Hysterical Headlines for August 7th – Big Sugar is bigger and badder than Apple?
Bottom Line: Your daily doses of nonsense in the media and my takes on them...
Hot Take: Cue the scary music...
Excerpt: Florida politicians from both parties used to have a sweet tooth for campaign contributions from the state’s powerful sugar industry.
But now that Big Sugar is getting blamed for toxic algae blooms, a connection to the industry has turned into a political liability. This campaign season, only one person running for governor is still taking sugar’s money: Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam.
So far sugar companies and their affiliates have given Putnam’s campaign and his Florida Grown PAC $804,000 in direct contributions, a reward for a reliable ally. He’s also received $7.6 million from five political action committees that receive a significant portion of their contributions from the industry, or one out of every five dollars he has raised.
Hot Take: Am I the only one who gets annoyed by the implications that being successful makes you big and being big makes you bad? That is unless you’re beloved by leftist radicals (that double as journalists) like Amazon and Apple in which case it’s great that you’re the hugest because you know. Well, not really. Doesn’t add up. See Apple, for example, the largest company on the planet also donates to political campaigns. Even South Florida campaigns. And btw, the estimated value of US Sugar, at around $2.5 billion, means that Apple is 40 times the size of big sugar. 40 times. Let that sink in for a moment. But it’s totally cool if they support Carlos Curbelo’s challenger in Miami this year and even folks like the Ossoff in the Atlanta special election last year. Because, well, 92% of the money they donate goes to Democrats. So that keeps you from being a scary, big bad corporation. Even if you’re 40 times the size of the company that’s being hailed as the big bad boogey-man. No intellectual inconsistencies here. Not at all.
In 2008, We Stopped Believing in the American Dream Frank Rich, NY Magazine
Hot Take: And in 2016 we woke up, voted more responsibly, and voila we’ve got the best economy in a generation. See how that works?
Until Tomorrow...