The Hightower Report

In today's so-called "democratic" election process, Big Money doesn't talk, it roars – usually drowning out the people's voice.

Bizarrely, the Supreme Court decreed in its 2010 Citizens United ruling that money is a form of "free speech." Thus, declared the learned justices, people and corporations are henceforth allowed to spend unlimited sums of their money to "speak" in election campaigns. But wait – if political speech is measured by money, then by definition speech is not free. It can be bought, thereby giving the most speech to the few with the most money. That's plutocracy, not democracy.

Sure enough, in the first six months of this presidential election cycle, more than half of the record-setting $300 million given to the various candidates came from only 358 mega-rich families and the corporations they control. The top 158 totaled $176 million in political spending, meaning that, on average, each one of them bought more than a million dollars worth of "free" speech.

Nearly all of their money is backing Repub­lican presidential hopefuls who promise to: 1) cut taxes on the rich; 2) cut regulations that protect us from corporate pollution and other abuses of the common good; and 3) cut Social Security, food stamps, and other safety-net programs that we un-rich people need. The great majority of Americans adamantly oppose all of those cuts – but none of us has a million bucks we can spend to buy an equivalent amount of political speech.

It's not just some good public programs that are endangered by the Court's ridiculous ruling, but democracy itself. That's why a new poll by Bloomberg Politics found that 78% of the American people – including 80% of Republicans – want to overturn Citizens United. To help work toward that goal, go to www.freespeechforpeople.org.