The caliber and quality of the final two Republican and Democratic candidates for the executive office indicate to me that we have struck the bottom of the barrel. They owe their souls and success to the corporations that financed their rise to power. Their solutions to problems are superficial and address the symptoms not the causes, which are the corporations.
For instance, their solutions to the health-care problems are like plugging up the nose to treat a sneezing problem.
The candidates’ foremost interest is preserving the exorbitant profits of the health-care industry.
The greed of the military industry leads the candidates to call for more military spending when we have no significant enemies. We already are outspending three-to-one all of our potential enemies combined.
Our current candidates have a cruel, plantation mentality. George Bush is concerned about rich people; Al Gore, about the middle class. Neither is concerned, let alone outraged, that 20 percent of our children are living in poverty. Neither is concerned that our embargo against Iraq is killing 5,000 children each month.
These insensitive candidates have no minds of their own. They have obligations to those who finance them. The well of white male candidates, from which all our presidents have been drawn, obviously is exhausted.
Let’s tap the wells of women and minorities that compose the other 75 percent of the population and get new ideas, new values (or maybe I should say, values), integrity, equality, democracy, justice, independence, altruism and honor. Then we could truly call ourselves a great nation. Then, perhaps, most of the rest of the world would not hate us and want to kill us every chance they get.
