Why is it that I feel so much better about life when neither the state nor federal legislature is in session? This question kept swirling through my head as I watched my dog adrift in a fog of painkillers with an anesthesia hang over from some minor surgery. She had that look on her face that clearly said all was quite wonderful in her world. In fact, if a dog’s lips could actually form a grin, she was grinning from ear to ear.
But I wasn’t. At a time when I’m already feeling as though there is no one representing me on any level of government, the Supremes come along and declare that corporations are legally people and can spend as much money as they want to promote one candidate over another.
If you thought your input had minimal impact on your legislators before, this ruling basically removes even that vestigial shred. Unless you can afford to mount and fund an independent campaign for the candidate of your choice, your influence over the electoral process has just been downgraded to something lower than my dogs’ votes on what kind of treats I buy them. I have the money, so I have the power. It’s a very simple equation.
Will politicians continue to pretend they care what you think? Of course they will. But what you think will now be influenced more than ever by campaigns run by corporations with a vested interest in the outcome. How you view a candidate will be formed by what that candidate says or does. But to a much greater extent than before, you will also be influenced by the kind of PR campaign a large, multinational corporation is able to create to get someone favorable to them into office.
In other words, Bill Allen was merely a few decades ahead of his time.
We need to put all candidates on an equal footing by public funding of campaigns with no other campaigning allowed. That way, the candidate who has sold his or her soul to a corporation does not get an unfair financial advantage over someone with actual morals and ethics.
I also thing campaigning should be limited to only one month prior to the election. That would keep me from running through my house with my ears bleeding from the incessant, loud and rude ads that seem to run for three to four years before any election. If you can’t tell me what you stand for in one month, then you don’t have a clear enough concept of what you stand for to merit winning office.
There are very important topics in our public life that are quite complicated and take more than thirty days to truly grasp. If we are the involved voters we should be, those are issues we’ve already explored. I don’t look to a candidate to explain the intricacies of energy legislation and its tax implications for industry. There are all kinds of policy wonks who do that for a living. I look to a candidate to tell me where they stand on that issue and why. If they can’t come up with a clear answer, then they should go back to the drawing board and run again when they do.
The debacle over health care reform that has kept us captivated and horrified over the past year should be lesson enough in what overwhelming influences large corporations already have over our elected representatives. The bastardized mangle of unintelligible phrases that was horse-traded into existence and called health care reform protected those health care industries that made major contributions to the people crafting the law. The reason no one could put that mess into simple declarative sentences was because if they did, we would have been so outraged over what was given away at our expense to these large industries that we would have openly revolted. And now the Supremes have handed those industries even greater influence.
You and I, my friend, do not stand a chance in that arena. Public funding of campaigns and limited campaigns periods are the only logical way to start reclaiming a government that is purportedly by, of and for the people.
And I don’t care what the Supremes say, corporations are not people.