Real Answers in a Presidential Election Cycle NOT Just Talking Points

I was watching CNN’s coverage of the presidential debate while I was stuck in the hospital, yet again. I watched as a moderator, who had zero control over the panel of candidates, seemed to be more interested in instigating conflict between party members jockeying for the GOP’s nomination than finding answers to serious questions that need to be answered, all for the sake of infotainment and ratings. There were a few candidates who defused the moderator’s attempts at GOP cannibalization by pointing out who the real adversary is, but in a desperate attempt to stand out from the crowd most candidates took the cheap shots.

However, if you managed to get past hyena pack feeding frenzy induced by the moderator you would have seen that there was eleven great politicians who who gave superficial talking points with no real substance. Considering no one on stage wanted to answer the questions, are oblivious to the public’s life circumstances, or are desperately trying to conceal their true beliefs from voters I’m going to take some of my favorites and rebut them if I had the opportunity to speak to twenty three million people. (Please excuse the quotes. I didn’t take notes so I don’t know what was said verbatim.)

Medical Marijuana:

“If I’m elected president I’m going to enforce the federal laws outlawing marijuana. It’s a gateway drug and we need to protect the American people.” Well Governor Christie as an American who has lived in chronic pain for over ten years I can tell you that we have a long list of legal gateway drugs that have a stronger correlation to heroin and cocaine use than marijuana: morphine, dilaudid, oxycontin, demoral, need I go on. All of the drugs that are currently used for pain management by mainstream medicine have significantly greater negative effects and are vastly more addictive than marijuana. Not to mention that the FDA does everything within it’s power to obscure the other possible health benefits of cannabis, things like killing cancer cells, helping with stress, and alleviating seizures. Does this have anything to do with the fact that if cannabis were to become socially accepted it would have dire consequences to the bottom line of Big Pharma, and the, increasingly for profit, corporate penal system? Besides clouding reality to protect corporate interests lets not forget a document that all of you career politicians in Washington only like to acknowledge when it suits your interests called the Constitution. “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” In case you forgot that is the tenth amendment. Nowhere in the constitution did I see a clause giving the federal government the authority to create a federal agency to usurp the States’ right to manage themselves. So by doing so Mr Christie as President you would be in violation of your primary sworn duty to uphold and defend the constitution. Is this really a question of morality or money?

Rebuilding the Military:

“When I’m elected president I’m going to open new bases, rebuild the sixth fleet, increase the troop counts in all branches of service, and protect veterans’ benefits.” I like that idea Mrs Fiorina, but before you do that I have a few questions for you. The United States’ expenditure with the Military Industrial Complex is greater than the sum total of the next fifteen nations in the world. With that kind of expenditure why do you need to invest more financial resources into the military? Based on that number alone it would lead any rational human being to believe that there is no need to invest more money into the Military Industrial Complex, but rather the defense industry should be investigated for mismanagement, redundancy, negligence, and fraud. As for bases. Did you know that the United States has between 700 and 900 military installations across the globe? Why do we need more military installations? In fact I would go so far as to say a comprehensive inventory of what currently exists should be performed and a significant reduction of facilities is in order. That’s the equivalent of having six military facilities in every one of the 130 or so countries we have a military footprint. I’m all for a strong military, but I think it’s about time the Department of Defense does some serious Spring cleaning to justify and account for the apparent fiscal black hole it suffers from.

Jobs:

“What do you think of Mrs Fiorina’s 30,000 layoffs at HP, or Mr Trump’s four corporate bankruptcies and lobbying practices?” Well Mr Moderator I think you need to take the full picture into perspective. First if politicians didn’t sign globalist deals, which provide the technicalities and loopholes for major international corporations to profit through plunder then we wouldn’t have this problem. Over time the corrupt practices of unions and the decline in the American work ethic led major manufacturers to pursue jobs abroad in countries where there was over supply of human capital that could be exploited at a discount. Another fringe benefit that was discovered is most developing countries have less stringent protection laws so the cost of production is decreased further. Lastly when you apply creative corporate structuring that enables major corporations to manipulate profits and losses to reduce their global tax responsibility it’s no wonder that companies like GE, FORD, GM, and anyone else who can go global does, at the expense of the domestic workforce. If you want to rebuild the middle class in this country you can’t do it by imposing a $15 minimum wage. If you want to resurrect the middle class in America you need to stop creating trade deals like NAFTA, SAFTA, and GAFTA that only serve corporate profit margins and bloated C-Suite financial incentive packages. Dump all global trade partnerships, impose tariffs on all foreign products and services, penalize corporations hiding profits abroad for tax minimization (tax evasion), and create an environment where consumption of domestically produced products is preferable. However, you can’t get mad at someone for doing his or her job. As senior executives of private corporations Fiorina and Trump are tasked with a fiduciary duty of exploiting every financial technicality available to them. If you don’t like it stop signing into law bad deals for the American people. Crony capitalism simply exploited the greed and self serving nature of politicians to create modern Corporate Feudalism. All hail King George!

Plenty of meat was left on the table. What we got from this debate was a bunch of self promoting blowhards who were spitting out canned talking points. At no point was there anything that seemed like a leader who was willing to take the calculated risk of speaking the truth and answering the hard questions, but what if they did? What if CNN was actually interested in helping America find the next great leader it so desperately needs, and not competing with Wednesday night’s prime time line up? What if?

 © Christopher L. Hedges and AverageJoesStory.com, 2015. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Christopher L. Hedges and AverageJoesStory.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.