Full text here; an excerpt:
[T]he parties try to exclude the population from participation. So they don't present issues, policies, agendas, and so on. They project imagery, and people either don't bother or they vote for the image. The Gallup Poll regularly asks, "Why are you voting?" One of the choices is, "I'm voting for the candidate's stand on issues." That was 6% for Bush, and 13% for Kerry and most of those voters were deluded about the positions of the candidates. So what you have is essentially flipping a coin. Each candidate got approximately 30% of the electorate. Bush got 31%, Kerry got 29%.
The party managers know where the public stands on a whole list of issues. Their funders just don't support them; the interests they represent don't support them. So they project a different kind of image.
If you listen to the presidential debates, you can't figure out what they're saying, and that's on purpose. The last debate was supposed to be about domestic issues. The New York Times commented that Kerry didn't make any hint about possible government involvement in health care programs because that position has, in their words, "no political support." Well, according to the most recent polls, 80% of the population thinks that the government ought to guarantee health care for everyone, and furthermore regard it as a moral obligation. That tells you something about people's values. But there's "no political support."
Why? Because the pharmaceutical industry is opposed, the financial institutions are opposed, the insurance industry is opposed, so there's "no political support." It doesn't matter if 80% of the population regard it as a moral obligation: That doesn't count as political support. It tells you something about the elite conception. You're supposed to vote for the image they're projecting. That's not surprising really. Just ask yourself, "Who runs the elections?"
The elections are run by the same guys who sell toothpaste. They show you an image of a sports hero, or a sexy model, or a car going up a sheer cliff or something, which has nothing to do with the commodity, but it's intended to delude you into picking this one rather than another one. Same when they run elections...Quite naturally, the [advertising] industry uses the same technique to sell candidates that it uses to sell toothpaste or lifestyle drugs. The point is to undermine markets by projecting imagery to delude and suppressing informationand similarly, to undermine democracy by the same method.
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