AMERICA FOR SALE

The September article, “How We Got Here and Where We Are Headed” broad-brushed the politico-economic history of the nation since the 1930’s and identified options for rescuing the nation from an inevitable downward trend if we stick with a consumption based economy.
An article in the September issue of LeMonde diplomatique (www.Lemonddiplomatique.com),authored by Robert W.McChesney and John Nichols, provides devastating insight into the unprecedented tilt toward ownership of the government that has resulted from unlimited funding of candidates, as well as complicity of corporate media. The title and first four paragraphs of the article follow:

US democracy sold out - No media checks on election ad campaigns
Le Monde diplomatique (France) - Thursday, September 1, 2011
Author: Robert W McChesney and John Nichols
Karl Rove used media appearances at the close of the 2010 midterm campaign to dismiss President Obama’s complaints that Republican consultants, led by the former White House political czar, were distorting Senate and House races with hundreds of millions of dollars from multinational corporations and billionaire conservatives. “Obama looks weirdly disconnected - and slightly obsessive - when he talks so much about the Chamber of Commerce, Ed Gillespie and me,” Rove mused. “The president has already wasted one-quarter of the campaign’s final four weeks on this sideshow.”

The “sideshow” was the most important story of the most expensive midterm election in American history: the radical transformation of politics by a money-and-media election complex that now defines more than any candidate or party - and is as much of a threat to democracy as the military-industrial complex. This is not the next chapter in the old money and politics debate. This is the redefinition of politics by new and equally important factors - the freeing of corporations to spend any amount on electioneering and the collapse of substantive print and broadcast reporting on campaigns. In combination they have created a “new normal”, in which consultants dealing in dollars unprecedented in American history use “independent” expenditures to tip the balance of elections in favour of their clients. Unchecked by even rudimentary campaign finance regulation, unchallenged by a journalism sufficient to identify and expose abuses of the electoral process, and abetted by commercial broadcasters who this year pocketed $3bn in political ad revenues, the complex was a nearly unbeatable force in 2010.

Of 53 competitive House districts where Rove and his compatriots backed Republicans with “independent” expenditures that exceeded those made on behalf of Democrats - often by more than $1m per district, according to Public Citizen - the Republicans won 51. Roughly three-quarters of all GOP House gains came in districts where independent expenditures by groups like the Chamber of Commerce and Rove’s American Crossroads gave Republican candidates, some of them virtual unknowns, the advantage. The money is powerful but that power is supercharged because of the decay, and disappearance, of independent journalism at the state and regional levels, where elections are decided.

Campaign narratives used to be created by reporters who pulled together the multiple threads of an election season to give voters perspective. Now that narrative is driven by millions of commercials, most negative. The narrative comes from broadcast and cable TV stations, as it has for some time, but it is now produced and paid for by economic elites that seek to define not just the results of an election but the scope and character of government. To neglect the complex or to imagine that progressive forces can compete within it will make the 2012 election look like 2010 on steroids. Determined and dramatic responses are the only options if we hope to maintain anything more than the remnants of a functioning democracy.

(I can forward entire article to anyone interested - hujsaked@aol.com )