ManicDDaily

Emboldened Fat Cat

I was all set to put up a post on bad snack habits making regular people get fatter, when I read about today’s Supreme Court decision allowing fat cats to get fatter, or at least, to better spread their fat around.  (Sorry, that’s a yucky metaphor, but it’s a pretty yucky concept.)

As most of you know by now, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission basically allows corporate entities and interest groups to spend unlimited funds to directly torpedo or advance a political candidate or cause.

I’m not sure why I’m surprised by the decision.  We are living in the age of Qualcomm Stadium, Minute Maid Park, Citi Field.  Why should we not now have the explicitly corporate candidate? Statehouse?

In the old days, there was Wrigley Field.  But this was at least named for the individual person, William Wrigley Jr.  (It isn’t, for example, Juicy Fruit Field.)  Wrigley Field, in addition, has historically been home to just about the losingest team in baseball, so it’ s difficult to talk of undue corporate influence there.

This new decision raises the concern that the whole country (as well as every small locality) will become the South Florida of a Carl Hiaasen novel.  The scariest part of this is that all the terrible things that happen in those novels—the destruction of the Everglades and the manipulation of single-mother-topless dancers to protect and enrich sugar farmers and real estate developers—will suddenly be, more or less, legal.  (Okay, okay, maybe not the express manipulation of topless dancers.)

I don’t mean to imply that voters are naïve.  But, well, many voters are naïve.  Money, presentation, packaging, glossiness, go a long way in the sale of a message in the same way that they do of a product.  I think about the use of music as a backdrop for film—how different music can make the same footage menacing or romantic, comic or grave.   The Supreme Court decision suddenly allows in a huge amount of very determined money to pay the piper well; it is hard to believe that this new money will not be able to effect great changes in the contextual “music” underlying any political message, and to fundamentally alter the way in which such messages are perceived.

Sure, individuals often vote their self-interest, but the self-interest of individuals is far more complex than their economic well-being; people, real human people (as opposed to corporate entities and associations) tend to be more than their bottom lines.  People often don’t even have bottom lines;  many are simply at the bottom, standing in lines.  It’s unlikely such people  will be well-served by this ruling.

This entry was posted on January 21, 2010 at 11:52 pm and is filed under news, Uncategorized. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: bottom lines, Carl Hiaasen, Citizens United v. FEC, corporate influence, drawing of fat cat, election expenditures, fat cats, manicddaily, mood music in movies and political messages, paradigm of South Florida, Qualcomm Field, real live human beings, Supreme Court Ruling re corporate money, topless dancers, Wrigley Field