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09-01-2008, 05:05 PM
|  | Corporate Watchdog | | Join Date: Jun 2008 Location: The Valley of the Sun
Posts: 682
Rep Power: 1 | | | Politics Of Avoidance
The “politics of avoidance” is receiving a great deal of media attention during this period of national political conventions. Unfortunately, the newspapers and television programs do not use the phrase: “the politics of avoidance.” Together with John McCain and Barack Obama, members of the press have become used to living the “politics of avoidance” every day by not asking, talking or reporting about the essential core of what politics should be about—power!
Power! Who has it? Who doesn’t have it? Who should have less of it and who should have more of it? What does concentrated power do to the everyday life of the people as workers, patients, consumers, taxpayers, voters, shareholders and citizens?
Just use these and other power yardsticks and watch how thin and how superficial daily political reporting, even by the best of the press, can become.
In the August 25th edition of The New York Times, a long analysis by Michael Powell is titled “Tracing the Disparate Threads in Obama’s Political Philosophy.” There was no mention of corporate misbehavior—as in corporate crime, corporate corruption, corporate governance, corporate accountability, or cracking down on corporate abuses from the contractors in Iraq to the speculators on Wall Street.
Bear in mind, The New York Times and other newspapers often report about corporate crime and misdeeds. Sometimes reporters do such a good job that they win the Pulitzer and other prizes. Yet, strangely, these reporters do not carry over the reporting of their own paper to their questioning of the Presidential candidates.
Since there is no challenging of the candidates by the reporters about what the candidates would do about this continual corporate crime wave and the miniscule prosecution budgets, or the limited enforcement and regulatory efforts, the candidates can remain mum, very mum.
In Powell’s article, Obama’s economics are described as “a redistributionist liberalism but [he] is skeptical of too much government tinkering. His most influential advisors hail from the University of Chicago, a bastion of free-marketers.” This is Obama’s way of saying to corporations that he is a safe bet not to trouble them with his earlier experience as a community organizer in neighborhoods that were up against a variety of corporate predators, including redlining banks and insurance companies, supermarkets that dumped contaminated food products, landlords who rented apartments with asbestos and lead contaminations, CEOs who close plants and established pay-day lending sharks.
The same day—August 25, 2008, the Wall Street Journal had an entire special section devoted to “Debating the Issues” described as ‘Health Care,’ ‘Energy & the Environment,’ ‘The Economy’ and ‘Trade.’ The Health Care headline is sub-titled: “How Involved Should the Government Be?
Once again the same paradox. The Journal prints some of the best exposes of corporate greed and power in all of mainstream journalism. Yet one strains to detect any of this power analysis when it comes to the paper’s political coverage or campaign features.
Conventional political journalism is all about palliative descriptions, the question of governmental involvement primarily as an issuer of dollars to the recipients in presumed need. It is about symptoms, rarely about causes, and even less often about the need to curb or displace corporate control.
About 75 percent of the American people believe corporations have too much control over their lives. Yet reducing such control or holding it accountable is not part of electoral or political discourse.
A majority of the American people, and fifty-nine percent of physicians in an April poll, favor single payer or full government health insurance (as in full Medicare for all) with free choice of hospital and doctor, private delivery of care, and far less administrative costs and billing fraud. The health insurance companies would be displaced.
John McCain and Barack Obama have never had to debate this majoritarian preference along with their piecemeal, concessionary heathcare plans that please these same insurance companies.
The pollsters also reflect, embody and are saturated with this politics of avoidance. They do not poll the various impacts of concentrated corporate power on the various roles people play in the workplace, marketplace, and their communities.
The New York Times/CBS News Poll of delegates to the Democratic Convention asked about the condition of the economy, health care, going into Iraq, energy, abortion and gay marriage.
Not one question was asked about the most dominant power over government, elections, politics, the federal operating budget, and our political economy.
Whoever asks the questions, whoever controls the yardsticks controls the agenda of public dialogue. The politics of avoidance is designed to avoid the politics of corporate power.
Presidents Jefferson, Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt and leading Supreme Court Justices, Louis Brandeis and William Douglas understood and warned about the menace of unbridled corporate domination.
Today multinational corporations are more powerful then ever, especially over workers and the government. And politics is more about avoiding this central topic than ever before. Discussions about corporate power are off the table.
So much for the Preamble to our Constitution which reads, “We the People…” 
__________________
"Some men see things as they are and say 'why'; I dream things that never were and say "why not?" -Robert F. Kennedy
"Too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of other human beings" - Robert F. Kennedy
"But we can perhaps remember, even if only for a time, that those who live with us, are our brothers. They share with us the same short moment of life. They seek as we do, nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and happiness. Winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can. Surely this bond of common fate, this bond of common goal; can begin to teach us something. Surely we can learn, at least to look at those around us, as fellow men. Surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us, and to become in our own heart's brothers and countrymen once again." - Robert F. Kennedy |
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09-01-2008, 05:41 PM
|  | Registered User | | Join Date: May 2004 Location: Austin, Tx
Posts: 25,191
Rep Power: 79 | | Quote:
Originally Posted by greenpartyaz  The “politics of avoidance” is receiving a great deal of media attention during this period of national political conventions. Unfortunately, the newspapers and television programs do not use the phrase: “the politics of avoidance.” Together with John McCain and Barack Obama, members of the press have become used to living the “politics of avoidance” every day by not asking, talking or reporting about the essential core of what politics should be about—power!
Power! Who has it? Who doesn’t have it? Who should have less of it and who should have more of it? What does concentrated power do to the everyday life of the people as workers, patients, consumers, taxpayers, voters, shareholders and citizens?
Just use these and other power yardsticks and watch how thin and how superficial daily political reporting, even by the best of the press, can become.
In the August 25th edition of The New York Times, a long analysis by Michael Powell is titled “Tracing the Disparate Threads in Obama’s Political Philosophy.” There was no mention of corporate misbehavior—as in corporate crime, corporate corruption, corporate governance, corporate accountability, or cracking down on corporate abuses from the contractors in Iraq to the speculators on Wall Street.
Bear in mind, The New York Times and other newspapers often report about corporate crime and misdeeds. Sometimes reporters do such a good job that they win the Pulitzer and other prizes. Yet, strangely, these reporters do not carry over the reporting of their own paper to their questioning of the Presidential candidates.
Since there is no challenging of the candidates by the reporters about what the candidates would do about this continual corporate crime wave and the miniscule prosecution budgets, or the limited enforcement and regulatory efforts, the candidates can remain mum, very mum.
In Powell’s article, Obama’s economics are described as “a redistributionist liberalism but [he] is skeptical of too much government tinkering. His most influential advisors hail from the University of Chicago, a bastion of free-marketers.” This is Obama’s way of saying to corporations that he is a safe bet not to trouble them with his earlier experience as a community organizer in neighborhoods that were up against a variety of corporate predators, including redlining banks and insurance companies, supermarkets that dumped contaminated food products, landlords who rented apartments with asbestos and lead contaminations, CEOs who close plants and established pay-day lending sharks.
The same day—August 25, 2008, the Wall Street Journal had an entire special section devoted to “Debating the Issues” described as ‘Health Care,’ ‘Energy & the Environment,’ ‘The Economy’ and ‘Trade.’ The Health Care headline is sub-titled: “How Involved Should the Government Be?
Once again the same paradox. The Journal prints some of the best exposes of corporate greed and power in all of mainstream journalism. Yet one strains to detect any of this power analysis when it comes to the paper’s political coverage or campaign features.
Conventional political journalism is all about palliative descriptions, the question of governmental involvement primarily as an issuer of dollars to the recipients in presumed need. It is about symptoms, rarely about causes, and even less often about the need to curb or displace corporate control.
About 75 percent of the American people believe corporations have too much control over their lives. Yet reducing such control or holding it accountable is not part of electoral or political discourse.
A majority of the American people, and fifty-nine percent of physicians in an April poll, favor single payer or full government health insurance (as in full Medicare for all) with free choice of hospital and doctor, private delivery of care, and far less administrative costs and billing fraud. The health insurance companies would be displaced.
John McCain and Barack Obama have never had to debate this majoritarian preference along with their piecemeal, concessionary heathcare plans that please these same insurance companies.
The pollsters also reflect, embody and are saturated with this politics of avoidance. They do not poll the various impacts of concentrated corporate power on the various roles people play in the workplace, marketplace, and their communities.
The New York Times/CBS News Poll of delegates to the Democratic Convention asked about the condition of the economy, health care, going into Iraq, energy, abortion and gay marriage.
Not one question was asked about the most dominant power over government, elections, politics, the federal operating budget, and our political economy.
Whoever asks the questions, whoever controls the yardsticks controls the agenda of public dialogue. The politics of avoidance is designed to avoid the politics of corporate power.
Presidents Jefferson, Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt and leading Supreme Court Justices, Louis Brandeis and William Douglas understood and warned about the menace of unbridled corporate domination.
Today multinational corporations are more powerful then ever, especially over workers and the government. And politics is more about avoiding this central topic than ever before. Discussions about corporate power are off the table.
So much for the Preamble to our Constitution which reads, “We the People…” | Who owns, runs, supplies and buys from these corporations ? Chipmunks ? 
__________________
"Some men eventually stumble over the truth but they usually pick themselves up and walk on as if nothing ever happened."
-Winston Churchill
"But though there is no difference in this respect between the best demagogue and the worst, both of them having to present their cases equally in terms of melodrama, there is all the difference in the world between the statesman who is humbugging the people into allowing him to do the will of God, in whatever disguise it may come to him, and one who is humbugging them into furthering his personal ambition and the commercial interests of the plutocrats who own the newspapers and support him on reciprocal terms."
-George Bernard Shaw |
09-01-2008, 06:02 PM
| | Yes we can! | | Join Date: May 2008 Location: Va. Beach, Va.
Posts: 5,224
Rep Power: 14 | | Quote:
Originally Posted by greenpartyaz The “politics of avoidance” is receiving a great deal of media attention during this period of national political conventions. Unfortunately, the newspapers and television programs do not use the phrase: “the politics of avoidance.” Together with John McCain and Barack Obama, members of the press have become used to living the “politics of avoidance” every day by not asking, talking or reporting about the essential core of what politics should be about—power!
Power! Who has it? Who doesn’t have it? Who should have less of it and who should have more of it? What does concentrated power do to the everyday life of the people as workers, patients, consumers, taxpayers, voters, shareholders and citizens?
Just use these and other power yardsticks and watch how thin and how superficial daily political reporting, even by the best of the press, can become.
In the August 25th edition of The New York Times, a long analysis by Michael Powell is titled “Tracing the Disparate Threads in Obama’s Political Philosophy.” There was no mention of corporate misbehavior—as in corporate crime, corporate corruption, corporate governance, corporate accountability, or cracking down on corporate abuses from the contractors in Iraq to the speculators on Wall Street.
Bear in mind, The New York Times and other newspapers often report about corporate crime and misdeeds. Sometimes reporters do such a good job that they win the Pulitzer and other prizes. Yet, strangely, these reporters do not carry over the reporting of their own paper to their questioning of the Presidential candidates.
Since there is no challenging of the candidates by the reporters about what the candidates would do about this continual corporate crime wave and the miniscule prosecution budgets, or the limited enforcement and regulatory efforts, the candidates can remain mum, very mum.
In Powell’s article, Obama’s economics are described as “a redistributionist liberalism but [he] is skeptical of too much government tinkering. His most influential advisors hail from the University of Chicago, a bastion of free-marketers.” This is Obama’s way of saying to corporations that he is a safe bet not to trouble them with his earlier experience as a community organizer in neighborhoods that were up against a variety of corporate predators, including redlining banks and insurance companies, supermarkets that dumped contaminated food products, landlords who rented apartments with asbestos and lead contaminations, CEOs who close plants and established pay-day lending sharks.
The same day—August 25, 2008, the Wall Street Journal had an entire special section devoted to “Debating the Issues” described as ‘Health Care,’ ‘Energy & the Environment,’ ‘The Economy’ and ‘Trade.’ The Health Care headline is sub-titled: “How Involved Should the Government Be?
Once again the same paradox. The Journal prints some of the best exposes of corporate greed and power in all of mainstream journalism. Yet one strains to detect any of this power analysis when it comes to the paper’s political coverage or campaign features.
Conventional political journalism is all about palliative descriptions, the question of governmental involvement primarily as an issuer of dollars to the recipients in presumed need. It is about symptoms, rarely about causes, and even less often about the need to curb or displace corporate control.
About 75 percent of the American people believe corporations have too much control over their lives. Yet reducing such control or holding it accountable is not part of electoral or political discourse.
A majority of the American people, and fifty-nine percent of physicians in an April poll, favor single payer or full government health insurance (as in full Medicare for all) with free choice of hospital and doctor, private delivery of care, and far less administrative costs and billing fraud. The health insurance companies would be displaced.
John McCain and Barack Obama have never had to debate this majoritarian preference along with their piecemeal, concessionary heathcare plans that please these same insurance companies.
The pollsters also reflect, embody and are saturated with this politics of avoidance. They do not poll the various impacts of concentrated corporate power on the various roles people play in the workplace, marketplace, and their communities.
The New York Times/CBS News Poll of delegates to the Democratic Convention asked about the condition of the economy, health care, going into Iraq, energy, abortion and gay marriage.
Not one question was asked about the most dominant power over government, elections, politics, the federal operating budget, and our political economy.
Whoever asks the questions, whoever controls the yardsticks controls the agenda of public dialogue. The politics of avoidance is designed to avoid the politics of corporate power.
Presidents Jefferson, Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt and leading Supreme Court Justices, Louis Brandeis and William Douglas understood and warned about the menace of unbridled corporate domination.
Today multinational corporations are more powerful then ever, especially over workers and the government. And politics is more about avoiding this central topic than ever before. Discussions about corporate power are off the table.
So much for the Preamble to our Constitution which reads, “We the People…” | Nice post.
Corporate lobbyists control our government. That is why our energy, drugs, and healthcare are so expensive.  |
09-01-2008, 06:03 PM
| | Registered User | | Join Date: May 2004 Location: Austin, Tx
Posts: 25,191
Rep Power: 79 | | Quote:
Originally Posted by Kirk Nice post.
Corporate lobbyists control our government. That is why our energy, drugs, and healthcare is so expensive. | those are people too, idiot.
__________________
"Some men eventually stumble over the truth but they usually pick themselves up and walk on as if nothing ever happened."
-Winston Churchill
"But though there is no difference in this respect between the best demagogue and the worst, both of them having to present their cases equally in terms of melodrama, there is all the difference in the world between the statesman who is humbugging the people into allowing him to do the will of God, in whatever disguise it may come to him, and one who is humbugging them into furthering his personal ambition and the commercial interests of the plutocrats who own the newspapers and support him on reciprocal terms."
-George Bernard Shaw |
09-01-2008, 06:23 PM
|  | Optimistically Apathetic | | Join Date: Mar 2008 Location: Fayetteville, AR
Posts: 3,335
Rep Power: 35 | | On this forum, we cite our sources: Politics of Avoidance - The Nader Page
Plagiarism is for the weak-minded.
__________________
An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind. -Mahatma Gandhi
I can't go back to yesterday - because I was a different person then. -Lewis Carroll |
09-01-2008, 07:47 PM
|  | Registered User | | Join Date: Feb 2004 Location: Philadelphia
Posts: 9,652
Rep Power: 28 | | Quote:
Originally Posted by Kirk Nice post.
Corporate lobbyists control our government. That is why our energy, drugs, and healthcare are so expensive. | This is exactly why we have to get Democrats out of Congress.
__________________
“The living of one protective principle of the gospel is better than a thousand compensatory government programs—which programs are, so often, like ‘straightening the deck chairs on the Titanic.’ ” Neal A Maxwell
“The Lord works from the inside out. The world works from the outside in. The world would take people out of the slums. Christ takes the slums out of people, and then they take themselves out of the slums. The world would mold men by changing their environment. Christ changes men, who then change their environment. The world would shape human behavior, but Christ can change human nature." -ETB |
09-01-2008, 09:21 PM
|  | Registered User | | Join Date: Jan 2008 Location: Florida
Posts: 2,534
Rep Power: 29 | | Avatar, Repubs have been in control until 2006. Since then they have had more filly busters than scandals. Blame the right people. Quote: |
those are people too, idiot.
| No, lobyists are not people really, they are economic extensions of those who want favored treatment and have the money to pay for it.
If you really don't think our lobbyist system isn't broken,  |
09-01-2008, 09:24 PM
| | Corporate Watchdog | | Join Date: Jun 2008 Location: The Valley of the Sun
Posts: 682
Rep Power: 1 | | Quote:
Originally Posted by jsanders | Don't worry we all know who it comes from except you!
__________________
"Some men see things as they are and say 'why'; I dream things that never were and say "why not?" -Robert F. Kennedy
"Too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of other human beings" - Robert F. Kennedy
"But we can perhaps remember, even if only for a time, that those who live with us, are our brothers. They share with us the same short moment of life. They seek as we do, nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and happiness. Winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can. Surely this bond of common fate, this bond of common goal; can begin to teach us something. Surely we can learn, at least to look at those around us, as fellow men. Surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us, and to become in our own heart's brothers and countrymen once again." - Robert F. Kennedy |
09-01-2008, 09:27 PM
| | Corporate Watchdog | | Join Date: Jun 2008 Location: The Valley of the Sun
Posts: 682
Rep Power: 1 | | Quote:
Originally Posted by Avatar4321 This is exactly why we have to get Democrats out of Congress. | You need to educate yourself a little better before you go spouting off stuff in a political forum. You look pretty foolish saying that when, Republican's have a lot more lobbyists in their corner than the Democrats. Personally I don't like either of them, so I feel the need to rip into both of them. But before you post, please do yourself a favor for you credibility's sake, and study before you speak!
__________________
"Some men see things as they are and say 'why'; I dream things that never were and say "why not?" -Robert F. Kennedy
"Too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of other human beings" - Robert F. Kennedy
"But we can perhaps remember, even if only for a time, that those who live with us, are our brothers. They share with us the same short moment of life. They seek as we do, nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and happiness. Winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can. Surely this bond of common fate, this bond of common goal; can begin to teach us something. Surely we can learn, at least to look at those around us, as fellow men. Surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us, and to become in our own heart's brothers and countrymen once again." - Robert F. Kennedy |
09-01-2008, 10:10 PM
|  | Disgusted with America | | Join Date: May 2004 Location: Cheese Country
Posts: 6,476
Rep Power: 25 | | Quote:
Originally Posted by jsanders | It can also get you banned...
__________________  |
09-01-2008, 10:13 PM
| | Disgusted with America | | Join Date: May 2004 Location: Cheese Country
Posts: 6,476
Rep Power: 25 | | Quote:
Originally Posted by greenpartyaz You need to educate yourself a little better before you go spouting off stuff in a political forum. You look pretty foolish saying that when, Republican's have a lot more lobbyists in their corner than the Democrats. Personally I don't like either of them, so I feel the need to rip into both of them. But before you post, please do yourself a favor for you credibility's sake, and study before you speak! | Hey ass wad... take a look at avatars join date... take a look at mine... we've been around blogging long before your cherry ass came on the scene. The last thing avatar needs is a lecture from a jerk off like you, the guy who posts articles without links... ahem... plagiarism. Avatar is a great guy, and I'd lay odds twice as intelligent as you ever wished you were.
Get your attitude back in check skippy. Nobody needs it.
__________________
Last edited by Pale Rider; 09-01-2008 at 10:14 PM.
|
09-01-2008, 10:21 PM
|  | Rightly-Guided Caliph | | Join Date: Jan 2004 Location: Northern Virginia
Posts: 5,125
Rep Power: 33 | | Quote:
Originally Posted by greenpartyaz Power! Who has it? | American Jewry. They have successfully obliterated any semblance of immigration control, and launched a useless war in the middle east to protect Israel. Through their control of government and media, we never hear of their own power.
__________________
Does anyone think it's weird that the two biggest goals of our time are "tolerance" and "zero tolerance"? |
09-01-2008, 10:24 PM
| | Disgusted with America | | Join Date: May 2004 Location: Cheese Country
Posts: 6,476
Rep Power: 25 | | Quote:
Originally Posted by William Joyce American Jewry. They have successfully obliterated any semblance of immigration control, and launched a useless war in the middle east to protect Israel. Through their control of government and media, we never hear of their own power. | Speaking of out of control immigration, you're absolutely right brother. Did you see this video? Immigration by the numbers.
__________________ |
09-01-2008, 11:00 PM
| | Mr. Forgot-it-All | | Join Date: Jun 2008 Location: Maine
Posts: 6,572
Rep Power: 43 | | Quote:
Originally Posted by dilloduck those are people too, idiot. | EXACTLY!
That's why we know we can't trust them. People...a very unsavory lot.
On the whole, I prefer dogs. |
09-01-2008, 11:52 PM
| | Registered User | | Join Date: Apr 2008
Posts: 522
Rep Power: 20 | | Quote:
Originally Posted by editec EXACTLY!
That's why we know we can't trust them.
People...a very unsavory lot.
On the whole, I prefer dogs. | Dolphins are much more pleasent. Good thing they don't have opposable thumbs.
__________________
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