Let me connect the dots. The heart of the protests is a lament about widening income inequality in the U.S., brought about, in part, by a government that seems to favor disproportionately wealthy interests. The Occupiers have focused their outrage on the bailout of banks that reaped huge profits on mortgage-backed securities and are now profitable again, while millions of homeowners have been foreclosed upon or lost their jobs.

The best antidote to this imbalance of income and influence would be to greatly reduce the role of private funding in our elections. Nothing is more empowering to the well-heeled — corporations, unions, lobbyists, political-action committees, trade associations and bundlers — than our political leaders’ need to come to them hat in hand for the money to get elected.

While this might, at first glance, seem little more than another attack on the dreaded Citizens United decision, that equated free speech for corporate spending, it goes well beyond that.  It’s an attack on money itself, the Buckly v. Valeo holding that by contributing to political campaign is how speech is put into action.  The problem, of course, is that the people with the money, and the will to spend it, are the ones politicians hear.

In recent polling, for example, almost three-quarters of Americans favored raising taxes on millionaires. Yet any such proposal has been consistently blocked in Congress, despite the overwhelming popular support for the idea.

Unfortunately, nothing less than a constitutional amendment is likely to reverse the situation. For now, the court’s conservative majority is firmly entrenched. And even were the court to become more moderate, with the replacement of one of the conservative justices, the principle of stare decisis, of respect for prior decisions, would mean that any effort to erase the damage done since Buckley would necessarily be incremental.

Turow argues that the only way to change cash and carry politics is to amend the Constitution to regulate it.

Meanwhile, those in tents across the nation should start going door to door with petitions, visiting legislators and building alliances with good-government groups, all in service to a proposed amendment that might read something like this: “The Congress and the States shall regulate the direct and indirect expenditure of private funds on the electoral process in order to ensure that no group, entity or individual exercises unequal influence on an election by those means.”

Of course, the notion that we, meaning each of us individually or as we circle the wagons with our respective interest group(s), actually wants equal influence on an election.  We all want unequal influence, just our own being predominant.  

I stumbling upon Turow’s commentary via Ann Althouse, who always manages to find a facile characterization that suits the attention span of her audience, headlining it “Scott Turow advocates amending the Constitution to restrict free speech.”  This, of course, returns us to the question of Buckley (and obliquely, Citizens United) of whether money is speech.

If you’re of the school that it is, then sure, Turow wants to take away your ability to speak louder than poorer and cheaper people.  No reason to question whether the supporters of the alternative think that corporation cash is supporting positions that inure to their benefit. They think so, as they suck down a tall one and thank the Lord that corporations exist to protect them from evil.

Putting aside the language proposed by Turow, the gist of his proposal appears to be good, old campaign contribution limits, so no rich guys get to buy more influence then the 99%.  Does this solve the problem?  Not likely, as Turow himself notes that candidates spend a ton of money on campaigning, and it’s got to come from somewhere.

This creates an appetite for political money that naturally can be best fed by the rich. Only 0.5 percent of Americans contributed $200 or more during the last general election cycle. Their generosity made up 82 percent of itemized contributions.

If we all cared that much, it wouldn’t seem to break the bank for most of us to put $200 into the pot.  The fact is that most people choose not to contribute. Not $200. Not $20.  So the real gripe isn’t that the 1% are so filthy rich that they can outspend us, but that they spend at all whereas we don’t want to put a dime up on our own behalf.

It’s no huge stretch to say that Turow’s proposal has absolutely no chance of happening, and indeed, it smacks of restricting free speech when the idea is based on prohibiting the influence of those who care enough, whether for good or evil, to put their money where their mouth is. 

But this isn’t the end of the discussion.  It’s not that politicians enjoy sucking up to donors for cash, but that they need money to mount a campaign.  Why?  Because we’ve come to expect it, or maybe demand it, of them.  We won’t take someone seriously if they don’t have signs, campaign planes and television commercials.  We require them to put on a show and spoon feed us their agenda with fireworks in the background.

For all the nice Americans screaming to bring us back to horse and buggy days, because everything was perfect then and we had no problems at all, the notion hasn’t been applied at all to the mechanics of political campaigning.  What if a candidate said he wanted no contributions, wouldn’t be buying airtime and had no need for slick campaign commercials?  What if the candidate instead started a blog, set out his agenda (maybe with a few youtube videos for spunk), and left it to Americans to read it and decide if he was their cup of tea?

It’s not the candidates who desperately desire to pander to money.  It’s not the rich people who desperately want to give money away to candidates.  It’s us, the 99%, who create the demand.  We don’t need a constitutional amendment, but it would be a whole lot easier than adjusting our own conduct so that campaigns didn’t need to be funded by the 0.5% willing to put their money on the table.