Velociworld

All Politicians are Bought

The good ones stay bought.

Although I agree with the majority opinion in the Citizens United Spupreme Court case, I find the reasoning risible. The construct that people may have free speech, that people may also associate freely, and therefore corporations represent free associations that must necessarily also enjoy free speech, is bullshit of the first order.

Corporations are not free associations of people. Now or ever. They are merely for-profit entities, with various peoples associating at will for very limited and specific goals, with vast hierarchical differences. Certainly they are free associations insofar as one may choose to work for a corporation or not, however there is no level playing field inside the shell. The average cubicle dweller or dildo machine punch operator has virtually no say so as to how a publicly-traded corporation disperses its political donations, and to pretend otherwise is a case of reductio ad absurdum.

Here's an example: I worked for almost two decades for a huge old school Southern corporation, formerly headquartered in Richmond, still headquartered in the South. To this day they love to gather customers and senators at their swank West Virginia resort and spa so that they may be served mint juleps by nigras attired in white livery, and have darkies fetch their errant golf shots. That doesn't mean the old PAC monies didn't flow to both sides of the fence. A good 40% of those PAC donations went to leftist ideologues who detested the corporation.

It was fucking insurance, pure and simple. Actually, it was attempted vote-buying, pure and simple. But they just couldn't not give to the cocksuckers on the Commerce, Energy, Transportation, and Appropriations committees who controlled their destiny. My conscientous-objector status to enrollment and participation in the PAC hurt me, too, but I could not give a dime out of my pocket to some of the screwheads they were bribing. What they did with other employees' money and their own profits was beyond my control.

Free association? Sure, if one considers the pimp and whore equal business partners.

I still believe Citizens United was decided correctly, however. I figure if Obama could turn off the verification codes on his donations and reap such sizeable piles of untraceable foreign cash he could afford to forego public money, then everyone else should be able to bankroll a politician, too.

I thought I might essay this concept on a smaller, more personal scale. Say, strike up a conversation with a county commissioner in a bar. Give him some cash, "for the cause." Then send a stripper around a few days later. I'm fairly certain I'd have the gibbering idiot in my pocket in no time. Get five of nine commissioners in your pocket? You're sitting pretty good.

It's not that there's "too much money" in politics, as these asses are wont to say. It's that it's not being focused properly. Or, more importantly, it's not being focused by me. Most politicians can be bought a hell of a lot more cheaply than people think. But not by anonymous internet donors. A bundler, however, can pull together some cash from several sources, none of it his own, by the by, and have that politician all over the snotty end of his fuck stick, if you know what I mean, and unfortunately I think that you do.

Politics is money. Always has been, always will be. And every time the do-gooders try to exorcise it from the body politic, it just gets even seedier. These do-gooders simply fail to remember two critical points:

1. Money makes the world go round

2. There's nothing new under the sun