It is much easier to play cards with the deck stacked in your favor by a corrupt dealer

VHeadline's Washington D.C.-based commentarist Chris Herz writes: This commentator makes a serious effort not to report on the daily shenanigans of the US presidential contenders and the nonsensical framing and distortions of the corporate media in their reporting of the same. These silly and vain posturings by the principals and their sycophant stenographers are usually without much significance to those interested in the real mainsprings that force the USA to act in certain very predicable ways.

Looking at our system from the outside must be for the uninitiated much the same agonizing exercise as was once labored over by reporters in trying to pierce the mysteries wrapped in enigma that was the Politburo of the late great Soviet Union.

Nothing important, nothing real is ever stated outright in public by either politician or reporter. We whose job it is to follow the news are force fed a constant diet of nasty stuff about flag pins or being under enemy fire as little girls present bouquets of Bosnian flowers. Or a former prisoner of the Vietnamese, one who collaborated with his captors is presented as some sort of hero. Sometimes it even descends to the level of who is boffing whom. All pure codswallop. But once in a while the mask slips. Totally by accident we are allowed to see the ugly faces under it. If we've the courage to lift our faces and take a look.

And so it is with the tremendous media-manufactured din about the former pastor of Barak Obama's church.

There's quite a lot here to think over.

First of all, no one is allowed anywhere near the Senate of the United States unless a lot of very rich and important people consider him or her to be a reliable and corrupt servant. Not of the people as an whole, but of the one or two percent of our populace who control 40 or 50 percent of all capital assets in the USA.

All three remaining contenders for the presidency, the two Democrats, Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama, and the Republican, John McCain more than meet this criterion. Yet because he has not been long in the Senate, only 4 years or so, and then before that he was only an obscure and rather inactive state legislator in Illinois (from Chicago) there persists a very small element of doubt in certain elite quarters as to whether Obama is perfectly trustworthy.

Clinton and McCain have had much longer track records in public life. Their friendliness to all the favored agendas of the rich and well placed is thoroughly understood without the slightest doubt. For years they've loyally done the bidding of their masters in voting for war, for tax favors for the wealthy, for corporate trade deals, for favored defense contractors. Long have they both wallowed in all the stinking corruption that is Washington. Each is a known quantity.

Our masters did not get rich by taking chances. It is much easier to play cards with the deck stacked in your favor by a corrupt dealer. And that is what these politicians are all about.

At the same time, the natives out there in Oshkosh are getting restless. They are waking up to the fact that for two generations they have been experiencing a real fleecing at the hands of the corporate state. And with unemployment at well over 13 percent, and inflation running at at least that level as well, there looks to be no way out for most of the population.

Ignoring the doctored official statistics, the real standard of living for working-class Americans has been in decline since at least the inflationary period following the Vietnam War. Matters now are getting so serious at the gas station or the grocery store that reality is starting to overwhelm the TV propaganda. There's a nasty mood out there.

Clearly in recent weeks many of the powers that be in the media have decided to take no chances and to knock off Obama. The extensive and more or less accurate reporting of the statements, in themselves also accurate (if bitterly phrased) knocking American anti-Black racism by retired Pastor Jeremiah Wright, an old friend of Obama's, is going down without stay or hindrance. It is an wholly shameless effort to mobilize the racism that has always been the chief factor in the electoral choices of most lower-class whites.

The USA and its elites are under such severe economic pressure that the survival of even our weak and purely nominal constitutionalism is hardly possible. Some form of authoritarianism is seen as the only way forward for the once-mighty warfare state. And only Clinton or McCain armed with the provisions of the so-called Patriot Acts can be trusted with the leadership of the empire.

I think we will see this sort of nasty stuff all the way to November.

From the capital of the Empire,

Chris Herz
cdherz44@yahoo.com