As the run up to the elections for America’s Next Top President heats up, some issues are curiously missing from the media frenzy.

Yes, the 2008 elections are, as Chris Floyd put it, “simply a debate over the best way to keep the empire in fighting trim while gussying up some of the ham-handed excesses of the past few years.”

What empire you ask? Well let’s start small. The “U.S. Army Central [is] establishing a permanent platform for ‘full spectrum operations’ in 27 countries around southwest Asia and the Middle East,” according to Stars and Stripes.

“Full spectrum operations” means permanent bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Oman, and other nations, National Security correspondent William Arkin notes in the Washington Post.

The buildup was decades in the making, Arkin astutely observes, and no matter who’s elected this year, these bases aren’t leaving and neither are the troops stationed there.

The presidential candidates talk about the Iraq war as a “mistake,” not as an illegal war of aggression that has killed over 1 million innocent Iraqis. And as Alan Greenspan recently reminded us in his memoirs, “The Iraq war is largely about oil.”

Nope, our nominees aren’t talking much about this, are they? Here’s a little of what else they’re leaving out:

The defense budget for 2008 will be more than $1 trillion (by conservative calculations) for the first time in history — to maintain and expand our empire of 737 military bases in more than 130 countries — and continues growing rapidly at the expense of domestic programs and infrastructure, which are shrinking, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

The nominees aren’t talking about the shredding of the Constitution, our growing surveillance state, or our intense nationalistic militarism.

They also ignore the 27,000 children who die each day from preventable causes, global food shortages, the specter of peak oil, the U.S. nuclear proliferation, the collapse of the world’s commercial fisheries, the loss of the Arctic ice sheet, mass extinctions and the present and future resource wars for energy and soon, water.

What can you do? Perhaps we should realize that real social change requires more than simply voting a leader in.

The privileges we enjoy were not magically given from our benevolent leaders who suddenly said, “I think I’ll grant voting rights to women or end segregation today.” They were the result of tireless effort by individuals who envisaged a better world, and then went out and did something about it.

That means you.

If you’re still sitting on the sidelines waiting for positive “change” to fall miraculously from above, realize that social change starts from the bottom — from people like you. So roll up your sleeves and get active: start educating, start reading, start organizing, start talking to your friends, family, neighbors and strangers until a social movement emerges they cannot ignore any longer.

Keep in mind the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, “Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: ‘Too late.’”

It’s time to get to work.

Are you up for it?