Popular protests not important to media–if political news not about presidential race then it gets little attention

If political news doesn’t have to do with the presidential race and Barack Obama’s war with Congress, it’s not important.

Popular demonstrations are unimportant almost by definition. Wall Street sit downs are not considered news but rather distractions by troublemakers, cranks, radicals, college students, junior professors and other powerless people.

Serious people, who run the country, appear on Sunday morning talk shows and write newspaper columns, look on popular movements as political background noise.

The only popular movements of modern times that made any difference to the United States were the civil rights campaign and the anti-Vietnam-War demonstrations of the 1960s.

While neither of them had mass popular support, both succeeded in morally blackmailing the Johnson administration (which then left Richard Nixon with the unwinnable war).

Not even the Great Depression produced a mass popular protest that changed anything. The unemployed begged on street corners; families had to move in on one another; farms and small businesses were foreclosed; and the Dust Bowl confirmed that something like a biblical curse had struck the country.

Today, the trouble is that it is working less and less because the machinery of politics is now all but completely controlled by business interests, thanks largely to the Supreme Court and the pressure of lobbyists.

The Reagan administration killed equal treatment on political radio and television. The Supreme Court ruled that even under the American system of paid political advertising, spending money on ads is free speech, so the millionaire has a million times more free speech than the ordinary citizen.

And now citizenship has been bestowed on business corporations, which can spend as much money as they want to elect a political candidate who will effectively be on the corporation payroll.

Can the Wall Street sit downers inspire a national popular rising to throw today’s rascals out? I don’t think so. Therefore, the bankers and brokers and their employees will have to go on stepping over the popular rabble camped out in their way to and from their gilded counting houses. That seems to be the way it is in the USA today, and for a long time to come.

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