U.S.: Nine Topics Absent in the Debates

When two opponents do not address a topic that could knock their rival down it is because they have a lot to lose and little to gain with it. Here, Obama and Romney (O&R) act with an unspoken agreement to silence some important national and international questions.

For example, not even Hurricane Sandy managed to get O&R to tackle global warming — generated by human actions — which intensifies the effect of natural disasters. In the case of Sandy it did just that, by up to 10 percent. According to the Pentagon there is a greater risk to U.S. security from climate change, in the long term, than from terrorism. Not to mention that Al Gore warned about it in his “An Inconvenient Truth” — another undeserved Nobel Prize, the same man who after bombing (as part of the Clinton administration) Yugoslavia, Albania, Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Haiti, Zaire and Liberia and causing thousands of deaths and irreparable damage to the environment, tried to rob the flag of the green movement. Even so, Democrats and Republicans refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol.

Sandy, in its path, struck several nuclear power stations; here is where the second topic arises. We still think that technology is able to guarantee security from these growing demons of the apocalypse, but who will save us from the chronic negligence of our leaders? The disaster of Fukushima was the fault of “the human being” and not of nature. O&R have not presented any alternative plan for this dangerous source of energy.

Third topic: Will the U.S. launch more wars? The two faces of the same American establishment dispute the imperial gown with “I am more warmongering than you.” Obama has threatened Iran with a nuclear attack, has bombed Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia and Libya, and cunningly he calls “terrorists” those who Bush baptized as “collateral damages”: thousands of assassinated civilians. What moral bankruptcy! In Pakistan alone, between 2004 and 2011, drones killed about 3,500 civilians in funerals and weddings, schools and hospitals. Crafts that, in addition, are being used even in the U.S. to gather data about those who demonstrate against the power.

Romney did not mention the fact that Obama arms al-Qaida in Libya and Syria, nor that he betrays his promise to recognize a Palestinian state.

The fourth: The responsibility of the great financiers in the economic disaster. The crisis has drowned 11 million families in mortgages and has left thousands of people evicted and homeless. According to the campaign “Moratorium Now,” there are 7.5 million empty homes — 24 for each person without a home!

The fifth: The poverty that devastates 45 million citizens. An entire industry created by the system of “save yourself” in a market-jungle. Children have replaced the elderly at the base of the poverty pyramid: 27 percent of all children — the future of the nation! — live in poverty, and always blacks more than others. They are those people that are far from useless expenses, like the $6 billion spent each month in the occupation of Afghanistan.

The sixth: Racial discrimination. Obama is nothing more than the opaque face of the White-Christian power. He that announced with trumpets the dawn of the post-racial era soon had a bitter pill to swallow, apologizing to a white police officer that he had criticized for attacking a black professor (the fragility of a black president). Blacks remain the most discriminated sector of the population: their family income is seven times smaller than that of whites, the mortality rate of their babies is almost double that of whites and they are only 8 percent of the spectators of the NBA, whose teams are 90 percent made up of black players.

The seventh: The prison population. The U.S. spends $80 billion a year to maintain 2.3 million human beings — the majority of whom are black — in cages, a world-wide record in the matter. Many cannot pay the bail of $1,000 or less to leave — racism and poverty. Black people are also 77 percent of those condemned to life in prison without parole. One of those who know where they are going to die is, since 1992, Jacqueline Montanez, a 36-year-old black woman who committed a crime when she was 15 years old. The reason why a girl came to commit such barbaric act doesn’t really matter to them. Behind bars another 300,000 Latinos “without papers” lose their lives, in spite of not being dangerous or a flight risk.

The eighth: Capital punishment. The U.S. continues using this gruesome terrorism of the state, despite verifying that since 1976 about 130 innocents have been on death row. For that reason Julian Assange fears being turned over to this country! In spite of the 60 percent decrease in executions since 2000, around 3,300 men and women wait for death or a miracle. Blacks are the most punished, since the victims and assassins usually are of the same race. Troy Davis, a black man accused of killing a white person, insisted on his innocence but was executed in 2011. Today, the high cost of these sentences — $90,000 each — is an argument in favor of abolishing this cruel and useless penalty.

The ninth: Violence against women. Last year 4.8 million women were victims of violation and abuse. 4,000 died. The rooted male-dominated system, the traditional concept of family and the roles of men and women — endorsed by the attitudes of both candidates and their spouses — are responsible for this problem.

Taboo subjects include universal health care, how to rescue an economy in bankruptcy and the obscene influence of money in the elections.

What can be expected of candidates seated in the comforts of the bourgeoisie, tied with the globalization of a predatory and warmongering capitalism, devoid of courage or a sense of empathy for those that suffer and a real vision of the world in which they live?