The War in Iraq is off limits to both of them, except it is not off limits to the voting public, it is the most important issue. The issue of "Gay" marriage is too toxic but they are both on the same side of the issue, prevent it at all costs. The issue of poverty in America has been swept under the carpet issue of jobs in a nation where jobs often no longer offer people a way out of poverty. Nothing in life is as certain as the fact that in any nation where labor is cheap, people without assets are poor. Show me a nation where that is not true today and I will show you a nation with a publicly funded safety net that does not exist here. The new major target of prejudice is not race, it is poverty. Through our politically supported antagonistic approach to the poor people in our nation our worst prejudice is imposed on childhood itself.

Our new prejudice is also against drug use only in poor neighborhoods where drugs are not prescribed by Doctors. There is a war on against drugs in this nation that is further impoverishing people whose disease is already destroying their lives. That war is mostly being fought in the neighborhoods of the black and brown people who live in our cities. Make no mistake, Black People are still poorer than white people in the USA today, and they will be as long as the schools are as bad as they often are in their neighborhoods. Prejudice is delivered in a different envelope today but the contents are still disastrous for whole segments of our society.

No child left behind was a great slogan but as a program it fails to support the basic elements of education. It is a program all about measuring progress in knowing facts, not interest in learning ideas. It is only in stimulating a child's interest in learning new concepts and new facts to support them that we truly educate our children. The system was broken before the "No Child" act became law. Have we now decided that fixing it is too hard so we will just measure its failures? That is how the under funding of the "No Child" act works against Public Education across the nation. In taking money from the educational programs that work best and giving it to the testing companies and the administrative uses that over-testing demands, this act is further impoverishing poor schools and not aiding the rich ones.

The war in Iraq, the war on drugs that has millions incarcerated under conditions that are immoral and unethical, and the war against the poor that denies them basic human needs are the three great wars being waged by our government today. Neither candidate has anything to offer that will change those policy areas significantly. Certainly the idea of taxing the rich less will not improve the lot of the poor of this nation. Nor will it improve the nation itself. The economy is only one element of our success in this nation. Our ideals and our dreams of a more decent world are suffering because of our leadership's obsession with that area of our social system.

We are "shocked, shocked" at the events in Iraq that are depicted as individual sadism in the press. We have institutional sadism enough in this nation to tell us where those failures of conscience come from. Our sadistic approach to handling those who are drug addicted or criminally insane is a disease of our society; not just a disease of our leadership or the rare individual who embraces pain as their muse. To transfer that institutionalized sadism to Iraq where the "enemy" are not even English speaking people and some of them are trying to kill us is no great leap.

Both of our would-be Presidents are caught in the politics of the expected and afraid to lead us in a new direction. The press will misconstrue and miscast anything it does not expect or understand, is apparently the conventional wisdom in both campaigns. Nothing like the fire of a John Kennedy, without whose reluctant willingness to support "Brown" as the law of the land that historic victory would have been meaningless, resides in either of these men. Bush with the naïve idealism of the Neocons as his guiding star since 9/11 is a disaster, Kerry with his failure to offer to lead the nation in a new direction in any major area of policy will be a small change. The politics of our nation are bound up in the fallacy that political parties matter more than people and money matters more than both of them.

It is time for another great reform movement to sweep the nation, and we have the tools to create such a movement. Moveon.org is one example of how to create that national movement; there are many others out there today. A lot of us will have to abandon our political parties to do this but either we will abandon them or they will continue to ignore us, that is the only real choice we have. God bless you and keep you safe from leadership that cannot lead, does not follow a moral and ethical path, and will not just get out of our way as we people strive to make this a better nation.