After watching the debate tonight on ABC, I would like to make some comments and observations. First, something about me:
(more on the flip)
I work as a college professor, making between 50-55k per year. Between taxes, health care contributions, gas, food, paying mine and my wife's past bills and student loans, and trying to start a business, we are living (in a very modest apartment) paycheck to paycheck.
Our future educational goals are on hold because there's no way we can pay for them. Basically, until the business takes off or I get a substantial raise (which is likely years away), we're going to have a hard time getting ahead. We're happy, healthy, and totally in love, but we're haivng a rough time. Our difficulties have a lot to do with our local economy and the challenge of starting a business (my wife works nonstop, seven days a week for nothing trying to get it moving) but also to do with the conservative economic policies that have dominated Washington for almost 30 years.
However, we have it easy - I mean, beyond easy - compared to most Americans. The challenges facing ordinary Americans are beyond anything we've seen in this country in 70 years.
Some broader points on this theme:
Our health care in this country is shit, unless you make more than 500k per year. The industry does better the sicker we get. It is designed to profit from our illness and slow death, and it's not stopping.
Food prices are skyrocketing, our food is less safe, and less healthy.
Our infrastructure resembles that of a devastated peasant society.
In my classes, at least 30% of my students (native-born English speaking students) either cannot read or can barely read at a 5th grade level. This in a middle-class white suburb.
Wages and salaries are stagnant or falling, job security is nonexistent, and union organizers/supporters are fired with impunity (about 25,000 per year, up from 6,000 per year in 1969) for exercising their basic human rights.
Income inequality is worse than it has been in almost 100 years.
About 10% of the population of Ohio is on food stamps, and 15% of that state's population qualify for food stamps.
Corporations are acting as if there is no government at all to check their power. As it turns out, there isn't a government to check their power. Welcome to 1920.
As for foreign policy, I don't even know where to start. A war based on lies and deceit; threatening and intimidating other countries that don't support our policies; setting back the Israeli-Palesinian peace process decades; our former friends and allies reticent to work with us or even believe anything we say; overthrowing the democratically elected government of Haiti, attempting to do the same in Venezuela...
Then of course there is environmental destruction, pollution, deterioration of safety and health, the homogenization of our culture and media, ongoing race and gender discrimination, the continued sexual objectification of women...
Oh, and the Constitution. That quaint document. Ripped to shreds. Accountability is a joke. Checks and balances is apparently no longer applicable to our system of government. Presidents can sieze any power they desire. Impeachment has become a constitutional joke, reserved, it seems, for sexual indiscretions.
And what did you do, when faced with all this, and given the opportunity to question two people, one of whom will likely be the next president and in a position to have a real impact on how these issues are addrssed and resolved?
Here's what you did:
You focused on comments made by Barack Obama's former pastor, comments that he has already addressed repeatedly and to everyone's satisfaction, except apparently yours and Sean Hannity's. You did not ask Hillary Clinton about her former pastor's comments about his pastor, nor did you ask her about her association with a secretive, allegedly dominionist religious organization in D.C. known as the Fellowship, or "The Family" the leader of which has compared its work with the tactics of Mao.
You asked, in a question that appears was given to you, George, by Sean Hannity, about a connection between Barack Obama and a former domestic terrorist that is tenous at best.
You asked if each candidate thought the other could win.
You asked Barack Obama why he doesn't wear a flag pin.
You asked each candidate's views on the right to own guns.
You asked about Iran's desire to obtain nuclear weapons, an assertion that is debatable, including by people within the U.S. government.
You asked about Iraq, but not really.
You asked, ad nauseaum, about taxes on people making over 100k per year (a small percentage of the population) and about capital gains taxes.
In other words, you ignored every crucial issue facing most Americans today, and asked - to be blunt - stupid, juvenile, and meaningless questions.
You crystalized, for all of us, the complete and total failure of the traditional media to seriously and adequately address the important issues of the day. People magazine would have asked more meaningful questions of Paris Hilton than you did of these two candidates.
In closing, I say these two things:
First, you should be ashamed of yourselves.
Second, and I mean this with complete and utter sincerity:
Fuck you. Fuck the both of you. You fucking sad, worthless fucks. You've failed your country, and every citizen in it.
-Mateo Cruz