Media watch
By Arshad Mahmud
Why I’m not voting in American election
A few days ago I got yet another email from the Biden campaign, declaring it would be their last message to me unless they hear back. “Good riddance”, I muttered to myself. To be sure, they don’t know me personally and it was part of the mass mailings they sent to supposed potential Democratic Party supporters. And they were right. Like most from the South Asian diaspora, I voted enthusiastically for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. Then came the desperate message: “please vote early for Biden-Harris ticket to ensure democratic victory.”
Unmoved, I kept trashing the Biden messages, primarily to de-clutter my inbox. But more importantly, I felt no urge to respond, let alone cast my vote, convinced that it would be a complete of waste of time.
Why did I get so disenchanted about American elections? It started with Obama’s victory, which sparked unprecedented hope and aspirations, not only in the United States but around the world, because of his promise to radically change the way Washington works, which, as we all know, only benefits the rich and powerful, regardless of which party is in power.
No wonder, like millions I was ecstatic by his spectacular victory, largely because he was an outsider, with no known ties to the Wall Street or Washington establishment. Sadly, it didn’t take long for my euphoria to evaporate. You may perhaps recall his repeated assertions during the campaign that there would be no place for lobbyists and special interests in his administration. To refresh your memory, just ten days after his inauguration on Jan 20, 2009, he appointed a top executive of Raytheon, a big defense contractor, as undersecretary of defense for policy, a very important position at the Pentagon.
That appointment came as a shock to me as I couldn’t imagine that a man like Obama, an African-American with a humble background, could so swiftly turn into a stooge of the Washington establishment. Unfortunately, that has been the case ever since America’s emergence as a superpower in the 1950s, and no matter which party in power — Republican or Democratic — its protagonists invariably serve the purpose of the defense industries and big corporations.
And why they shouldn’t be beholden to that rich, powerful lobby because the astounding amounts of money both campaigns spend during elections mostly come from them. To be sure, it has grown phenomenally over the last 40 years. For instance, in the 1980 presidential election, Republicans and Democrats spent $60 million dollars ($190 million in today’s money). In this year’s presidential election, advertising alone is projected to reach $7 billion, a 37-times increase in spending. You want to know how much Trump and Biden spent in the past 15 months — a whopping $2.3 billion between Jan.1, 2019 and March 31, 2020, according to the Federal Election Commission.
No wonder, the toxic mix of money and power has given so much influence to the defense industries and corporations that they set the agenda for whichever party comes to power. This explains why you see the likes of James Rubin or Hank Paulson — Wall Street players — alternating at the Department of Treasury or Dick Cheney and Leon Panetta at the Pentagon.
The danger of such monopolization by the special interests perhaps led to the coinage of terms like the military-industrial complex.
In 1961, at the height of the Cold War, President Dwight Eisenhower, who commanded the allied forces in the Second World War, issued a warning at his farewell address: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
To be sure, in nearly 60 years since Eisenhower mentioned “industrial complex”, it has been used often to describe the self-justifying and self-perpetuating nature of various industries — medicine, entertainment, media and education.
In an Op-Ed last month in the New York Times, Elliot Ackerman wrote about how America has now been mired in the political incarnation of the “military-Industrial complex”, threatening to undermine American democracy as it did in Eisenhower’s time.
This observation has been further buttressed by a recent Harvard Business Review analysis. Two scholars Katherine Gehl and Michael Porter elaborated: “Far from being broken, our political system is doing precisely what it’s designed to do. It wasn’t built to deliver results in the public interest or to foster policy innovation, nor does it demand accountability for failure to do so. Instead, most of the rules that shape day-to-day behavior and outcomes have been perversely optimized — or even expressly created — by and for the benefit of the entrenched duopoly at the center of our political system: the Democrats and the Republicans (and the actors surrounding them), what collectively we call the political-industrial complex.”
This political-industrial complex, they wrote, includes not only legions of campaign staffers, pollsters, consultants and other party functionaries, but also media (both traditional and nontraditional) that inspire division because division keeps people engaged, keeps eyeballs on screens, and so drives profit.
That’s why you’ve noticed the astounding surge in the earnings of the liberal CNN and the conservative Fox News.
Have I been able to lay out my reasons for not voting on Nov 3? You be the judge.
