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.