A few points from Monday's presidential debate









As expected, Monday's presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, didn't make us wiser. However, it would be useful to focus on a few moments, anyway.





Generally, the rhetoric of the two candidates was based on simple conclusions concerning various US internal problems, which anyone knows and actually experiencing to a much higher degree than themselves. This type of rhetoric, of course, is very usual for the establishment politicians around the globe in our days.





For example, you may notice that they frequently used the phrase "we have to ...", or, "we need to ..." deal with (put whatever issue you like in the dots), which actually only identifies the problem, does not provide a solution for it.





The debate was full of such generalities. Another example is the phrase of Hillary Clinton that “We just have a different view about what's best for growing the economy, how we make investments that will actually produce jobs and rising incomes.”





Well, she didn't give a taste of how she will do all these things, but her "glorious past" tells us the opposite. She supported international trade agreements that actually bring further deregulation in favor of multinationals, which means that they can proceed in mass layoffs at will, sue entire nations demanding huge amounts in compensations, and generally, establish the new era of corporate feudalism.





At this point, we should mention an interesting fact from the debate. When Trump fiercely attacked Clinton about the NAFTA agreement, also accusing Bill Clinton for his role on it, Hillary defended herself by saying “I was against it once it was finally negotiated and the terms were laid out.”





She didn't try to defend the agreement, as the corporate lobbyists would like. Instead, she tried to find an excuse for herself in the context of the "politics of lesser evil". This is another significant mark left by Bernie Sanders and his movement. Hillary continues to try to persuade for her relocation further to the Left of the political spectrum, in order to attract voters from the tank of Bernie Sanders mass movement.





Furthermore, it was quite impressive that Hillary tried persistently to identify herself as part of the US middle class, probably in order to highlight the fact that the billionaire Donald Trump, naturally, could never be part of it. It's still a joke, of course, because of the millions she received by some of those who are highly responsible for the dramatic decline of the US middle class today.





And, of course, we shouldn't expect something like "student debt cancellation" like Jill Stein or Bernie Sanders clearly state simple and straight, neither from Clinton nor from Trump.





Also, Hillary couldn't hide her anxiety to name the US "enemies", showing that she actually can't wait to lead Cold War 2.0. In the context of cyber-attacks, she clearly named Russia, China, Iran, despite the fact that there is no proof that the Russians hacked the DNC:





“ ... we are seeing cyber attacks coming from states, organs of states. The most recent and troubling of these has been Russia. There's no doubt now that Russia has used cyber attacks against all kinds of organizations in our country, and I am deeply concerned about this. I know Donald's very praiseworthy of Vladimir Putin, but Putin is playing a really tough, long game here. [...] We need to make it very clear — whether it’s Russia, China, Iran or anybody else — the United States has much greater capacity. And we are not going to sit idly by and permit state actors to go after our information, our private-sector information or our public-sector information. And we're going to have to make it clear that we don't want to use the kinds of tools that we have. We don't want to engage in a different kind of warfare. But we will defend the citizens of this country. And the Russians need to understand that. I think they've been treating it as almost a probing, how far would we go, how much would we do.”





At this point, Trump responded correctly, pointing Hillary's obsession with Russia:





“ I don’t think anybody knows it was Russia that broke into the DNC. She’s saying Russia, Russia, Russia, but I don’t — maybe it was. I mean, it could be Russia, but it could also be China. It could also be lots of other people. It also could be somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds, OK?”





Probably the most interesting part of the debate came when both actually tried to defend themselves concerning the chaos in the Middle East and Libya. Trump intensively repeated that he was against the invasion in Iraq. He also condemned fiercely the intervention in Libya. Yet, the most interesting here is that Hillary didn't try to defend this decision. Instead, she tried to "drag" Trump into the "club" that made these decisions, as if she wanted to present him equally responsible:





“ Donald supported the invasion of Iraq. [...] He actually advocated for the actions we took in Libya and urged that Gadhafi be taken out, after actually doing some business with him one time. But the larger point — and he says this constantly — is George W. Bush made the agreement about when American troops would leave Iraq, not Barack Obama.”





This is actually an indirect admission by Hillary that the US invasion in Iraq was a disaster, as well as, the intervention in Libya.





Finally, Trump sent some signals to the neocons and the US deep state, showing that he won't hesitate to follow their agenda, which proves that he is only a reserve of the establishment against establishment's favorite Hillary Clinton. As he said characteristically “... you started the Iran deal, that’s another beauty where you have a country that was ready to fall, I mean, they were doing so badly. They were choking on the sanctions. And now they’re going to be actually probably a major power at some point pretty soon, the way they’re going.”





Again, what we have here is the worst couple of presidential candidates , from the bipartisan establishment, for decades. Yet, the American people do have alternatives. It's up to them to beat the bipartisanism in the oncoming elections through a political earthquake that would create an unprecedented moment in the US history.



