What do we really know?

Michael Bloomberg was in Portland, Maine yesterday selling his multi-billion dollar campaign.

The media were giving him free media coverage and touting him as a 'centrist' who could unite the country.

If I had to predict at this point I'd say the Democrats will 'pick' Bloomberg as their presidential candidate and they will also choose Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) as the V-P.  Klobuchar is a corporate favorite who opposes Medicare for All and who is really bad on foreign policy.

So it could look like two New York city rich guys running against each other for president.  As I like to say the 'mob' against the 'mafia'.

We've been trained since we were in the crib to respond to the prompts from the corporate mind machine that uses every possible vehicle to turn us into consumers.  Consumers of products and also consumers of politics.  The corporate agenda leads us down the primrose path and tells us which candidates are acceptable and which are not.  All the while convincing us that we live in the 'greatest democracy in world history'!

Trump got a huge jump start from the media when he ran in 2016.  They essentially made him because the idea was to have him run against Hillary to ensure that she won.  She was so disliked by the public they needed someone hated even more than her and that is how we got Trump.  But then the disillusioned Democrats in the rust belt turned on their own party and voted for Trump because the Democrats in Washington did virtually nothing for them as millions of corporate industries moved jobs overseas.

If you make a study of it you will find that the media does in fact create the inevitable.  Read the mainstream media articles and see how they constantly use language that favors one candidate over the other.  Watch how they completely omit some candidates from their coverage (no mention of them, no photo of them, etc).  Watch how the media takes an unknown guy like Pete Butta-jig (a small city mayor with no national experience or constituency) and use words like 'strong 4th place in the polls' to create an impression that he is surging.  This is all mind manipulation.

They did the same thing in 1976 when they found an unknown peanut farmer and governor of Georgia and made Jimmy Carter president.  (Another guy with no national constituency.) They needed a 'fresh face' after the Vietnam War but his campaign was orchestrated by Zbigniew Brzezinski and his Wall Street boss David Rockefeller at the Trilateral Commission.

Brzezinski also bragged years later that he discovered Barack Obama when he was a student at Columbia University at a time when they were looking for ambitious people of color to develop as candidates whom the elite would control.  We all know how that one worked out in the end.  Hope and change.....Obama's campaign won an award for its great public relations gimmickry - the highest recognition one could ever wish for from Madison Avenue.

If we dare step outside of this corporate constructed electoral 'reality' even some of our own friends and associates on 'the left' will try to sheep dog us back into the corral by saying things like 'you are trying to make the perfect the enemy of the good'.

What that means to me is accept the imposed limitations from the start.  Accept that we will have to pick someone who will be a political 'half-stepper' because this is the best we can get under the circumstances. Leave your idealism and your vision at the door and step into the 'real world' of politics.

Sadly or not, I grew up on military bases attending schools run by the US military.  I was trained to be patriotic and to swallow the 'greatest democracy' pill.  Then when I was in the Air Force during the Vietnam War one day at lunch I was in the BX (base exchange store) and found a book on the rack entitled 'The Pentagon Papers'.  Reading this book changed my life as I learned how the media, the White House, Congress and the Pentagon all lied for years about the Vietnam War. (The same kind of lies that still sell us the war in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.)

My problem is that I actually believe in the idea of democracy and I believe that each of us has the right (and the obligation) as citizens to strive to bring this vision of 'we the people' into focus.

I also believe in the idea of freedom - freedom of thought, of action, and when it comes to electoral strategies, freedom to choose your own course.  If that means supporting the Green Party then OK.  If it means supporting the Democrats then OK.  If it means not voting at all because you can't stand the process (and the pre-selected candidates) then that is OK as well.

The ultimate key is what one does the rest of the time when elections are not underway (although in America these days elections never seem to end).  We can't just think that voting is all one has to do to ensure 'democracy' works.  That is a very limited interpretation of citizenship.

So yeah let's debate which candidate is the 'best' and which party should be supported.  That should always be an acceptable topic for discussion.  But let's not declare that one party (Greens for example) is not to be considered because it might limit the ability of another party (the Democrats) to win.  That is a false construct as far as I am concerned.

Bruce