Hicks on a sticky wicket

Does Bill Hicks' line on celebrity advertising still ring true, if ever it did? His socialist idealism produced the credo that if you are a famous name and you do advertising, you lose the right to have an opinion, period. Leaving aside hypothetical musings about whether a more mature Hicks would have compromised his youthful beliefs - like Alexei Sayle did - had he lived longer, can it apply to everything related to advertising?
What if you promoted a charity that paid you for the work - would that forfeit your right to hold forth and be heard because you didn't chalk your billing down to a good deed for charity X? Moreover, don't we earn the right to be listened to through our relevance, irrespective of our interaction with the commercial world?
Hicks was cheesed off that his heroes - the 'good people' - like Jay Leno were selling out (that phrase an instant perjorative). Sure, there are plenty of nauseating celebrity ads out there which are utterly shameless, such as Justin Timberlake saying that he and McDonalds share the same values(!). But should Mikhail Gorbachev be excluded from all future keynote speeches and have all his invites ripped up because this last leader of communist Russia has signed a deal with Louis Vuitton - should his obituary be published now because he has nothing worthwhile to say anymore?
What about Alan Hansen, the new face of Morrisons? He is the foremost football pundit of his generation, though in Hicks' sight his money-for-old-rope contract with the BBC, I guess, should be binned, since footy fans must be protected from his corrupted words. This is not forgetting that old traitor to the cause, Stanley Matthews, who earned virtually nowt from playing but got £20 a week from the Co-Op for letting them use his name.
Angus Deayton's cynical asides on Have I Got News For You lost their piquancy not because he did advertising but as a result of being found snorting coke off prostitutes when not indulging in orgies with them while his wife was pregnant (yet, after the penance of not being on TV for a year, he was welcomed back into the media fold, disgustingly).
And for Transformers' fans, was Orson Welles diminished in his voiceover for the movie from his promotion of Japanese whiskies? (I would argue he was diminished because of his voiceover).
Hicks was frequently very funny and explained the Iran-Contra scandal better than anyone, but it doesn't make him a total authority. The jibbing of celebrities who use their celebrity to make money stems simply from the fact he didn't like these people. It's an easy populism since most of us will never be in such a position. What about the irony of a celebrity pushing a Hicks' video compilation on TV - would a certain grave turn at that? There is a greed at the heart of those we like e.g. Robert de Niro, who ruminate, "why should Paris Hilton get all these lucrative gigs to herself?" But this does not make Robert de Niro contemptible, maybe because celebrity marketing has become so commonplace in a way it wasn't maybe twenty years ago. Yet Hicks' reasoning lives on; however, just because a phrase is repeated often, such as Dr. Johnson's "only a fool would write for anything else than money," doesn't make it right.