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July 7, 2014

A Bunch of Good Stuff, a Mediocre Summary, and Another Story

(More on free speech. Continued from July 3rd.)

The good stuff is from an excerpt of Timothy Kuhnen’s Capitalism v. Democracy: Money in Politics and the Free Market Constitution on Salon.com I posted on Facebook earlier today. (I’m always a couple of days behind. Here’s the Salon link again. Information about the book is below.)

“[S]ome still manage to see a difference between speech accessible to virtually everyone—such as speaking with people in a public square . . . or organizing a protest in the town square—and speech acquired only through wealth. The latter might include a full-page ad in the New York Times [or] a political advertisement on ABC tested by focus groups and refined by psychologists . . . . The accessible sort of speech is really just speech, while the kind inaccessible to most Americans is less a matter of speech as such, and more a matter of making one’s speech influential.”

            “The Buckley appellees [Buckley v. Valeo, 1976] made this argument. . . . ‘We are dealing here not so much with the right to personal expression or even association, but with dollars and decibels. And just as the volume of sound may be limited by law, so the volume of dollars may be limited, without violating the First Amendment.’”

            The Supreme Court was unsympathetic . . . . and now “money’s newfound status as speech [means] that donors and spenders can leverage First Amendment protection in order to avoid regulation. This allows them to obtain a greater share of the market for political power. By making money into speech, the Court ensured that the rich can enjoy more speech than the poor . . . ” [italics mine].  Thus:

            “In an old-fashioned sense, the amount of speech one can produce depends on how many points one has to make, how much energy one has to talk, and whether one can stir up enough goodwill to convince others that it is worth their while to listen. In the Buckley sense, it depends only on how much money one has to spend.”

            “The noted philosopher Michael Walzer gets to the heart of the question: ‘It’s often said that the exercise of these freedoms [of speech, press, religion, and assembly] costs money, but that’s not strictly speaking the case: talk and worship are cheap; so is the meeting of citizens; so is publication in many of its forms. Quick access to large audiences is expensive, but that is another matter, not of freedom itself but of influence and power.’”

Capitalism v. Democracy: Money in Politics and the Free Market Constitution. Copyright (c) 2014 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University. All rights reserved. Published by Stanford University Press.  

*  * *

So, this much I understand:

When money becomes speech, the rich can shout from the rooftops, while the poor whisper in the kitchen, if they speak at all. Freedom of speech is no longer protected; what is protected is influence bought and paid for.

Another story:

I can’t afford Hyde Park, London; but, because it’s nearby, I can afford what I’ve heard is "something" like it, Jekyll Park in New London, Kanutevada. I take my grandnephew, Mateo, who is just turning five.

          And we find the same man I saw in in Hyde Park in London fifty years ago, unchanged: the same wiry man with the same wiry hair in the same black suit, white shirt, and narrow black tie. He’s standing on the same orange crate, and he is dancing the same dance of the string-puppets. He is dancing as fast as he can; he’s singing at the top of his voice; and he’s waving his arms, pointing toward what so far only he can see.

          I look down at Mateo; I hold out my hand. He takes it and we walk over to the small crowd that has gathered to listen and look. “We won’t be long,” I tell him on the way.

          But we’re hardly there when we hear thunder. Then, we see it: a low-rider limo with a massive sound system, a whomp-whomp-pa-whomp in the bass that causes the trees to weep leaves. The speaker raises his voice another notch, but that one notch is all he has; it makes him no more audible. His eyes turn to cloud and his nose begins to bleed; he loses his balance. And all anyone can hear is the thunder:

Shuh-shuh-shuh duh fuh uhp

Shuh-shuh-shuh duh fuh uhp

Shuh-shuh-shuh duh fuh uhp

DOLLUHZ.*

Mateo pulls at my hand. We begin running, though neither of us is very fast, and it’s hard to run away from thunder:

Shuh-shuh-shuh duh fuh uhp

Shuh-shuh-shuh duh fuh uhp

Shuh-shuh-shuh duh fuh uhp

DOLLUHZ.*

And, by the time we fall down in the grass because we can’t run anymore, the sound has begun to fade.

          “I’m sorry,” I say. “Did that hurt your ears?”

          “It hurt everywhere.” Then, Mateo says, the way five-year-olds do when they’ve skinned a knee and see their mothers about to cry, “But I’m okay now.”

          I’m not reassured, but I pretend to be. I say I’ll be better if he kisses my ears. So he does, and I kiss his ears. And we get up off the ground and start back to the car.

 n

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         *Pronounced $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$.