"Politics at the Neanderthal level "- Will U.S. Election Madness Ever End?- by Ben Cohen

Watching the presidential election take shape in modern times is a painful process. I have been following U.S. elections closely for 12 years and each time have been astonished at the spectacle.

While half the country lives with chronic food insecurity, billions of dollars are poured into strategists, analysts, makeup specialists, advertisers, planners, managers, advisers and hangers on, all in the name of electing a faceless politician who sounds and looks exactly the same as their predecessors (the only exception being Obama's election in '08).

Gore, Kerry, Bush, McCain, Romney, Gingrich, etc. all blend into one grey mass of old white people with almost identical policies and identical rhetoric. While there is still a difference between the Democrats and the Republicans (one party is sane and the other isn't), their platforms vary only slightly in the scheme of things. Right now, those variations are important, particularly when the economy is so vulnerable. Electing a free market, deficit hawk into the White House this year could literally tank the economy completely. Having a vaguely Keynesian president has been the only thing propping the economy up for the past 3 1/2 years, and it would be a very wise choice to keep him in office.

But in the long term, a two-party duopoly funded by exactly the same financial institutions and beholden to the same corporate interests cannot be sustained. The public knows the election is a gigantic clown show, and that's why voter participation has declined year after year for decades. The scripted events, sound byte debating points and relentless image based advertising has an effect on the public -- they know that nothing will change, that no politician is telling the truth, and there's absolutely nothing anyone can do about it.

Note EU-Digest: this is politics at the Neanderthal level...
 
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