New Jersey's Corzine Offers Free Ads to Corporations

In a state that is so broke that it can't hire immigrants to pick up the massive garbage collected along its highways or fix the potholes that could swallow an SUV (a small one), Jon Corzine (D) is looking for ways to do something for nothing. As is often the case in the political world, he has hit upon the opposite result, doing nothing for something--and the something is a new PR campaign for the state's largest corporations.

Corzine announced yesterday that his corporate chums, whose companies have been involved in the attempted hijacking of the State's high school curriculum, are giving, hold on now, $150,000 to fight the dropout problem in New Jersey. From the NYTimes:

The New Jersey campaign, which is expected to cost about $150,000, will be financed entirely by donations and grants from a cross-section of foundations, businesses and civic groups. Verizon gave $35,000; other supporters include P.S.E.&G., Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield, State Farm Insurance, Prudential and the New Jersey Chamber of Commerce.

Never mind that Verizon alone, for instance, has a national advertising budget of $950,000,000. Even with all that, however, they could not buy what Corzine has handed them for free--the image of a company determined to save the poor urban child from a life of crime and poverty. And never mind, by the way, that these same companies, under the Chamber's banner and the phony research supplied by Achieve, Inc., were at the forefront of an attempt to ditch New Jersey's alternate assessment for high school students who failed the high school exit exam. Which, by the way, is the primary reason that New Jersey's dropout rate is one of the lowest in the nation.