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is America a democracy or a plutocracy?

DR. FAKHRUDDIN AHMED writes from Princeton
SoMETIMES one has to wonder whether America is truly a democracy (ruled by the citizens) or a plutocracy (ruled by the wealthy). No public office can be won without the expenditure of a considerable sum of money; either one's own, or accumulated through fund raising. Consider this: In 1982, the owner of a company that produced computer-generated pay checks for small companies, Frank Lautenberg, decided to run for the Senate from the state of New Jersey. Mr. Lautenberg, a
Democrat, had never held elected public office of any sort before. He poured in 7 million dollars of his own money into the campaign, then a record, and was elected Senator! Senator Lautenberg served three 6-year terms, retired in 2000, but was reelected in 2002 when his Democratic party turned to him in desperation. When Senator Lautenberg retired in 2000, his Senate seat was won by a fellow Democrat, Jon Corzine, a Wall Street banking executive, who had also never been elected to public office.
What is the current price tag for buying a US Senate seat, you ask? Mr. Corzine spent over 60 million dollars of his own money to get elected! (Blame it on inflation!) There have been spectacular failures too. California tycoon Huffington spent a fortune, close to 60 million, in an unsuccessful bid to unseat a sitting Senator a few years ago. Therefore, one should not begrudge President Bush for his single minded determination, with enormous success, to break all the previous fund raising records in the US presidential fund raising sweepstakes!
The money is used almost exclusively, through television commercials and newspaper ads to discredit
one's opponent. Every trick in the book is employed to destroy the opponent's credibility and promote the candidate. When Republican Christie Whitman attempted to unseat Democratic Senator from New Jersey Bill Bradley in 1990, The New York Times endorsed Bradley by saying: "Ms. Christie
Whitman will make a very good Senator; but New Jersey already has an excellent one in Bill Bradley." In their clever commercial, the Whitman camp said, "The New York Times says 'Miss Christie Whitman will make a very good Senator,'" implying that the Times had
endorsed Whitman, when it had actually endorsed Bradley!
According to an impartial media watchdog, Campaign Media Analysis Group, 75 percent of President Bush's political commercials are negative (far more than John Kerry's); meaning, their sole purpose is not to sing the President's praise, but to portray his Democratic opponent John Kerry as negatively as feasible. The reason candidates keep running negative ads is because negative ads work. With all the bad news from and the death of close to 900 American soldiers in Iraq, there is no reason on earth why Democratic candidate John Kerry should not be miles ahead of President Bush in the presidential race. But Mr. Bush spent over 80 million dollars over the last three months painting Mr. Kerry as evil incarnate. Watching some of those scathing Bush commercials one got the
feeling that not only Kerry should not be allowed to seek the presidency, for doing enormous harm to America already Kerry should be in jail!
In a piece entitled, "The gutterfighting Bushes," Tom Teepen of Cox Newspapers says: "These guys (Bushes) are gutter fighters and the incumbent president's re-election campaign is extending the family's journeyman skill at first creating a phony version of its opponents and then running against the fake. Kerry is a long time, notably serious U.S senator; but to hear the Bush campaign tell it, he is a laughably flipflopping leftwing loon. He wants to
counsel Osama Bin Laden, not fight him. Doesn't think there is a war on terrorism. Would repeal the Patriot Act and is straining to increase everyone's taxes. He wants to add 50 cents a gallon to gasoline tax. All of this is dead false.
"Far from wanting to raise taxes, Kerry had proposed only repealing the Bush tax cuts for incomes of more than $2,000,000 -- to help pay for the war against terrorism, not to stop fighting it. The gas tax idea was one idea he kited 10 years ago in utterly different circumstances and doesn't support now. Some flip flop. Ah, but didn't Kerry try to cut 1.8 billion from the intelligence budget and vote against several new weapons proposals. He did indeed. But when he voted to nick the intelligence budget, congressional Republicans were proposing a 3.8 billion cut. And Dick Cheney, in Congress at the time, voted against
many of the weapons proposals that Kerry opposed. And rather than repealing the Patriot Act, Kerry has proposed only -- and quite sensibly -- installing closer judicial supervision for some of its provisions. (A nuanced position, but Bush -- proud C student -- has boasted that he doesn't "do nuance.") The list goes on.
"This is politics at its most cynical, taking advantage of the fact that most voters don't do detailed political research and, honest themselves, want to believe others are being fundamentally square with them, too. They figure that, even in
politics, matters put factual must be within shouting distance of the truth. Bush the Elder whomped Michael Dukakis for presidency in '88 in part by recasting the Massachusetts governor -- a moderate technocrat indifferent to ideology -- as the next thing to a flag-hating extremist. A concurrent whispering campaign hissed about Dukakis's "foreign" name -- a bit of nastiness echoed this time by the project to put across the idea that Kerry somehow "looks French," whatever that means.
Mr. Teepen concludes: "And the current Bush won the presidency in part thanks to a smear that Al Gore was a serial liar and exaggerator. Gore was said to have claimed that he invented the Internet, discovered Love Canal and -- well, you remember the drill. Every one of the charges -- in sum, a litany that dominated the election and made Gore nightly chum for the midnight
comedians -- was either false or grossly distorted. Presidential candidates typically have opponents. The Bushes have bogeymen." Based on all of the above, isn't it amusing and hypocritical of the Republicans to complain that Michael Moore's smash box office hit, anti-Bush documentary, "Fahrenheit 9/11" distorts President Bush's records? Mr. Bush is reaping the rewards of the ascendancy of the rightwing movement in America which started during the Carter administration over 25 years ago. On the religious side this movement spawned Jerry Falwell's "moral
majority," and on the conservative side Kristol's pro-Israeli neoconservatives (neocons). If Mr. Bush wins reelection in November, the right-wingers will become even stronger.
For a long time the Republicans have been complaining that the American press is "too liberal." This does not mean they accuse the media of supporting the Democrats; their gripe is that media is not rightwing enough. For instance, if a black man commits a crime, the general media will report the event without mentioning the race, unless race is relevant (such as in a racially-motivated crime.) The right-wingers would like a crime reported as, "Black man kills a white man" regardless of whether the murder is random or not! Rightwingers dominate talk radio. Rush Limbaugh, Bob Grant, Sean Hannity and Michael Savage have
long used the radio to bash the Democrats and the "liberals," and have hogged "patriotism" for themselves. They take advantage of the fact that in the privacy of their cars, as they listen to the diatribes of these rabble rousers, the white males, their main audience, can be themselves, and share views with likeminded listeners by calling these radio hosts over their cell phones.
Roger Ailes, a top official in the Reagan administration, decided to do one better. He used the Republicans' enormous wealth to buy the Fox (Television) News Channel, which unlike the main media is unabashedly Republican and rightwing. They have a direct line to the White House. The Who's Who of the administration -- the President, Vice President, the Secretaries of State and Defense, National Security Advisor, and all the neocons and pro-Bush think tankers and journalists -- are only a phone call away before rushing to the Fox Channel to be interviewed. Fox News, whose motto is "fair and balanced," -- they are anything but -- present speculation as news and opinion as fact. That is why in their opinion polls, President Bush is never behind! Who is Roger Ailes, you may wonder? He is the author of the notorious "Wille Horton" ad, which in 1988 destroyed the presidential candidacy of Democrat Michael Dukakis by portraying Dukakis as someone not outraged by a black criminal raping a white woman! As the voice of money becomes louder and shriller in the American democracy the voice of truth is becoming weaker and fainter.