To the editor:

If money equals speech in America, then middle-income and poorer folks barely rate a whisper compared to the amplified voices of deep-pocketed wealthy folks jawing away at politicians. The deeper the pockets, the louder the voices.

Corporations, according to those in charge of America, are folks, too. Thus big-buck CEOs can slip their ample corporate booty into the greasy palms of politicians in exchange for preferred treatment.

Making matters worse, the privileged squatting in corporate boardrooms can and do bend the ears of politicians nonstop, and don’t even have to show their faces, thanks to five wise men in black decking the hallowed halls of our nation’s highest court with boughs of folly. Union leaders have those same rights, but so what? Working stiffs don’t even have to pay union dues in right-to-work-for-crumbs states. Can modestly funded featherweights knock out heavyweights passing out duffel bags full of money? Can they even climb into the same ring?

No doubt the vast majority of ordinary citizens are on the ropes, unable to dodge the sucker punches thrown at them by those they elect, who have gone to the dark side, bought off by the rich and infamous. And it’s all legal. Kafka would be enthralled by America’s absurd world, her venerable Constitution turned on its head. What would our forefathers say to the notion that human speech and greenbacks, human beings and corporations, are legally enshrined to be one and the same?

When a few folks own the gold, everybody else is stuck in the shaft. Pay to play leashes the American dreams of ordinary citizens to the priorities of political heels and their well-heeled patrons. Alas, money talks while hardworking folks walk to their desks or assembly lines one day at a time, hoping their jobs will still be there.

We’re outsourcing America the Beautiful to distant shores, and ordinary people can’t get a word in edgewise to their political representatives (apparently in name only). It’s a bidding war for political access at a rigged auction where the little guy’s voice is drowned out by the super-powered megaphones of the mega-rich.

Might public financing of political campaigns rectify such obvious injustice? Might banning PACmen, including the super PACmen spawned by our five wise men in black’s Citizens United decision, close a few nefarious loopholes? Might politicians then be forced to heed public interests in lieu of corporate interests? Grassroots America could at least pay attention, assert itself, and resist imbibing in electronic narcotics for but a moment.

If the status quo continues, our middle class will soon join those at the bottom and morph into a virtual modern-day peasant underclass. Is that the America we want our kids and grandkids to inherit?

Lawrence Uniglicht

Galloway