The Election Nobody Won.

• Author: Hathaway, William T.

The pomp and protest of inauguration day marked the end of a political season that saw Gore sacrifice his principles and Bush sacrifice our democracy, all to the great god Winning. After a campaign directed by Madison Avenue, the post-election debacle stripped away the last facade of red, white and blue idealism. Five weeks of political thuggery made it clear that our votes don't count. Bush didn't win the election; he seized power through a legalistic coup d'etat.

We may mourn for Gore, but he wasn't even outraged. A true son of the system, he'd rather sink than rock the boat. His concession speech skipped over what had happened and instead calmed the public with make-nice emotionality, thus re-establishing his membership in the power elite and earning him the chance to run again.

Despite some positive qualities, Gore is not a genuine agent for change. Like Bush, he supports capital punishment, genetic engineering of foods, corporate globalization, and a military build-up. Economically, the two men differ only in the size of their trickle down.

The soft-money moguls don't want us to have a real choice. Campaign financing shows us that the major parties are just two sides of the same gold coin, two modes of control by the corporate oligarchy.

The economic power base of both parties lies in the business establishment, and they represent two tendencies within it. The Republicans support a fiscal orientation aimed at preserving the value of capital by keeping taxes and inflation low. To them, a moderate increase in the number of poor people provides an anchor on the economy by holding wages and thus inflation down. The Democrats support a mercantile orientation aimed at expanding public buying power. To them, a moderate increase in the number of prosperous people enlarges the customer base. Each party contains more than this, but this is their economic core that keeps their leaders from acting against corporate interests. The alternation of power between them ensures that neither tendency gets carried so far as to destabilize the very profitable enterprise. Given this structure, the changes we need can't come from them.

Through ballot-access laws, matching-fund regulations, and debate policies, the major parties try to shut out other approaches. They want to be the only game in town, and it's now obviously a shell game with no winners except them.

They and the corporate media have also avoided an open discussion of their economic interests by...