The Oligarchy Primaries

I recently heard Chris Matthews mention that at present 70 percent of the public is following the 2008 presidential election. Then he began spinning a fabrication entertaining me dissect it while lecturing MSNBC viewers, residents and visitors alike that they should pay close attention to the candidates from both parties who have presidential aspirations before the primaries.

It is more than merely quite possible that even the poll results are skewed by the media focusing more on the different candidates than any other single issue perpetuating foregone conclusions as if they made a difference.

Illusion in the process of being defined as reality when we are told it will be those primaries which are a year away that will determine the choice the public will be given to in the next general election to decide who will lead this country for the next four years and therein lays the deceit.

In fact corporate media has already reduced the choices to three candidates from each of the two “major” political parties predetermined by their individual ability to raise 150 million dollars to get a job that pays $400,000. At the risk of digressing it is worth noting that the president’s salary was $200,000 up until July 1999 when the House voted to increase the next president’s salary to $400,000.

Even someone possessing a modicum of intelligence questions the motivations of someone who raises 150 million dollars to get a job that pays $400,000 just isn’t right. The six candidates chosen by corporate media are Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama, and maybe, just maybe John Edwards for the Democrats and Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, and Mitt Romney for the Republicans.

In the category of fund raising they are all alike and their ideological differences are but superficialities that exist to conceal the reality that regardless of which of the six are elected their policies will reflect the desires and ambitions of their major contributors but will never address the needs of the majority of the public even those who refuse to recognize the legitimacy of an illegitimate system by withholding their consent for an oligarchy because democracy does not exist in present day America.

Indeed we have a form of government where political power is held by a small elite segment of society distinguished by wealth, family, or military prowess. An early 19th century sociologist, Robert Michels theorized that all forms of organization regardless of how democratic at the start eventually and inevitably develop tendencies representative of an oligarchy. He coined the phrase “Iron Law of Oligarchy” which simply stated means that democracy and large-scale organization are incompatible.

Decades later the vulgar proverb “shit floats to the top” was considered to be a rephrasing of the Iron Law of Oligarchy. The rhetoric expressed by the six major presidential contenders able to raise at least 150 million dollars is repeated by corporate media to manufacture consent for oligarchy masquerading as democracy and that offensive stench we are beginning to smell is emanating from a political system polluted by pandering politicians and the press perpetuating another fraud on a passive public.