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people need to question whether the media reports the leading candidates? or makes them. Way in the beginning of the race in 2007, we have heard rumors that "oh it's most likely going to be hilary or obama" PFFT! On what fucking basis? who is the one that analyzed that? anyways, since then hilary and obama have gotten the most airtime on main news outlets. but the un even coverage isn't just in the democratic side. the media plays the same game with republicans, putting one person's face in front of all the voters that aren't heavily into politics.
What is the impression people get? a vast number of people don't even do their research on candidates, and vote with what the unbiased tv spoon fed them (joking haha) Even I fell into this trap. Back before i had my political values and principles straightened out, I too went along with the "oh so and so & so and so are the leading candidates" and ten subconsciously it was like someone told me "choose one of them" BOOM. There it is. Anyone else go through the same sort of thinking process i went through, consciously or not? Of course we can all think and choose to do and choose to elect whoever we want, but there is a thing called psych-Ops. psychological operations. If you control the input into a human, then statistically you will get a very high percentage of a known output.
Here's some evidence. As of februrary and late january, there are 2 dem candidates, and 4 reps. However, for weeks when i would watch ABC NBC or FOX report the results, they would always show only 5. who was left out? hilary and obama were shown on one frame with percentages totalling 100% or 97% at the minimum. On the republican side, they would always show Romney, McCain, and Huckabee, but their summed percentages would never ammoung to a modest 97%!!! WAHTS WRONG HERE!? hello? there IS another republican candidate. It's one thing when there are like 20 candidates, like in the beginning of the race, when it may be cumbersome to display everyone with less than 5%, (although i strongly believe they should), but it's another when there are only 6 left. They take the time to display 5, but as i have observed for these weeks, not show Ron Paul's numbers, or his face (as if he wasn't in the fucking race). Now one must wonder, "is it really that difficult to show one more person's numbers? i mean, it is an even 6. they can show 3 and 3 on two frames, or 2 2 and 2 on three frames. When i added up the numbers there is a decent remainder of points left out of the 100. And many times, the remainder (Ron Paul's give or take a couple points) would be even greater than the 3rd place republican nominee. Yet ABC and FOX think somehow fourth place is worth showing more than third place. obviously because fourth place is beating third (O.o???).Or maybe it could be that they habitually forgot about Ron Paul, (give them a break, the news reporters work hard. They can screw up with our news info sometimes)
Anyway, all i'm trying to get across is that maybe we should think and question if 1) the political-media complex, is truly "reporting" the leading candidates, or 2) the media influences who becomes the leading candidate and eventually the winner, via the "best teacher of all" - repetition.
As well as HOW strongly media influences the outcomes of the election... I've read one research that said the biggest factor of winning the elections is media coverage. - how much time and how often your name and face is on the boob tube.
I believe the way to saving America is to go back to the constitution and the intentions of the founding fathers. Small small government, small small taxes (we didn't even have income tax that is now about 50% of the gov's revenue for over 100 years until 1913 and we did just fine) not having "entangling foreign alliances" having the power to coin money in the hands of Congress, and not a private corporation (the FED) and respecting privacy and rights of the people. We've drifted far. America has become very socialistic de facto. Lets pray America doesn't go down the toilet soon.
 
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Sounds like you like Ron Paul.
My only problem with small government is the institutions that we enjoy due to taxes:
Public schools, roads, police, fire department etc.
I can't imagine a private fire department or police force, or even schools, though more people seem to support that.
I agree with you on the media part though: I held Kucinich in high regard, but because of his radicalism he didn't get much support or coverage.
I like Ron Paul too though, despite the vast difference in ideology ... what's important to me is a passionate desire to change the world for the better, and listening to Ron Paul he has that.
Forgive me if my assumption was incorrect, but the rest is still relevant.
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i understand a lot of people agree with you about the public schools roads police and fire dept. However you need to realize that we had all of these services (except public schools) way back before income tax or social security tax.
If you look at the revenue proportions of today, almost 50% is from income tax, and about 20 is from social security. income tax started in 1913 along with the federal reserve act. that means for half of our nation's life, we did fine without it, and we still had public service roads. I am not against taxes. we need some to keep the govenrment running, that is, much of thing things you described. But the fact is that the government already had more money than it needed before income tax or SS. Also, we send billions of dollar as foreign aid. just a few months ago we sent 10 billion to pakistan of all places. (quoted from ron paul). we send millions to iraq, and put sadam in power, we funded alqaeda and now we want them out. This is what is happening with all of the extra funds that the founding fathers didn't wnat happening. Without all that extra revenue since 1913, the us gov wouldn't be able to do such international shananigans.
Another thing about the income tax. If we really can't afford things, shouln't our first priority as a nation be to pay off the debt so we don't waste any more money on interest? Andrew Jackson was the only president in history to pay off the debt. If congress had the power to create money like lincoln instituted with the greenbacks, then we wouldn't have to pay interest, although the inflation still has to be monitored. The fact is, today since 1913, and before 1913 through the Bank of US and SecondBUS, private central banking entities have alwyas lended to government, and collected interest on it via taxes. There is a reason why the national debt doesn't get paid off. Someone is profitting from it and they don't wnat it to end. Bush cranked up the debt like crazy. its a national record, if not world record.
The fact is, our income taxes go mostly toward the intrest on our debt that we borrowed from the FED. they're profitting. its not federal, and there are no resreves. they print the all the money, and its a private corporation for profit. And those scheming moneychangers put precautions into place. Their identities are concealed so you can't know who owns 20% of the stocks of the FED. and you can't even buy the stocks if you wanted to. they won't let you.
While i support taxes, what is needed in reality to run the government is much much less than we pay today. 30 fucking percent! and most of that money is going toward America being an agent for global change, raising and destroying foreign nations. To what purpose? some say its good, some say its for a global agenda. What is for sure, is that it's not constitutional, and not what the founding fathers had in mind.
I'd love to hear back from ya and get a good conversation going. Find out what you think and believe in. Cheers! =)
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if we want our tax dollars to run the goevrnment, and do things for public services, we need to stop wasting it on interest and pay down the debt. It would be like donating to a charity, but having pay checks of workers running it be 100k each, sucking up all of our donations to personal profit, when we donated (or paid taxes) to get things done.
Undoubtedly those profitting from the interest of our nation's debt has a hand in our government, blocking repayment or simply cranking up the debt again and again.
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hey, you're totally omitting Mike Gravel in all this! have some respect.. there are THREE democratic candidates left!
Honestly, i see your point. but if Ron Paul had managed to get more support in the actual polls, he would have generated the media attention (i.e. Huckabee, who no one knew back in August). It is a Catch-22, but honestly, you can't give equal time to everyone who says they are running. You have to discriminate somehow.
I do however agree that Paul has gotten shafted on a number of specific issues (shut out of some debates, some other issues being downplayed).
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The media definitely has a very strong influence on the primaries. In general elections it's less of an issue since there are generally just 2 candidates.
The media unquestionably picks the frontrunners in a primary. Before any voting or real debates are held, they selectively report on certain candidates. This means most people aren't going to hear much about any other candidates, resulting in them getting marginalized. It happens to Kucinich every 4 years, to use one example. The guy is a perpetual candidate and actually has views closer to a majority of the democratic base than the mainstream candidates, but he never gets any attention, thus never gets picked in polls and it's a self perpetuating cycle.
This is why we really need some kind of equal time rules and ideally goverment funding of campaigns. Lobbyist money and the media basically control elections, at least in the primary stage. The problem is of course that any candidate likely to change that will simply be ignored by them since they like the power they have now.
Hopefully the internet with its easier access to broader sources of information can start to change this soon. I'm actually extremely impressed with how well Ron Paul has done this year; despite getting very limited attention from the media (I'm surprised he was even invited to the debates) he's consistently getting 5-10%+ of the vote in most states. It'd be very interesting to see what kind of numbers he'd get if the mainstream media were actually forced to pay attention to him.
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On February 08 2008 06:19 Ancestral wrote:
Sounds like you like Ron Paul.
My only problem with small government is the institutions that we enjoy due to taxes:
Public schools, roads, police, fire department etc.
I can't imagine a private fire department or police force, or even schools, though more people seem to support that.
I agree with you on the media part though: I held Kucinich in high regard, but because of his radicalism he didn't get much support or coverage.
I like Ron Paul too though, despite the vast difference in ideology ... what's important to me is a passionate desire to change the world for the better, and listening to Ron Paul he has that.
Forgive me if my assumption was incorrect, but the rest is still relevant.
I like the idea of private schools. Private industry tends to do things cheaper and more efficiently. From what I've read (one of John Stossel's reports), public education spending is up yet the quality of education has not improved.
I do agree however that privatizing essentials like fire and police is difficult. Hell, even health care is difficult to completely privatize. Libertarianism is a great idea (I'm a Libertarian myself), but some people like Ron Paul are just a bit too idealistic.
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Well the media did say bush was already going to win in the 2000 elections before the votes were fully counted. Also 2 canidates set up by the media in 2004 and more than 2 canidates set up in 2008. There is a obviose agenda. I still have hope even if they wright the history books.
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I think the traditional media used to control the elections, but with the people's massive migration to the internet as a source of news (largely between 2004 and 2008 due to higher public awareness, cheaper computers, cheaper broadband, google, youtube, digg, blogs, etc) the media's grip on information has diminished considerably, and shows no signs of slowing down. Eventually enough people will use the internet that traditional media will no longer be able to control public opinion on anything, as the web will be popular enough to be able to refute whatever the media says. This is, of course, assuming that the net stays neutral and accessible by everyone in the future.
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Gwho, your knowledge is extensive, much greater than mine. And unfortunately, at least for a few weeks, I get to study for classes instead of real life...
But here's where I think we can agree, and I believe this is the most important part of it all. Bureaucracy is the greatest waste of resources, and our current tax codes etc. are full of it. A massive simplification is in order I feel, since a lot of government waste comes from inefficiency. I would say military and infrastructure in general are more expensive now than they were in our early days though.
Nevertheless, I definitely feel clear, simple, concise tax codes, international agreements etc. are usually a good thing.
The reason I tend to advocate publicly funded roads, fire dept, police, and education is because these have positive social effects that people who consumed them do not weigh when evaluating their own private value on them.
But I bet a lot of money could be saved if fewer papers needed to be signed / reviewed, all that sort of thing.
As far as foreign aid (this may be an oversimplification), I feel the best "foreign aid" we can give to any one (and indeed, anyone can give us) is protection free trade. Protectionism to me is a nostalgic notion that does nothing but, now get this, add superfluous bureaucratic elements to an already generally excessively bureaucratic system.
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Funny coincidence. The maker of the movie Zeitgeist (can't remember his name) mentioned that the only political candidate who wasn't sponsored by large companies was Ron Paul. I don't know whether this is true, but if he's right this is definitely alarming.
The fact that most people neither realize this or care about it much is something that's quite dangerous for the US and also for many other countries where the average political consciousness is emotionally based or very poorly thought out. Every time I learn about something like this I want to fight it. Do any of you have an idea how this could be done? I've thought of becoming a philosophy teacher to try to inspire some people to adopt critical thinking (in Quebec where I live, there is an intermediate school called CEGEP between high school and university, and students have compulsory philosophy classes there), although I'm not sure that's the best way. gwho, you sound like you have decent economical knowledge. Are you aiming to try to share some politically influential conclusions with people about this as a career?
Heh, sliding off topic a little but this stuff appalls me... it seems sad to just say "well, I know about this, but most people don't, and there's not much I can do about that."
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ron paul was against the war
thats great for the general election, but loses lots of votes in the primaries... there just arent that many libertarians in the republican audience
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On February 08 2008 07:25 Clutch3 wrote:
hey, you're totally omitting Mike Gravel in all this! have some respect.. there are THREE democratic candidates left!
oh wow, i didn't even know... thats totally my mistake, and i should have done my research better. but i guess that helps make my case better. the media definitely plays a roll. it's really not like they can't afford or have the time to display all candidates.
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There is far too little education about the constitution, the intents of the constitution, and the threats against the things the constitution and the founding fathers were trying to prevent.
As long as we stick to it, it will be more or less an automated system that keeps those threats out. (monetary usurping/privacy invasion/entagnling alliances/"unions") but we have not stuck to them. Congress doesn't coin money, doesn't regulate the value as it says in article 1 section 8. instead a private corporation the FED has all of that power all the while operating in secrecy while it makes rulesfor all o fthe people, in private interest.
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United States22883 Posts
Don't forget the Constitution is a living document.
I'm a leftist libertarian and ACLU member btw, it just sounds like you're leaning too much on the founding fathers, who were quite brilliant, but left things up to interpretation for a reason.
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On February 08 2008 07:25 Clutch3 wrote:
hey, you're totally omitting Mike Gravel in all this! have some respect.. there are THREE democratic candidates left!
Mike Gravel! Fuck yeah! Who cares what his opinions/views are, with a name like Mike Gravel he should be president.
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EPT
