Your Money or Your Vote

To comment on Miss Information's post below on the recent Supreme Court rulings, I want to note that one of the biggest mistakes the court has made in the last few decades was ruling that money equals speech. Any effort to reform campaign finance is going to run against this idea. I personally don't believe that money equals speech primarily on the basis that free speech is inherently about the equal access to speech. Yet for the vast majority of Americans we do not have the monies necessary to put up a political ad, provide serious funding to a political candidate or buy the services of a lobbyist to argue our case to a representative. While we do have our ability to vote and make our voices heard through polling we have little recourse beyond that. Unless we actively organize every time an issue of concern to us arose we have little chance of affecting the votes of our representatives. For a lot of people, myself included, such constant protesting is unfeasible and unrealistic, which the more cynical representatives count on.
Such is not the case for corporations, particularly those that have an agenda that requires the services of a representative or senator. Corporations, with their large piles of liquid cash, can easily buy air time to run political ads, offer large campaign contributions or hire a literal army of lobbyists to push their wants and desires before Congress. To make the argument that money equals speech is to say that some people or organizations have more access to speech than others. More importantly, those with more money have greater access to speech and thus have a greater chance of having their voice heard. This is not to argue that there is some grand corporate conspiracy to lock out the voice of the average American (although that is entirely possible) but simply to point out the logical inconsistency between our Constitutionally protected ideas and how the Supreme Court shapes the limits of those ideas. I think that such rulings as money equals speech run counter to our idea of equal opportunity and access, allowing corporations to hold greater rights than that of the individual. This is a fundamental flaw that I do not see going away until the composition of the court changes, and not just in a left/right division.