Economic Meltdown (?), the Election, and all those other "things" on our minds lately

I have to admit, I've been extremely distracted by all of the events going on in the US right now. The largest 2 (most obvious, I should say), being the election and the crumbling of our Casino Street ecomony. What concerns me right now is how little these things actually intersect, or at least, how little it seems either of our presidential candidates seem to understand that they actually do.

During the second Presidential debate neither candidate was willing to actually point out to Americans that the economy will get worse before it gets better. This is contrary to statements released by Paulson (Treasury), Roubini (academic), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, and I should mention that the debt ticker in NY is no longer long enough to show our actual debt (the new one will go up next year, probably to calm panic when people see it daily.) This includes the crumbling of other global economic systems (see the disasters in the European and the Asian markets for details) which- whether or not we'd like to admit it, are highly related to the function and stabilization of our own economy. Both candidates also seemed to endorse the bail-out plan, while neither candidate seemed to be able to state exactly what that bail-out did/will do to alleviate the rippling effects of Casino Street's now 6th straight day of loss on the average American. A point of clarification: by average I mean lower middle class and poor and in the last decades we can also add: complete poverty level Americans. The wealthy- corporate elite and government employees- are not considered "average Americans" to me, and how anyone could consider them as such is far beyond my comprehension. What this bail-out has essentially done is add a taxpayer financed patch to a corrupt system without any true restructuring to prevent this from happening again in 2 weeks, one month, 6 months, etc... I should be clear now in saying that it is not the bail-out specifically I oppose but rather, the entire de-regulated, neoliberal economic policies of the US that have gotten us (and most of the world) into this mess. The bail-out fails to address that. The presidential candidates also fail to address this. In fact, I am almost certain that Washington is part of the reason that 'neoliberal' isn't even listed as a true word in American dictionaries because to them we are just a "capitalist democracy" legitimized by tagging democracy to every possible word we can. News to Washington: we are capitalist, yes. A democracy? Not by a long shot. Americans should be calling our govenrment out on this abuse of the word.

Now, I still stand strong on my vote against McCain. Not because I believe that he and Obama are drastically different candidates. They are I suspect, largely different humans with largely different ideologies. However, I doubt either of them will be able to accomplish much on this 'compromise with the already in place system' tickets they both fall on. At the end of the day, I can barely tell the difference between the democrans and republicrats with their US Empire/imperialist policies of the last half century. I have to admit too that any elected president after George Bush will face a tremendous workload, and will need to possess a keen ability to rationalize which issues need to be tackled first. I hope what they include as a prime focus is the welfare of the people of this nation without whom they would fail to have any legitimacy. What I hope they are able to see is that globalization has not worked and local economy needs to be focused on to ensure a stabilized nation at all, let alone a powerful one. Face it: we cannot help our own with all of our jobs overseas, massive wars being fought and funded by external sources, with no access to healthcare for MOST Americans, with post-dated policies and officials enforcing them, with our civil liberties and rights slipping through the cracks unknowingly. America is in a tragic state of potential disrepair.

As a suggestion, I urge everyone to start living more conservative lifestyles. This government injection into Casino Street will cause inflation. Money is going to be sparse. If the government does buy banks to free loan availability be wary that these loans are now a speculative measure to pay off the debt used to boost Casino Street. This is a circular loop of self-defeat. I urge everyone to contact their local, state, and federal representatives to push forward a global, multilateral solution to this problem. Not a US-led solution. A democratically created and approved global solution. I urge US citizens to support global systems such as the United Nations, by telling your representatives they are wrong to bypass the UN in making decisions such as military interventions. In essence I urge US citizens to step down from our role of "global leader" to a role as "global citizen". It is imperative to the success of humanity on more levels than just economics.