Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Special interests

Wall Street Journal:

Some of the largest U.S. business groups announced a multimillion-dollar television advertising campaign aimed at defeating the Democrats' pending health-care legislation, as both backers and opponents of the initiative sought to target wavering lawmakers in what is expected to be the final phase of the legislative process.

The business coalition, Employers for a Healthy Economy, said it would run between $4 million and $10 million of ads targeting the districts of several dozen Democratic lawmakers, carrying the message that the bill would cause job losses. The ads are being funded by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other trade associations that represent a broad swath of industry.

...

Several big labor unions and progressive organizations are running $70,000 in TV ads in Washington through an organization called Health Care for America Now. The ads tell Congress to "listen to us, not the insurance companies. Pass health-care reform now."

A notable custom in the business-run society is to chalk democratic dysfunction up to the prevalence of "special interests" in politics. This category includes not only those interests which own and control the productive wealth of society, but also those concerns which have developed in direct response to this monopoly power, and whose financing springs forth only from its crumbs. Thus we bear witness to the perennial construction "Corporations, unions..." as it is used in actual sentences by actual human beings who actually believe it has some meaning.

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