by Peter A. Belmont / 2011-10-13
© 2011 Peter Belmont

RSS Recent Essays (All Topics)   •(12/23) How did we get to October 7th? •(11/23) Our Political Habits Are Ending The Human Race •(10/23) Sketch of Israel-Palestine History •(10/23) Whoever controls the discourse controls emotional reactions to reality •(08/23) Russia On Trial •(01/23) The Purpose of "Conservatism" •(10/22) The project of returning the earth to the cockroaches couldn't be in better hands! •(05/22) Abortion, The Constitution, And The Supreme Court •(03/22) The Problem of Climate Change Framing or Discourse or Understanding •(06/21) Israel-Palestine: If not apartheid, then what? The “Occupy Wall Street” movement is a new and exciting ground-up political expression in America. People outside the movement have been asking what the protesters, the Wall Street Occupiers (“WSOs”), want. My best guess is that they want an America which is not “occupied territory”. They know that Palestinians live under Israel’s cruel military “occupation” and that the Palestinians want their freedom from Israel. They also know that the government(s) of America are, in essence, “occupied” by those with lots of money to spend on political manipulation. Who has lots of money to spend on political manipulation? In a word, Wall Street. In short, the protesters, the WSOs, know that America is “occupied territory”, occupied by “Wall Street.” I propose a revised system of political expenditure in which corporations are allowed NO such expenditure and every USA citizen—whether CEO or homeless person—is allowed to spend no more than a grand total of $5000 per year for all political manipulations (campaign contribution, lobbying, political publication). This system, if it could be achieved, would replace the Supreme Court’s system of “one CEO one billion political voices” with a system of “one woman, one political voice.”

The American system of governance is called “democracy”, meaning government of, by, and for the people. However, as practiced it is actually government in the service of big-monied-interests. Big banks, big insurance companies, big pharmaceuticals, big agriculture (and that’s not “family farms”, Virginia), big credit card companies, big armaments manufacturers, big oil, big coal, big gas, and many others, to say nothing of very, very rich individuals (collectively, the “bigs”)—have the nearly undivided attention of those who are elected (and also of those who administer the government) in the USA. The people (other than “bigs”) are heard by their “representatives”, if at all, only on issues of unconcern to the “bigs” or on issues of enormous emotional resonance (such as guns and abortions and death penalties).

The Supreme Court of the USA recently ruled that corporations as such (and not merely the rich people who own them and run them, acting as citizens and spending their own money) have an unlimited right to spend corporate money in the service of political manipulation—and without first receiving direction to do so by the shareholders whose money they would be spending![1]

Wall Street achieves its strangle-hold on American governance not by an occupation by armies of soldiers, but by an occupation by armies of well-funded lobbyists and campaign-funding donors.

Every Wall Street Occupier (WSO) knows that there is no reason, no reason at all, why any Congressman or President should listen longer or more closely to the President of a Big (PoB) than to herself—except the ability and readiness of that PoB to spend money to support the Congressman or President either personally (by what might be difficult to distinguish from a bribe) or electorally (by campaign contributions and “independent” political spending).

The Supreme Court has decided, first, that money is speech (that is, that the generally unrestricted freedom of political speech includes a generally unrestricted freedom to spend as much money as one commands on political manipulation; and, second, that the freedom of speech as so construed is enjoyed by corporations as well as by natural persons.

Each of these decisions is, to my way of thinking, quite wrong-headed and of anti-democratic tendency. I believe the WSOs feel the same way.

Imagine a political system in which people (citizens! the 99% as well as the 1%) talk to their representatives through lobbying organizations which they support by small contributions (not merely gun-rights and pro- and anti-abortion organizations, but environmental, anti-war, pro-war, human-rights, civil-rights, banking-regulation, and other groups) and contribute to political parties and campaigns through similar organizations, and that their

MONEY CONTRIBUTIONS FOR ALL THESE POLITICAL PURPOSES ARE LIMITED TO $5000 PER YEAR PER CITIZEN-PERSON.

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