"Story of Stuff" vs "Citizens United" ANS

This is from Brad Hicks.  It's about who wins elections.  Read it an weep....
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--Kim

"Story of Stuff" vs "Citizens United"

• Sep. 17th, 2010 at 4:06 PM

Via the Story of Stuff's Facebook feed, I got a request to blow 40 minutes of my (admittedly copious) free time watching a selection of YouTube videos that came out after the Citizens United Supreme Court decision that legislated from the bench that corporations have a First Amendment guaranteed right to spend as much money as they want on political campaign advertising at all times, including in the last few days before an election. I had nothing better to do, so I figured what the heck, as much value as Anne Leonard has donated to my life, I can spare her 40 minutes.

As I start to write this, I'm about halfway through ... and I feel my brain liquefying and running out of my ears.

And I'll tell you why: here are about a dozen or more supposed experts on the subject, both in favor of and against the Citizens United decision, and after almost half an hour of talking nobody's talking about the real issue here. They're talking about straw men like censorship, or alleged buying of votes in exchange for campaign donations, and they're not talking about the only vote that has been bought by corporations:

Yours.

The elephant in the living room that nobody wants to talk about is the fact that the second most powerful decider of every election that's been held in this country since I was a child in the early 1960s is the 15 second broadcast television advertisement. And the most powerful decider (the basic likability of the candidate, their ability to seem like nice people when in public) is not one that's at stake here.

Now, if you're reading this blog entry, the odds are that you're not actually one of the people I'm talking about. On the other hand, if you're actually reading this blog entry, the odds are just as good that you feel like you have little or no voice in our elections, that you've been frustrated for your entire life by the fact that the voters who matter, the voters who decide the election, seem to be making their decision as to who to vote for in total ignorance of even the basic facts about the parties, about the candidates, about the policies being advocated. And you're right. In every statewide or federal election since the 1960s, the most reliable predictor of which candidate will win is which candidate was able to place the largest number of 15 second television advertisements. Period.

Sure, some ads do more harm than good, and some candidates have a hard time looking good in their ads, and some can never get it right. And once or twice per decade, somewhere in America, there have been gifted politicians who've won the old fashioned way, without depending on saturation bombing campaigns of TV ads. But probably in excess of 90% of the people who show up at the polling places on election day based their entire collective impression of each candidate off of nothing but 15 second campaign TV ads. As long as that remains true, then running campaign television ads is like taking swings at a pinata full of ill-informed voters to see who can knock the most of them out of it. Only the tiny handful of candidates who are so inept at swinging at the pinata that no matter how many swings they take they can't hit it, and only the even tinier handful of candidates who are so good at swinging at the pinata that they only need one swing, are exempt from this basic math: the person who gets the most swings at the pinata is the one who'll get the candy.

The result is not a Congress or a statehouse or a White House that can be bought. The result is 50 statehouses, a Congress, and a White House who don't need to be bought, because all of the candidates who were even willing to consider occasionally voting against the interests of the Fortune 500 and the Forbes 400* were massively out-spent on 15-second broadcast television advertisements. Out of any given pool of candidates, the one or two that the wealthiest individuals and the wealthiest corporations in the world personally trust to see the world their way will be given 9 or 10 chances to puff themselves up, 9 or 10 chances to smear mud on the other guy, for every 1 chance that any of the less-reliably pro-corporation candidates get, and study after study has shown that with enough repetition, you can convince almost anybody of almost anything.

By the time I got to the end of this essay, the videos were done, and still, nobody had said word one about this simple fact: almost the only form of political activity that has mattered since the 1960s is the running of 15-second broadcast television political campaign advertisements, and those are (a) prohibitively expensive and (b) to some extent, auctioned.

I love Anne Leonard's videos to date, and I wish everybody in America would watch them. But I can't get past this fact: before she made "The Story of Stuff" and its sequels like "The Story of Bottled Water" and "The Story of Cap and Trade" and "The Story of Cosmetics," she spent her entire adult lifetime to date studying the materials economy. By comparison, she's spent mere months studying American electoral politics; I don't really have a whole lot of confidence that when her next video comes out, it'll reflect the same level of insight as what she brought to the extraction to production to sale to consumption to disposal economy.

---

* P.S. It was in the news, yesterday, that over 40 million Americans are now living in poverty. There are only 400 people on the Forbes 400 list. Even with one hundred thousand poor people's votes for every one ultra-rich person's vote, the ultra-rich people's preferred candidates win every election. As my old friend the_geoffrey used to say, "Coincidence? Or ancient astronauts?"

Comments

( 9 comments ­ Leave a comment )

teflonspyder wrote:
Sep. 17th, 2010 09:35 pm (UTC)
So if you want to make a significant change in national government policy you've got to come into it with an absolutely unholy amount of financial backing. The Paulsies tried that last election, but even knowing what to do they just couldn't hold a candle to the real players. Cash-to-enthusiasm only converts in the one direction as far as elections are concerned.

Also you really nailed it with the 15-second ads; even persons with strong media presence prior to a run haven't been able to make a dent without commercial support.
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mikazo wrote:
Sep. 17th, 2010 09:48 pm (UTC)
I don't wish to change the original subject, but do you suppose that alternative voting would change any of this? In Minneapolis now, you can vote for three candidates in order of preference. The point is apparently to support voting for third-party candidates. Perhaps people would be more inclined to vote in a manner less influenced by corporate advertising if they could put their favorite corporate candidate as their second choice instead of only being able to vote for him or her?
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bradhicks wrote:
Sep. 17th, 2010 10:48 pm (UTC)
As long as the conversation is driven by 15 second sound-bites, and which sound-bites a decisive number of the voters believe are determined by the rate of repetition, how could that affect the outcome? Once in a very rare while it might get a candidate out of the primaries and to the nomination who was less corporate funded, but what then stops the corporations and the hyper-rich from picking the friendlier (to them) candidate of the three and smearing the other two, or the other six, 9 times an hour for all four hours of television a night the average voter watches?
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jonathankorman wrote:
Sep. 17th, 2010 09:56 pm (UTC)
This unhappy observation reminds me of an old favourite: Teresa Neilsen Hayden's essay Common Fraud which contains the horrifying observation that deceiving us has become an industrial process.
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captain_swing wrote:
Sep. 18th, 2010 01:24 am (UTC)
Interesting links. They remind me of the the point Phil Agre constantly repeated on his Red Rock Eater mailing list; that properly debunking slick industrial sophistry requires substantially more time and effort than its consumption.
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tacky_tramp wrote:
Sep. 17th, 2010 10:00 pm (UTC)
This is part of my starry-eyed motivation for going into education: increasing media literacy may help average people be less susceptible to advertising manipulation, and more able to make thoughtful political decisions based on the facts and their values and priorities. But that's about as long-term a goal as turning public opinion away from unfettered campaign spending, and it would encounter just as much resistance.
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peristaltor wrote:
Sep. 17th, 2010 10:30 pm (UTC)
. . . the most reliable predictor of which candidate will win is which candidate was able to place the largest number of 15 second television advertisements. Period.

While I don't doubt it at all, I've never seen it stated more boldly. Do you by any chance have a source to back that assertion?
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westrider wrote:
Sep. 18th, 2010 02:14 am (UTC)
Here in Washington State, because we've got Citizen's Initiatives on the Ballot, every Voting Household gets sent a packet with an overview and brief pro- and con- statements on these Initiatives.

Since they're sending out the packet anyhow, the Elections Commission (I think that's who puts these out) also includes a brief statement from every Candidate running for Office in that Election. These range from a quarter-page or less for Municipal Positions, up to a full page for Presidential Candidates.

I've long maintained that they should make these packets standard nationwide, and then simply ban any other form of Political Advertising. Candidates get their couple of paragraphs to a page to make their point, and that's it.

Probably totally unfeasible, but it seems like it might be worth considering.
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simulated_knave wrote:
Sep. 18th, 2010 04:16 am (UTC)
That's...that's beautiful. Absolutely beautiful.
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kimchalister wrote:
Sep. 18th, 2010 06:32 am (UTC)
Well, my partner tells me that television is dying. Not fast enough....
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