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Friday, January 22, 2010

Will corporate ads buy 2010 voters?

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Be prepared for an on tons of propaganda about candidates now that this has been decided.

From the AP: Photobucket

WASHINGTON) — The Supreme Court has ruled that corporations may spend freely to support or oppose candidates for president and Congress, easing decades-old limits on their participation in federal campaigns.
By a 5-4 vote, the court on Thursday overturned a 20-year-old ruling that said corporations can be prohibited from using money from their general treasuries to pay for their own campaign ads. The decision, which almost certainly will also allow labor unions to participate more freely in campaigns, threatens similar limits imposed by 24 states.

The Supreme Court has opened the door to a new era of big and possibly shadowy election spending, rolled back anti-corruption laws and emboldened critics of fundraising limits to press on. In the middle of it all will be voters, trying to figure out who's telling the truth.
The court's ruling Thursday lets corporate America start advertising candidates much as they market products and tell viewers to vote for or against them. While it almost certainly will lead to a barrage of hard-hitting TV ads in the 2010 elections, its implications reach far beyond that.

The ruling was a victory for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the AFL-CIO, the National Rifle Association and other interest groups most likely to run ads with money from their treasuries. It's unlikely major corporations would want their name on an ad, but they can avoid that by giving money to interest groups, who would then run ads and disclose the spending under the groups' names. It also presents a new option to wealthy individuals who were allowed to spend millions on their own to run election-time candidate ads before, but now can join forces to do so and get more bang for their bucks.

From the corporate titans of the early 20th century bribing candidates, to Watergate in the 1970s, Democratic fundraising scandals during the Clinton years in the 1990s and most recently, the Jack Abramoff influence-peddling case, Congress has periodically tried to rein in political spending only to have loopholes emerge or political players mount successful constitutional challenges to the rules.
The court seemed to sweep those concerns aside, saying that it doubted election-time ads could lead to the corruption of lawmakers and that in any case, proponents of the ban hadn't provided any proof of corruption.
Campaign finance watchdogs predict members of Congress now will cast their votes on controversial legislation with an eye to whether their position on it risks inviting a barrage of special-interest ads against them before the election, or on the flip side, could draw outside spending favorable to them.

And in the middle of it all are voters, the people whose opinions the new spending will seek to influence.
The court seemed to agree with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's contention that voters want more election ads and that they are craving the viewpoints and information that will be presented in them.

But if the country's experience in the years before the McCain-Feingold law, when corporations and unions poured millions of dollars into election-time ads that targeted candidates but stopped short of calling for their election or defeat, is any indication, much of the new ad spending will likely be aimed at turning voters against a particular candidate, rather than urging them to vote for one.
That may please voters who do not like the candidate anyway, but it could turn off some voters so much they tune out. Getting key voting blocs to stay home on Election Day can be as important as getting voters to turn out.

The bottom line ...we need to see beyond all the crap and lies that are going to thrown at us and lets see who is getting all the money and who is giving it to them and why??

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