Elections & Voting
The murdering of the Kucinich campaign
By Jack Balkwill
Online Journal Contributing Writer


Jan 28, 2008, 00:48

The Dennis Kucinich campaign was destroyed by the corporate media for trying to represent the public interest.

At the start of his campaign, corporate media did not cover Kucinich because he refused to take the bribes. The transnational investors who own corporate media, or represent its interests on corporate boards, or advertise in it for control, do not trust anyone to be president who does not take the bribes.

So at the start of our modern presidential campaigns, all of the talk is about who raised the most cash from transnational investors who don’t give a damn about this country or its people.

Next, corporate media cited the lack of campaign funding for Kucinich as the reason they did not cover him. “Hillary has more money from the nuclear mafia and Medical industrial complex than any other candidate” they recognized, “so we have to give her tens of millions of dollars of free coverage.” Same for all of the corporate CEOs; Clinton, Edwards, Obama.

All that free publicity for the CEOs moved their polling numbers up until, voila, corporate media could exclude Kucinich because he was not as well known. Finally, they simply refused to let him into the debates.

When Kucinich was allowed into debates and got brief chances to speak, the audiences went wild. It was a rare time when a candidate spoke to their issues, the public interest. This forced other Democrats to move toward Kucinich positions, at least in rhetoric, to win audience share.

Polling tells us that most Americans want cuts to that which euphemistically passes for “defense” spending, a withdrawal of our troops from Iraq, and a single-payer health care plan, as Kucinich advocates. The CEOs are all on the other side of these and many other of Kucinich’s issues, the only viewpoint corporate media allow.

So they had to kill the campaign from fear of a second opinion rising up to smite them with an outbreak of democracy. Ironically, on the day he announced, all of the mass media broadcast that he withdrew from the race. These are the same corporate media outlets which rarely let a whisper of his existence be known prior to this, except for an occasional slur from one of their talking heads.

It is probably best for Dennis that he does this. Corporate media had so blacked out the campaign anyhow that he was no longer influencing the message of CEOs Clinton, Edwards and Obama. More importantly, his Ohio congressional seat is being challenged and he needs to spend time working to keep the seat in order to provide a rare progressive voice in Congress.

The whole election process is rigged against the public interest in every important way. As an old man, I have watched this happen, with great frustration, for decades, feeling helpless.

When Kucinich declared his candidacy, I noticed attacks on him from everywhere, including the left, so I wrote a piece supporting him and published it at Online Journal, showing why it might be a good idea to send the campaign a few bucks.

Dennis’s wife Elizabeth posted the article on her web site, and I remember feeling that it was pathetic that the campaign couldn’t get help from someone more famous than a guy who has a name nobody can pronounce or spell.

In the piece I said it was important to have a candidate to bite at the heels of those promoted by corporate media as the frontrunners. He would force the frontrunners to accept his positions or lose the audiences, and Dennis did this so well that corporate media finally took him entirely out of the debates for fear the CEOs might consider exchanging corporate interests for public interests.

The American people don’t know what they’ve lost, because most are watching sitcoms as directed, zombie-like, learning from corporate news media that they should want a candidate who is for “change,” without any details of what this means.

Now that Kucinich is gone, platform particulars are unimportant. The CEO peace programs are Orwellian war programs, their health care is run lock stock and barrel by the same corporations that will run Republican health care, and they may drown in the campaign contributions they are given to toe the line.

The Kucinich campaign was a diamond shining briefly in the shit which passes for an election season here in the Land of the Free. Idealism just had a dagger plunged through its beautiful heart.