Neither candidate is going to solve our economic problems.

Henry Ford paid his workers well enough to buy the products they manufactured and the middle class grew.  For the past three decades, capitalism has forgotten his wisdom and the middle class continues to shrink.

Regardless of the promises made by both candidates to help the middle class, the financial industry has captured government.  The Supreme’s Citizens United ruling gave it the major lever of power and we have been relegated to debating social issues. 

As evidence, I offer these excerpts from an article by Michael Meurer from the website titled, truth-out.org. “In the endless swirl of headlines about the current global financial crisis, the dominant narrative, which is also driving the 2012 US presidential election, is that crippling amounts of public debt run up by profligate government spending have brought us to the brink of financial ruin and must be offset by deep cuts in social services and ‘entitlements.’

It is a false narrative that masks the largest ongoing financial swindle in human history, a swindle being carried out at public expense by a small class of elite financial speculators. This speculative class has been unleashed over the past three decades by a Utopian neoliberal political project now embodied in its most virulent form in the Republican presidential ticket of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.

In 1997, for example, the total value of annual financial transactions worldwide was an already-staggering 15 times greater than global GDP. Today, it is 70 times greater . In 1995, the six largest US banks controlled assets worth 17 percent of annual GDP. Today, the figure is 64 percent . Again in 1995, the global total of outstanding derivative debt obligations was $17.7 trillion. By 2010, at nearly $470 trillion , outstanding derivatives were  741 percent of global GDP .

This wholesale financialization of the US-led global economy has burdened the public sector with the task of propping up unregulated speculative debt in the private sector that is 7.4 times our annual productive capacity. Add US deficit spending for three wars since 9/11, and major cuts in the top tax rates, and the burden becomes unsustainable. The difference is being made up in the guise of austerity, as everything we own is liquidated, from personal and retirement savings, to homes and public-sector assets that have been built up over generations.

In the US […] by most estimates, the national debt is at least $15 trillion. Here is one way to understand where the money went:  The US government spent $7.4 trillion  on bank bailouts.  It then spent $5 trillion  for three elective wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. It simultaneously incurred $2.8 trillion  in lost revenue due to the Bush tax cuts for the top income brackets.

Where did this money come from? It came from we the people. During the current economic downturn: US citizens suffered $14 trillion  in lost stock market value , declining home values  and lost pension fund values . Workers lost $1 trillion in wages  due to long-term unemployment. The total losses to citizen wealth are also $15 trillion.

From this perspective, the ongoing financial crisis of the past few years is a giant swindle that transfers wealth from low- and middle-income citizens to bankers, defense contractors, real estate speculators and the wealthiest 1% via the US Treasury, which is acting as an agent for upward redistribution.”

Although, Mr. Meurer points out that the responsible philosophy is now embodied in  the Republican presidential ticket, President Obama has had four years to enact protections, promote regulations, indict criminals.  Precious little has happened short of the addition of a new form of capitalism: The company that's too big to fail, who keeps the profits in the hands of the few and unloads the losses on the backs of the taxpaying masses.

Robert DeFilippis