Speech found in mailbox of supreme underdog on Super Tuesday
By
Saul Landau
Between
now and the November election, the public and the political
professionals expect me to behave like a traditional candidate. Avoid
important issues and instead focus on abstractions like “change”
and non-political, lifestyle issues like for or against abortion, gay
marriage and owning machine guns. I’m supposed to support the
deportation of immigrants and stand for lowering taxes. I’m
supposed to act
like
the toughest leader in the world, meaning I’ll send U.S. troops
anywhere to fight “terrorism,” or whatever.
Candidates
say these things because their advisers tell them to do so. They
follow such suggestions because above all else they want to govern,
no matter what the agenda. Mitt Romney, for example, favored and
opposed abortion and gay rights. Like other candidates, he changed
positions more often than a two-year-old playing with a light switch.
I’ve decided to break with tradition.
By
Saul Landau Read Spanish Version
Between
now and the November election, the public and the political
professionals expect me to behave like a traditional candidate. Avoid
important issues and instead focus on abstractions like “change”
and non-political, lifestyle issues like for or against abortion, gay
marriage and owning machine guns. I’m supposed to support the
deportation of immigrants and stand for lowering taxes. I’m
supposed to act
like
the toughest leader in the world, meaning I’ll send U.S. troops
anywhere to fight “terrorism,” or whatever.
Candidates
say these things because their advisers tell them to do so. They
follow such suggestions because above all else they want to govern,
no matter what the agenda. Mitt Romney, for example, favored and
opposed abortion and gay rights. Like other candidates, he changed
positions more often than a two-year-old playing with a light switch.
I’ve decided to break with tradition. President Bush in his State
of the Union smirk refused to offer a realistic assessment of our
nation — how our people are doing and where we stand with the rest
of world.
Voters,
if you know my assessment and plans you can then vote for me on the
real issues and not just on my flaming desire to have the most
powerful job in the world.
First,
I’m grateful to Bush because he dramatized the decline of the U.S.
Empire. He never used the “E” word, of course, but nevertheless
the son of Bush I, who proclaimed the New World Order, wrote the
obituary for his father’s elusive dream.
That
imprudent brat — I avoid stronger words — has turned trillions in
surplus into trillions of deficit, hastened the fall of the dollar
and the decline of U.S. prestige in the world. He has also helped
invert the American dream into a nightmare.
Our
people have become the most stressed-out folks in the world (not
counting countries at war or famine). Middle class young men and
women fear they’ll never own a home or a decent job or have secure
health insurance.
In
the first seven years of the 21st
Century, the income gap between rich and poor (bottom 40%) grew wider
as manufacturing jobs continued to disappear.
The
percentage of workers with work-based health insurance — or any
health coverage — shrank. Poverty grew alongside consumer credit
debt and the number of home foreclosures. Each day we confront a
rising cost of gasoline and home heating fuel. In truly poor
neighborhoods we see hunger — a shameful situation in the richest
country in the world.
Excuse
me please, members of the media, for interjecting realism
into the soap opera aura that you all have created around the current
primary elections. I have watched endless reports
about gossip (this candidate cried because her feelings were hurt)
and that one felt betrayed when the race issue emerged, but only as a
way to smear another candidate. Mostly, the candidates said little
about reality and nothing
that offers even a hint about the real issues of the nation or its
empire.
Look
how U.S. health care has fallen — a long way from number one —
while pieces of our infrastructure collapse along with it. I’m
talking about the broken levees in New Orleans, the bridge in
Minnesota and the crumbling school houses in much of the country.
The
U.S. economy is or is about to fall into recession. While
Bush turned a surplus of trillions into a deficit of trillions,
Europe and emerging Asian powers didn’t piss away their economic
surpluses. China capitalized on U.S. preoccupations with “security”
in the Middle East and sent its investors throughout the world to buy
up or get stock in raw material and energy resources. As the U.S.
political system slowly falters without adding oil — pardon the pun
— to its creaky ideological foundations, China and Europe, and some
other nations have transcended the 20th
century themes and actually begun to prepare themselves for the
realities of this 21st
century.
Our
government depends on once
despised nations like China to
keep it afloat and to fund futile wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,
neither of which can be won. Yet, the other candidates refuse to
declare total opposition to the wars, and admit that any support for
them ever was a mistake. The leading Republican predicts more wars if
he wins, while pledging to keep troops in Iraq and Afghanistan for a
century if necessary. Has he smoked some of Afghanistan’s bumper
opium crop?
Have
they inhaled too deeply on Cuban cigars? The candidates swear to
oppose Castro’s Cuba and make no big changes until it becomes
democratic — it’s been almost fifty years of futile embargo —
while saying nothing about Saudi Arabia that supports the Taliban and
still refuses to allow women to drive cars. Have the candidate not
noticed that Castro has four sons — ideological not biological —
running governments in Nicaragua, Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador? Did
none observe his cousin Lula, President of Brazil, dropping a billion
dollar credit on Cuba?
Meanwhile,
the candidates act as if they suffer from a disease that has plagued
our leaders for fifty years: visions of omnipotence. Wake up, I say.
Our dollar dropped to the point where Europeans buy New York
apartments on the cheap and Chinese purchase houses in San Francisco
and absorb U.S. companies from Wall Street to the heartland. Our
country is for sale at cheap prices afforded by the weak dollar.
While
Bush undertook expensive military adventures with congressional
approval and doggedly clings to them in the face of death and
destruction — Europe, China, India, Brazil and some oil-rich states
have begun to spread their non military influence throughout the
world.
You
don’t find this out from watching Larry
King interviewing Britney Spears about parenting and drinking. Nor
does King ask top generals why they need a military budget of over
$700 billion at a time when no nation poses a threat. The candidates,
like most of the people, have succumbed to media culture, accepted
trivia as a daily value and vicarious entertainment as the spiritual
condiment of the real spiritual national value: shopping.
My
adversaries and I have sparred — with words of course — but none of
us dared to tread on sacred imperial terrain. Women applaud that
their candidate will act as tough as any man when it comes to using
military force against evil Iran. Liberals hail the Black candidate
running on the Hope platform who pledged to send more troops to
Afghanistan and possibly invade Pakistan.
The
leading Republicans orate with bravado on the military front using
“security” as the code word for willingness to dispatch troops
anywhere at any time. They pander to religious zealots on abortion
and gay issues and — except for McCain — show no objections to the
use of torture as a routine technique of interrogation when the “t”
word arises. Indeed, Bush’s supposed war on terrorism forms the
backbone of their campaign agenda: tough on terrorists (as if!).
The
United States created the rules for the world in 1945 with us as the
leader and other “developed” countries like England, France,
Italy, Japan and Germany
as
junior partners. The poorer nations became obedient servants,
dubiously neutral actors or mortal communist enemies. That world is
gone.
The
UN, supposed to function to keep the others in line, has lost its
ability to function. Even our control over world economics has
dwindled. Countries desert the dollar, for half a century the world’s
standard, in favor of the Euro. Venezuela replaces the IMF in
Argentina and the IMF finds fewer countries willing to undergo its
stressful borrowing terms and has laid off 15% of its staff. The
World Bank has also lost prestige along with the U.S.-style free
market ideology.
The
very word “free” as used by Bush has become a joke for much of
the world. The United States for most of its history stood as the
beacon light for immigrants; now its people and politicians deride
them. The nation that stood as the bastion of habeas corpus and anti
torture principles now more than vacillates on both subjects.
Imagine,
almost half the audience applauded Bush in his State of the Union
smirk. That pompous moron has done enough damage. Let’s stop
talking about being number one. It makes no sense in a world
undergoing possibly fatal climate change, one riddled with epidemics,
with a third of its people under the line of minimal income.
Elect
me and I’ll stop the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, cut the military
budget by 80%, redirect funds to the real needs of the country and
begin to meet the challenges of global warming.
If
you’ve listened carefully, you’ll realize I’ve committed the
cardinal sin in American politics: telling the truth.
Yes,
Mike Gravel — an anti-Vietnam War Senator from Alaska — deserves
your vote: the “honestest” President since Lincoln.
Saul
Landau is an Institute for Policy Studies fellow, author of A
BUSH AND BOTOX WORLD
and maker of WE
DON’T PLAY GOLF HERE,
winner of best activist video in the San Francisco video fest. Write
roundworldproductions@gmail.com
to purchase a DVD.
