Oh, I know, money is speech. The first amendment means that there can be no government control over what is allowed on the media when political discourse is involved. “God bless the first amendment”, they say in the executive suites of the major corporations. Can there be any doubt who controls the information for mass distribution in the US? The people who own the country run the country. Their power is the purse. Ownership of the media controls the media. Ownership of congress and the political system results in controls by campaign contributions and lobbying expenditures. We don’t want to believe the above. We want to think that “public opinion” has some affect on what the government does at the national and state level. But time after time we find that public opinion has very little to do with the way that government decisions are made. Huge majorities in polling stand in stark contrast to the way the votes go at the national and state level. Michael Moore points this out routinely. Polling organizations show how the government is at odds with the long term public sentiment, ad infinitum! Read the rest of this entry