The Road to Twenty One Presidential Debates

[Donnachaidh]

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/11/02-12

What people would not want Presidential Debates in multiple cities all over America in September and October 2012? Why, the people at the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD). CPD is a private corporation created in 1987. It is controlled by the Republican and Democratic Parties and acts as the iron gatekeeper regarding the number of debates, who is chosen to ask the questions and who is excluded from most important forums for reaching millions of people interested in the presidential elections.

Powered by the television networks that transmit the debates to the public, the CPD is set in concrete when it comes to entrenching the status quo for the two party dictatorship's orchestrated bubble of exclusion and manipulation.

Citizen groups such as Open Debates have exposed the CPD's inner workings, picketed its Washington, D.C. headquarters and used federal courts to try to pry open the presidential debate process. Aside from a modest settlement and apology for one of its nasty transgressions, the Commission has emerged unchanged. After all it is a corporation that has mocked the Bill of Rights and side-stepped the Federal Election Commission and IRS rules.

Presidential campaigns are repetitious, tedious, often sterile and trivial. They narrow down to half a dozen issues many months before Election Day, ignore very important domestic and foreign subjects and public necessities by common implied consent. And they deliberately ignore local and regional matters.

More at the link --