Welcome to “What Matters Today,” a new blog at our new website, BillMoyers.com.
And what does matter? Lots of things and we’ll be talking about them here, eager to hear what you think, too, but we’ll be focusing much of our attention on money and its corrosive influence on government and politics: who’s spending the big bucks on contributions and lobbying — and to whom it’s going – as well as the impact of cash on elections, policy and the drafting, amending, or killing of legislation and regulations.
We’ll be tracking the monster impact of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision that unleashed vast – and often anonymous — corporate and special interest dollars. We’ll also look at various attempts at campaign finance reform via constitutional amendment or legislation at the federal and state level and how such proposals stand up against courtroom challenges.
Journalist William Greider said it eloquently a decade ago when he wrote that the hard questions of government “are questions of how and why some interests are allowed to dominate the government’s decision making while others are excluded.” Just follow the money – it affects each of us in our everyday lives, growing the inequality gap. Who are the winners and who are the losers, who gets the payoff and who has to pay, who must be heard and who can politicians safely ignore? As Moyers says, “If speech is money, no money means no speech.” We ain’t got a barrel of money, but we’re here to speak up.
