Presidential debate arrives where roots of financial crisis can be traced

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 13:32:00 -0500

When President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney debate Monday night in Boca Raton, they'll be doing so, almost literally, in the shadow of the housing crisis and economic collapse. While the topic of the debate is foreign policy, Boca is where the financial products that built up the housing bubble were conceived.

Nikos Retsos

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 14:33:52 -0500

This debate is not going to be about the Wall Street collapse and the global economy. It is going to be about "U.S. interests, about Might is Right, about Iran, about China's creeping into
the Pacific, the aftermath of the Arab Springs, and where we are after our debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan. I expect the veteran CBS correspondent and FACE THE NATION anchor Bob Schrieffer to touch on all of the above topics.

Mitt Romney said recently that a "strong U.S. military is a catalyst of peace," and that view is contrary to John F. Kennedy's view who argued that: "The basic problems facing the world today are not susceptible to military solutions, " on quote. And he said that at the peak of the Cold War era! Today, after Vietnam. Iraq and Afghanistan, anyone who sees the U.S. military a s a vanguard of global peace belongs in a chicken coop - not in the White House! General William Westmorland said during the Vietnam war: "We will blast them back into the stone age," but we achieved nothing, and they saddled us with the Vietnam Syndrome. General George Patton said: "I do like to see the arms and legs fly." Well, we have made plenty of " arms and legs fly" in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan with airstrikes and with predator drones. We are leaving empty-handed after 10 years, and that slaughter has brought us plenty of hatred in the Muslim world. Do we want an encore?

The presidential candidates debate on foreign policy tonight should be a cleat-cut victory for Obama because Romney is totally clueless about foreign policy. He would depend solely on rehearsals by his staff on hot button issues that the republican newspapers have labeled as Obama's shortcomings. But match Obama's 4-year experience in foreign policy, and that equals a B.A. degree in international politics and diplomacy, whereas Romney comes on the debate as a clueless high school graduate with a homework on the subject prepared by others - which is equivalent to someone having bought a term-paper he couldn't write himself for his class from an internet vendor!

From my own watching tower, I see Mitt Romney as a George W. Bush student and accolade, and as a warmonger just a shade below the most infamous warmongering politician, the late Barry Goldwater! I expect plenty of finger-pointing to be "the hallmark of the debate, " as I expect to hear a lot of boasting by both candidates about keeping the U.S. as a superpower above all other nations, and Iran to become the whipping boy of the evening. Beyond that, I expect only abstract or murky answers on anything else. After all, by this time most voters have had a sensory overload of campaign rhetoric, and see this debate as a laundry machine on the last wringing spin! Nikos Retsos, retired professor

PRI: Public Radio International

Presidential debate arrives where roots of financial crisis can be traced

Nikos Retsos