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Banned
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Originally Posted by roachboy
....b. this is a far right group and in the schema of political demonization abroad in the land, so long as you don't blow up a federal building somewhere, anything goes. consider for example the non-reaction to the mobilization of militia groups to operate as de facto vigilante border guards. not a word about the problematic relation of militia organizations to the existing political structure. as a thought experiment, however, consider what would be the case amongst the rightwingers had a negative image of palin belonged to a trotskyist group, even one the membership of which was 3 guys who met in a bar once a month. THAT would be a Problem.
c. so there's no space for far-right groups in contemporary political demonology, and because the republicans are already mounting a counter to this problem of membership in the aip....well, this should not be enough, should it? but fact is that you also see taking shape an attempt to align the press as a whole with some phantom coastal Elite which hates those who "love life" blah blah blah, and because the campaign is based not on issues but on the construction of affinity, what results is a situation in which the republican denials will probably be enough for the faithful---addressing one of those "non-issues" you see (as a function of the non-place for the far right matter)--and information to the contrary will function to confirm the Persecuting status of the evil "elite media" and so will function to delegitimate the messenger.
what seems to already be getting conceded in all this is that the mc-cain base is not going to expand. so what the idea seems to be is to use any and all tricks to appeal to identity as a way of mobilizing that base as a base. whcih means that, in the end, the election will be a test of political machines, one against the other, fought out over who can get the largest number of bodies out.....
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rb, below is the "blueprint" for how they do it, without increasing the size of their base, because, without a huge investment in time, money, there is a limit to how many will vote with the interests of the tiny fraction of Americans who hold most of the power and the money that it buys.
People who are indignant over opinions posted on this forum that are negative towards Palin, or towards her family members, or towards McCain and his mobbed up father-in-law, the religious right and the GOP, should, as I often challenge them to....examine how it is that "they know what they know". What I "know", is not the result of constant propagandizing by the establishment/rich man owned media... .no one, based on manipulating "what I know and how I vote because of what I know", would make a fortune and avoid paying taxes due as a consequence of manipulating labor and leaching off of public investment in infrastructure and military spending....CAN THEY SAY THE SAME ABOUT WHAT THEY THINK ARE THEIR OWN BELIEFS, and by the way they vote them?
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Sarah Palin's ties to Alaskan Independence Party are played down - Los Angeles Times
The McCain campaign denies his running mate supports the party's separatist bent.
By Michael Finnegan, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
September 3, 2008
Sarah Palin and the Alaska Independence Party. Palin addresses AIP convention
YouTube - Sarah Palin and the Alaska Independence Party. Palin addresses AIP convention
...But back home, she has cheered the work of a tiny party that long has pushed for a statewide vote on whether Alaska should secede from those same United States. And her husband, Todd, was a member of the party for seven years...
...The Alaskan Independence Party, founded in 1978, initially promoted "the Alaskan independence movement." But now, according to its website, "its primary goal is merely a vote on secession." Introduction to the Alaskan Independence Party
McCain campaign spokesman Tucker Bounds said Tuesday that Palin did not support splitting Alaska off from the rest of the country. He sidestepped the question of whether she favored a statewide vote on secession.....
..."Gov. Palin believes that every American is entitled to their point of view, and their political beliefs," he said.
Bounds also did not directly answer the question of whether her husband supported the secession of Alaska.
"I can tell you that Mr. Palin is a proud American," Bounds said. "And he's excited that his wife has joined John McCain to reform Washington and make government work more effectively for all Americans."
For all but two months from 1995 to 2002, the governor's husband was registered as an Alaskan Independence Party member, according to the Alaska Division of Elections.
With McCain's campaign emphasizing patriotism -- his latest slogan is "Country First" -- the Palins' links to a party founded by the late secessionist gold miner Joe Vogler could prove awkward.
"I'm an Alaskan, not an American," Vogler is quoted as saying elsewhere on the party’s website. Introduction to the Alaskan Independence Party
"I've got no use for America or her damned institutions."
The party supports a plebiscite on four options that it says Alaskans were entitled to vote on before becoming a state in 1959: Form a sovereign nation of their own, become a state, accept commonwealth status similar to Puerto Rico's, or remain a U.S. territory.
Leaders of the party say many of its 13,681 registered members have joined out of frustration over restrictions that the federal government has placed on the use of its vast land holdings in Alaska. Beyond the secession vote, the party also advocates gun rights, home schooling and abolition of property taxes.
A question-and-answer page Alaskan Independence Party
on its website asks, "Aren't most Alaskan Independence Party members a bunch of radicals and kooks?"
"The party has its share of individualists, in the grand Alaskan tradition," the answer says. "No longer a fringe party, the AIP is a viable third party with a serious mission and qualified candidates for elected offices."
Less than 3% of the state's 479,721 registered voters are members of the party......
....McCain's campaign also slammed ABC News for posting a Web story saying that Palin had been a member of the party, calling the report a "smear."
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As it was in the 1896 presidential campaign, and in 1934 in California, it is today. It does not change. It is a struggle between what those, although much fewer in number, can do to buy the thinking of voters who would, if left to sort it out for themselves, vote against these interests, but are persuaded to vote for them..... versus those who vote their own best interests, if by some good fortune, both major party candidates are not in the back pockets of these elite, controlling parasites.
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AmericanHeritage.com / HOW MEDIA POLITICS WAS BORN
...In September 1933 Upton Beall Sinclair, the author of The Jungle and more than forty other books, decided to run for governor of California. The amiable, fifty-four-year-old Pasadena resident had run for governor twice previously, both times on the Socialist party line, where he hadn’t won more than sixty thousand votes. This time, however, he was going to run as a Democrat.
After living in California for nineteen years, Sinclair had come to believe that the state was “governed by a small group of rich men whose sole purpose in life was to become richer.” The result of their rule was “hundreds of thousands driven from their homes” and “old people dying of slow starvation.” Most of the land in California, he believed, had been “turned over to money-lenders and banks.” One in four residents of Los Angeles was on relief, receiving an average of four and a half dollars a month, and Sinclair was not confident that President Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration was going to remedy that. After registering as a Democrat, Sinclair began his pursuit of the governorship, intending to win this time.....
...His 1906 documentary novel The Jungle had led to passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act. Years later he had helped found the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). He later won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was nominated for a Nobel Prize by, among others, John Dewey and Bertrand Russell. He was friends with leading thinkers of his day, playing the violin with Albert Einstein and tennis with the radical poet and editor Max Eastman. Charlie Chaplin considered him one of his political mentors. “Practically alone among the American writers of his generation,” the critic Edmund Wilson observed, “he put to the American public the fundamental questions raised by capitalism in such a way that they could not escape them.” Next to Debs and Norman Thomas, he was the most famous socialist of his time.....
...There were few original planks in EPIC’s platform. Sinclair had merely adapted ideas from economic salvation plans already put forward by such national leaders (or demagogues) as Huey Long and Father Charles Coughlin. The local press poked fun at the EPIC plan, but thousands of Californians embraced it, creating what Turner Catledge of The New York Times called “the first serious movement against the profit system in the United States.” By primary day there were a thousand EPIC clubs across the state, and the campaign’s tabloid newspaper, the EPIC News, had a circulation approaching a million copies weekly.
Sinclair spoke to overflow crowds in high school gyms, open fields, and arenas. Observers likened EPIC rallies to religious revivals. Time called Sinclair an “evangel of nonsense,” but to his followers he was a prophet, even a savior. His framed portrait hung in their homes. On primary day, in late August, Upton Sinclair received more than 430,000 votes, a total greater than that of all his eight Democratic opponents combined. “Congrats on nomination,” the politically obsessed poet Ezra Pound wrote from Italy. “Now beat the bank buzzards and get elected.”
Sinclair knew that to become the first Democratic governor of California in more than thirty years, he would need the support of national Democratic leaders, especially of President Roosevelt. A few days after winning the primary, Sinclair journeyed to Hyde Park for a two-hour conference. The President offered no endorsement, saying he was staying out of state politics. Privately Roosevelt told his aides that “it looks as though Sinclair will win if he stages an orderly, common sense campaign but will be beaten if he makes a fool of himself.”
Sinclair’s impending victory in the nation’s sixth-largest state became big news nationally. H. L. Mencken wrote that Sinclair, who “has been swallowing quack cures for all the sorrows of mankind since the turn of the century, is at it again in California, and on such a scale that the whole country is attracted by the spectacle.” Will Rogers observed that if Sinclair could deliver even some of the things he promised, he “should not only be Governor of one state, but President of all ‘em.” Theodore Dreiser called Sinclair “the most impressive political phenomenon that America has yet produced.”
But Time, hinting at what was to come, declared: “No politician since William Jennings Bryan has so horrified and outraged the Vested Interests. … They hate him as a muckraker. They hate him as a Socialist. … They hate him as a ‘free-love’ cultist. … They hate him as an atheist. …” On Wall Street the market value of the twenty top California stocks dropped 16 percent following Sinclair’s nomination.
Sinclair’s friends started calling him Governor, but the title still belonged to a Republican party stalwart named Frank Merriam. The Los Angeles Times, backing the incumbent, declared that the Merriam-Sinclair contest “is not a fight between men: it is a vital struggle between constructive and destructive forces.”
California’s conservative leaders had not taken Sinclair seriously until it was too late to save the Democratic party. Now the whole state was up for grabs, and they would not make the same mistake again. “Those whose stakes in California are greatest,” Time noted, “hold themselves personally responsible to their class throughout the nation to smash Upton Sinclair.” A new kind of political campaign was about to begin....
.... The national campaign that had been most similar to the 1934 California gubernatorial race was the contest for President in 1896 between the crusading Democrat William Jennings Bryan and the staid Republican William McKinley. Bryan’s attacks on the moneyed class had inspired amazing fervor among farmers and workers.
Recognizing the inadequacy of campaign tactics as they were then known, McKinley’s adviser Mark Hanna developed a plan and a national party organization that ushered political campaigns into the twentieth century. Tens of millions of leaflets, explaining McKinley’s positions, were mailed to voters around the country. Fourteen hundred pro-McKinley speakers took to the stump. Hanna raised huge sums of money by assessing banks and businesses a percentage of their assets or profits. Spies were installed at Bryan headquarters. “Republican writers and speakers,” Gordon C. Fite has observed, “exerted every effort to portray Bryan as a wild-eyed radical whose election on what they charged was a socialistic Democratic platform would destroy the American system.”
McKinley won by a narrow margin. Fund raising and party organization were, as Mark Hanna showed, everything. Until the 1930s not much had changed in political campaigns except for the limited use of radio.
What was new in 1934 was a political party’s utilization of media experts from outside the party apparatus, the manipulation of the print media to promote a wholly negative campaign, and the first use of motion pictures in a campaign. These developments signaled the approach of a era “when election specialists, hired out as mercenaries,” as Schlesinger put it, would play a larger role than the party itself in mobilizing voters.
There was something else unprecedented about the 1934 campaign to defeat Upton Sinclair: the cost. In the hotly contested 1932 race for President between Hoover and Roosevelt, each party had spent an estimated three million dollars across the country. Two years later the Republicans spent upward of three times that amount in just one state—California.
When news that Upton Sinclair was now favored to win the governorship reached Europe, William Randolph Hearst cut short a vacation in Germany to return to California, calling the Democratic candidate “an unbalanced and unscrupulous political speculator.” Louis B. Mayer, the head of Metro-GoldwynMayer (MGM) and the vice-chairman of the state Republican party, hurried home from France “to organize the fight of the film industry against Upton Sinclair’s candidacy for Governor,” according to a United Press dispatch. In northern California, the Alameda County district attorney, Earl Warren, who was also the Republican state chairman, took to the campaign trail, charging that Sinclairism was threatening “to overwhelm California with Communism.”.....
...irtually every newspaper in the state lashed out at Sinclair. An editorial cartoon in Hearst’s Los Angeles Examiner pictured Sinclair as “The Fourth Horseman,” racing to catch up to Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini. Following Whitaker and Baxter’s lead, the Los Angeles Times printed a box on the bottom of its front page every day, featuring an out-of-context Sinclair quotation.
On October 1 Sinclair complained at a rally: “I don’t know what there is left for them [the Times] to bring up unless it is the nationalizing of women.” Two days later a Sinclair statement on cooperative child care appeared in the Times under the heading NATIONALIZING CHILDREN. Instead of presenting his program, Sinclair spent most of his time trying to correct what he called “a million lies.” He was discovering the wisdom in Mark Twain’s observation that a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its boots.
To distract the candidate even further, the Republicans took another ground-breaking step. They hired Lord & Thomas, one of the first and most prominent national advertising firms, to direct an advertising struggle against Sinclair. Lord & Thomas had sold Lucky Strike cigarettes and Pepsodent toothpaste to the public; maybe, the GOP hoped, it could sell Frank Merriam as the answer to the Sinclair menace. Besides handling all the paid advertising—including the use of thousands of billboards to display twisted Sinclair quotations—Lord & Thomas may have had its own dirty-tricks squad. Sinclair charged that EPIC’s phones were tapped and some of its mail was stolen. “We hired the scum of the streets to carry placards: Vote for Upton Sinclair,” a Lord & Thomas manager later admitted.....
...Extremely conservative to begin with, the Hollywood studio bosses were incensed when they heard of Sinclair’s plan to impose a special new tax on the film industry and to let out-of-work actors take over abandoned sound stages to make their own movies. The heads of several studios threatened to move their entire operations to Florida if EPIC became a reality. Joseph Schenck, the president of United Artists, went so far as to inspect sites in Florida. But when some of the studios began building new facilities in Hollywood, it became apparent that they were bluffing. If Hollywood meant to defeat Sinclair, the moguls would have to take more direct action.
And so, under the leadership of Louis B. Mayer, most of the studio bosses asked their employees, from stenographers to stars, to donate money to the Merriam campaign. Many workers feared that if they did not contribute, they risked losing their jobs. The levy generated half a million dollars for the anti-Sinclair campaign, an enormous sum for a statewide race in the 1930s. Several stars, including Katharine Hepburn, James Cagney, and Jean Harlow, rebelled. When the screenwriter Dorothy Parker spoke up for Sinclair, she was told, “You’re cutting your own throat.”
But Mayer and the movie establishment knew that to defeat Sinclair they would have to reach the masses beyond Hollywood with the message that he was a dangerous radical, and they would have to do it in a novel, exciting, and at the same time subtle way. Variety had issued a call: “With theatres available to provide Sinclair opposition, so far as propaganda is concerned, let the picture business assert itself.”...
...Because newsreels had heretofore maintained a nonpartisan stance in election races, these shorts, based on an innocuous inquiring-reporter format, had an enormous effect. Well-dressed couples and prim, elderly ladies invariably endorsed Merriam. Disheveled, wild-eyed citizens with thick accents stood up for Sinclair. One man observed that Sinclair was “the author of the Russian government, and it worked out very well there, and it should do so here.”
Some of the interviews were legitimate; others were staged, using “bit” actors reading prepared scripts. The newsreels were just subtle enough to be effective. “Every screen fan in California,” The New Yorker later commented, “to prove that he was not a congenital idiot, was inclined to vote for Merriam.” Hard-core EPIC supporters, naturally, were angry. Outbursts in dozens of theaters forced some managers to stop showing the newsreels, “fearing wideopen terrorism,” according to Variety.
As a crowning blow, MGM, Fox, and possibly other studios produced newsreels showing an army of hoboes—or actors dressed in whiskers and rags—marching across California or arriving by rail, heading for the EPIC Utopia. A photograph showing the same migratory scene began appearing on the front pages of leading newspapers. Sharp-eyed readers identified the photo as a still from a recent movie, Wild Boys of the Road, provided to the newspapers by Warner Brothers.
There was more to the anti-Sinclair campaign. As much as ten million dollars may have been spent to defeat the EPIC candidate—a record for a state campaign that would stand for forty years. The funds were used to create front groups, print leaflets, and pay for countless newspaper ads and radio programs, all under the direction of Whitaker, Baxter, and Lord & Thomas. EPIC supporters were referred to as a “maggot-like horde.” Sinclair was called a “dynamiter of all churches,” and since he was often confused with Sinclair Lewis, he had to answer for Elmer Gantry as well.....
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The last thing I could ever be concerned about would be the victimization of any candidate by "liberals" or by the liberal fucking media. There is no liberal media, and barely even any liberals......
Last edited by host; 09-03-2008 at 09:42 AM..
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