'Tis the season to be greedy.

Tra la la la la, la la, la, la.

One of the most maddening aspects of American media during any political campaign season is our tendency to cover even the most serious legislative or societal news through the lens of how it might affect candidates' election chances. This so-called "horse race" reporting usually comes at the expense of looking at what actually happened, and how it will affect people. It's easier and "sexier"--although not particularly relevant--to guess what might happen at the ballot box.

Never has this syndrome been on fuller display than in coverage of the presidential signing of a bill extending prescription drug coverage--sort of--to Medicare-eligible seniors and the disabled. The bill stinks to high heaven, but all we could hear about was whether its passage would help George Bush in 2004.

This is sort of like not seeing the forest for the pine needles on the forest floor.

Let's review. Why was legislation offering drug benefits needed in the first place? Because for America's growing number of people facing serious health issues while on fixed incomes, the cost of prescription drugs is an urgent crisis that continues to worsen daily. Too many seniors cannot afford the drugs, cannot afford preventative medical care, and cannot afford the acute medical care that becomes necessary when they can't stay on their meds. Many die, unnecessarily, as a result.

Why is the cost of prescription drugs such a crisis, and why are America's drug costs so much higher than those in other industrialized countries? Largely because drug companies are run by heartless greedy bastards, and our health care system allows--no, encourages--their worst tendencies.

So how has President Bush "fixed" this problem?

By pushing hard for, and then signing, marginally beneficial legislation that will cost taxpayers $400 billion--some $139 billion of which (over one third) will go directly into the profit-laden pockets of those same drug companies.

You can bet this bill will help Dubya's reelection bid--though not because grateful seniors will line up at the polls. For many, drug costs will still be a crisis when this bill takes effect, and they know it. (Seniors are smarter than the White House apparently thinks.) Instead, the bill will help Bush in 2004 because Bush is trying to raise a nearly limitless pool of money to run his campaign and flood us with those attack ads. And grateful Big Pharma execs will now line up to reinvest a small portion of their new windfall on another four years of their best buddy. One percent of one year's extra profits would come to about an extra $14 million over what they were already planning to contribute. (Multiply that by every industry Bush is in a position to help.) Think those wire transfer lines are already humming? Think it was a coincidence that he signed the bill on the road, just before holding fundraising events in Las Vegas and Phoenix?

This is a bill designed to raise reelection money for George Bush, at the expense of seniors' lives. Between this Medicare gift and an even worse energy bill--what one Democratic wag labeled the "No Lobbyist Left Behind" Act--the season of using staggering amounts of our tax dollars for craven political catering to big donors has now begun. The widespread looting now going on in Iraq--and I mean Bechtel and Halliburton and friends, not poor, teenage Iraqi thugs--has officially come home.

Why do we let this happen? And, more importantly, why are so many, in the media and beyond, so reluctant to connect the dots? (Or decimal points?) The $87 billion supplemental appropriation for Iraq--to cover some of the cost of the first year of our occupation alone--was so laden with pork that Middle East companies were begging Congress to let them do some of the reconstruction work at a tenth of the cost being budgeted for those infamous no-bid contracts for Dick Cheney's business partners. Across the West, public lands and the mineral rights therein are up for sale for fractions of a penny on the dollar, environmental laws be damned. "Free trade" restrictions notwithstanding, farm subsidies to big agribusiness have ballooned in the Bush 43 era. And so it goes.

This auctioneering of the public trust is something Clinton and predecessors of both parties have laid the groundwok for, but Dubya's firesale has been particularly bold for the last three years. In the 2000 campaign, Al Gore could talk seriously about not just maintaining a federal surplus, but actually paying off the federal debt. The robust surplus Bush inherited was officially a deficit in only six months, well before 9/11, due less to economic downturn than to the first of Bush's multiple tax gifts to the rich. Now, the deficit has exploded beyond our grandkids' wildest dreams, America's already record gap between rich and poor is now expanding like the Big Bang's aftermath, our national soul is being outsourced, the oxymoronic term "jobless recovery" has entered our language, and the world's economy is being kept alive by our consumer debt and trade deficits. You know how foreign debt has crippled the economies of many developing nations? Think what China will be able to do to the US in 20 years, and then consider whose TV ads should be questioning which candidate's patriotism.

A generous heaping of scorn and outrage has been dogging AARP of late for supporting Bush's hideous Medicare bill; many are questioning whether the fact that AARP is in the business of selling health insurance and accepting drug company advertising influenced their decision. Well, of course it did; it's hardly news that many of our country's larger non-profits have sold their soul for corporate funding and that it's affected their political stances: anti-cancer groups that studiously avoid discussing environmental causes of cancer, for example, or big Green groups that send out those pretty four-color pictures of wilderness, but never, ever talk about reducing America's destructive infatuation with resource consumption. AARP is no different

But AARP's corruption is nearly meaningless when compared to the far larger, more comprehensive, and vastly more destructive auctioneering of our public trust and money going on at the White House. Forget the horse race; for the real story, go to the stables, and follow the smell.