Friday, January 30, 2015

When Corporations Bite the Hand That Feeds Them

Mr. “Corporations R. People” will not be running for president again after all, he announced today.

Some of the corporate media were so certain Mitt Romney was announcing his candidacy that they actually ran headlines to that effect, only to retract them 15 minutes later. But if Romney based his campaign last time around on the “corporations are people” line, he remained true to his principles today. Romney’s reason not for running was that he couldn’t get the funding for his campaign. And when you remember some of the more offbeat television commercials from the Romney campaign, including one where he proposed banning solar panels and shutting down one solar cell manufacturer in particular, you realize what this really means is that he couldn’t line up enough corporate sponsors to finance a third presidential run.

Romney campaigned on the theme of corporate rights before anything else. He put corporations first and people a distant third at best. Those priorities remained in place with his announcement today. Romney still had the same voter support that he had four years ago and the same connections with political insiders, but today, none of that mattered. It was not the people but the corporations that decided Romney could not run again.