The major crises we faced in the 2004 election – environmental degradation, the Iraq war, the power of the military-industrial complex coupled with imperialism, health care, failing economy, compromised constitutional rights, failing education, unmet infrastructure needs, and government abandonment of responsibility for the common good – were largely unaddressed, or inadequately addressed, by candidates, the corporate mass media and even a troubled electorate. They have all worsened since, yet Washington continues in denial of reality.

The propaganda success that made government the enemy continues to be influential. It has given us a government of the rich and powerful dedicated to enhancing the wealth and power of the greedy and powerful – add now the Roberts Court – without regard to everybody else, from the middle class to our poor to the hungry, exploited billions abroad. Washington’s singular purpose explains why these crises continue unmet.

Our government’s indifference to the dignity of human life is accentuated by its embrace of torture, of indiscriminate killing of Iraqi women and children, and of Israel’s carnage in Lebanon last summer.

Our planet’s ecosystem is fragile; the detritus of greed and comfort already floated into the atmosphere assures worsening climate for years to come, whatever measures we take. At the risk of our grandchildren dying on a cinder, the response of the earth’s foremost polluter is a miserly $6 billion and denial of scientific fact.

The military-industrial complex’s power, against which Eisenhower warned, rules Washington unchallenged, spewing its obscene and economically dead-end merchandise – and consequent wars – on the defenseless and poor worldwide, bankrupting us.

President Bush continues to parrot the fear mongering that led us into Iraq. Washington writes off Americans killed daily for no discernible purpose and is indifferent to the hundreds of Iraqis killed daily, a number the military, understandably, refuses to reckon. Political calculation prevents politicians from uttering a plain “no.” Corporate media amplify that fear mongering and indifference to the innocent dead. The equally indifferent public, albeit angry and impatient, can be counted on to choose between unacceptable alternatives – and go shopping.

It is not just Iraq. The media and public acquiesced in Bush’s low-intensity war against a popular constitutional democracy in Haiti, at a cost of tens of thousands dead of disease and hunger. A U.S.-sponsored insurgency stalled, we kidnapped President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and unleashed an orgy of thuggish slaughter of thousands of democrats, as President Bush’s father had a decade earlier. Who cared?

Since Harry Truman’s support produced the 1947 partition of Palestine and Israel, although it ignored his demand that it end its ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinian Arabs from their homes and farms, Washington has increasingly abetted Israel’s designs on all of Palestine – without Palestinians. It has denied Palestinian human dignity in every imaginable way – killings, torture, dispossessions, home demolitions, starvation, imprisonment, humiliation – and funded this open racism with $200 billion, United Nations vetoes and congressional resolutions on cue.

Those who have effectively cancelled the social contract here fiercely oppose recognition of health care as a basic right, one long-established in other first-world countries. Thousands die, millions go without medication or food, lives are blighted, families bankrupted. The media and public, including the victimized, acquiesce – and vote for those who are telling them to get lost. Hurricane Katrina measures our repudiation of the common good.

The global economy’s immoral exploitation of labor and consequent destruction of our manufacturing economy, our soaring personal, national and trade debt, our education and infrastructure shortcomings, and the trashing of the Constitution are other unaddressed major crises.

Maine’s congressional delegation, its mass media, and public are too compromised by self-interest, too lazy to inform themselves and think, and morally indifferent to recognize or courageously meet these challenges. We serve the military-industrial complex, U.S. imperialism, corporate greed, Israeli racisim, Latin oligarchies. No one cries out at our killing and maiming of millions and denial of human dignity to the billions left to misery.

Kuciniches and Wellstones should be crowding every coming U.S. House and Senate race, with armies of supporters, challenging the system, identifying its evil roots and addressing how they can be torn out, insisting that the realities that challenge us be faced. Instead, money and media’s preoccupation with it all but prevent those who recognize the survival crises we face – and why we are in such a mess – from doing so.

Bill Slavick is a retired professor and coordinator of Pax Christi Maine. He ran for the U.S. Senate in 2006.