The fateful day is 48 hours away. If the election doesn't turn into a tragic farce like the year 2000, we will have a winning candidate but America will lose either way. None of the major candidates has a decent credible plan to solve our difficult and dire problems. Let me try to enumerate them and discuss the pathetic non-solutions they have to offer.

We have perpetual trade, budget and current account deficits that can only be remedied by a 25% or more devaluation of the dollar to eliminate the trade deficit and make our goods competitive. This would bring back jobs to America and reduce our current account deficit and prevent us from being at the mercy of Asian largesse in buying our debt in depreciating dollars.

Japan and Korea are already trading more with China than with America. Only China and India, which need to provide jobs for their large growing populations and need American technology, are willing to hold the depreciating assets.

The EU has created its own reserve currency in the Euro, and has expanded to 450 million in 25 countries and is willing to let the Euro rise in value, even at the cost of persistent unemployment. At some point their patience will end and the estranged ties will be damaged beyond repair.

The current president is so intellectually handicapped that he is incapable of any understanding or solutions, and keeps repeating the mantra of a steadfast but disastrous and errant course in a war against terror, like a talking doll programmed to shrilly and monotonously reiterate the five phrases by the computer chip put in it by its manufacturer and programmer, Karl Rove. A more sinister version of the same doll is named Cheyney.

John Kerry offers nothing better as he is afraid to be seen as a wimp and lose the support and vote of the infantile unthinking children that American voters are. No solutions for creating jobs are offered except bashing corporations, yet neither candidate has the integrity or honesty to refuse large political contributions from vested interests. Nearly one and a half billion dollars have been spent by the presidential candidates and you can bet that whosoever is elected will have to make good on all those IOUs.

No country developed by unrestrained free trade and Not one superpower, including Rome, Britain and currently America has been able to sustain its hegemony by completely free trade. All have attained and retained their status by managed trade and Listean policies and bitten the dust when the specter of free trade has become the resident divinity. The other dethroner is profligate expenditure for distant and unnecessary wars, indulged in due to paranoia, delusions of grandeur or jealousy to prevent other nations from achieving similar or higher status.

The burning bush wants to invade Iran, North Korea and any weak oil-producing nation to sustain our lifestyle.

Kerry has no solutions either for the Iraq fiasco and no clear ideas of how to deal with Iran and North Korea. He is so stupid that he wants to coerce India back to its non-nuclear status by a series of carrots and sticks.

Domestic and financial exigencies prevent both candidates from offering a realistic solution for the legitimate rights of the Palestinians or freeing the Islamic hordes from the tyranny, oppression and corruption of the illegitimate rulers, imposed by the West and America to grind the Muslim masses under their heels. It suits America to have pliant corrupt autocrats to serve as the masters and whose strings can be pulled by the puppet master to plunder the wealth and resources of those nations, to the benefit of the developed countries and the corrupt figureheads, while leaving the populations ignorant and without useful skills and thus readily manipulated by the religious extremists who get free rein to overlook the perverse practices of the prodigal ruling thieves. Both candidates wish to perpetuate the status quo and thus cannot stabilize the bubbling cauldron of the Middle East or eliminate terrorism. The loss of high explosives from Al Qaqa in Iraq due to the incompetence of Bush and the Pentagon and the neglect of the Nunn-Lugar amendment to safeguard loose Russian nuclear material shows that Bush is all talk and no substance and Kerry offers no intelligent plans.

Forty-five million Americans lack health insurance and Bush has nothing sensible to offer and Kerry has a partial solution that is still meant to enrich insurers. The only solution is a single payer non-profit entity like Medicare and thus national health insurance, as recommended by the American College of Physicians. Neither of the two candidates has the courage or the honesty to touch the issue as they want to be elected. They know that the foolish American public has been brainwashed and is incapable of seeing what is good for it. There is the looming bankruptcy of Medicare, Social Security and the nation in a few years when the baby-boomers retire, but they both have no clear solutions and the Bush plan of privatizing social security is fiscally insane. Kerry will not touch the third rail either. It is easy to blame them, but at the root of all this lies the idiotic nonchalance of an ignorant citizenry, whose majority believes that the world was created six thousand years ago in six days by a divine power, and wants to teach creationism in our schools to balance evolution, just as equally idiotic Indian leaders want to teach astrology in schools to balance astronomy.

There are suckers born every minute in the two largest democracies of the world. The less educated and less developed democracy has an uneducated electorate with one basic redeeming instinct. Throw the incumbent rascals out. This is such good advice that I recommend it to the second largest democracy's voters. Hold your nose to avoid the stink as you read the names on the ballot, but throw the incumbent rascals out. That is the only way to combat gerrymandering and bought and paid for politicians. Create a third party periodically is another alternative but it will only work for a short time as the political process is like the passage through the alimentary tract. No matter how tasty, fragrant, nutritious and good food you put in at its beginning, in less than three days it turns into foul smelling, useless and harmful excreta that is best gotten rid off and needs rehabilitation in a sewage treatment plant, if it is not to become a health hazard for the public.