http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2011/08/roubini-karl-marx-had-it-right-at-some.html
2. “As The Economy Crumbles, The Media Goes into the “Ritual Politics Mode”
The game is on. The boys are back. The election industry is cranking up its own army of professional consultants, advertising mavens, spin doctors, media buyers, disinformation specialists and field operatives. The cycle is cycling again, hooray.
There are two rules in the political game book:
l. Don’t Say What You Mean.
2. Don’t Mean What You Say.
Election fever is something the networks know how to market and massage. They have had a lot of practice at it. Their graphics people are already at work. The sets are being built. The clichés are being sharpened.
And the political experts are out in force collecting data as in this study arguing that when campaigns are rocking, fewer people are taking their own lives. (I would have thought it was the other way around)
Read this dreck:
“Using an original data set, this article explores the impact of U.S. presidential elections as collective rituals on monthly suicide rates. Controlling for a host of rival explanations, including year and month fixed effects, the business cycle, and other collective events (the Olympics), I find that certain months of the presidential election cycle are associated with lower suicide rates. I conclude that U.S. presidential politics, typically seen as an arena of conflict, can be a source of social solidarity, and therefore, society- or network-centered theories of social cohesion need to be augmented to include institutional mechanisms of social integration.”
Meanwhile, the forces behind the candidates, the funders and astro turf organizations are mostly out of the news, still hidden in a shadow political landscape, like a shadow banking system.
Everyone knows its there, but no one talks about it. The focus is always on issues never interests”
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=26034
3. “The misery of the protracted presidential campaign season
Those depressing, destructive trends are exacerbated by the manipulative fear-mongering that drives these campaigns. Every four years, The Other Side is turned into the evil spawn of Adolf Hitler and Osama bin Laden. Each and every election cycle, each party claims that — unlike in the past, when Responsible Moderates ruled and the “crazies” and radicals were relegated to the fringes (the Democrats were once the Party of Truman!; Ronald Reagan was a compromising moderate!) — the other party has now been taken over by the extremists, making it More Dangerous Than Ever Before. That the Other Side is now ruled by Supreme Evil-Doers means that anything other than full-scale fealty to their defeat is viewed as heresy. Defeat of the Real Enemy is the only acceptable goal. Election-time partisan loyalty becomes the ultimate Litmus Test of whether you’re on the side of Good: it’s the supreme With-Us-or-With-the-Terrorists test, and few are willing to endure the punishments for failing it. It’s an enforcement mechanism for Party loyalty that — by design — breeds slavish partisan fealty.”
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/08/16/elections/index.html
