Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Perhaps we need to amend the Constitution


Perhaps the demonstrations by Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party movements will lead to amendments to the Constitution. A couple that might be considered:

  • Organizations are not people and thus organizations don't have human rights. Members of organizations must enjoy freedom of speech, but organizations don't speak and so don't enjoy freedom of speech. Members of organizations vote, but organizations don't vote and so don't enjoy rights to participate in the political process.
  • Money is not speech. The very rich and the rich organizations don't have human rights to spend unlimited amounts of cash to influence public opinion and voter behavior.
  • One person, one vote calls for the United States to undo the Constitutional provisions introduced to protect slavery and to induce small colonies to join the United States. Those reforming the Constitution might consider giving the federal government the control of elections rather than the states, introducing means to prevent  gerrymandering, and even making electoral districts for senators based on numbers of people rather than state boundaries.
On the other hand, one-person one-vote might not be the end-all be-all. Maybe wiser, more informed and smarter people should have more weight in voting that more foolish, more ignorant and less intelligent people. We actually have the testing capability now to test for these attributes of voters. Of course, in the past voter tests were very badly misused and politicians are probably no better now than the racists who used voter tests in the past to disenfranchise blacks.


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