If there’s one thing commentators across the political spectrum seem to agree on with regard to this year’s GOP presidential primary season, it’s the extent to which so-called “Super PACs” are dominating the course of the campaign. Super PACs are vehicles, created as the result of a long string of Supreme Court decisions with regard to the flow of money into political campaigns, that can accept unlimited contributions from companies, organizations or individuals and spend it in unlimited amounts. As might be expected, this is putting the fate of American elections increasingly into the hands of a very few. For instance, according to The Washington Post, in January only five individuals were responsible for one quarter of the money raised for the GOP primaries that month.

Think about it. If one of these nominees becomes president, he could owe his office to just two or three of the super-rich. The public doesn’t even need to know their identities: limited liability companies can be created to make donations that shield donors’ identities.

Just how much attention would you expect a president elected in this way to pay to your wants and needs if they happened to conflict with those of the couple of billionaires who bought his victory? And the problem is not restricted to the GOP primaries; we can expect it to play out in the general election for offices at all levels.

The American people seem to be fully aware that there’s a problem. Earlier this month, for instance, an ABC/Washington Post poll revealed that 69% of Americans think Super PACs should be banned, one of several polls that have reflected a similar negative opinion.

But changing things is easier said than done; indeed, it would probably require a Constitutional amendment. That’s because this sellout of American democracy is rooted in two principles promulgated by the United States Supreme Court for many decades: corporations are people, and money is speech. Both are Orwellian nonsense.

Corporations are legal fictions designed for the specific purpose of maximizing profits. As such, they can make good servants but bad masters to real, live, breathing human beings. And the way they become masters is by using those maximized profits to influence elections (so the winners will help them amass more profits)—which they can do as long as money is deemed speech.

But speech is “the communication or expression of thought” (Webster’s). It nurtures democracy to the extent that it constitutes an open exchange of ideas; that is, a forum in which all participants have an equal opportunity to share those thoughts. Now let’s say you distribute giant amplifiers to only a few people, who can now shout down all the rest, and even provide them with a false view of reality, against which the truth cannot prevail because the people who know it aren’t blessed with amplifiers. That’s money: not the ideas—the amplifiers. Used by a few to shout down the many, it is the antithesis of democracy.

So what do we do?

The solution is obviously not going to come from the top down. The Supreme Court is part of the problem, not the solution. Nor can we expect the initiative to come from officeholders in Washington, most of whom are already beholden to big corporate and individual donors.

The good news is that, from the bottom up, we are already seeing one initiative that could eventually have an impact. A number of municipalities throughout the country—some big cities like New York and Los Angeles, but also a number of small towns, especially in New England—are adopting resolutions calling for Constitutional amendments declaring that corporations aren’t people, and money isn’t speech (for a map, visit movetoamend.org/resolutions-map). The resolutions are not binding, and by themselves, don’t do anything. But if enough municipalities in any given state pass them, then maybe their state legislatures will take action. And if you can get two-thirds of state legislatures to call for a Constitutional convention, you’ve got one.

Yes, that’s a high bar. But there’s only one way to get there: one municipality at a time. So we herewith issue a challenge to the municipalities in our readership area. We urge them to take a stand that corporations are not people and that money isn’t speech. By themselves, such resolutions might seem merely Quixotic gestures. But combine one town’s resolution with those of many others around the country, and suddenly we’ve got our own amplifier, saying: human beings are people, and the expression of thought is speech.