I've not before today been so very excited to make a friend with someone I have never met. Today, I saw an opportunity to send Dahlia Lithwick a compliment for her outstanding work in tracking the United States Supreme Court (referred to in the news and blog business as SCOTUS). While it may have seemed heavily frosted, I only expressed how I really felt and she added me as a friend.
I am honored and thrilled. She's the business, the dope, the real deal.
Monday night, I had also the great pleasure of having dinner with Lance at Johnny Carrabba's non-mainstream restaurant. We talked, as usual, about a great many things, and he asked me my thoughts about SCOTUS and their recent decision regarding the free speech of corporations to intercede in politics and elections.
In case you have been hiding in your living room with your color TV and your radial tires, hoping to be left alone, the Five Supremes (the fascisti plus Kennedy) decided that corporations had unlimited free speech rights, and could not be limited in that speech to how much money they spent to promote their own goals and ideas. Now, the only focus has been on the unlimited speech of corporations; their ruling also applies to individuals.
So, if you're an individual with unlimited funds, and you wish to produce a movie, a symphony, a television series to promote your political ideology, knock yourself out.
However, even Bill Gates pales in personal resource as compared to the likes of the multinational corporations that already hold sway over our governmental processes.
Bill Gates entire fortune approximates the quarterly profits of ExxonMobil, for instance.
Lance asked me what I thought the outcome of this decision would be.
As does my new FB friend Dahlia, I try to take a longer view toward things -
I think that indeed, there will be a Niagra Falls torrent of money into "soft" campaign manipulation - corporations can now create their own political ads, their own films, television programs, books, print ads, billboards, magazines, door hangars, push cards, polls, sky writers...
However, I think that the normal and unintended consequence of such decisions will far more quickly come to light here.
The "rights" offered by SCOTUS to political speech are not restricted to "citizen" corporations of these United States. That, plus the tendency of any organization or individual to hang itself when given enough rope will put a final stop to this entire Randian intrusion into our public affairs.
Hypothesis: Large, foreign corporation desires to take over "domestic" corporation. They create ads, movies, films, video, television imploring government action in FAVOR of their desire. Their "target" has not the resources to fight them off.
Per SCOTUS, that's just fine.
Hypothesis: Well established Congresscritter behaves in traditional manner, and publicly, legislatively supports "domestic" corporation against aggression, or supports any position antagonistic to large corporation. Large corporation create ads, movies, films, video, television directly in opposition to well established Congresscritter.
If something were worth, say, a couple of billion dollars in increased profits to any one corporation, why would they not open the financial floodgates?
The entire "race for the presidency" in 2008 consumed just over $1B (Billion. A thousand million in US counting.) If, say, the remaining "sisters" (no one remembers the Seven Sisters. Life used to be so poetic) got together to promote fossil fuels, they could dredge up over a billion dollars with (four? three?) phone calls.
How could well established politicians even begin to cope with a billion dollars of antiphony?
I'll tell you how -
Hypothesis: Congresscritters will have to abandon even the fiction that they are now representing "the People", as "the People" cannot financially compete with the newly right-ed corporate world.
Congresscritters will be whipsawed back and forth between whichever checkbook is screaming the loudest.
You know what's going to be fun about that?
The Congresscritters will HATE it. They'll hate every second of it. They can no longer maintain their fiction that they're elected to serve the people (this ad hominem does not include Alan Grayson of Orlando, bless the man) they can no longer ensure their own succession to their elected office, and even if they do the bidding of what seems to be the loudest checkbook, there will be no continuity in their ability to bet on the right horse.
The media and publication world will be awash in "creative" product that shills for more corporate profit.
Yes, we have that now. Product placement has given away to vaguely disguised creative product that exists solely to promote. Cynic though I may be, has it occurred to anyone that "Ugly Betty" is canceled shortly after all of the big designers and design houses have been featured thereon?
If you were a Veep in charge of increase profits (and your bonus) and you realized you could get your clothing successfully hawked at every Wal-Mart in the world by having glamorous models flounce around wearing them while being glamorized by the star designer him/herself, the whole while the advertising impact is subtly poured into the consumer's blood stream by a hinky, loveable heroine and amusing dialogue, wouldn't you haul out the checkbook?
It's actually CHEAPER to underwrite a season of a show like Ugly Betty than it is to throw down advertising in magazines, newspapers, internet banners, internet websites, social networking sites, radio, cable, television ...
"Hey, let's just underwrite or create a hit show!"
And the people won't realize that they're drinking the Kool-Aid.
All of it, all of it legitimized by the tortured "logic" of Justice Kennedy's law clerks. My new friend Dahlia has analyzed this, in a series of articles you can find starting with this one.
Did anyone notice that (so far as I could see) the ENTIRE house, EVERY Congresscritter stood and applauded the President's remarks castigating SCOTUS for this decision?
Why would they do that? Is it that they realize that the end to their gravy ladling is neigh?
If, to assure their own elected continuity, they have to create a Constitional amendment to reign in this insanity, so aptly predicted by Paddy Cheyefsky, the battle will be on between the real live little boy created by SCOTUS and known to use as the multi-national corporations and the Congresscritters who gladly labor in their behalf, but are unwilling to participate in an all out bloodbath.
Each one of those corporate leaders will want THEIRS to be the surviving holding company, and the new generals will be the investment bankers who will profit from every skirmish, whether won or lost.
I promised prognostication. Here it is - via metaphor, then clarification.
When you own a house, and you have a dripping water pipe, most of the time you may wonder from time to time why your water bill has increased but you note nothing amiss.
After a time, the drip grows into a constant trickle, and you may find a little dampness, which you mop up, and wonder whether maybe you shouldn't look into it. Yet, there is no impetus.
After a further time, the trickle becomes a steady leak, which undermines foundations, saturates floor plates, and risers, rafters and studs. You may smell some mustiness, or some dampness - but, there's been a lot of rain after all.
One evening, you come home from your day at the modern salt mines - you have labored with no purpose, you have striven for fewer wages, you have accepted longer hours, and shorter vacations, and fewer benefits - and you find that the ceiling has collapsed in a soggy heap of destroyed sheet rock, water pours down from a clearly broken pipe and the floor is ankle deep in water. The carpeting is ruined, the furniture is wet to the knee, the electronics are shorted out -
Will your insurance cover it?
Hey, guess what - the insurance companies have managed to get that considered part of a flood policy, which you didn't buy, because after all - it doesn't flood where you are.
What SCOTUS has done here is to apply the heavy pipe wrench to loosen the pipe right where it's been leaking for thirty years.
And we, the People are about to walk into a soggy, wet mess and find we have no insurance.
In the longer view, I feel that we have begun to see the force that will bring down this house we have been living in. This house with the leaky pipes, that has for so long seemed sound and sturdy.
The salesman has been telling us all along that this is just the right house for us.
In parody of the current featured saleswoman, the People are about to question just how well that "Ayn-ey Rand-ey style of governing" has worked out for us.
(cross posted on Daily Kos)
I am honored and thrilled. She's the business, the dope, the real deal.
Monday night, I had also the great pleasure of having dinner with Lance at Johnny Carrabba's non-mainstream restaurant. We talked, as usual, about a great many things, and he asked me my thoughts about SCOTUS and their recent decision regarding the free speech of corporations to intercede in politics and elections.
In case you have been hiding in your living room with your color TV and your radial tires, hoping to be left alone, the Five Supremes (the fascisti plus Kennedy) decided that corporations had unlimited free speech rights, and could not be limited in that speech to how much money they spent to promote their own goals and ideas. Now, the only focus has been on the unlimited speech of corporations; their ruling also applies to individuals.
So, if you're an individual with unlimited funds, and you wish to produce a movie, a symphony, a television series to promote your political ideology, knock yourself out.
However, even Bill Gates pales in personal resource as compared to the likes of the multinational corporations that already hold sway over our governmental processes.
Bill Gates entire fortune approximates the quarterly profits of ExxonMobil, for instance.
Lance asked me what I thought the outcome of this decision would be.
As does my new FB friend Dahlia, I try to take a longer view toward things -
I think that indeed, there will be a Niagra Falls torrent of money into "soft" campaign manipulation - corporations can now create their own political ads, their own films, television programs, books, print ads, billboards, magazines, door hangars, push cards, polls, sky writers...
However, I think that the normal and unintended consequence of such decisions will far more quickly come to light here.
The "rights" offered by SCOTUS to political speech are not restricted to "citizen" corporations of these United States. That, plus the tendency of any organization or individual to hang itself when given enough rope will put a final stop to this entire Randian intrusion into our public affairs.
Hypothesis: Large, foreign corporation desires to take over "domestic" corporation. They create ads, movies, films, video, television imploring government action in FAVOR of their desire. Their "target" has not the resources to fight them off.
Per SCOTUS, that's just fine.
Hypothesis: Well established Congresscritter behaves in traditional manner, and publicly, legislatively supports "domestic" corporation against aggression, or supports any position antagonistic to large corporation. Large corporation create ads, movies, films, video, television directly in opposition to well established Congresscritter.
If something were worth, say, a couple of billion dollars in increased profits to any one corporation, why would they not open the financial floodgates?
The entire "race for the presidency" in 2008 consumed just over $1B (Billion. A thousand million in US counting.) If, say, the remaining "sisters" (no one remembers the Seven Sisters. Life used to be so poetic) got together to promote fossil fuels, they could dredge up over a billion dollars with (four? three?) phone calls.
How could well established politicians even begin to cope with a billion dollars of antiphony?
I'll tell you how -
Hypothesis: Congresscritters will have to abandon even the fiction that they are now representing "the People", as "the People" cannot financially compete with the newly right-ed corporate world.
Congresscritters will be whipsawed back and forth between whichever checkbook is screaming the loudest.
You know what's going to be fun about that?
The Congresscritters will HATE it. They'll hate every second of it. They can no longer maintain their fiction that they're elected to serve the people (this ad hominem does not include Alan Grayson of Orlando, bless the man) they can no longer ensure their own succession to their elected office, and even if they do the bidding of what seems to be the loudest checkbook, there will be no continuity in their ability to bet on the right horse.
The media and publication world will be awash in "creative" product that shills for more corporate profit.
Yes, we have that now. Product placement has given away to vaguely disguised creative product that exists solely to promote. Cynic though I may be, has it occurred to anyone that "Ugly Betty" is canceled shortly after all of the big designers and design houses have been featured thereon?
If you were a Veep in charge of increase profits (and your bonus) and you realized you could get your clothing successfully hawked at every Wal-Mart in the world by having glamorous models flounce around wearing them while being glamorized by the star designer him/herself, the whole while the advertising impact is subtly poured into the consumer's blood stream by a hinky, loveable heroine and amusing dialogue, wouldn't you haul out the checkbook?
It's actually CHEAPER to underwrite a season of a show like Ugly Betty than it is to throw down advertising in magazines, newspapers, internet banners, internet websites, social networking sites, radio, cable, television ...
"Hey, let's just underwrite or create a hit show!"
And the people won't realize that they're drinking the Kool-Aid.
All of it, all of it legitimized by the tortured "logic" of Justice Kennedy's law clerks. My new friend Dahlia has analyzed this, in a series of articles you can find starting with this one.
Did anyone notice that (so far as I could see) the ENTIRE house, EVERY Congresscritter stood and applauded the President's remarks castigating SCOTUS for this decision?
Why would they do that? Is it that they realize that the end to their gravy ladling is neigh?
If, to assure their own elected continuity, they have to create a Constitional amendment to reign in this insanity, so aptly predicted by Paddy Cheyefsky, the battle will be on between the real live little boy created by SCOTUS and known to use as the multi-national corporations and the Congresscritters who gladly labor in their behalf, but are unwilling to participate in an all out bloodbath.
You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won't have it, is that clear?! You think you have merely stopped a business deal -- that is not the case! The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back. It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity, it is ecological balance! You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations! There are no peoples! There are no Russians. There are no Arabs! There are no third worlds! There is no West! There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multi-variate, multi-national dominion of dollars! petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars!, Reichmarks, rubles, rin, pounds and shekels! It is the international system of currency that determines the totality of life on this planet! That is the natural order of things today! That is the atomic, subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And you have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and you will atone! Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale? (pause) You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen, and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and Dupont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state -- Karl Marx? They pull out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories and minimax solutions and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments just like we do.So, the battle is now no longer between nations. With the advent of this torrent of corporate communication, the battle will quickly become that of Dassault and EADS versus Boeing, Hyundai versus Tata, AT&T versus Deutsche Telekomm, SkyTeam versus Star, Con-Agra versus A-D-M.
We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably deter- mined by the immutable by-laws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale! It has been since man crawled out of the slime, and our children, Mr.Beale, will live to see that perfect world in which there is no war and famine, oppression and brutality --one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused. And I have chosen you to preach this evangel, Mr. Beale.
(Ned Beatty as as Arthur Jensen, to Howard Beale played by Peter Finch, in the movie Network, 1976, written by Paddy Chayefsky)
Each one of those corporate leaders will want THEIRS to be the surviving holding company, and the new generals will be the investment bankers who will profit from every skirmish, whether won or lost.
I promised prognostication. Here it is - via metaphor, then clarification.
When you own a house, and you have a dripping water pipe, most of the time you may wonder from time to time why your water bill has increased but you note nothing amiss.
After a time, the drip grows into a constant trickle, and you may find a little dampness, which you mop up, and wonder whether maybe you shouldn't look into it. Yet, there is no impetus.
After a further time, the trickle becomes a steady leak, which undermines foundations, saturates floor plates, and risers, rafters and studs. You may smell some mustiness, or some dampness - but, there's been a lot of rain after all.
One evening, you come home from your day at the modern salt mines - you have labored with no purpose, you have striven for fewer wages, you have accepted longer hours, and shorter vacations, and fewer benefits - and you find that the ceiling has collapsed in a soggy heap of destroyed sheet rock, water pours down from a clearly broken pipe and the floor is ankle deep in water. The carpeting is ruined, the furniture is wet to the knee, the electronics are shorted out -
Will your insurance cover it?
Hey, guess what - the insurance companies have managed to get that considered part of a flood policy, which you didn't buy, because after all - it doesn't flood where you are.
What SCOTUS has done here is to apply the heavy pipe wrench to loosen the pipe right where it's been leaking for thirty years.
And we, the People are about to walk into a soggy, wet mess and find we have no insurance.
In the longer view, I feel that we have begun to see the force that will bring down this house we have been living in. This house with the leaky pipes, that has for so long seemed sound and sturdy.
The salesman has been telling us all along that this is just the right house for us.
In parody of the current featured saleswoman, the People are about to question just how well that "Ayn-ey Rand-ey style of governing" has worked out for us.
(cross posted on Daily Kos)
