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    The Election Circus Begins

    The Election Circus Begins

    “Elections are about a lot of things, but at the highest level, they’re about money.”

    Chris Hedges
    Jan 07, 2019

    It is January 2019. This signals the start of the 2020 election circus. Sen. Elizabeth Warren is the first big-name Democrat on stage. But we will soon be deluged with candidates, bizarre antics and endless commentary by fatuous TV and radio pundits. The hyperventilating, the constant polling, the updates on who has the largest campaign war chest, the hypothetical matches between this hopeful and that hopeful, the mocking tweets by Donald Trump, will, as we saw in the 2016 election campaign, have as much relevance to our lives and political future as the speculation on cable sports channels about next year's football season. This farce takes the place of genuine political life.

    It costs a lot of money to mount this spectacle. Our corporate masters, like the oligarchic rulers of ancient Rome who poured money into the arena as they stripped the empire and its citizens of their assets, are happy to oblige. The campaign sustains the fiction of a democracy and gives legitimacy to the corporate state. Maybe Hillary Clinton, who raised $1 billion in her 2016 run for president, will return for another season, although the Bill and Hillary tour is now a debacle with empty seats and slashed ticket prices. Maybe Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders will make comebacks. And what about the new faces in the scramble for the presidency--Beto O'Rourke, former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu, former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, former Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., former Housing Secretary Julian Castro, Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand, Cory Booker and Kamala Harris, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and the billionaires Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg?

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    Opinion
    The Right-Wing Firestorm That Rages On

    The Right-Wing Firestorm That Rages On

    A new documentary reveals how the right-wing attack on the national, grassroots anti-poverty group ACORN was a dress rehearsal for our current toxic political culture.

    Peter Dreier
    Jul 29, 2018

    "We need to know the full extent of Senator Obama's relationship with ACORN," said Senator John McCain in his third presidential debate with Barack Obama in October 2008. ACORN, he said, "is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy."

    By early 2010, ACORN had closed its doors, a victim of an orchestrated assault by right-wing media and politicians, as well as some self-inflicted wounds.

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    Opinion
    There's Fake News on Your Television, Too

    There's Fake News on Your Television, Too

    Sinclair Broadcast Group is a hard-right corporation that imposes its views on the local television stations it owns.

    Richard Eskow
    Mar 21, 2018

    There is increasing public concern about the political manipulation of Facebook and Twitter by private corporations and foreign actors, and it's certainly warranted. Social media, especially Facebook, are increasingly mediating their users' realities in ways that traditional broadcasters can only dream about. But millions of Americans still rely on television news, and they probably give it more credence than they do to random strangers on the internet.

    That's bad news, because there's fake news on your television, too. And there's about to be more of it, unless something is done to stop an upcoming merger.

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    Opinion

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