This article from TIME on why greenwashing is so profitablecorporate social responsibility programs and the customers they attract included this unsurprising comment, "The only thing that has sunk lower than the public's opinion of Congress during this recession is its opinion of business."
Instead of seizing this moment when the public doesn't, perhaps, believe that what's good for corporations is good for America, Democrats have been busy campaigning to be the finance industry's new BFF while the rest of us struggle with debt, lose jobs, maybe lose homes. But politics abhors a vacuum. Enter ... Don Blankenship, CEO of Massey Energy and close, personal contributor to Sen. James winter-disproves-global-warming Inhofe!?
"Enviromental extremists and corporate America are both trying to destroy your job."
Listen to it three times, if you want to. It won't sound any less crazy.
Blankenship sits on the national board of directors for the US Chamber of Commerce*, no less. I guess if corporate America were coming for my job, he'd know. But why would he tell me about it?
Because his side's out of power, that's why. The playbook of both parties seems to be to campaign as a populist, govern as a corporatist. The Republicans and their closer allies have nothing to lose by stirring up the very real, and deserved, anger that corporations have raised through their misbehavior. Their side doesn't have to do anything about it and their authoritarian followers (pdf) will never hold it against them.
That's the Democratic leadership's big problem right now. If they were only the people they'd told us they were for the last decade, they could seize on this anger, this existential fear over basic needs in a bad economic situation, and channel it towards 'their' ends. Even if they were bad at it, they would try. But no. They must be so comically hypocritical, falling all over themselves to rake up the corporate money and be solicitous of our robbers' profits, that Don frakking Blankenship of Massey sodding Energy thinks he can plausibly sound like a man of the godsdamn people.
Heckuva job, Democrats.
* - Perhaps Blankenship will be relieved to know that Glenn Beck will set his compatriots in corporate America right when he keynotes the Michigan Chamber's Future Forum. One presumes Beck will warn them against their affiliations with environmentalists and others who might turn the US into Mexico.
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