Get The Money Out of Politics

[written in 2013] The more I hear about the crap going on in our country as a result of politics, the more it seems obvious that the solution is to get the private money out of politics all together.  But of course, with the Citizens United decision, the Supreme(ly stupid) Court has pushed the country in the other direction, with unlimited, secret contributions now allowed.  I mean, if you think of a problem in this country, it is almost always traceable to the money. Climate change? Traceable to politicians who won't budge because of the oil money. Minimum wage stagnation? Corporate money and lobbying. Two wars that bankrupted the country? Halliburton and other oil services companies that benefit from accessing more oil, not to mention defense contractors!  In fact, oil is the main reason we are involved in the Middle East at all.  Think about it - if we didn't care about the oil, we wouldn't really care about what went on there, and the Middle East could burn itself down for all we care.  Oh but Israel.... well, that particular problem is also due to the money of the Israeli lobby, which is funded by the amount of wealth that Jews have in this country (ooh, I told the truth about Israel/Jews - I must be anti-semitic! No I am not).  I mean, why is Israel important, other than a strategic ally foothold in an oil rich region?  But I digress a bit.

Tax code a mess? It is because of all the special interest groups on both sides of the aisle that have given enough money to the politicians to buy influence into law making.  And the list goes on and on.  Think about it: individuals and corporations give money to politicians to gain access to them and influence them to do what they want them to do.  And if they don't do what they want them to do, then the stop giving them money. It is essentially a system of legalized bribery.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, MONEY IS NOT SPEECH, and cannot be protected under the First Amendment. If that were true, then why do rich people get more speech than poor people?!  That is not democracy.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

An addition to the sadness

 2/11/2023: Well, as expected, I have not been back to this blog much since my last post a couple of months ago. Alisa's progression has progressed unfortunately, and her speech is really suffering. This is part of the brutality of #ALS - it just keeps taking things away from you. As one of our friends said, we have to keep "riding the waves of loss." Quite accurate, but some are worse than others. For my dear Lis, speaking is something she was good at, and always had lots of nice things to say to people, so I can't imagine how difficult it is to have her preferred form of expression curtailed so drastically, especially in the devastating drip, drip, drip fashion that it happens in #ALS. We are just over a year in from diagnosis (1/13/22), which is both hard to believe, and depressing, especially looking back at how she was a year ago, speaking reasonably well, walking well, etc. A picture came up on my phone of her and Bella up on Mt Toby right about a year ago, with
Read more

A Simple Twist of Fate

Although I am not much of a Dylan fan - I could never get past his mediocre voice - my partner Alisa is, and this is one of her favorite songs. And it applies brutally to what has happened to her, which is that she was formally diagnosed with #ALS in January 2022, after a series of doctor visits. So this blog is going to turn into a a bit of an #ALS journal for a while, although not necessarily exclusively. We have a CaringBridge site set up so I'll not duplicate much of that. One thing that didn't make it on the CB site was my initial email to family and friends, which I do want to reproduce here as a record of how things went early on. I'm going to go back a little bit for those who haven't been part of the process early on. We noticed some speech and swallowing difficulties in the late spring early summer last year. We didn't think too much about it (but should have of course), thinking it was due to some sores in her mouth (as opposed to the cause of those sore
Read more

Does Religion Have A Corner On Moral Values?

Reading this editorial in the NY Times, I was reminded of an idea that occurred to me sometime ago: why do moral values = religion? It is of course my contention that they don't, which is well illustrated in the article, but perhaps even more so by the pedophilia in the Catholic church and the other sex/money scandals involving prominent evangelists. But after the last election, which was supposedly decided by "values voters," the media in general equated them with religious people. Personally, some of the most moral people I know have nothing to do with religion. They simply care about other people, animals and the earth, and act accordingly. Religious people generally favor "traditional" values, which is all well and good as long as profession of those values is not simply a cover for behavior in direct contradiction of those values.
Read more