More dollars = more votes

Aaron sent in a link to this article about a recent Supreme Court decision to overturn a 20-year-old law limiting the amount of money corporations can spend on independent campaign advertising. This change gives corporations more latitude to produce advertising that encourages you, the voting viewer, to choose the candidate who's more likely to advocate policy that will be good for the corporation's own bottom line.

[Chief Justice John] Roberts, in a separate opinion, said that upholding the limits would have restrained "the vibrant public discourse that is at the foundation of our democracy."

Roberts' assessment is based on several assumptions: that a corporation is just one more equal voice in "vibrant public discourse," and that its opinion won't drown out you and me; that corporations are equal to people as the "foundation of our democracy"; that a large corporation's buying power doesn't represent a serious imbalance of power. Makes me think of the guy at the public debate in The Corporation who says the idea of voting with our dollars is great, but if you have more dollars, you get more votes.

For me, this all calls to mind the question The Persuaders was asking about the political language work of Frank Luntz. Are they attempting to more clearly articulate what people really want and need or are they just trying to figure out how to get us to desire what they want to sell us, as if it was our idea? With this court ruling, it's going to be even more important for each of you to be asking this question when it comes to politics.

SARCASM ALERT: It's a good thing our Supreme Court is populated by such noble champions for our poor, underprivileged, multi-billion dollar businesses.