Wages and salaries for working-class and middle-class Americans have either stagnated or fallen in the past few decades of “trickle down” economics.

Both parties ostensibly agree on the need to lessen the country’s dependence on foreign oil, but there is disagreement on the means to that end. Republicans insist that all the oil we need is somehow magically underneath the ground within the continental United States and the outer continental shelf–which is not at all true. Obama and the Democrats, while still loyal to the oil corporations, urge alternatives to dirty fossil fuels.

It should be noted that the Middle East is “unstable” due largely to the actions of Washington and Western governments to create conditions of maximum profitability for oil corporations.

It is good that Osama bin Laden is no longer a threat, but bin Laden didn’t blow up the projects.

GOP frontrunner Newt Gingrich has seized upon the racism of the far-right Republican base in order to advance in the Party. It is a long-standing American tradition to have race divide people whose economic kinship should prevail.

The President celebrates the accomplishments of the US military as a basis upon which to build his larger argument: that the success of the military is due not to dog-eat-dog individualism, but to cooperation and teamwork. The country must work as a team to pull ourselves out of the mire of recession and decline.

It’s worth mentioning, however, that despite the great courage and selflessness of the soldiers themselves, the imperial project does not, in fact, make the country “safer and more respected around the world.” It is precisely the United States' meddling in other countries which arouses anger.

The current “threat” of Iran, for example, can be drawn back to a fifty-year history of Washington’s meddling in that country’s affairs and an obsessive support of Israel’s regional aggression.

It is something of a myth that Silicon Valley-type corporations will resuscitate the entire US economy. Apple, for example, uses the brutal Foxconn factory in China to assemble its products. An epidemic of suicides has plagued Foxconn in recent years, as the essentially slave-like conditions leave the more than 200,000 desperate workers with few options. The company installed “suicide nets” to try to mitigate the crisis at the factories.

More than 30 years of essentially uninterrupted neoliberal capitalism (or Reaganism) has depleted the US of its economic security.

The United States–though once a global leader in education–has slipped in relation to its peer nations

Despite Mos Def’s best efforts, the US doesn’t even show up among the top 25 in mathematics

In higher education, though, the U.S. still dominates, holding about ½ of the spots in a ranking of the world’s top universities

Journalist Chris Hayes argues that confidence in our institutions has suffered unprecedented erosion.

For more than 35 years, Gallup has polled Americans about levels of trust in their institutions — Congress, banks, Big Business, public schools, etc. In 2008 nearly every single institution was at an all-time low. Banks were trusted by just 32% of the populace, down from more than 50% in 2004. Newspapers were down to 24%, from slightly below 40% at the start of the decade. And Congress was the least trusted institution of all, with only 12% of Americans expressing confidence in it.

Obama is anchoring his message to the one institution which still maintains some degree of bipartisan respect, the US military apparatus.