I recieved a piece of mailtoday from Russ Carnahan's office. I guess the intent was to update consituents about his office's activities in Washington. But when you look at it, it is a glorified campaign mailer. That's fine - it's an election year. I'm going to recieve plenty of campaign material between now and Novermber. Then I saw the disclaimer and was furious. It said, "This mailing was prepared, published and mailed at taxpayer expense." I am amazed that we have the money to spend for flashy mailers touting "Holding Wall Street Accountable", even though we are currently adding to the 12.6 trillion dollardebt at the highest rate in history. We'll leave the fact that while he's fighting Wall Street, he's recieving, or will recieve, campaign contributions from some of the biggest (and some would say most corrupt) Union PAC's in this State for another day.
There is a bigger story than Carnahan's mailer. It's the fact that for a long time now politicians have been distrubuting propaganda to the public, under the guise of legitimate and trustworthy news sources. This site is 24thState.com. The Mission Statement is one of the first things you see. It is very clear as to where we are coming from regarding our commentaries and stories. However, there have been many sources of information that have presented opinions and stories from a biased perspective, while not letting the reader know first what that persepctive is.
One group in Arnold has been doing this very thing for a while now. The are the Political Action Committee known as "Citizens for a Better Arnold". Many people will not recognize the name, but have seen the newsletterthey mail out every year around municipal election time, called "Community News". This newsletter glorifies certain candidates while smearing their opponents. By doing this under the guise of "Community News", it gives the false impression that this is a publication that is intended to present facts to the public. In reality, it's intended to present only some of the facts, and twist, spin or even lie about other facts in order to help one candidate and harm another.
This tactic is commonly known as propaganda. It is certainly nothing new to the world. Yet it is these tactics that have caused much of the distrust and apathy by people towards the political process. Four words that have become a testament to my ideology is "the truth just is". It would be one thing if the ideas of higher taxes on the wealthy, free healt care for everybody, or that socialism is more fair than capitalism, actually worked. But historically it doesn't work. The more you tax the rich, the less income tax the government recieves. Every time universal health care is tried, it leads to enormous costs to the government and rationing of care. And the fact is that the ideology of socialism has killed more people than anything in the history of the world. In Arnold, the CFABA praised the use of eminent domain in Arnold Commons, said red light cameras were making the roads safer, and that the smoking ban was the right thing to do. The reality is that after stealing land from homeowners by perverting state law (and leaving a scar on the community in the process) the TIF bonds used to lure developers are now costing the City $3,000 a month from the General Revenue fund. There have been 19,000 Red Light Camera violations in the past 5 years. And many businesses have closed partially due to the restrictions placed on them by the smoking ban. It just doesn't work. And portraying these issues, local or national, as successes instead of the truth - historically as failures, is dishonest. It's a disservice to the people that elected these officials. We must all follow the truth, wherever it leads us.
Welcome to the World of "franked mailing". __All__ members of the house and senate do it.
http://j.mp/9b3Ikl
...was the franked mailing that every legislator targeted by this ad http://j.mp/2O6ofq put out.
Posted by: John Henry | 03/24/2010 at 01:03 PM