A Clearer Perspective

The Fed worked overnight this weekend to exactly what it’s not supposed to do: get its hands dirty to bail out the private sector.The New York Times reported yesterday that in hopes of avoiding a “systemic meltdown in financial markets” the Fed had swooped in to offer a $30 billion credit line to “engineer the takeover” of firm Bear Stearns and at the same time announced an open-ended (so no limits on the amount) lending program for Wall Street’s biggest investment firms.

You see his name strung out on banners on freeway overpasses, riding along on bumper stickers and popping out on signs around campus.He is Ron Paul … the grassroots, pro-constitution, anti-war, fiscally conservative candidate so loved by his supporters and yet so ignored by the mainstream.

Ron Paul is what’s happening out on the margins while the mainstream candidates are standing on their soapboxes offering the same rhetoric that every kind of political candidate has every said. The campaign he’s running is a subtle, yet enlightened call for revolution.

It’s fitting that media reform would be a campaign issue for presidential candidates like Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel. Don’t know who they are? Well, that starts to get toward my point. Kucinich and Gravel – both still trying to hold their own in the race for the White House – are prime examples of the chronic lack of coverage that less well-funded candidates receive. These “back of the pack” runners are given their few moments to speak at the debates and press conferences, and then quietly ushered aside to make room for the glitz and glam of media hogs like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

When I was traveling in Chile last year, in the lovely seaside town of Valparaiso, I walked past a colorful little house where two discarded televisions sat outside on the porch. Written on them in white paint was the message:

“¡Apaga la tele… vive tu vida!” Turn off your television… live your life!

I smiled and kept walking, feeling secure enough in myself to know I wasn’t the type of person to succumb to media addiction anyway. Thoughts like that are easier when you’re half a world away from the junk-media society of America so it was only after my return to the States that I really understood what it is to create for oneself a virtual reality.