Glenn on the never-ending Presidential campaign

yes, and we're expected to sit here like the good reality-show addicts we've been so carefully trained to be, eating our popcorn and reveling in the spectacle of our substance-free "democratic" process...

you go, glenn...

The reality is that both parties' voters, early on in the process, like to flirt with candidates who present themselves as ideologues, but ultimately choose establishment-approved, establishment-serving functionaries perceived as electable (e.g., the Democrats' 2004 rejection of Dean in favor of Kerry, the GOP's 2008 embrace of the "maverick" McCain). In those rare instances when they nominate someone perceived as outside the establishment mainstream (Goldwater, McGovern), those candidates are quickly destroyed. The two-party system and these presidential campaigns are virtually guaranteed -- by design -- to produce palatable faces who perpetuate the status quo, placate the citizenry, and dutifully serve the nation's most powerful factions.

They can have some differences -- they'll have genuinely different views on social issues and widely disparate cultural brands (the urbane, sophisticated, East Coast elite intellectual v. the down-home, swaggering, Southern/Texan evangelical) -- but the process ensures a convergence to establishment homogeneity. The winner-takes-all, Most-Important-Election-Ever hysteria that precedes it masks that reality, creating the illusion of fundamentally stark choices. That's what makes the 18 months of screeching, divisive, petty, trivial rancor so absurd, so distracting, so distorting. Yes, it matters in some important ways who wins and sits in the Oval Office chair, but there are things that matter much, much more than that -- all of which are suffocated into non-existence by the endless, mind-numbing election circus.

i honestly can't believe it's all in full swing yet again... what a joke...!

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The amazing, disappearing presidential candidate, circa 1992, an excerpt from the movie Spin [UPDATE: Rap video from disappearing Mike Gravel]

from brasscheck tv...

US elections are rigged long before the voting results are falsified.

The news media helps the process along by making (or trying to make) legitimate candidates disappear.

In the 2008 campaign for president, the candidate the news media is trying to trivialize and marginalize Ron Paul. [profmarcus: also Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel, both of whom are also being subjected to outright ridicule]

In 1992, the "disappeared" candidate was Democrat Larry Agran.

The good news is that the Internet has made this kind of chicanery, much more difficult.

here's "spin" from which the above excerpt was taken...

Artist Brian Springer spent a year scouring the airwaves with a satellite dish grabbing back channel news feeds not intended for public consumption. The result of his research is SPIN, one of the most insightful films ever made about the mechanics of how television is used as a tool of social control to distort and limit the American public's perception of reality.

Take the time to watch it from beginning to end and you'll never look at TV reporting the same again.

[UPDATE]

mike gravel is a perfect example of what's being talked about above... if not for alternative news sources like raw story and youtube, we would never even know about this...

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Hillary's Wall Street, weapons and defence industry contributors

just sayin'...

The US arms industry is backing Hillary Clinton for President and has all but abandoned its traditional allies in the Republican party. Mrs Clinton has also emerged as Wall Street's favourite. Investment bankers have opened their wallets in unprecedented numbers for the New York senator over the past three months and, in the process, dumped their earlier favourite, Barack Obama.

[...]

Employees of the top five US arms manufacturers – Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop-Grumman, General Dynamics and Raytheon – gave Democratic presidential candidates $103,900, with only $86,800 going to the Republicans. "The contributions clearly suggest the arms industry has reached the conclusion that Democratic prospects for 2008 are very good indeed," said Thomas Edsall, an academic at Columbia University in New York.

[...]

So far, Mrs Clinton has received $52,600 in contributions from individual arms industry employees. That is more than half the sum given to all Democrats and 60 per cent of the total going to Republican candidates. Election fundraising laws ban individuals from donating more than $4,600 but contributions are often "bundled" to obtain influence over a candidate.

The arms industry has even deserted the biggest supporter of the Iraq war, Senator John McCain, who is also a member of the armed services committee and a decorated Vietnam War veteran. He has been only $19,200. Weapons-makers are equally unimpressed by the former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Despite a campaign built largely around the need for an aggressive US military and a determination to stay the course in Iraq, he is behind Mrs Clinton in the affections of arms executives. Mr Giuliani may be suffering because of his strong association with the failed policies of President Bush and the fact he is he is known as a social liberal.

Mrs Clinton's closest competitor in raising cash from the arms industry is the former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, who raised just $32,000.

thanks to kevin at cryptogon, who calls hillary "cheney in drag..."

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The view from Germany: corporate-funded politics

yesiree, THIS is just a little snapshot of what we look like to the rest of the world... it's all about

$$$$$$$

The American presidential candidates are so busy drumming up campaign contributions and grabbing at opportunities to fly around on corporate jets that they have little time left for the people. Fundraising costs run into the millions, which helps explain why half the candidates in the race are already broke.

check out the subtitle that leads the following paragraphs...

Groveling to Get Big

The task of drumming up contributions from potential small donors is probably the least of the candidates' concerns. Big Business is a different story. Soliciting campaign contributions from the senior executives and owners of major corporations is a far more challenging task, one that requires candidates and their staffs to hone and apply the fine art of wooing and cajoling. The road to the White House leads through the living rooms of Hollywood executives, Wall Street financiers, defense industry lobbyists, oil magnates and corporate strategists of every stripe and color. Indeed, groveling is practically a prerequisite for hitting the big time: the country's highest office.

[...]

These major donors, known as "fat cats" in the jargon of campaign managers, hold so much clout that they can sometimes make or break a candidate's political career. Indeed, the bank accounts of the country's economic kingpins contain the raw materials needed to turn politicians into presidents.

The ordinary people are second in line when it comes to being graced by the candidates' presence. But even that isn't always free anymore. Obama, who has raised the most money so far in this year's presidential race, is now charging $25 for tickets to his appearances. But he does offer student discounts.

Political fundraising is now the dominant campaign issue for the public. Who is raising the most money? Who is ahead of whom? What are the candidates' fundraising strategies? It's almost as if the Americans were gearing up to elect the chairman of a nonprofit organization, not a new president.

here's the question that's always asked but never answered...

[W]hy is it that such a wealthy country seems incapable of introducing a clean, public campaign finance system untainted by the odor of corruption?

anyone care to venture a response...? ok... i will... plain and simple, the elites don't want one...

finally, the concluding (and very sad) perspective...

President George W. Bush's 2004 campaign against Democratic candidate John Kerry cost $881 million, which is equal to 0.008 percent of the US national product or 0.04 percent of the government's total budget. Based on these numbers, public campaign financing would weigh in at a cost of $3 per US citizen, once every few years.

By comparison, US per capita spending on pet food amounts to $47 -- a year.

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The troubling specter of candidates courting business leaders

this article, written for fortune magazine and re-printed in cnn money, is looking at which candidate might be friendlier to business interests, and puts the spotlight on hillary clinton who, it says, is making a number of advances to business leaders and who has landed several major endorsements...

why do i find this troubling...? for years and years, our country has pretty much been ruled by business interests, a situation that has been pushed to the extreme in the bush administration... i'm not anti-business, but the enormous contributions businesses and business-related groups can and do make to political candidates dwarf those made by individual citizens... and, given that the campaign universe remains all about money, candidates naturally gravitate to those interests in order to raise enough of it to stand even a chance of being elected, with the perfectly understandable result that, once elected, a politician will feel obligated to return the favor... it's a system that virtually INSURES the common good of the people and the nation as a whole will not receive first, or even second or third, priority...

The more than 150 top executives who have raised money for Clinton represent such brand names as Anheuser-Busch, Comcast, Estée Lauder, Palm, Sun Microsystems and Qualcomm. Venture capitalist James D. Robinson III, the former CEO of American Express and a longtime Republican, told Fortune he now supports Clinton for President, citing her "breadth of experience, especially on the international level, which is critical for going forward."

[...]

Business leaders can provide added heft to a candidate's fundraising efforts - the major candidates are expected to raise a record $1.4 billion in this race - but they also help a candidate's image branding. Democrat John Edwards, who offers sharp-edged populism, is a tougher sell to business. But Clinton and Obama view CEO support as a key part of their crossover appeal.

A roster of business endorsements "says to voters that you'll be strong on the economy," says Clinton campaign chair Terry McAuliffe. Most of the top-tier candidates - Republican and Democrat - have made pilgrimages to the Business Roundtable's offices in Washington to pitch some 60 CEOs at a time.

i think it's important to know who is giving how much and to whom... while hillary's list of backers represents a laundry list of some of the country's most rich and powerful, rudy giuliani's list is positively frightening...

Giuliani's Wall Street support isn't as broad as that of fellow New Yorker Clinton, but he has culled important business support in Texas and elsewhere. Billionaire hedge fund manager T. Boone Pickens has raised nearly $1 million for the candidate. "In New York he cleaned up the city, ran Mafia convictions, then [handled] 9/11," Pickens says. Giuliani also has the support of Texas Rangers owner Tom Hicks, billionaire investor Sid Bass, and superstar activist Carl Icahn.

pickens, bass, and icahn are some of the most predatory, devious, unscrupulous, capitalist plunderers on the planet, and their endorsement of giuliani tells me more about giuliani than i ever wanted to know...

as much as i try to avoid reading the business press, it pays - pardon the pun - to stay informed, particularly in this, among the most crucial presidential election seasons in the history of the united states...

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"[T]here is no 'third way' or 'consensus' way out of many of our most pressing problems"

no, there isn't, and that is why moderation and bipartisanship is proving to be such a dismal failure... there is no reasoning with those who will take a country to war illegally, and sacrifice hundreds of thousands of lives so that they can retain power and continue to have money flowing into their pockets in rivers...

sirota writing at daily kos...

...it became obvious that this [Barack Obama] is a person who wants to do the right thing and has genuinely strong convictions. But he also seems to believe that the reason our country has such challenges is because all sides of every issue have not come together in unity...

[...]

The problem with this outlook is that it fundamentally misunderstands why we are at this moment in history.

[...]

[T]here is no "third way" or "consensus" way out of many of our most pressing problems, as Obama seems to believe. Why? Because many of our most pressing problems are zero-sum: someone is benefiting from the status quo, and to change the status quo means someone may lose something.

my jury is still out on obama as it is on edwards, and, if al changes his mind, on gore as well... my verdict was handed up long ago on hillary and biden, and i simply refuse to hear the cases of the candidates on the other side... keep talking, barack... i'll listen, but, unlike sirota, i'm much too cynical at this point to say i even WANT to believe...

[Obama] will have to decide whether he wants to offer up poll-tested platitudes about nebulous "hope" and run for President, or whether he wants to really challenge the status quo and actually BE ELECTED President. And as I said at the beginning, I want to believe he will make the right choice.

if he does, fine... i will be more than happy to jump on board...

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Let's celebrate the demise of the "old ways"

- QUOTATION OF THE DAY -

"This is all being made up as we go along. It is difficult to apply the old ways campaigns were run in late 20th century to this new wide-open citizen-led politics."

- SIMON ROSENBERG, of the New Democrat Network, on politicians' use of the Internet.

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