Obama's Anti-Corporate BS
From Obama's radio address this week:
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As the political season heats up, Americans are already being inundated with the usual phone calls, mailings, and TV ads from campaigns all across the country. But this summer, they’re also seeing a flood of attack ads run by shadowy groups with harmless-sounding names. We don’t know who’s behind these ads and we don’t know who’s paying for them.
The reason this is happening is because of a decision by the Supreme Court in the Citizens United case – a decision that now allows big corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence our elections. They can buy millions of dollars worth of TV ads – and worst of all, they don’t even have to reveal who is actually paying for them. You don’t know if it’s a foreign-controlled corporation. You don’t know if it’s BP. You don’t know if it’s a big insurance company or a Wall Street Bank. A group can hide behind a phony name like “Citizens for a Better Future,” even if a more accurate name would be “Corporations for Weaker Oversight.” ...
Well, we cannot allow the corporate takeover of our democracy.
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What utter nonsense. As Target recently discovered, the left's culture police are prepared to jump on any corporate donation that offends their sensibilities. As Target's rapid retreat proved, corporations are basically cowardly on these issues.
In fact, if anybody's going to takeover our democracy, it'll be unions. As Obama knows very well, the Citizens United decision applies to unions and nonprofits just as much as it does to big corporations. As Obama also knows very well, union political contributions dwarf corporate contributions:
Labor unions have dominated spending on independent campaign ads so far this election season, despite a recent Supreme Court decision that freed spending by corporations, a Washington Post analysis shows.
The findings are an indication that corporate money is not flooding into campaigns as many predicted would happen after the landmark decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.
So far this year, $24.7 million in independent spending has been reported to the Federal Election Commission, campaign filings show. Unions have spent $9.7 million (or 39 percent of the total), compared with $6.4 million (26 percent) spent by individuals and $3.4 million spent by corporations.
Unlike corporations, which typically hedge their bets by giving to both parties and mainly to the party in power, union contributions flow 90%+ to Democrats.
Comments
It's good of President Obama to be concerned that "We don’t know who’s behind these ads and we don’t know who’s paying for them." That would resemble candidate Obama's campaign contribution website, where his campaign intentionally turned off the credit card name and address verification so anybody could contribute any amount on any credit card they could gain access to and nobody would know who was doing it.
It's also disheartening to see him continue his gutter politics and thuggery by continuing to demonize the Supreme Court for performing its constitutional functions...
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Obama is clueless and dishonest. I wouldn't bet a dime that he actually knows about 527 groups that do not disclose their funding sources and which spend tens of millions every election cycle. I believe it was Byron York who reported that George Soros spent 80 million dollars in 2004 trying to defeat George Bush via 527's. Obama didn't complaint then. Also, the Obama campaign turned off the security settings on its web site so that it could receive unverified campaign donations from god knows where.
Posted by: AT90064 | 08/22/2010 at 10:48 PM
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