The Seditionist

A big thing happened in the U.S recently; the Supreme Court overturned a judgement which prevented corporations from directly using corporate money to run political advertising and campaigning (it had to be done through political action committees or otherwise funnelled to parties through donations).

Many on the left are deeply worried by this development.

Then there are those on the left that agree corporations should enjoy freedom of speech. Those of the classic ‘liberal’ tilt. After all, the owners of corporations are also people, and they should be able to use their private resources to speak freely. Right?

Let’s disregard for a moment that the CEOs that make these decisions do not hold democratic polls of corporate shareholders (owners) and assume that all shareholders are somehow involved in this process and it is indeed their free speech that is voiced by the corporation. Is that really very free?

How free is your speech? We can talk to people, we can blog, we can youtube. We cannot purchase TV advertising, roadside advertising, radio advertising, viral advertising… sure, we could, theoretically, if we had a few million dollars just lying around for when we wanted to open our mouths; most of us don’t.

But we can join together, pool our money in non-profit corporations and then make our voices heard! Right? Sure… theoretically… we can scrape together enough money to run the occasional ad on an issue lots of us care very very strongly about. But we’re not even in the same ball park.

Why? Well, take into account that 5% of the U.S population own 60% of the total wealth. If we base free speech on the amounts of money that can be raised, those 5% have 60% of the voice. Then we know that the bottom 80% own 15% of the total wealth in the U.S. Translated, that means that rich U.S citizens have an economic voice 12x louder than would be the case would distribution be equal, and the bottom 80% have a voice only 1/5 of what it should be. The rich are 60x louder than the poor. And that’s without taking into account the known fact that of what poor people own, far less is disposable in percentage terms than for a rich person’s wealth.

Yes, income distribution is getting worse. This problem is getting worse. And we’re the lucky ones, we are the 80% of citizens of the  RICHEST countries on earth. The voice of your average African is the sound of perfect silence.

When democracy was in its infancy, there was both exclusion of minority groups and proportional voting, in which the votes of the powerful counted for more. Today, we are institutionalising a system that undemocratises (no, that’s NOT a real word!) free speech, and by omission stifles the speech of the vast majority of citizens. We allow ourselves to be propagandised and silenced, and we have learned to call this freedom.

We need the greatest amount of freedom for the greatest possible number of people. If we’re going to be satisfied with only the first part of the last sentence, we’re betraying ourselves and our fellow citizens because there’ll never be space for all of us in the top 5%. That’s just maths, folks!

This entry was posted on Friday, January 29th, 2010 at 3:34 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.