Posted by
Curt Day on Friday, October 09, 2009 8:28:37 PM
Perhaps nothings gives us a better picture of how both our media and two political parties try to control our views of the issues of the day than football. Here, I am specifically referring to the placekicker as he attempts to make an extra point or field goal. If his kick is long enough, then the only kicks that count are those that go through the uprights. Kicks that are either wide left or wide right are no good. And so we get a glimpse at how the media and our 2 political parties are coaching us as to what views to have and what views to bypass.
An example of the narrow range of choices we are given can be seen in the most recent presidential campaign as the candidates addressed the Iraq War. The view of the the "antiwar" candidate Barack Obama challenged the validity of the invasion and war by using business criteria. He claimed, and rightfully so, that the war was neither an efficient use of American resources nor was it effective in our fight against global terrorism. Thus, Barack claimed that invading Iraq was a foolish decision. Meanwhile, his opponent had only challenged the way in which our country was fighting the war. According to McCain, the invasion was a wise and even necessary choice, he felt that we just needed to change how we were fighting the war. So we the people were offered a very narrow range of options by our viable Presidential candidates regarding the war. Views that were waved off as being wide left were those that challenged both the morality and legality of the war while conservative isolationist views were counted as being wide right. And those who held such views, Democrats Kucinich and Gravel and Republican Paul, were marginalized during their parties' primaries. Nader's views were largely ignored because he has, in retribution for 2000, been considered to be irrelevant while even non-Presidential candidate, Reverend Wright, received scorn from much of the liberal media. With both Presidential candidates and the media placing the goal post in front of us, we were herded into accepting legitimate views. By coincidence, these views greatly benefited those who profit from the war.
Unfortunately for us, similar narrow ranges of solutions, with the same beneficiaries, are being presented to the American people on other issues as well. Our latest national effort to kick the ball through the uprights can be seen in our national debate on health care where the most radical option being presented to us is one that funnels more and more potential customers to the ones causing us so much trouble, our health care insurers. Those opposing President Obama's Health Care Plan want fewer regulations and even more reliance on the free market than what we currently have. Those who advocate a single payer system paid for by the government are said to be wide left and so they don't count even by their own political party. The putting of the free market and private sector on a pedestal by both sides, though the size of the pedestals are different, is despite the fact that both have seriously failed. Not only does America pay more money for health care per capita, a recent study conducted by researchers at Harvard Medical School reported that approximately 45,000 Americans died in the last year because of either a lack of insurance or care. Simple arithmetic will tell us that 45,000 is over 15 times the number of people who were brutally murdered on September 11. But will these 45,000 people matter to us when a system that many of us depend on, rather than foreigners, is what killed them? Do those who are adequately covered think that being upset at the number who died here be interpreted as biting that hand that feeds us?
A few observations can be made regarding what has become a public compulsion to kick the ball through the uprights on the important issues of the day. First, there is the same beneficiary to what has been deemed as an acceptable set of views. That beneficiary is business. That our wars benefit the corporate world has been documented as far back as the early 20th century by people like Helen Keller and former Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler. Keller noted how war benefits business when, in 1916, she spoke out against the US entering WWI. She noted that the motive for all of our previous wars was to benefit business. Smedley Butler said the same regarding the action he saw while in the Marines. Historian William Blum has noted that since WWII, we have participated in the attempted regime change at least 50 times. Some of these regime changes involved replacing democracies with dictatorships. In many cases, the motive for our actions was to protect vital American interests (a.k.a., business interests).
With regards to health care, it is not difficult to see that regardless of which view wins out in the health care debate, business wins again. Even with health insurance companies' worst case scenario known as Obama's Health Care reforms, a significant number of new customers are being generated for health insurance companies.
Second, we should also note that there is an ever increasing conflict of interest for those who shape our views of the world. The media faces this conflict because there is an ever decreasing number of corporations that owns them and this limited ownership puts the control of media into the hands of a few whose future depends on how they are perceived. In addition, corporations are often our political leaders' leading campaign contributors. Thus our political leaders face a conflict of interest just in trying to meet the demands of their job. On the one hand, they are charged with representing the people. But on the other hand, these leaders must receive corporate donations to run for reelection. The result of business's funding our politicians is that these politicians return the favor by passing legislation that requires the purchase of goods and services provided by their benefactors.
Third, if we put the first two observations together, we see that business-state coops have formed. The purpose of these coops is to ensure each other's existence. Business ensures the election of desirable candidates both through contributions and through control of what the American public perceives as acceptable. In return, these candidates, once elected ensure the suvivability and even success of their favorite business by directing more customers their way through domestic and foreign policies. In the meantime, the American public has been relegated from being the primary interest of our government to that of a hurdle that must be cleared to continue the race.
Fourth, while we the people could show righteous indignation at that the business-state coop that works to our detriment, we need to reserve some loathing for ourselves as well. We enable this partnership by settling for a lazy bipolar democracy. We can call our democracy lazy because our only participation in the democratic process occurs every x number of years as we knowingly elect officials who strongly support and participate in the previously mentioned business-state coop. We can call our democracy bipolar because, in most cases, we have allowed ourselves to be placed in a game of pong between our two major political parties. All to often, the differences between our two political parties consist of deciding which set of corporate interests will benefit from the election and/or which party will receive the honor of serving the corporate world.
Our last election, as most past elections have, offered to bring change to America. But, for the most part, what we have seen thus far is business as usual. And perhaps, we should ask ourselves how in the world can we really expect change from our political system when we
refuse to change ourselves by falling into the same trap of voting for one of two parties. For as long as we the people settle for the same old same old kind of lazy bipolar democracy, how can we possibly expect change? Though we have some time to wait until the next election to vote someone new in, we can change the lazy component of our democracy right now. The question becomes, do we want change? If so, perhaps the change has to start with us.