Cashing In

Oh, I'm going straight to the newsreels today, because I saw a couple things there that pissed me off, and it's pretty early for me to be that pissed off, so here goes.

I know that I ask this frequently (and rhetorically), but why does everything in this country have to make money? This time, I bring it up because the Supreme Court ruled to do away with corporate spending limits on federal election campaigns. Second question: so, um, yeah, how does this in any way make anything better in this country? Pretty simply, what this means is that big corporations can throw all the money they want at the candidates they like, which almost universally means Republicans, who are notoriously pro-big business. The problem with that should be obvious, but hey, let's state the obvious. If Wal-Mart throws millions of dollars at a candidate for office, and that candidate is elected (probably will be, since he or she will have much more campaign funds than his or her opponent), then that person will be compelled to act in ways favorable to Wal-Mart, rather than on behalf of the people who actually elected him or her. This is exactly why politicians seem almost always not to act in the interests of the American public; it's because they're not. And now the Supreme Court decides that, hey, that's not such a bad thing!

And by the way, in case you hadn't figured it out yet, big business is bad for America. Big business eliminates competition, even moreso since our anti-trust laws seem to be falling by the wayside. Without competition, prices go up, cost of living goes up. However, since big businesses are running everything, and they don't care about the average person working near the lower rungs of their company, perhaps running the registers or stocking the shelves in their stores, then those folks aren't earning a decent wage, and they can't afford it when the cost of living goes up. But that doesn't matter to your Wal-Mart executives and the like, as long as they get their fourteen cars and nine homes and monthly vacations in Paris. We expect that sort of behavior from executives, but when our politicians start behaving in that way, then nothing will be done to rectify those wrongs. In other words, we are now starting down a slippery slope towards the eventual demise of capitalism. So, hey, it's not all bad!

On a more minor note, the new film "Creation", starring the always-excellent Paul Bettany as Charles Darwin, was slow to find a company willing to distribute it in the United States, because Darwin's theory of evolution is still considered to be a hot potato issue in the U.S. Really? Is this country still that backwards that there's still controversy over evolution? Oh, right. It is. Still, when's the last time we ever let controversy stop us from making money in this country? Didn't distributors jump all over "The DaVinci Code" (also featuring Paul Bettany, incidentally) for the very reason that controversy sells? This crazy country.