Bud Bowl III

Our families like it when we go off to cover a presidential debate. That's because when we come back from one, we bring back bags full of goodies.

After the second debate, we drove home from Winston-Salem with a C-Span canvas bag that included Matchbox racing cars (paid for by 3Com), Budweiser beer mugs (from Anheuser Busch) and a handful of ATT pre-paid long distance phone cards ("proud technology sponsor of the Presidential Debates").

>From the Boston debate, we came back with t-shirts, baseball caps, a canvas bag, reporters' notebooks, pens, key chains.

The food and beer at the debates are being provided by Anheuser-Busch. Post-debates, the Starbucks coffee and Krispy Kreme donuts are on the house. (Why would any reporter in his or her right mind choose to walk a half a mile through police lines, horse manure and pepper spray to cover hundreds of young people protesting Green Party candidate Ralph Nader's exclusion from the debates and forgo watching the Yankees in the playoffs while sipping a cold Budweiser?)

The Ford Motor Co. logo is emblazoned on the plastic press pass holder. In Boston, before slipping the Ford press pass over our heads, we held a moment of silence for the hundreds of innocents killed while riding unstable Ford sports utility vehicles on frayed Firestone tires.

We guessed Jim Lehrer wouldn't ask the corporate candidates on stage whether or not they favored a criminal homicide investigation of these two companies and the responsible executives for the deaths of these innocents. He didn't.

Remarkably, the hundreds of reporters covering these debates think little of the corporate sponsorship of the debates. (Or if they are thinking about it at all, few choose to express their thoughts in print.)

Thirteen years ago, the two major parties hijacked the presidential debates away from the League of Women Voters, after the League made the mistake of opening the debates to third party candidate John Anderson in 1980.

To replace the League, the two parties set up a front called Commission on Presidential Debates (it is run out of a political consulting firm's office off of Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C.) to set rules that would effectively exclude third party candidates.

Big companies--Anheuser-Busch, U.S. Airways and 3Com--put up big money to sponsor the debates. Anheuser Busch, for example, paid $500,000 to be the "exclusive" sponsor for the debate in St. Louis.

Not coincidentally, the two main candidates who seriously question the power of giant corporations over our political economy--Nader and Reform Party candidate Patrick Buchanan--have been banned from the conversation.

The Commission says that there are more than 100 candidates for president this year and you can't fit them all onto the stage, and that's why they set the bar at 15 percent in the polls. Candidates polling less than 15 percent are excluded from all three of the Commission debates.

But such a standard would have excluded Jesse Ventura, the former wrestler whose debate success catalyzed his victorious gubernatorial campaign, from the debates in Minnesota. A more reasonable standard would be five percent in the polls, which would cut the field to two, three or four. Or you could ask the public who they would like to see in the debates. (More than half want to see Buchanan and Nader in.)

But far be it for us to complain. We say -- bring on [the goodies]. Bud Bowl Three. Can't wait to see what we get in our canvas bags in St. Louis.

Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime Reporter. Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Multinational Monitor. They are co-authors of Corporate Predators (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press; see www.corporatepredators.org). To subscribe to weekly corp-focus e-mail service, send an e-mail message to listproc@essential.org with the following all in one line: subscribe corp-focus your-name (no period). (c) Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman