Delusion 2000.

• Author: Zinn, Howard

How the candidates view the world

Every day, as the soggy rhetoric of the Presidential candidates accumulates into an enormous pile of solid waste, we get more and more evidence of the failure of the American political system. The candidates for the job of leader of the most powerful country in the world have nothing important to say. On domestic issues, they offer platitudes about health care and Social Security and taxes, which are meaningless given the record of both political parties. And on foreign policy, utter silence.

That silence is what I want to talk about.

In domestic policy, there are enough slight differences among the candidates to make some liberals and progressives--desperate for hopeful signs--seize upon the most feeble of promises. Al Gore and Bill Bradley take wobbly steps toward covering some fraction of the forty-four million uninsured, but no candidate proposes universal, nonprofit, government-guaranteed health care. John McCain and George W. Bush mutter unintelligibly about one or another tax plan, but no Republican or Democrat talks about taxing the wealth and income of the super-rich in such a way as to make several trillion dollars available for housing, health, jobs, education.

But on foreign and military policy, there are not even mutterings about change. All the candidates vie with one another in presenting themselves as supporters of the Pentagon, desirous of building up our military strength. Here is Mr. Universe--bulging ridiculously with muscles useless for anything except winning contests and bullying the other kids on the block (it is important to be #1, important to maintain "credibility")--promising to buy more bodybuilding equipment, and asking all of us to pay for it.

How can we, if we have any self-respect, support candidates--Republican or Democrat--who have nothing to say about the fact that the United States, with 4 percent of the world's population, consumes 25 percent of its wealth? How can we support them when they have nothing to say about our obligation to the other 96 percent, many of whom are suffering as a result of American policy?

What is our obligation?

First, to follow the Hippocratic Oath and "Do No Harm." Instead, we are doing much harm.

By depriving the people of Iraq of food, medicine, and vital equipment, we are causing them enormous suffering under the pretense of "sending a message" to Saddam Hussein. It appears we have no other way to send a message but through killing people...