Ever wonder why the left & the right can agree on so much?

[jpgray]

I present to you a few simple figures:

-Of the world's 100 largest economic entities, 51 are corporations.

-Campaign cost is growing exponentially. In the seventies, presidential campaigns were run on ~$12 million. Now they go for half a billion or more. Senate and House races are also prohibitively expensive, having progressed from thousands of dollars to several millions.

I also provide you with this chart of mine. It is expertly drawn, but not to scale:

Wealth and Industry

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$$$$$
Contributions
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VVV

Political Candidates

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$$$$$
$$$$$
$$$$$
$$$$$
$$$$$
$$$$$
$$$$$
Favorable Policy
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VVV

Wealth and Industry

[ThomCat]

1. Yes, no matter what party you are in, nobody can't get elected

President unless the Walton family and one or two of the other wealthiest families decide that THEY want that person to become president.

It is that well known Money Primary that weeds down the candidates to the few they like before we ever get a chance to vote. So no matter who we vote for, they know they have already won.

Everything we see is posturing, public relations and spin created and designed by image professionals to make each politician look different, and most importantly, to make them look independent so that they don't look like they are already bought and paid for.

Nobody would vote for someone who already had a clear reputation as being owned and controlled. The PR firms have to convince us that our candidate is different. Our candidate is somehow free of all that influence and control from all that big money.

But it is the big money that pays for all the PR firms and image professionals that convince us that there isn't any big money there. What a nice circle that creates.

We vote for our candidate, thinking we have someone who will represent us, when in fact all we have is another President who represents them. Their lobbyists will be able to walk in and out of Oval Office and staffer's offices every day. Their lobbyist's calls will be answered right away. They will be able to write their own legislation, and guaranteed they get huge returns on their investment that way.

We will just get constant spam asking us to donate more money to the party, to every candidate, every race, and every PAC. But if we get anything else out of it, it's purely accidental. Nobody is there to serve us they way they are there to serve each and every one of those big spenders.

[napi21]

2. I agee with most of your post, but I believe there are still

a ki=ot of people who would change their feelings if the facts were presented to them in a stated manner like Bernie Sanders does. It's noit the liberals who need to be educated, it's the independts & moderate RWers that they are wrong in their thinking.

[dreamnightwind]

5. Yes

I am not sure where the OP is coming from, but your post makes sense to me.

I think we could get a lot done by shelving or at least back-burnering some of our social liberal agenda and finding common cause with many similarly disaffected people in the middle and the right (let's face it, except for the privileged elite, we're all getting screwed) on a people verse multi-national corporate axis.

Most people that vote GOP do so against their own interest. Take away the perceived threat to god, guns, etc., and we could join together to reign in the corporations that are ripping us all off.

The sooner we do this the better. Fight them on the social issues, but keep it separate, join with them against the beasts of no nation. There's no other way to win this fight, the deck is stacked in favor of the PTB and we need all the help we can get.

[ThomCat]

11. Putting those issues on the back burner as you put it

means abandoning people. It means allowing racism as something acceptable, and no longer fight against it, because that fight is now "on the back burner."

It means giving up on women's right to choice, because fighting to protect choice is no longer a priority, and that too has been put on a back burner.

It means giving up on every program that helps poor children, poor families, poor elderly people, unemployed people, poor people who become sick or injured, homeless people, and people struggling to pay for a better education to improve their lives, because of those fights and issues have been put on the back burner too.

Almost everything except the military, police, and corporate welfare would be abandoned. Those are the common ground that both parties always agree upon.

Is that really what you want?

I don't know what you want, but that is exactly what I, and many others here, definitely do not want. That vision is what I would fight against! I'm a liberal because I believe in liberal issues and because I refuse to sacrifice them.

Bipartisanship is a myth, and I refuse to sacrifice real issues of real value to try to pursue some myth of bipartisan agreement that will never happen, and will certainly create anything of lasting or great value worth the abandonment of our liberal issues.

Our nation has been dragged to the right, too far to the right, and has suffered for it. The very last thing we need now is put the left on the back burner and compromise even more with the right. We need to do everything we possibly can to drag this nation back to the left again!

[Hannah Bell]

4. that's why i stopped donating. no voice, no money from me. not that it matters to them.

[Democracyinkind]

8. Which is laudable in a country in which a dollar has the potential to change more things than a vote

We should all vote with our wallets, since that's the only decision we can mae that our overlords really care about.

[hfojvt]

6. right now I am down on Obama

but I don't think it is quite that bad. We wouldn't have gotten the Bush tax cuts if Gore had been sworn in, nor would we likely have gotten the Iraq war (and possibly not even 9-11). We wouldn't have gotten Roberts or Alito on the Supreme Court if Kerry had been elected. Granted, we wouldn't have gotten Mumia or Michael Moore either, but we'd have gotten much better people than Alito or Roberts. And I am sure there are lots of other differences. We didn't get a minimum wage increase, the Matthew Shepard Act nor the Lilly Ledbetter Act until Democrats took over Congress and the White House. Same thing with an expansion of SCHIP.

[dreamnightwind]

7. President Lieberman

I fear inconvenient Al would have had an accident and President Lieberman would have been every bit the hawk that W was.

[Democracyinkind]

9. Either that or...

... President Gore would have had to deal with 9/11. Somehow I can't imagine Gore resisting the onslaught of nationalism and barbarism that swept this country after 9/11. Not that I'm saying that he would have pulled an Iraq but honestly I think many people hold great illusions about how Gore would have reacted... I dunno... Can't say that the contrafactual tale wherein Gore would have gotten the presidency is necessarily better than what we actually got. But one never knows.

[saras]

3. Very good

Clear, succinct, precise answer to those whiners who always say "if you don't like the candidates, why don't you run then?"

[kgnu_fan]

10. "True "left" has been pushed aside in Washington