Our election system is broken
11/13/06 12:55
In 1886
the Supreme Court ruled that corporations have the
same rights under the Constitution as people, in
effect granting them citizenship.
In 1975 the Supreme Court ruled that money is equivalent to speech in election campaigns and therefore the amount candidates can spend is unlimited.
These two decisions have combined to steal democracy away from the average citizen. Ideally, in a democracy, your vote is your voice, but that ideal is based on the presumption of a fully informed voter. The average American voter today is woefully uninformed because, let’s face it, if it’s not on the tee-vee then most Americans have never heard of it. But commercials cost money. Lots and lots of it. So we end up locked into a two-party system of government not because there are only two parties, but because there are only two parties with with scads of cash. Corporate cash.
The messages of the numerous other political parties out there aren’t getting out. Some of these parties have some good ideas (of course some are batshit crazy), but they can’t afford to share those ideas with the masses because they can’t get on the corporate teat.
Simply put, if your money equals your speech then your wallet is your voice and whoever has the largest wallet has the loudest voice. Joe Sixpack can still donate to the candidate or organization of his choice, but since his wallet is so small, his voice is largely unheard. Since these corporate citizens have by far the largest wallets, they own the election process (and of course the re-election process). This gives them a great deal of power in our legislative process, and they have used that power to completely alter the way our government collects it’s revenue.
In the 1950s corporate taxes accounted for 28% of federal revenue. Today that figure is down to 7% and there are literally thousands of lobbyists in Washington working to make that number go even lower. That shift in revenue has fallen onto the backs of wage-earners. Our government is giving tax breaks to the oil industry even as they post record profits. It seems that every time a politician opens his mouth any more he talks about giving still more tax subsidies to American corporations to “stimulate the economy.”
Any government needs a solid revenue stream in order to carry out it’s functions. Everything from road maintenance to military readiness to public education has a dollar figure attached to it. It costs money to run a country and that means taxation. To a good corporate citizen, it should just be part of the cost of doing business in a country that provides a solid infrastructure to support that business. If a corporation is going to be a citizen, then there need to be laws written specifically to ensure that they are responsible citizens. The problem is that the people who would presumably write such laws are the same people addicted to that corporate cash.
I don’t know how to fix the problem. I’m just here to bitch about it. I do know that Mussolini said Fascism could more accurately be called “corporate governance” and that scares the shit out of me.
In 1975 the Supreme Court ruled that money is equivalent to speech in election campaigns and therefore the amount candidates can spend is unlimited.
These two decisions have combined to steal democracy away from the average citizen. Ideally, in a democracy, your vote is your voice, but that ideal is based on the presumption of a fully informed voter. The average American voter today is woefully uninformed because, let’s face it, if it’s not on the tee-vee then most Americans have never heard of it. But commercials cost money. Lots and lots of it. So we end up locked into a two-party system of government not because there are only two parties, but because there are only two parties with with scads of cash. Corporate cash.
The messages of the numerous other political parties out there aren’t getting out. Some of these parties have some good ideas (of course some are batshit crazy), but they can’t afford to share those ideas with the masses because they can’t get on the corporate teat.
Simply put, if your money equals your speech then your wallet is your voice and whoever has the largest wallet has the loudest voice. Joe Sixpack can still donate to the candidate or organization of his choice, but since his wallet is so small, his voice is largely unheard. Since these corporate citizens have by far the largest wallets, they own the election process (and of course the re-election process). This gives them a great deal of power in our legislative process, and they have used that power to completely alter the way our government collects it’s revenue.
In the 1950s corporate taxes accounted for 28% of federal revenue. Today that figure is down to 7% and there are literally thousands of lobbyists in Washington working to make that number go even lower. That shift in revenue has fallen onto the backs of wage-earners. Our government is giving tax breaks to the oil industry even as they post record profits. It seems that every time a politician opens his mouth any more he talks about giving still more tax subsidies to American corporations to “stimulate the economy.”
Any government needs a solid revenue stream in order to carry out it’s functions. Everything from road maintenance to military readiness to public education has a dollar figure attached to it. It costs money to run a country and that means taxation. To a good corporate citizen, it should just be part of the cost of doing business in a country that provides a solid infrastructure to support that business. If a corporation is going to be a citizen, then there need to be laws written specifically to ensure that they are responsible citizens. The problem is that the people who would presumably write such laws are the same people addicted to that corporate cash.
I don’t know how to fix the problem. I’m just here to bitch about it. I do know that Mussolini said Fascism could more accurately be called “corporate governance” and that scares the shit out of me.
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