Hey – remember when I first wrote about the Supreme Court decision to roll back restrictions on corporate/union campaign contributions? And how I said, “Shouldn’t we, the American people, be given some credit for being savvy enough to know when big corporate money is trying to sway us a certain way?”
Guess what! This dude agrees with me. I love when I’m agreed with. But this dude uses a fantastic analogy, which I was not creative enough to come up with on my own.
But let me back up a bit. First I have to point out how awesome it is that the author calls out Obama and Chuck Schumer specifically for their hypocrisy in denouncing the Supreme Court’s ruling. Obama was all, “(This is) a green light to a new stampede of special interest money in our politics’’ and “a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies, and the other powerful interests.’’ He then criticized the justices in front of the world at the SOTU saying the decision would “open the floodgates for special interests’’ and for good measure threw in: “I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests.’’
Yyyyeah. During his election, Obama collected $745 million in contributions from all kinds of special interests – lawyers and lobbyists and healthcare industry donors and banks and real estate interests and Hollyweird and the TV industry, according to the source link. But that was all TOTALLY cool, apparently.
Senator Schumer huffed about the Supreme Court decision by saying the justices
“predetermined the winners of next November’s elections. It won’t be Republicans. It won’t be Democrats. It will be corporate America.’’ Gawd. Chuck’s apparently the number one beneficiary of campaign contributions from PAC’s and donors in the real estate, securities, liquor, insurance and hedge fund industries.
So once again, “what’s good for me is not good for thee.” That’s the name of the Democratic game. But back to the awesome analogy.
The author, like me, thinks that the American people are comprised of grown-ups, who are perfectly capable of making informed decisions all by ourselves, regardless of what sort of propaganda is thrown in our direction. In other words, if I see an ad for Obama in the next election cycle which promises more hope and change and rainbows and skittles, I’m still more likely to think, “This ad is full of crap” than I am to be persuaded by it. I mean, I have an Actual Brain, and I enjoy using it. I know the same can’t be said for everyone, but as a whole, we need to give people some freaking credit. We’re not robots who are going to blindly choose people just because we’ve seen an ad for them. The article’s author says it best when he says, “If corporate advertising was irresistible, after all, we’d all be drinking New Coke.”
PERFECT.
