Corporate 1984?

The Obama administration is embarking on tougher talk and proposals on jobs, the economy and reining in Wall Street. According to the NY Times: "The tougher approach to financial regulation that President Obama outlined on Thursday reflected a changed political climate, the rebound in big banks’ fortunes after their taxpayer bailout and a shift in power within the administration away from those who had been seen as most sympathetic to Wall Street."

But is it all too late, and was it ever really possible? It's clear now that Republicans and insurance companies--perhaps in conscious collusion--lied repeatedly to the White House before getting brazen on their so far successful attempts to delay a health care bill until they could change the politics enough to kill it.

Corporate money also flowed into creating and maintaining the so-called Tea Party movement, currently with factions at war with each other over money as much as anything else, and the largest group proving to be a profit-making enterprise.

So now the Supreme Court weighs in, by misapplying law to the wrong case, in order to unleash corporate money to further corrupt politics and government. It's the most blatantly political decision since Bush v. Gore.

This has the obvious potential to turn this country into a corporate version of the Orwellian Nineteen Eighty-Four. Except that it probably won't be that obvious. As repugnant as it is for me to agree with anything in Politico (and I will instead link to the Caucus blog describing it), it had already occurred to me that corporations are unlikely to put their logo on their actual political stands. They could lose customers that way. They are far more likely to continue their currently successful practices of creating dummy advocacy groups and phony scientific research institutes, all with deceptive names--and of course, the lying only starts there.

So the real effect of the decision is probably not in giving corporations the right to buy political commercials but in allowing them to spend a great deal more money contributing to their dummy groups that create and buy political commercials, and otherwise engage in buying politicians.

What dim hope there is for balance resides in corporations with a stake in the future--technology companies and those engaged in clean energy businesses, for example. Plus the citizen activism that can boycott offending companies, although to be effective, these boycotts may require some self-induced pain. Will people stop using their electricity completely once a month, say, to protest even more coal and oil money pouring into politics?

Of course this doesn't work so well for health insurance, since the whole goal of these insurers has been to soak up market share and then kill off or eat the competition, so that they have a monopoly in entire areas, even entire states and regions. Making sure they got no new competitors--a public option, say--seems to have been the first stealth goal of killing health care, although killing any sort of regulations on their conduct came in a close second.

In an immediate sense, the clear beneficiaries of the Supreme Court decision will be media companies and public relations firms. We will soon be even more awash in bullshit--all of which we pay for as surcharges to every product and service we buy--as wells as more Newspeak and doublethink, on the way to thoughtcrime and the Thought Police.