Sharpe's Opinion
Thursday, 4th Feb, 2010
Corporation Says It Will Run for Congress
Following the Supreme Court decision implicitly granting corporations the right to free speech (by determining that political spending is a kind of speech), a corporation has decided to take what it believes to be “democracy’s next step”: It is running for Congress.
OK, first question: is this actually any different to a political party standing a candidate? They’re organisations too, after all, even if they’re supposedly non-profit. I suppose the corporation’s candidate would be explicitly serving the commercial interests of the corporation, whereas the party politician tends to implicitly serve the interests of his/her own ambition…
Second question, who else would probably choose to vote for a commercial candidate over any of our current breed of political parties? Admittedly, that particular advert is horribly cheesy and slightly disturbing (I love the message from the ‘designated human’ at the end, though), but in theory, at least.
Third question: could this be the new type of political party that Manwiddicome blogged about a few months back?
Food for thought.
Comments
The anti-politics sentiment in the UK could easily put a few celebrities into Parliament at the next general election, and I see no reason why similar logic could not push a few big brands into the limelight too – particularly if they throw some serious money at it.
Unlimited funding does rather bring to mind images of the old Banana Republics. United Fruit and Standard Fruit used to practically run large swathes of South American. The USA is very entrepreneurial; maybe new companies will spring up to offer affordable government with easy monthly installments.
Governments already have trouble controlling multinationals and in their pursuit of profit, it can all go awry. In your scenario they will govern us so they no longer have to sell us decent goods and services to get hold of our money but in the initial stages they might be nice to us to get us to vote for them. I can see various conflicts of interest arising. In the short term it is going to be the world of academia that has a field day on this one.
measured
February 8, 2010 at 5:17 am