http://www.worldrecordsacademy.org/society/most_expensive_presidential_campaign-US_Election_sets_world_record_80426.htm
3.
With Wall Street thus supporting him, moreover, Obama reaped not just those millions but--no less important--the warm affections of the corporate media, which never would have treated him so nicely if their parent companies were not entirely confident that he would serve their interests.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/feedarticle?id=7217369
"Open attacks on the business elite are seldom heard from mainstream White House candidates in America, despite skyrocketing CEO pay, rising income inequality, and a torrent of scandals in corporate boardrooms and on Wall Street," wrote reporter Kevin Drawbaugh, who quoted several business lobbyists describing Edwards's run in catastrophic terms. "He has gone to
this angry populist, anti-business rhetoric that borders on class warfare," said one. An Edwards presidency, said another, would be "'a disaster' for his well-heeled industrialist clients."
That sentiment throughout the boardrooms and penthouses had already skewed the media's coverage of Edwards's campaign, which was not so much reported as attacked, with story after story on his haircut and his mansion and his lecture fees, etc. All of this was meant to cast his economic program as a sham, because of his own wealth (as if, say, FDR had lived like a sharecropper). The media's anti-Edwards drive was so pronounced that several sharp observers, including Jeff Cohen and Greg Sargent, wrote about it:
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/05/31/1570/
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/horsesmouth/2007/10/ny_times_we_onl.php
So ferocious was the press's animus that they continued bashing Edwards long after he had quit the race. Of course, they went ballistic on his extra-marital affair--while staying absolutely mute on Sarah Palin's, although she was running and he wasn't, and even though she postured as a paragon of "family values" (and he hadn't). The double standard was especially egregious, since both those scandals had been broken by the National
Enquirer, and yet that tabloid was somehow illegitimate in Palin's case alone.
Clearly, that belated shower of mud was meant to finish Edwards off politically, so that he might not ever rise again. Thus he was destroyed for threatening the Big Money-- much as Eliot Spitzer too was taken down for having (prematurely) spoken out against the crimes of Wall Street and their likely consequences. There as well the media did its usual plutocratic job, by simply piling on, refraining pointedly from raising any questions as to
why the government was nailing Spitzer for so slight a crime, and why he must resign, while Sen. David Vitter, who had also played around with hookers, stayed in office. That sinner could stay on the job because he was a Bush Republican (just like Sen. Larry Craig), while those rogue Democrats were driven out, perhaps for good.
4.
Obama, on the other hand, is no rogue Democrat, but the accommodating type, who wouldn't be where he is now if Wall Street and its huge affiliates had not blessed his campaign; and so he's pushing forward with his bank plan, strangely deaf to all the thunder that may bring the house down yet, if and when things don't turn out the way he's hoping that they will.
And with that growing thunder there is nothing wrong: on the contrary. Wall Street's apologists throughout the media have been haughtily deploring all this public wrath, because they fear us more than anything--which is surely why they backed Obama, figuring that he would not just safeguard their own interests but also keep us quiet, with his hypnotic oratory and amazing air of calm.
But it's not working; and it shouldn't work. We have to speak out forcefully against the mammoth crap-shoot that Obama and his men are playing with our money, and our future. Otherwise we'll all go down, because this country's rotten politics is killing us, even with Barack Obama, not his heinous predecessor, at the helm. So let's all face the fact that things are likely not to "change" at all, unless we force him to it.
MCM
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