Depending on the office, special interests have two, four or six years during which they lobby public officials to create or change policies that favor their narrow needs or to eliminate those policies that dont meet their requirements for maximum profit. When labor-intensive businesses dont want to pay a higher minimum wage, their lobbying organizations can visit as many congressional offices as needed to block such an increase. When gas drillers dont want to disclose the chemicals injected into the ground during fracking operations, they can make it rain on local, state and federal officials in order to have their voices heard. When gun manufacturers want to sell more guns that kill more efficiently, they can threaten as many legislators as they deem necessary in order to sell more. When payday lenders or title loan companies want to limit disclosure on just how hammered you will be when you sign that loan document they can get direct audience with the people who can help limit those disclosures. Special interests have the opportunity to make their desires known to lawmakers every day. Now that the Supreme Court has said that corporations - who are people, mind you - have an unlimited opportunity to speak with their money, there is no limit to the influence they can exercise with people who decide the policies that affect all of us now and all of our descendants in the future. Unlike special interests, we have only an occasional opportunity to speak in a manner that is definitive. Anyone not addled by morbid ignorance knows that tomorrow is one of those opportunities to speak. The number of people actually exercising that opportunity will determine whose interests could be served over the next couple of years. Will we squander this opportunity by not voting only to spend the next two years complaining about everything that isnt getting done? Will we not hold public officials accountable for their fealty to those who eagerly trade our future lives for their current profits? Will we simply roll over and hand our future to those who have worked to stifle our voices with new Jim Crow impediments to voting? Tomorrow is our chance to speak. We should do so. Loudly.
Posted on: Mon, 03 Nov 2014 12:24:30 +0000
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