US presidential candidates skirt around key issues

By Paul J. Balles

9 October 2008

Paul J. Balles shows how US presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain are avoiding the key issues facing the USA, barely mentioning “the criminality of the Wall Street thugs who profited while sitting at their desks, manipulating financial markets at the expense of investors and borrowers. 

Why anyone is running for the presidency of the United States in these times must be a mystery even to the candidates. Both candidates, during a presidential candidates’ debate, sounded like they were addressing the issues facing America. They avoided the key issues like the plague.

What Mahatma Gandhi referred to as "wealth without work" should have been the frame for the discussion of the economic crisis facing America and the world. Yet, the candidates barely mentioned the criminality of the Wall Street thugs who profited while sitting at their desks, manipulating financial markets at the expense of investors and borrowers.

By promoting a destructive free-market ideology and deregulating the financial markets, American politicians have been responsible for hundreds of thousands of unforgivable job losses. By allowing wild inexcusable market speculation, the white-collar Wall Street thieves caused millions of foreclosures on homes, ran the price of oil sky high and bankrupted the largest investment banks and their insurers. Might this be the behaviour Gandhi had in mind when he spoke of "commerce without morality?”

The real issue isn't whether the market manipulators should be saved with a bailout, but what can and should happen to punish the guilty and return America to the workers. Both presidential candidates voted for a bailout. Who benefits? The same people who got the country into a fix in the first place!

The best way to punish the guilty? It would have been to do nothing! Let them rot in the hell of their own making! Let credit dry up. Let the banks close! Let millions lose their jobs! Let more lose their homes! Let the government go broke! Wake up, America!

The bailout brokers know very well that this is what will happen if the whole truth comes out. They know that they have done enough to foment a revolution because the shoe they have tightened around America's economy will finally pinch; and that's when people revolt.

Nowhere in the debates did the candidates connect the financial problems with the costs of the wars America has been indulging in to satisfy greed without control. Ghandi might have called this "knowledge without character" Could the candidates not know? To avoid the issue is to reveal serious character flaws in a country’s potential leaders.

Why fund wars while taxpayers lose jobs, homes, education and health care? Why fund Israel's illegal wars and settlements while taxpayers lose jobs, homes, education and health care? Those at the head of the crumbling American empire have to be getting their kicks out of these pathological pursuits.

Think about it. Certainly, the deaths of 3000 in New York on 9/11 did not justify the slaughter of more than a million Iraqis at the pleasure of the American war machine. What else fits the war-game mentality? America having 761 active military bases in 151 foreign countries!

Add to that, threatening a new cold war with Russia over Georgia; threatening a new cold war with Russia over a satellite proposal for Poland; threatening a new cold war with Russia by surrounding it with NATO membership for previous Soviet Union countries; and squandering the nation's wealth on weaponry.

When an empirical gang has been spending itself into oblivion, when it can see the writing on all the walls, and when its manipulators get nervous about being caught, the leaders of the country should at least relinquish their arrogance.