Our election process is a pathetic laughing stock!
If there was any doubt about that before the current candidates declared, including Donald Trump, that should be long gone now.
There should be little or no doubt that research done by people like James Carville, Frank Luntz and Carl Rove, among many other political strategists, is designed to enable politicians to manipulate voters more effectively instead of actually addressing their concerns; but first it should be made clear what this system is not.
It is not making any attempt to enable the public to participate in the democratic process by providing them with the information they need to make important decisions.
In a Democracy the people control the government and if we do this through a representative Democracy, which we supposedly have, then we elect representatives to do the will of the people and they're accountable to the public.
In order for this to work properly the people have to have reasonable control over the election process and we have to have a media that reports the most important issues. The media should also report on all the candidates that address the issues that concern the public not just those that are bribed through thinly disguised campaign contributions.
A real democracy would have a system that enabled the voters to participate in the interview process of people who are asking voters for a job to represent them. Voters should have an opportunity to ask about the most important issues to them and they should be able to influence the high profile discussion about issues. Applicants, often called candidates should be required to attend interviews controlled by voters if they want to be taken seriously for the job.
If a job applicant for any other job told the people he was asking for a job that he should be able to control the interview process, perhaps with the help of a consolidated media controlled by a relatively small percentage of the public with a conflict of interest, there is no way he would get the job; yet this is exactly how were expected to elect our political representatives.
Few if any of the necessities of Democracy happen in our current system nor is there any attempt by those in power to educate the public and let them know that it is their job to participate in the interview process to look out for their own best interests. No one is trying to remind people that they're supposed to hire a candidate that is actually capable of doing a good job, instead of representing campaign contributors regardless of what the majority wants.
You might think this would go without saying; but when the public is constantly inundated with appeals to emotions and enormous amounts of propaganda without any rational educational information, unless they get it from alternative media outlets then it can be easily forgotten and the lies repeated over and over again begin to seem like the truth.
Also contrary to what the media has been saying the leading establishment candidate, for now at least, is Donald Trump.
The media has been saying that the reason why so many voters like him is because he isn't part of the establishment and they think he speaks his mind instead of consulting with the polls. They repeat this over and over again.
Just in case anyone hasn't noticed this is part of the standard operating procedure for introducing new establishment candidates. First the media gives them enormous amounts of air time so they can say "I'm not a politician;" then if they get elected they start acting like politicians, and cut deals with the establishment.
The ones who really aren't establishment candidates can easily be recognized, assuming you hear about them through alternative media outlets, because their not getting any coverage from the establishment. If there is an exception it might might be someone like Bernie Sanders who gets an enormous amount of grass roots support so eventually the media feels they have to pay at least a token amount of coverage to him. Recently Rachel Maddow implied he has received enormous amounts of coverage from the media in her "Tales of the tape" show; but she almost certainly had to search for the few rare clips they did of him and failed to mention that real establishment candidates get ten times as much coverage and don't have to wait years to get it.
Donald Trump clearly has an enormous amount of support from the commercial media for one reason or another and that is why he's doing so well in the polls, assuming they're accurate, which I doubt. His own former aid raised doubts about what he called unscientific polls that Trump was citing from the traditional media, shortly after resigning or being fired. This is almost certainly accurate and it is probably much more difficult to take statistically representative polls now with modern technology since many people use them to avoid unwanted calls, including pollsters, so most polls don't target a representative portion of the public.
The obsessive focus on polls is some of the strongest evidence that this is a research project to study how to manipulate voters in the most effective way possible. The people running the media are constantly taking polls and talking to what they call focus groups to find out what they think in response to one candidate or another and their ads; and the candidates also do their own polling and focus groups. They use these polls and focus group to find out how to improve their messages so they can manipulate voters and then once they get in office they do what their campaign contributors want.
They have mentioned repeatedly that Donald Trump has the most money because he's a billionaire and has even said he would be willing to spend a billion dollars on the campaign; however ad buys are often the biggest expense in any campaign and he isn't the leading buyer of ads in the New England area, especially New Hampshire, which overlaps Massachusetts and Maine media. John Kasich was the first person to buy a large amount of ads, followed by George Pataki, Chris Christies, Ben Carson, Lindsey Graham, Rand Paul and perhaps a couple other candidate; however Trump has bought few if any ads that I know of. The media is providing him all the coverage he needs to get his message across; why should he bother buying ads?
This provides a perfect opportunity for someone to study how much coverage the media provides and compare it to how those candidates rise of fall in the polls as the coverage changes, assuming they can sort out the polls with the least flaws. It is virtually guaranteed that some of these political researchers are doing just that so they can understand how to more effectively manipulate the public. It is also possible that media researchers like Ben Badakian, Robert McChesney and other academics that have tried to inform the public about how the system is being rigged; however they're less likely to have the resources to do this research and they might also ahve to deal with copyright laws making it harder to do it without permission.
The media has records of all their own coverage so if they want to they can do their own research without worrying about permission but a non-government organization would either have to ask permission or tape them all to do a thorough study. If this were done then the public would know better about how the system is rigged, or at least those that seek out alternative media would since the mainstream media wouldn't expose themselves.
If this isn't part of a research project what is it?
This has become so absurd that even the people controlling it admit that the system is broken but they do nothing to change it; instead they keep getting even bolder and more clownish.
Donald Trump has even repeatedly confessed to bribery and no one is doing anything about it or claiming that he should be disqualified along with the people he bribed, some of whom he is running against, including Republican's and Hillary as well.
During the first debate Brett Baier said, "You explained away those donations saying you did that to get business-related favors. And you said recently, quote, 'When you give, they do whatever the hell you want them to do.'” And Donald Trump responded, "You’d better believe it." (Trump’s Triumph: Billionaire Blowhard Exposes Fake Political System 08/07/2015)
If that isn't a confession to bribery what is it?
Why hasn't there been any discussion of prosecuting him or the clowns that he's been bribing?
The segment just before it was one of the rare occasions that they actually mentioned Single Payer health care but they didn't actually discuss how it works and how it could save an enormous amount of money for the public, except for a brief comment from Trump where he says it works in Canada and Scotland, but caves and says he isn't for it here anymore.
This is odd for someone who is not afraid to speak his mind. Instead of explaining to the public that a Single Payer Health Care system would eliminate an enormous amount of corporate expenses and profits that is sending prices through the roof he agrees that he wouldn't support it which contradicts his claims that he will fix the system.
There are plenty of candidates who are much more qualified than the ones presented by the commercial media and there would be even more if they thought they would be treated fairly but the vast majority of the public never hears from them; however the only ones that the media does cover are ones that are involved in enormous scandals often being investigated for one of them or another or related to members of the ruling party.
The media has been trying to rig the nomination for years for Hillary be declaring that she is the front runner even though she doesn't seem to have much if any grass roots support. This is designed to ensure that if people think she's the front runner they're more likely to support her.
They've been studying this tactic for decades, and it has been very successful, to a point; however the reason there are so many people frustrated with the system is because they're doing this.
By giving Trump an enormous amount of attention they're making him seem even more absurd than traditional candidates, at least to some people; but a surprising number of people might actually take him seriously, although he will almost certainly be stopped by the same media establishment that propped him up.They can also make him seem more absurd than the media pundits; however if people think it through it isn't hard to realize that the media helped create his popularity by giving him so much coverage while refusing to provide any coverage for real grassroots candidates that are much more rational but don't collect bribes thinly disguised as campaign contributions.
This could enable them to try to make the candidates that they consider "non-establishment" appear like nutcases; without acknowledging that some of the real non-establishment candidates are much better than the ones they cover.
It is no longer an exaggeration to say that the presidential campaign has turned into a so-called reality TV show as bad as Jerry Springer if not worse. They might not have physical brawls on stage with the candidates, at least not yet, but their antics are worse since they keep the public distracted and avoid addressing the most important issues.
I wouldn't be surprised if many people In Europe are laughing their asses off watching the American political system; however people in the third world watching it might be much more likely to be horrified, since the United States has a bad habit of invading them based on lies and they know it, even if we can't get good news here from the establishment media.
Unless people at the grassroots level recognize this and stop settling for candidates covered by the media for most if not all offices, including the presidential race, then the establishment will continue studying how to manipulate the public into voting for one candidate or another and the candidate that has the best advisers and their campaign contributes will win the chance to rig the system in their favor while buying up enormous amounts of propaganda to appease the public, instead of addressing their issues.
If enough people support the pseudo-populist campaign for Donald trump, which I doubt then the political establishment will have one more demagogue to do their will, at least to a point and they can study his tactics so that they can arrange other candidates to use them again until the public falls for it one time too many.
If there is a short term solution to this it will probably involve either electing Bernie Sanders or another grass roots candidate like Jill Stein, but she would have to get more coverage. If they have to use dirty tricks to smear Sanders or steal the nomination from him then it could provide an opportunity to shift his grassroots support to Jill Stein or another rational candidate.
But even if we do somehow manage to elect a real grassroots candidate despite the overwhelming propaganda advantage from the commercial media, we'll still have to have an enormous amount of grass roots pressure on the rest of the government, hopefully electing more grass roots candidates to congress. Bernie Sanders has even acknowledge that, saying that no matter who wins the presidency, he won't be able to implement reform without a large grassroots organization, not to be confused with the AstroTurf provided for most establishment candidates including Hillary, who is as clownish as the Republicans.
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