Well, Doug, that's a difference between a plutocracy/oligarchy in the periphery mired in decades of civil war (Colombia) and a plutocracy/oligarchy at the core that has been at peace at home since the late nineteenth century. That America is peaceful doesn't make it democratic.
> In the US, to run for office
> from the left, you have to be willing to risk mocking press coverage
> or none at all. Yeah, the big guys dominate the public sphere, and a
> couple of centuries of bourgeois common sense have been drilled into
> our heads, but we're not terrorized and we're not powerless. You have
> to take seriously the possibility that many, maybe most, Americans
> are pretty satisfied with the status quo.
Let's take Max here. Max's politics is on the left edge of the "mainstream" in the US. Max's smart, funny, well-spoken, and you agree that Max looks better than Ross Perot. Or you can take Nader or any other comparable leftist of similar qualifications. Such leftists can't hope to get elected to any high office here, and they don't even pose a serious challenge in terms of getting on ballots and receiving sizable shares of popular votes, but Perot can. Is that because Perot's more in tune with Americans? I don't think so. It's because Perot got money, and leftists don't, and you need money to gain electoral "credibility" in plutocracy.
-- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>