How the Presidential Debates became almost useless.

At The Guardian, Glenn Greenwald refers to the work of historian George Farah:

He described how the two political parties in the 1990s joined forces to wrest control over the presidential debates away from the independent League of Women Voters, which had long resisted the parties' efforts to shield their presidential candidates from genuine surprise or challenge. Now run by the party-controlled Commission on Presidential Debates, these rituals are designed to do little more than " eliminate spontaneity" and "exclude all viable third-party voices". Citing a just-leaked 21-page "memorandum of understanding" secretly negotiated by the two campaigns to govern the rules of the debates, Farah recounted: "We have a private corporation that was created by the Republican and Democratic parties called the Commission on Presidential Debates. It seized control of the presidential debates precisely because the League was independent, precisely because this women's organization had the guts to stand up to the candidates that the major-party candidates had nominated. And instead of making public these contracts and resisting the major-party candidates' manipulations, the commission allows the candidates to negotiate these 21-page contracts that dictate all the fundamental terms of the debates."
What is the result of this behind the scenes usurpation? Greenwald explains:
Here then, within this one process of structuring the presidential debates, we have every active ingredient that typically defines, and degrades, US democracy. The two parties collude in secret. The have the same interests and goals. Everything is done to ensure that the political process is completely scripted and devoid of any spontaneity or reality. All views that reside outside the narrow confines of the two parties are rigidly excluded. Anyone who might challenge or subvert the two-party duopoly is rendered invisible.

Continue ReadingHow the Presidential Debates became almost useless.

Green Party Candidate for President Arrested for Trying to Enter Debate Venue

From Democracy Now: Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein and vice-presidential candidate Cheri Honkala were arrested Tuesday as they attempted to enter the grounds of the presidential debate site at Hofstra University. Like other third-party candidates, Stein was blocked from participating in the debate by the Commission on Presidential Debates, which is controlled by the Republican and Democratic parties. Stein and Honkala were held for eight hours, handcuffed to chairs. As she was being arrested, Stein condemned what she called "this mock debate, this mockery of democracy." I am outraged that "the debates" only invite candidates from the two financially entrenched parties. Given that this election for President is supposedly important, shouldn't we also be hearing from other candidates from other parties? Although the over-restrictive rules of the current debate system bar them from the debate, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now has given them the opportunity to weigh in on the questions asked of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.

Continue ReadingGreen Party Candidate for President Arrested for Trying to Enter Debate Venue

Not extricated from Iraq yet

You'll hear many politicians speak as though the U.S. has concluded it's war in Iraq. Not true:

The post-U.S.-withdrawal history of Iraq has had more than its share of debacles as well, most notably the collapse of the U.S. signature police-training program, a multibillion-dollar program the Iraqis said they didn't want... Meanwhile, despite the roughly $6 billion a year operating cost of the massive and heavily fortified embassy, diplomatic relations with Iraq have suffered as Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki consolidates power -- by among other things, exiling the country's vice president to Turkey and sentencing him to death. The State Department is consolidating its operations and reducing the number of people it employs in Iraq -- from 16,000 at the beginning of the year, to about 14,000 now, to less than 11,500 by the end of 2013, a State Department official told HuffPost. But because so many foreign service officers and contractors are falling back to the embassy itself, construction on the $750 million compound actually continues, in order to make room for them and maintain the embassy's self-contained infrastructure.
[Emphasis added]. The next time you are wondering why we can't afford to hire enough teachers for our public schools, consider that $6 Billion per year equates to more than $16 Million dollars per day, which (at $50,000 per teacher) is enough to hire 120,000 teachers.

Continue ReadingNot extricated from Iraq yet

Matt Taibbi excoriates the media coverage of the presidential election

Time to focus on the terrible "news coverage" of the election. Matt Taibbi nails it:

Banning poll numbers would force the media to actually cover the issues. As it stands now, the horse race is the entire story – I can think of a couple of cable networks that would have to go completely dark tomorrow, as in Dan-Rather-Dead-Fucking-Air dark, if they had to come up with even 10 seconds of news content that wasn't centered on who was winning. That's the dirtiest secret we in the media have kept from you over the years: Most of us [members of the news media] suck so badly at our jobs, and are so uninterested in delving into any polysyllabic subject, that we would literally have to put down our shovels and go home if we didn't have poll numbers we can use to terrify our audiences. . . . Mainly for grim commercial reasons, we in the media manipulate people to stay wired on hate and panic-focused on the race for every waking moment, indifferent to how much this depresses the hell out of everyone. In doing so, we rob people of their patriotism and their desire to vote.

Continue ReadingMatt Taibbi excoriates the media coverage of the presidential election

Romney’s foreign policy, and Obama’s

Glenn Greenwald's caustic article (accurately) sums up Mitt Romney's foreign policy:

[W]e're in a war for freedom against tyranny, and for justice against oppression - a war which Mitt Romney will fight in close alliance with the regimes of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. . . . [I]n light of extreme anti-American sentiment, we must drone-bomb more, kill Iranian civilians with sanctions, send more symbols of military occupation to their region, move still closer to Israel (which could only be accomplished by some sort of new surgical procedure to collectively implant us inside of them), and even more vigorously support the repressive Gulf regimes. In other words, to solve the problem of anti-American hatred in the region, we must do more and more of exactly that which - quite rationally - generates that hatred.

Here's the problem: It's almost impossible to distinguish Romney's imperialist foreign policy from that of our "Peace President," Barack Obama.

Continue ReadingRomney’s foreign policy, and Obama’s