My fellow Americans,
Our country, and with us the entire Western world, is in dire straits today. Our parents and grand-parents have built unprecedented wealth for America’s middle class since the end of World War II. Over the past decade, special interest groups have siphoned this wealth off into their pockets at a rate that was unforseeable and unimaginable.
By using and abusing the power of a friendly and impassive government, businesses in health care, investment banking, real estate, energy, natural resources, military contracting, telecommunications, and countless other groups, have been lining the pockets of their executives and lobbyists like there was no tomorrow.
Well, tomorrow has come after all. Today, we must recognize that our value system has been corrupted in this process. We have forgotten that only honest, hard work will lead to prolonged riches and wealth. The exploitation of our middle class for short-term profits on balance sheets has already lead to disaster and must end.
How did this happen? How did we get here? Ladies and gentlemen, we have followed Republican doctrin for too long. I will explain to you what this means.
Republican doctrin claims that free markets are self-regulating, that the bad guys will eventually get weeded out by cleansing market forces, helping these complex systems to remain stable over long periods of time. This doctrin has been applied to virtually every area of our lives. Health care, company stocks, energy, natural resources, and even our environment have been turned into free markets by Republican doctrin. And yet, many of these markets are failing us today.
Markets are made up of humans, and humans give in under pressure. This “giving-in” began in small areas at first. The pressure of seeing a neighbor selling his home for a higher price leads to cheating on the specs of one’s own home, for instance. The pressure of seeing a competitor’s stock price going up faster leads to overstating revenues on one’s balance sheet. We have become comfortable with lying, cheating, bullying, all in the interest of personal gains. We have learned to value personal gains above everything else. We reward those who take shortcuts, in the business world, in sports, in our personal lives. We even believe that this is inherently good.
Encouraged by society’s acceptance of small sins in our daily lives, people in powerful positions have begun to believe that it is ok to cheat at a larger scale. Our leaders started to think that it is ok to twist the facts a little bit in the interest of personal gains - with big consequences. We will forever remember a president who cheated a bit on intelligence reports so that he could justify a war and help his friends. These friends and their lobbyists made hundreds of billions of dollars in the process through weapons deals and army contracts that this president awarded them.
Left to themselves without proper oversight and regulation, greed and selfishness have become forces that shaped many of our markets, and greed and selfishness will soon shape this country and its people as a whole. We need to open our eyes, see what is going on, and stop it.
My fellow Americans, John McCain is a decent man and an accomplished politician. He may own more houses than most of you, but that does not make him a bad choice for President of the United States. My fellow Americans, what makes John McCain a bad choice for President of the United States is that he is in denial about our current situation. He his in denial about the fact that we are moving fast on a downward slope. John McCain refuses to recognize how bad things have gotten, and he will not begin recognizing that when he is in office. John McCain represents the Republican establishment, ladies and gentlemen, and the Republican establishment has brought this country to the edge of the cliff that we are barely hanging on to today.
John McCain is telling us that he will save the country by continuing to rob the American middle class. Ladies and gentlemen, the pitcher has gone to the well once too often. Republican policies have not worked, neither economically nor socially. Our children and grand-children will be in debt for their entire lives, paying the price for Republican politics that has brought unprecedented riches to a very small group of people, many of which are not Americans, but are in the Middle East or the Far East. This is what John McCain represents, and he has said or done nothing that would raise the slightest doubt about what he represents.
This election is not about how we can prolong our comfortable lifestyles for another 4 or 8 years! This election is about saving this country from economical and fiscal disaster. We must stop gambling with our children’s future. We must start rebuilding this country from the ground up. We must start by rewarding good, honest work, and by punishing people who put short-term personal gains above the long-term prosperity of this once proud nation. We can no longer be proud of our country, my fellow-Americans, and it breaks my heart.
There will be a cost, my fellow-Americans, that we will have to share. There will be pain, and there will be blood-letting. There will be many tough years ahead, and success will not come overnight. As a country, we have made mistakes, and we must pay the price. We cannot cheat ourselves out of the hole that we are in. My promise to you is that I will dedicate my term as President of the United States to uprooting the culture and the establishment of short-cut takers.
We need all the innovation that we can get. We will have to boost our eduction system, and we will have to re-energize science and technology. We will need to learn how to do things differently than we were used to in the past.
But you must never forget our cause - rebuilding America and making it the world’s leading nation once again. We must lead the world through new and high ethical standards in our legislature, in our judicial system, and in daily politics. We must drain the swamps of special interest that local, regional, and national politics have become. We must fight relentlessly, beheading every monster that sticks its head out of the swamp. We must educate ourselves. We must recognize nonsense when we hear it. We must be transparent, we must be credible. We must prevail, and with your help, we will!
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you and have a good night!