common sense and moral courage knows exactly what is happening. Some are just too weak willed to care and others just corrupt enough to prefer it this way.
III Hoist on the Petard of a Double Syllogism
But if all this is so obvious why does the court pretend to find it so hard to see? After all, their reasoning in support of their decision is so mind-numbingly puerile and banal it’s hard to believe they are serious. While pretending to give corporations parity with individuals they have actually ceded rights that exist no where else in our society to corporations with full sanction to adversely influence our political system in any way they wish. No citizen could possibly exert any where near similar leverage over our political processes as a corporation with unlimited money at its disposal, countless lawyers and accountants with nothing else to do, and the financial incentives to work at bending and corrupting our system to their advantage twenty four hours a day. At the same time it seems to us that corporations as conceived by the court (as they do not exist in any other reality) are able to operate under a double standard. When a corporation speaks of money it means money in the classical dictionary sense, as a medium of commerce and exchange. There is no duality of purpose gnawing at its virtual conscience. It only spends money for one purpose – expectation of immediate profit and return on its investment. Or in the case of a group of people incorporated to lobby for a specific special interest, they wish only specific legislation and nothing else. While the court feeds us odd and unworkable abstractions about money and speech these entities keep their focus on their bottom line. A corporation’s speech is merely a means to more money not as the court would have it as money being a means to more speech. More and more money has led directly to the current divisiveness of our political landscape as it splits our unified nation into bits and pieces and factions and fractions. Meanwhile all other abstractions such as human rights and democratic principles and patriotism and ethics and religious beliefs and morals are pretty thoroughly lost on corporate America as well. Fairness and equal rights are not rules they play by when they can devise an alternative to cheat and achieve unfair or monopolistic advantages for themselves. So although corporate rights and rights of individuals may occasionally coincide under our constitution, in all the most fundamental ways they do not. Corporations are not like us. Corporations, as put famously by one corporate reprobate, do not even like us, customers are the “enemy.” One hates to think how they regard the general mass of their fellow citizens who are not even their customers. Even though both corporations and citizens may be protected from illegal search and seizure, for instance, with the right to sue and be sued, etc., the vastness of our differences are more apparent than our similarities. Therefore corporations say money is like speech but our speech is never like their money. Otherwise we should be able to merely talk our way out of debt or enhance our purchasing power through our persuasive abilities and in consideration of our larger services to the community. But however long and hard you plead and appeal to their humanity a bank is still going to foreclose your house and throw you and your family into the street in the middle of winter. Although corporations want the legal rights of individuals in some instances for self protection at other times they may retreat behind a huge corporate shield and deny their individual liability for anything. Therefore if a person admits to a crime there is nowhere for them to hide and they are liable to do time. A corporation which commits a disproportionately much larger crime always will deny it and merely ascend the scales of justice until no one bears personal responsibility for anything as no one is ever in charge and pay a small – in terms of net worth – settlement while admitting no responsibility for anything. Not only are they sometimes too big to fail, sometimes they are too big to sue, or even prosecute. Thanks to the courts and lax regulations, and a compliant, well lubricated (with money and other party favors) congress, they are very prickly organizations to get at. In fact, corporations have little in common with individuals at all. They are broad collectives of shareholders and officers, employees and bosses. It is both feeble and facile to claim they share the same aspirations and have the same needs as the public. What human in tough times would simply furlough or lay off half their family so the legal head of the household can continue to live high on the hog in the style to which they have become accustomed? Same thing goes for health care and pensions and wages. When times are lean and regulatory regimes are bearing down what householder would merely fire his American family, sell the house they were living in and buy another newer and more manageable and less well regulated one overseas. What head of a household has the option of gambling wildly for profit with other peoples’ money, bankrupting many, going bust and because they are “too big to fail” be bailed out by the taxpayer via the Federal Government and within a year or so be making just as much and more money as before and still have enough to spare to bribe members of congress with campaign money and threats in order to block financial reform that might inhibit them from doing the same thing to us again? This is what just happened to financial institutions on Wall Street. Could you see this happening to you? If, as the court insists, that corporations are just folks like us won’t the government bail us out too? No? Now they tell us it doesn’t cut both ways? Corporations are people but people are never corporations. And the court, saying these corporate entities are just people, ordinary citizens like you and me, should have not less power than individuals, but far more power over our political system in order to manipulate public opinion and carve out special advantages and endless earmarks and undeserved tax advantages and dangerous deregulation for themselves? Apparently to make sure that they aren’t deprived by all we unjust Americans picking on them the court is taking it on itself to see that their fair protections under law must be far vaster and fairer than ours. It seems like corporations are sometimes like individuals and sometimes not, as it suits their purpose and intentions. Sometimes their money is like speech and sometimes it’s just their money. They have all our individual rights but an individual has none of their rights. Sometimes they are above and beyond the law sometimes they are just hiding behind it. Whatever they want to be, monolithic, weak or in need of special protection, the court follows them around like a dog owner carrying a pooper scooper and cleans up their messes.
For fun, let’s recap. The core of these issues revolves around two principles. One, corporations are people and two, speech is money. Put in a structure it runs something like two syllogisms entwined where four of the six individual points in the syllogisms are wrong. This is a perfect legal house of cards. For some this fact may weaken the force of the overall argument
People have freedom of speech Corporations are individual people too Ergo: Corporate speech is protected
Money is also speech So corporate (speech) spending is protected Ergo: corporations can spend unlimitedly
Result: Corporations can both speak and spend far more than anyone else in the country to influence our political system and impact our futures. They are more powerful politically and far more single minded and morally challenged than all the people taken together, individually and collectively, including our two political parties. Though never mentioned in the constitution they have been given more rights and privileges in our democracy than any mere mortal American could ever dream of having. This is odd because there is nothing remotely democratic about these institutions nor is there any mention of them anywhere in the constitution as the super men among us that the court apparently envisions. Who could have foreseen these things? Certainly not the founders of the country.
IV The world is too much with us… getting and spending we lay waste our powers
Now money too, is an useful object. But also a dry, utilitarian thing, deadening to the spirit, a simple measure of relative worth. It ties and binds and by design leads to rote talking, thinking and acting. Creativity and imagination are foreign countries to it. Words and ideas on the other hand tear down the walls that money builds up. Capital sustains corrupt regimes in power which free speech consistently works to erode and undo. Speech is freeing, expanding, consequential, liberating, inspiring, socializing, adding to, and consensus building. Money consolidates and isolates and misers the mind, hoards, weakens spines, controls, subtracts, monopolizes and closes alternatives down that free speech opens up. Normally when a government is corrupt it hates speech with a passion and will limit and alienate sources of free speech such as exposés, whistle blowers, public displays and meetings, honest reportage of facts, journalistic outlets and journalists, foreign press etc. You never hear of corrupt regimes banning money. There’s a reason for this. Money is the oppressors’ friend, his tool of choice. When consolidated into a few hands money helps to protect, abet and hide the worst abuses of humanity. It is a perfect amorality, that profits greater (so it thinks) when government is more oppressive and will in any corrupted system invariably be aligned with the wrong side, i.e. the side opposite to the majority of the people. Free speech is unscripted, revolutionary when it needs be, sentimental when appropriate, inspiriting and inspiring in the right circumstance. Money is none of these. The best ideas appear in words where they may stand on their own merit in the vibrancy of the intellectual marketplace. Often they are quiet, spare, simple or unadorned utterances and are often understated and even chaste affairs that if true, grow and glow far beyond themselves to influence and endure. Bad ideas, on the contrary, because they are so poor in spirit, complement with cash what they lack in persuasive capacity and tend to be fulsome, noisy, threatening and less than the full truth. Bad ideas wedded to money are the ultimate in class differentiation, are enemies of social justice and seek to exploit and expand societal divisions. At the same time free speech armed with open debate from which good ideas may come, seeks unanimity freely. So bad corporations and bad money ideas prefer a rigged , closed, secretive, cover-up and graft ridden system, while good speech and ideas (very often laboring with limited financing) love democracy, openness, free hearings and fair debate. Materially speaking, in fact, good thoughts and free speech are often poor and threadbare. In a corrupt, money driven system they will always find it hard to achieve fair hearing. Yet in the same system bad ideas will be flourishing money magnets, be marched and blared about with complacence or belligerence wrapped in garish verbal opulence. Freedom of speech is taken too much for granted, as a given, and its good ideas are only roused to their own defense as slowly and reluctantly as small families, householders and shop keepers against the marching hoards of big money whose organizers are always plotting and planning, undercutting and overwhelming and seeking to expand themselves at others’ permanent cost. Big money and political coups rig unfair playing fields together and rewrite rules in their favor to their own mutual benefit. True words and speech may also be mundane, boring, serviceable and everyday, of course. But at their best they give rich cloth to thoughts which are a mysterious mirror of the mind which may reflect all the way back to the depths of our soul’s eternal being. But, money, poor money, is an instrument by man made, crudely conceived and contrived stuff, that’s a never ennobling article of no consequence. When our times are done our words and speech will endure and as our legacy remain while the money we’ve gathered will blow like dried leaves meaninglessly away.
So isn't it odd that in these corrupt times, of all times, this court would think it prudent and wise to place addenda to the constitution that elevate money over words and place free speech itself at money's mercy. These strict constructionists are not so strict when it comes to furthering the triumph of a monetocracy over democracy. After all the founders might have protected money in the Bill of Rights, they knew of the concept, but since they could tell the difference from the real and indifferent and the imposter from the permanent, they didn’t bother. Apparently this was such an egregious constitutional oversight that our current court, which has never displayed any apparent insight, felt compelled to improve, 221 years later. Why, after twenty score and one years, a Supreme Court should suddenly feel this urge is unfathomable. You must ask yourself what was broken that this decision will fix and what that wasn’t working won’t this make worse? Because of course this is all wrong. This is a nation of individuals, and if their rights are honored above all, and a nation of healthy, well housed, well educated, well paid, fairly taxed individuals results naturally, then the future of our corporations will take care of itself. But if the government perversely focuses its attentions and loving care on our corporations above all, they will not help the individual American succeed but plunder them with the government’s connivance. This will jeopardize the future of the country. And that is just what these hollow, empty robes and their inbred cousins on Capitol Hill have been doing. They’re loyal slaves to these corrupt political times and have spent their entire lives on their knees and now would drag the rest of us down to their level. The real effect of this progression of rulings which culminate in Citizens United is not to make speech and money equal but to make speech subservient to money. If the hounds of money are loosed speech will always need to be allied with big money to compete in the political forum. At the same time money can always unite defensively to drown out any speech it feels unconducive to moneyed interests. To let corporations spend as much as they want to disrupt our political process merely raises the stakes immeasurably so that no individual or collection of individuals or any of their ideas can possibly compete without dancing to big money’s atonality. These policies do not eliminate free speech but they control it and water it down to levels approved of in advance by the corporate interests that bankroll them. All our politicians must be subjected to a similar litmus and only those approved of by capital that has very little interest in the wants and needs of of normal Americans, need apply. Many of these trends are already clear. There is already a money veto on many candidates and policies. Our politicians are like athletes who have taken bribes to shave points and take dives and throw games so that the bookies that control them may profit. That is why we see a virtual government of nullification by many in politics today. This is by design to clear the way, to discredit and destroy government because it is the only force extent which may actually have the power to stop the monetopoly from usurping democracy altogether. But rest assured, we will endure and all the meandering mendacities of these fools, charlatans and liars will not stand.
