The quadrennial presidential nomination propaganda fest indoctrinates and revives the naive, lazy person's self-delusion that all they have to do politically is get enough people to vote for the right candidates and the problems of the nation and world will be solved. Buzz-word copycatting “Change! by voting for me” is a pathetic substitute for genuinely different policies. A few bills will be passed and hyped, such as for increased health care access, but insufficient money will be put behind their empty promises. Even Bush plans to withdraw some troops from Iraq. But when a year or two goes by, you won't be able to tell how the behavior of a new Administration and gridlocked Congress differs from what the losing candidates and party would have done.

There's no free lunch, free war or free trade. The difference between “tax and spend” liberals and “borrow and spend” conservatives, aside from marginal differences over welfare versus war, is that “liberals” want to make you pay as you go, while “conservatives” want to make your kids pay in higher interest costs on the national debt. Both, having sponsored “free trade,” are making everybody pay in lost jobs, lowered wages, increased resource consumption and thus climate change adjustment expenses. This time, protracted downward volatility in the markets is a sign of a profound, correct sense that we are headed in a wrong direction.

Free trade is industrializing and so empowering the next world empires, China and India, to surpass us. Industrializing governments over a billion people each, all wanting more products, can't resist the pressure of that many people to act in an aggressive nationalist manner rather than for an international wealthy class. They will expand either until the US and European Union give up a lot of control of resources or until there is/will be world war(s) that will be much worse than WW1 and WW2. Free trade for us is national suicide.

Real progressives, Libertarians and Greens remain irrelevant partly because we criticize each other's theories and values, e.g., being a “bleeding heart,” or “racist.” Meanwhile the actual harm done by governing Republicans and Democrats by free trade and aggressive war so exceeds any harm from differences between us of theory and values that Libertarians and Greens should set aside their differences and jointly demand a return to economic nationalism, whether to stop tearing our country down and empowering others, or to slow global resource use and environmental damage. But it won't help unless these powerless minorities cooperate and leverage masses of voters to crash the Republican and Democrat parties by de- registering from them, registering Independent and opening the political system to competition. If effective, it might at least isolate and weaken the fundamentalist Christian – Neocon nexis in the Republican party and the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, helping evolve clearer conservative and progressive parties both for a return to economic nationalism.