Montana governor on money in politics

By Dan Brooks in corporatocracy 4 Comments

Governor Brian Schweitzer of Montana, wearing the legally mandated bolo tie

Say what you will about Montana—where, for example, the most liberal city in the state does not provide garbage pickup—we do preserve a certain political culture. The same Montana that devotes very little money to public services and has a legislature that meets for 90 days every other year was also one of the first states to legalize medical marijuana. When I first came to grad school here, it was legal to drink whiskey straight out of the bottle while driving on the interstate. Like the great libertarian states, Montana is suspicious of pretty much all laws; yet, like the great liberal states, it is also suspicious of corporate influence. Montanans are just suspicious generally. That’s why we have some of the tightest campaign finance restrictions in the country, and why Governor Brian Schweitzer took the New York Times yesterday to defend them.

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Florida legislator submits bill with ALEC mission statement still attached

By Dan Brooks in corporatocracy 3 Comments

Florida law-forwarder Rachel Burgin

A useful idea from economic theory is commodification, the process by which things that were previously not sold become accepted objects of economic exchange. Commodification is kind of a weird concept for contemporary Americans, since pretty much every aspect of our lives has been commodified already. Consider, though, the commodity that is clothing; for centuries, most people made their own, until rising incomes and better manufacturing in the early 19th century made it easier to buy them from somebody else. Degree of commodification is a good measure of the development of an economy. During the middle ages, for example, Europeans did not buy or sell land—one reason their economy stagnated for a millenium. Compared to those assholes, our economy is fantastic. Just last month, for example, a Florida legislator submitted a law drafted by corporate lobbying group the American Legislative Exchange Council, word for word, without remembering to delete ALEC’s mission statement from the top.

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Thursday corporatocracy watch: orange

By Dan Brooks in corporatocracy 2 Comments

Foster Friess, unfortunately likable gajillionaire Santorum donor

When I checked the corporatocracy meter this morning, it was damn near red. It turns out that the Rick Santorum victories in Minnesota, Colorado and Missouri that came out of nowhere Tuesday night actually came from Foster Friess, a Tea Party supporter and mutual fund investor. Props to Mose for the link. When the Santorum campaign could not afford to purchase advertising, Friess’s donation to the Red, White and Blue Super PAC paid for a monster radio and television blitz in Minnesota. On Monday, meanwhile, President Obama announced that he would begin accepting the aid of super PACs, apparently reversing his position on entities he called a threat to our democracy. For a while there, it looked like the whole corporatocracy meter/valve/pump assembly was going to blow, but then the House banned insider trading by members of Congress. So we’re back to just running at maximum pressure.

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US democracy enjoys healthy rental market

By Dan Brooks in corporatocracy 4 Comments

Mitt Romney, whose 2010-2011 income came almost entirely from capital gains.

During a flashback in the episode of The Simpsons where Homer and Grandpa enjoy brief success selling a homemade aphrodisiac, child Homer says he hopes to someday be President. “Son,” his father says, “this is the greatest country in the world. They’ve got a whole system to prevent people like you from becoming President.” We are now in the first presidential election year since Citizens United v. FEC, and the richest man ever to run for that office has been goaded into releasing his tax returns. In 2010, Mitt Romney received an adjusted gross income of $26 million—approximately 500 times what I made. He paid a federal income tax rate of 13.9%, around four points lower than what I paid. In Romney’s defense, almost all of his income came from investments and his inheritance, whereas my income came from wage work, which is taxed at a higher rate. In my defense, fuck Mitt Romney and the federal corporatocracy he hopes to captain.

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Wikipedia to go dark in protest of SOPA

By Dan Brooks in corporatocracy 2 Comments

Oh, boy! I'm shutting down this website and making it a crime for search engines to link to it!

Wikipedia, the massive online library of free papers for freshman rhetoric, will go dark on Wednesday in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act. The act, currently pending in the House of Representatives, would allow the justice department to shut down websites accused of posting copyrighted content and/or block access to those sites via US internet providers. That doesn’t seem so bad, until you consider that much of the content on many of the most popular websites is user-generated—which is to say movie- and TV-generated and, you know, stolen. Sony Pictures could get the Justice Department to shut down YouTube, if it wanted, because people posted videos of Spider Man. And that’s to say nothing of copyrighted Facebook avatars, copyrighted samples, copyrighted Evanescence lyrics on strippers’ blogs, and copyrighted information.

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