Corporate Contributions for McCain?

Corporations are banned from making campaign contributions (though they are free to form PACs, where all career-wise climbers toss their dollars in with their country-club bosses). It's becoming increasingly obvious, though, that the oil companies are NOT going to sit on the sidelines this election season. In an election that features change from Obama or a third term of record profits from "McSame", they are going "all-in" for McCain.

They've come up with an ingenious mechanism to translate some of those obscene profits into support for McCain, without technically violating the law against contributing directly. It's absolutely Rovian in its underhanded simplicity.

McCain has taken the moral low ground by flip-flopping on open drilling. Any honest and informed person knows that off-shore drilling will take a decade or more to produce even a trickle of gasoline, and provides absolutely no relief for high prices at the pump for the foreseeable future. Immediately, though, it will foul our coastal ecosystems, and expose more of our fisheries and natural beauty to the risk of another Exxon Valdez.

But birds gotta fly, and oil companies gotta drill. And McCain is the key to offshore oil drilling.

So, rather than making campaign contributions to McCain, they have worked out a little sleight of hand. McCain has sold his maverick soul to the oil companies, and now all the oil companies have to do is run dozens upon dozens of "issue advertisements" misleading Americans into believing that offshore drilling will lower gas prices.

An extra dollop of pay-off comes from the fact that there's no similar group of obscenely profitable companies who are positioned to respond. The charming bed and breakfast overlooking the ocean cannot afford prime time "issue advertisements" to compete with the oil companies. The hardworking fishermen don't have the time to go talk to the hotshots on Madison Avenue. Environmentalists cannot hope to raise money with the cruel efficiency of the oil industry siphoning unwilling donations out of my own wallet whenever I fill my tank.

The oil companies are going to use a portion of their record-setting profits to try to buy the election for McCain. They have profited wildly during Bush's presidency, and McCain represents more of the same.

Whenever you see their advertisements urging us to throw away our environmental heritage for a false quick bandaid, recognize what they are trying to do. They're skirting the laws and trying to fool us into supporting another term of record profits.