Where Have All the Issues Gone?

Well, there we have it: It's down to GoreBush. Dull vs. dullard. The political establishments of the two-party duopoly successfully rose up to surround, defend, and shove forward their chosen ones, both girded with tens of millions of dollars from the exact same sources of corrupt corporate money.

This means that the kitchen-table issues that actually matter to us will not even be up for discussion, since the money masters of the GoreBush travelling medicine show have decreed that their candidates must not disturb the populace with any questioning of the conventional wisdom and corporate order. Instead, GoreBush offers "Election 2000: A Space Odyssey" -- completely out of touch with the real life of our country's workaday majority. Here are a few examples of what the Democrat and Republican will NOT be discussing:

#1: The mugging of the middle class

Al and George are in perfect harmony on the prosperity theme, assuring voters that they will dutifully extend America's razzle-dazzle, Wall Street-driven "economic boom." Both are totally deaf to the chorus of America's majority asking: A boom for whom?

Real wages are lower today than when Nixon was president. Eight out of ten families have seen their incomes go flat or go down in this period of so-called prosperity. More than 90 percent of the gains in stock wealth have gone to the wealthiest 10 percent of families. Farm bankruptcies, corporate downsizings, and family debt are setting new records. Why is this gritty reality not being raised -- at least by the nominal Democrat?

Rather than reaching out to the middle class, Gore and Bush have agreed to continue the mugging -- both support tax and trade programs that subsidize more downsizings and the exporting of U.S. jobs; both favor immigration policies that allow high-tech companies to import workers to fill the majority of our tech jobs and undermine the salary scale for the whole industry; and both fawn over Alan Greenspan, favoring his reappointment as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, from whence he pursues a relentless policy of depressing wages.

#2: The return of the robber barons

In a greed-grab more feverish than a gold rush, every industry in our country is being consolidated and conglomerated by huge corporations to form entities with names like Global Goliath MegaHuge Inc. The bottom line is a shrinking of competition and a radical rise in monopoly power affecting our jobs, health care, the news we're fed, and much, much more.

The CEOs, with wide, toothy grins, rationalize their mergers in the name of "consumer benefits." Do we look like we have sucker wrappers around our heads? Is your cable bill lower? Is your medical care better? Is the nightly news any newsier as the result of these consolidations?

A handful of corporate and investor elites enjoy a golden windfall from these mergers. Everyone else loses -- workers, consumers, taxpayers, small businesses, communities, small shareholders. Yet this destructive re-ordering of America's economy is being done with no public discussion, much less a challenge. Instead of Teddy Roosevelt or "Fighting Bob" LaFollette, we get Al and George taking millions of campaign dollars from the merging barons and seeing, hearing, and speaking no evil.

#3: Globaloney

Corporate globalization is nothing but Reagan trickle-down economics writ large -- if we simply unleash the Great Stallions of Global Corporate Power, we're told, these beneficent beasts will naturally produce enormous wealth, put a Lexus in every garage, turn every bloody dictatorship into a utopian democracy, cure genital herpes, and let everyone have a Nike swoosh on their clothing.

Only it hasn't quite worked out that way. Instead, the U.S. has lost hundreds of thousands of good jobs, as our corporate stallions have stampeded to poverty-stricken nations to take advantage of powerless and dirt-cheap labor. The secret, autocratic, corporate-controlled tribunals set up by NAFTA and the WTO to enforce this global rapaciousness have been empowered, without our knowledge or consent, to overrule our national, state, and local laws, thereby stealing our most fundamental right: self-government (see The Lowdown, March '99 and Jan. '00).