FREE SPEECH FOR SALE

The case of Buckley vs. Valeo was decided by the US Supreme Court and stands for the proposition that in the USA money EQUALS free speech.

This case has skewered our political sysytem to the extent that whatever message we the people send to the politicians when we cast our vote, that message is subject to change and modification in all events by those with access to the politicians we have placed in office. We may think we have sent a message but the way the system works is that for all the time before and the day after the election and for every day, night, Sunday, Holiday ,vacations, golf junkets, brainstotrming sessions, airplane rides, cocktail parties, fancy dinners, those with the wherewithall are trying to adjust whatever has been decided or is going to be decided to their financial gain or other objectives.

We have the constitutional right to "petition our government." And money equals free speech.

There are corrollaries to that latter proposition and one of them is you can't tell people how to spend their money nor can you prevent them from spending it as they wish except for illegal endeavors-like engaging someone to eliminate your spouse. One of the other corrollarries is that therefore "the more money you have the more free speech you can buy. "

Maybe you can afford a full time staff in Washington DC to wine and dine the "worthies" and spread the staff all over the government telling them that your interpretation of this law or regulation was not the one congress intended but otherwise. But a lot of us can't. So a lot of questions arise from this. The one I have in mind is a concept in English common law which we have adopted here in the USA which is " your right to do anything you want stops at the tip of my nose." So moving this concept over to the issue of moneyand free speech the question becomes , "does there come a point at which person A's overwhelming use of money to express his free speech figuratively hits the tip of my nose and denies me my right to free speech?"

This is what this blog is all about. I do not see this as a partisan issue. I saw Chris Hedges formerly of the NY Times who recently said on C-span that ther is a slow motion coup de etat in the USA by large USA corporations. I have read George Will the conservative columnist who decried the present administration's policies as giving to the large corporations anything they want.

This is not a rant against big corporations and I have been in senior executive positions and a board member of these corporations. I have nothing but the best regard for those institutions.

My view is that theer has been a perversion of our democracy and the trajectory will be our undoing if it doesn't stop. We don't like to think about it but there may be almost a trillion dollars spent on the campaign for President of the USA. The President makes $ 400,000.00 per year. Who are those people who are leveraging their time and money for this campaign? What is it that they expect to get out of it or accomplish. is it in our national interest ?

I think that the concept in Buckley v. Valeo will be difficult to overturn nor am I convinced that it would be desireable.

The idea of this blog is to have a serious discussion about how can we deal with the other side of the equation. We can't control how people spend their money but we may be able to create a situation within the concepts of our democracy to diffuse the importance and relevance of money in operating and working within our system of government.