The System Investigates Itself

Boardman Robinson, 1921.

Published in The Liberator

March 19, 1921

Suckers & Kochs

By personalizing the issue, the focus on the Koch brothers involvement in right wing politics confuses the causality of the endemic corruption in our system. The Koch's, among others, are an inevitable result of the Supreme Court's metonymy confusing a signifier, money, for speech, one of the infinite number of things money can represent that also happens to be a constitutionally protected right of U. S. citizens.

Money is a universal signifier of abstract value, a yardstick by which all relative economic values can be compared. It is created through a printing monopoly by an issuing government, in our case the Federal Treasury. Speech on the other hand, most narrowly, is vocalizations by individual humans. More generally and as constitutionally conceived, it is the lined up sequences of words with their meanings individual citizens speak or write with political purpose.