This article follows from the Right-wing coup that shames America piece.

Date: Mon, 25 Dec 2000 10:59:25 -0500
To: redmaple@northnet.org (John Fadden)
From: Walter Miale <wmiale@acbm.qc.ca>
Subject: Re: Fwd: Right-wing coup that shames America

It seems to me that the electoral process lost its legitimacy long before
the Supreme Court did it's naked thing. The process is owned by the money
that finances the campaigns, by the Presidential Debate Commission which is
in turn owned by the two parties, and by the major media, principally GE,
Disney, CBS Viacom (owners of NBC, ABC, and CBS), the NY Times, Washington
Post AOL-Time Warner, and a few others. These giants took it upon themselves
to decide who is a "credible" candidate. Thus Perot was but Nader wasn't.
Perot had cash to spend on advertising in these media, and as basically a
candidate of the status quo, he did not declare war on the ascendancy of
multinational corporations. --Walter


                           TENNIS ON THE TITANIC

                               By Howard Zinn


     As the prize of the presidency lurched wildly back and forth in
     the last days of the year, with the entire nation hypnotized by
     the spectacle, I had a vision. I saw the Titanic churning through
     the waters of the North Atlantic toward an iceberg looming in the
     distance, while passengers and crew were totally concentrated on a
     tennis game taking place on deck.

     It is not just a phenomenon of this particular election. In our
     election-obsessed culture, everything else going on in the world
     -- war, hunger, official brutality, sickness, the violence of
     everyday life for huge numbers of people -- is swept out of the
     way, while the media insist we watch every twist and turn of what
     candidates say and do. Thus, the superficial crowds out the
     meaningful, and this is very useful for those who do not want
     citizens to look beneath the surface of the system. In the
     shadows, and hidden by the dueling of the candidates (if you can
     call it a duel when the opponents thrust and lunge with plastic
     swords) are real issues of race and class, war and peace, which
     the public is not supposed to think about, as the media experts
     pontificate endlessly about who is winning, and throw numbers in
     our faces like handfuls of sand.

     For instance, as the Gore-Bush contest rose to a frenzy, the media
     kept referring -- to the Hayes-Tilden election of 1876. The
     education that the public received about this was typical of what
     passes for history in our schools, our newspapers, our television
     sets. That is, they learned how the Founding Fathers, in writing
     the Constitution, gave the state legislators the power to choose
     Electors, who would then choose the President.

     We were told how rival sets of electors were chosen in three
     states, and how Samuel Tilden, the Democrat, had 250,000 more
     popular votes than the Republican, Rutherford Hayes, and needed
     only one more electoral vote to win the Presidency. But when a
     special commission, with a bare Republican majority, was set up by
     Congress to decide the dispute, it gave all three states to Hayes
     and thus made him President.

     This was very interesting and informative about the mechanics of
     presidential elections and the peculiar circumstances of that one
     . But it told us nothing about how that "Compromise of 1877",
     worked out between Republicans and Democrats in private meetings,
     doomed blacks in the South to semi-slavery. It told us nothing
     about how the armies that once fought the Confederacy would be
     withdrawn from the South and sent West to drive Indians from their
     ancestral lands. It told us nothing about how Democrats and
     Republicans, while fencing with one another in election campaigns,
     would now join in subjecting working people all over the country
     to ruthless corporate power, how the United States army would be
     used to smash the great railroad strikes of 1877.

     These were the facts of race and class and Western expansion
     concealed behind the disputed election of 1877. The pretense in
     disputed elections is that the great conflict is between the two
     major parties. The reality is that there is an unannounced war
     between those parties and large numbers of Americans who are
     represented by neither party.

     The ferocity of the contest for the presidency in the current
     election conceals the agreement between both parties on
     fundamentals. Their heated disagreement is about who will preside
     over maintaining the status quo. Whoever wins, there may be
     skirmishes between the major parties, but no monumental battles,
     despite the inflated rhetoric of the campaign. The evidence for
     this statement lies in eight years of the Clinton-Gore
     administration, whose major legislative accomplishments were part
     of the Republican agenda.

     Both Gore and Bush have been in agreement on the continued
     corporate control of the economy. Neither has had a plan for free
     national health care, for extensive low-cost housing, for dramatic
     changes in environmental controls, for a minimum income for all
     Americans, for a truly progressive income tax to diminish the huge
     gap between rich and poor. Both have supported the death penalty
     and the growth of prisons. Both believe in a large military
     establishment, in land mines and nuclear weapons and the cruel use
     of sanctions against the people of Cuba and Iraq. Both supported
     the wars against Panama, Iraq, and Yugoslavia.

     Perhaps when the furore dies down over who really won the election,
     when the tennis match is over and we get over the disappointment
     that our guy (is he really our guy?) didn't win, we will finally
     break the hypnotic spell of the game and look around. We may then
     think about whether the ship is going down and if there are enough
     lifeboats, and what should we do about all that.

     This is not the Titanic. With us, there is still time to change.