One man/one vote is not equal to one man/with a pile of money

Our Courts have ruled that money is equal to free speech; that is to say, you have a right to use as much of it as you wish to accomplish your goals. If you want to spend a million dollars to run for Sheriff, go right ahead! If your opponents don't have that kind of money, that is tough!

It might be one man/one vote, but it is obvious that one man with a lot of money is going to talk a lot louder than another with $57.

A lout with a lot of money is going to have to be pretty bad to lose out to an ordinary person with good ideas and no cash.

It is a system that is an offense to fundamental democracy. The whole idea of one man/one vote is to put aside other human inequities--wealth, intelligence, skin color, religious preferences, or anything else--and to count the number of people who favor, or oppose, a proposition or an action.

Instead, we allow people with obscene amounts of money to shout very loudly, indeed. There is no pretense of a free exchange of ideas: there is, instead, a huge megaphone in the room.

It is beside the point that occasionally someone like Meg Whitman, of EBay fortune, who spent $142 million of her own money, actually loses a bid to be elected. It require that someone else, with almost as much money, mount a similarly expensive campaign.

The money is a huge advantage. Not having much money is a huge disadvantage.

It is lunacy to equate free speech with money.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer. We do have an answer. We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...

On Watching a Formerly Sane Man Descend into Abject Religion

If you read the previous post, you know the apparatus, pictured here, is a torture machine. There are ten of them in our house, purportedly to circulate air to dry out all the problems caused by a water leak. We live in Tucson: it has not rained in Tucson since the Gadsden Purchase. A mudslide the size of the one in Washington State could course through our neighborhood and it would be bone-dry and stone-hard before it quit moving. I suspect it is the CIA, and probably the Border Patrol! We are, after all, only about a hundred miles from the border. I fully expect a large suburban assault vehicle to pull up to the house, and for lots of people with UPPER CASE LETTERS on their shirts to interrogate us, and I will have to explain that all the drugs I use come from Walgreens and Total Wine. But it won't work. Our minds are going. We are getting short with each other and, if they promise to turn off the fans, I will confess to having invented the Arab...

SmokeSound

Search This Blog