Issues Not Debated

It's extraordinary how few of the really important issues that face us have been debated in the 21 meetings by the Democratic candidates, or covered in the Presidential race.

The closest we have come to hearing anything about what the next President will do about the catastrophic acceleration of global warming has been: whether we should have a summer holiday on the gas tax. Obama, to his credit, pointed out the meaninglessness of the idea, that it was a gesture intended to banish more serious discussion.

But it isn't just worsening global warming that is not debated . It's also the question of Presidential powers. Is Bush's expansion of them legitimate? And related to this: is it legal to imprison people indefinitely on undisclosed or unexplained charges? Is it legal to torture? What about the Congressional dispute over holding telecoms accountable for the wiretapping they did for the government? Have the candidates discussed whether the wiretapping and data mining itself was acceptable? What about Bush's politicizing DOJ and probably other departments?

I hope the candidates' collective silence on these issues doesn't mean they all accept Bush's claim that wiretapping anyone in the name of National Security is legal, and that civil service non-partisanship is a dead letter.

What about the claim, by Bush, and apparently by McCain, that it is acceptable for the US to attack nations which we deem hostile to our interests, and therefore might someday become a threat? What's Hillary's take on pre-emptive war? Obama has only dealt with this debate indirectly, by repeating over and over that Iraq is a war that should never have been fought nor authorized--by Hillary among others.

The Romans did fight pre-emptive wars, although they didn't really feel the need to justify themselves: Romans debated, but not over the justice of imperial war. They assumed that it was their right to interfere wherever to enforce peace advantageous to them: they called it Pax Romana. It meant, of course, that they could take over the Mediterranean world, brutally, inexorably--and profit hugely from it.

But there has been a lot of history since Rome.

The creation of the Hague international court, the Rules of War, the Geneva Convention, the League of Nations and finally, the United Nations with its codes of international conduct and its Security Council, which is supposed to thrash out a collective international will on matters of war and peace: all these have created a very different paradigm from that of the Imperium keeping peace in its own interest.

The closest the campaigns have come to discussing this issue, was when Obama advocated talking to our enemies face to face. Hillary and the Republicans attacked this as defeatism, demonstrating his lack of toughness. Interestingly, voters liked him for it.

Have we had any debate on food vs ethanol, or anything at all about what to do about the rising food shortages world-wide? Perhaps McCain has already outlined his response when he told audiences that there would be "more wars, my friends." He wasn't addressing food insecurity per se, but it seems to be his approach to problem solving: if there are security threats because people are starving and rebelling, then suppress them first. Neither Obama, nor Hillary has really tackled the growing food problem. Are they afraid of the farm lobby? Of losing farm votes?

What about the "other problem" in the Middle East? Bush has initiated a half-hearted attempt at solving the Israel-Palestine conundrum, but none of the candidates has seriously discussed it: are they all afraid of alienating the Jewish vote?

There has been no debate on immigration, either, after Tom Tancredo faded early from the Republican field, nor on citizenship.

We have had a rather thin debate about whether and when to get out of Iraq, and I'm sure that will intensify in the general election campaign, but there has been no consideration, even by Obama, of whether we should continue to finance a war machine that is more costly than all other nations' defense establishments combined.

Nor has there been any debate over what Mario Cuomo once called our "domestic defense department," the criminal justice "system." Americans have become accustomed to by far the highest level of incarceration of any nation in the world. Why? Are Americans incorrigibly violent and lawless? Or perhaps we're unnecessarily punitive and harsh? It is striking, that except for an occasional rhetorical flourish about young black men having a better chance of going to prison than to college, how so little is said about this other egregious aspect of American politics.

Think about it: the US spends more on defense than all the rest of the world combined, and at the same time, the Land of the Free has more people behind bars, and for longer periods, than any other country, even China with a billion more people. And, none of the candidates talk about any of this either, except the mindless: support the troops.

And then there is the plummeting dollar. This is big, since it has been the pre-eminence of the dollar that allowed the US to create such an overwhelming global military establishment, and allowed Americans to buy so much from abroad. Well, the dollar is no longer dominant, yet not one candidate has said boo about it, or about what the US should do in response.

How can this be meaningful debate?

The last meeting of the two candidates, when they "debated" in Philadelphia, was even worse than those debated before, since it was bogged down by lapel pins, and Obama's associations with Rev. Jeremiah Wright and former Weatherman, Prof. Bill Ayers.

Obama did change the subject in the next weeks: pointing out the silliness of the gas tax proposal. That's probably why he did so well in North Carolina and came close to winning in Indiana. He changed the subject.

Which brings us back to the needed debate on global warming: granted that all three agree it's a problem, but all three need to address what they're going to do about it, especially since the data shows that global warming is accelerating faster than "all the models." Unless it can be stopped, our planet will be radically changed: consider what will happen if large parts of the Earth became uninhabitable from heat and drought; if the expanses of northern wastes turn temperate; if violent storms predominate everywhere, laying waste to human structures, and if coastal regions everywhere have to be abandoned (disasters like the typhoon in Burma's Irawaddy delta are only the beginning). The most any of the candidates have gone in discussing this has been to tout alternative energies, and, ironically, to promote bio-fuels.

I hope that in the General Election Obama and McCain will debate more of these issues, but I'm not sure the media will let them. Debates of gotcha keep the people from thinking about the life and death issues that actually face us. Who wants to argue about whether a President should be Emperor or not, when we can egg them on to snipe at each other over age versus experience, over toughness or judgment, or over whom their friends are?

Maybe the media really doesn't want the issues debated; that could threaten their business interests: in war, in oil and in Empire.