No hidden message. It's pretty obvious what's happened. Government has stopped looking out for the good of society and is instead defending the interests of a narrow few, who disproportionately impact the electoral system with huge campaign contributions. Our politicians spend most of their days fund-raising now. Their expensive media-blitz campaigns are funded by big business and wealthy individuals. Hopefully campaign finance reform will make an impact, but as it stands now, what's good for society is not a consideration for most politicians. When you let the free market run amok, you get a lot of bad consequences. The market is amoral - it cares only about profit. That's good in some ways, but bad in others. We need a vigilant government once again. And as for our foreign policy, we've got a President who is more willing to spend American lives in a war then he is willing to halt our over-consumption of oil, which funds these terrible regimes in the first place. There's no mention of our desperate reliance on oil at all from this guy. Hitting these people directly in the pocketbooks is a much better solution than attacking some ancillary dictator on the fringe of the battlefield. We need to starve them of the funds that we so willingly supply to them.