(Originally written September 13th but never posted –Blogger House cleaning.)
Anand Giridharadas, writing for the newspaper of record, took the time and column inches to suggest that when Sarah Palin spoke last week she had some useful things to say.
I know, shut the front door.
While not flattering, coming from the New York Times, there is some measure of respect for the notion that Palin is capable of critical thinking. But the left wing progressive memes still linger between the subdued high fives.
“Do you want to know why nothing ever really gets done?” she said, referring to politicians. “It’s because there’s nothing in it for them. They’ve got a lot of mouths to feed — a lot of corporate lobbyists and a lot of special interests that are counting on them to keep the good times and the money rolling along.”
Because her party has agitated for the wholesale deregulation of money in politics and the unshackling of lobbyists, these will be heard in some quarters as sacrilegious words.
Emphasis mine,
The end of the McCain-Feingold era of unconstitutional speech restrictions demonstrated one very important point. It was wholly a left wing agenda item, and critical enough to the Democrats as a party that they would make total fools of themselves over its end. Almost every left winger who has spoken on the matter is off the rails and Giridharadas’ remarks are no different; that public corporate speech and backroom corporate lobbyists are a reflection the same problem when in fact restriction of the first is what necessitates more of the second, and that is exactly the point.
The left has no intention of removing corporate money from politics or political speech because no Democrat can survive without corporate money or its equivalents. So the left wing narrative for controlling corporate speech has nothing to do with limiting corporate influence in politics it is about keeping the home field advantage. It is about controlling the speech and controlling the narrative–free has nothing to do with it.
McCain-Golding limited political speech in a prejudicial way, at a critical time in the election process, so how does a business now affect it’s interests before the government (because it is still paying that government taxes) when public expression of their positions or interests has been handicapped? And how does any business, regardless of size or resources, make a political statement about how the government deprives them of their income, when the state has promised to imprison them if they dare do so in opposition to laws made to silence them?
If they have the resources, they simply hire a lobbyist or more of them. This is great news for lobbyists, whom I suspect support speech limits on corporations for that very reason. The lobbyist can take the business or industries interests from the board rooms to the backrooms, turning what was an opportunity for a public discussion as an exercise of free speech, into an inside deal no one sees or hears about except the parties involved.
If you are a pro-government Democrat this is a win win. You get to nibble away at speech that could inhibit your ability to regulate, while limiting the players to the ones most likely to benefit from corporate socialism.
Hiring a lobbyist to advocate for a business or an idea limits the scope and number of businesses who can now participate in political speech, to whatever state defined window the government has established. This guarantees that only the largest business interests get to play that part of the game which gives them a significant advantage and increases the opportunity to make things more difficult for their competition.
So the lefts policy goals on business-related free speech do exactly the opposite of that which they profess. They reduce transparency, increase the need for lobbyists, reduce competition, and encourage corporate-government collusion and corruption. They not only limit some forms of speech to the elites who can afford it, they encourage a culture that hides the interest of business and industry away from the public by making it significantly more difficult and bothersome to track down the transactions and details that might shed light on the kind agreements that are being made.
This is intentional. The left does not want to remove the so-called evil influence of big business, they want to institutionalize it, bureaucratize it, milk it and monopolize it. Obama’s presidency has been an example of this "from day one." The Progressive must control the message. And if you have been paying any attention, you will have noticed that the Democrats are not just milking the corporate industrial cow with passion and ambition, they are also the only ones trying to put limits on speech–any speech.
Consider this in closing. In the mid to late seventeen-hundreds,and for most of the years to follow, the speech they claim to object most to was restricted to those with the resources to publish newspapers and pamphlets. Very few people had the resources to pay a printer to produce their speech. This is why the socialists invested years to take control the free press, the media, television, and the culture. They had to find a way to control the message.
The internet has changed that. We are all editors and owners of great media empires just waiting to be discovered. We are all journalists and investigative reporters one story away from going viral. Any one of us could take down a corrupt agency or expose a corporate scam with a little initiative and a small budget.
That simply means that there is more freedom of speech now than at any point in history and no amount of corporate money, invested in few TV spots, can ever change the desire of real journalists, beholden to nothing more than a desire and a suspicion, to ferret out the truth and share it with the world.
This is a message the left cannot control. It exposes them as the emperor with no clothes. And it is why they hate Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Conservative Radio, and the TEA Party and bloggers. It is why they yell and scream and spew hate and lies about them. You need to be afraid of listening, because they cannot control them. And that is why they want so desperately to control the internet.
The left does not want free speech. They cannot be who they are with free speech. They want to control speech, to limit it, to direct it. And they will erect as many straw men as they can, say or do anything–even ignore their own hypocrisy to convince you to let them do it. If you object, they will try to do it anyway–for your own good.
Corporate speech is no different. A Democrat cannot survive without corporate money or its equivalents in politics. They have no intention of limiting their access to it. All they want to do is control it.