[Peace-discuss] Closer Than You Think: Top 15 Things Romney and Obama Agree On

Sun Sep 2 21:39:35 UTC 2012

Wouldn't it be nice to live in a country where every four years you were
not told that there is no alternative? (sure, Obama is bad, but look at
Romney!)
It is a vicious circle! The only way to get out of it is by breaking it!
i.e. stop supporting the lesser evil and build something independent from
Dems and Reps!
Sure, it will take time... The more urgent it is to start now!
Here's what folks at the Black Agenda Report have to say:
http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/closer-you-think-top-15-things-romney-and-obama-agree

Closer Than You Think: Top 15 Things Romney and Obama Agree On
Wed, 08/29/2012 - 13:37 — Bruce A. Dixon

   - Republicans<http://www.blackagendareport.com/category/us-politics/republicans>|
   - Democrats<http://www.blackagendareport.com/category/us-politics/democrats>|
   - 2012 presidential
campaign<http://www.blackagendareport.com/category/us-politics/2012-presidential-campaign>

 Printer-friendly
version<http://blackagendareport.com/print/content/closer-you-think-top-15-things-romney-and-obama-agree>

*by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon*

Republicans and Democrats, like Romney and Obama are of one mind on many
more things than they disagree about. From war and empire to their policies
on Big Ag, Big Energy, “clean coal and safe nuclear power,” and the war on
drugs their areas of agreement are vast and troubling, and perhaps far more
important than the rhetorical and stylistic differences highlighted by US
political campaigns.

*Closer Than You Think: Top 15 Things Romney and Obama Agree On*

*by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon*

Too much agreement between Republicans and Democrats has always been bad
news for those at the bottom of America's class and racial totem poles.

Back in 1875, Frederick Douglass observed that it took a war among the
whites to free his people from slavery. What then, he wondered, would an
era of peace among the whites bring us? He already knew the answer.
Louisiana had its Colfax Massacre
<http://www.knowla.org/entry.php?rec=758>two years earlier.
A wave of thousands upon thousands of terroristic bombings, shootings,
mutilations, murders and
threats<http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/reconstruction/40acres/sf_violence.html>had
driven African Americans from courthouses, city halls, legislatures,
from
their own farms, businesses and private properties and from the voting
rolls across the South. They didn't get the vote back for 80 years, and
they never did get the land back. But none of that mattered because on the
broad and important questions of those days there was at last peace between
white Republicans and white Democrats --- squabbles around the edges about
who'd get elected, but wide agreement on the rules of the game.

Like Douglass, the shallow talking heads who cover the 2012 presidential
campaign on corporate media have noticed out loud the remarkable absence of
disagreement between Republican and Democratic candidates on many matters.
They usually mention what the establishment likes to call “foreign policy.”
But the list of things Republicans and Democrat presidential candidates
agree on, from coddling Wall Street speculators, protecting mortgage
fraudsters and corporate wrongdoers to preventing Medicare For All to
so-called “foreign policy,” “free trade,” “the deficit” “clean coal and
safe nuclear power” and “entitlement reform,” is clearly longer and more
important than the few points of mostly race and style, upon which they
disagree.

    15

*Although unemployment is the highest it's been since the Great Depression,
**the federal government** should **NOT **enact any sort of WPA-style
program to put millions of people back to work.* Under Democrat Franklin
Roosevelt in the 1930s, Depression-era unemployment was tackled head on by
direct federal hiring to dig subways, build roads, schools, parks, sewers,
recreational facilities and public buildings. Oblivious of this history,
Democrat Barack Obama maintains that only the private sector can or should
create jobs.

14

*Medicare, Medicaid and social security are “entitlements” that **need to
be cut to relieve **what they call “the deficit.”* Republicans have been on
record for this since forever, though they claim not to want to mess with
the Medicare people already over 65 are getting. One of the first acts of
the Obama presidency was to appoint a bipartisan panel stacked with
“deficit hawks” like Republican Allan Simpson and Democrat Erskine Bowles
to recommend raising retirement ages and cutting back Medicaid, Medicare
and social security, and pass a law directing Congress to have an up or
down no-amendments vote on its recommendations. Fortunately the “cat food
commission”, as it was called, was deadlocked and offered none. But Obama
and top Democrats, most recently House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi
continue to express their readiness for some kind of “grand compromise”
with Republicans on this issue.

13

*C**limate change treaties and negotiations that might lead to them should
be avoided at all costs. * The differences between them are only style.
Democrats admit that climate change exists and is man-made, Republicans say
it's a myth. But both ignored the Kyoto protocol and Obama like Bush before
him, has worked tirelessly to delay, derail and boycott any actual talks
that might lead to constructive international climate change agreements.

12

*NAFTA was such a great thing it **really **should be extended to Central
and South America and the entire Pacific rim.* Again, there are differences
in style. On the 2008 campaign trail, Obama sometimes mumbled about
renegotiating parts of NAFTA, and such. But even before the primaries were
done, press reports had him assuring the Canadian government this was only
campaign rhetoric, raw meat for the rubes. In four years he has pushed
NAFTA-like “free trade” corporate rights agreements with South Korea, most
of Central America and is now secretly hammering out something called
the Trans-Pacific
Partnership Agreement<http://www.citizen.org/more-about-trans-pacific-partnership-agreement>
.

11

*Banksters and Wall Street speculators deserve their bailouts and
protection from criminal liability, but underwater and foreclosed
homeowners deserve nothing. * Well, maybe not exactly nothing. Republicans
think underwater homeowners deserve blame for forcing banksters to offer
millions of fraudulent high-interest loans were then re-sold to investors
around the world. Democrats think underwater homeowners deserve empty
promises of help that never quite arrives for most of the foreclosed, the
about-to-be foreclosed, their families and communities. But both agree on
free money for banksters and speculators but no moratorium on foreclosures
and no criminal investigations of mortgage and securities fraud.

10

*Palestinians should be **occupied, **dispossessed and ignored. Iran should
be **starved and threatened from all sides. Cuba should be embargoed, and
Americans prohibited from going there to see what its people have done in a
half century free of Yankee rule. **Black and brown babies and their
parents, relatives and neighbors should be bombed with drones in Pakistan,
Yemen, Somalia and similar places. *The politicians and corporate
commentators have a misleading name for this. They call it “foreign
policy.” The realistic term for it is global empire.

9

*Africa should be militarized, destabilized, plundered and where necessary,
invaded by proxy armies like those of Rwanda, Ethiopia, Burundi or Kenya,
or directly by Western air and ground forces, as in Libya. * President
Georgia Bush announced the formation of AFRICOM, the US military command
for the continent which has officially swallowed all US civilian diplomatic
presence. But only a black US president, even under the cover of
“humanitarian war” could have invaded an African nation and openly
dispatched special forces to Central Africa.

8

*US Presidents can kidnap citizens of their own or any nation on earth from
anyplace on the planet for torture, indefinite imprisonment without trial
or murder them and neighboring family and bystanders at will.* To be
perfectly fair, there are distinctions between Republicans and Democrats
here that don't amount to differences. Republicans Cheney and Bush got
their lawyers to say these things were OK and did them. Democrat Obama got
Congress to enact “laws” giving these acts a veneer of fake legality,
something a Republican probably could not have done.

7

*Oil and energy companies, and other mega-polluters must** be freed to
drill offshore almost everywhere, and **permitted **to poison land and
watersheds with fracking **to achieve “energy independence”*. The
Republicans say “drill baby drill” but it seems only Democrats can chill
out enough supposed “environmentalists” to make this happen. Obama
campaigned on restricting offshore drilling four years ago, and reversed
himself just before the BP oil disaster in the Gulf. The White House
cooperated with BP in lying to the public about the extent of the disaster
and has shielded BO from paying anything like the value of actual damages
incurred to livelihoods, human lives and the environment.

6

*The FCC should not and must not regulate telecoms to ensure that poor and
rural communities have access to internet, or to guarantee network
neutrality. *Republicans have always been in favor of digital redlining,
against network neutrality. Barack Obama claimed on the campaign trail he'd
take a back seat to nobody in guaranteeing network neutrality. But he
appointed as FCC chair a man who helped write the infamous
Telecommunications Act of 1995, which gave away the government-built
internet backbone to a handful of immensely powerful telecoms like AT&T and
Comcast, and flatly reversed himself on network neutrality. The Department
of Justice was forced to stop the ATT-T-Mobile merger by a storm of public
outrage, but approved the Comcast-NBC deal.

5

*Of course there really ARE such things as “clean coal” and “safe nuclear
energy”.* Again these are things Republicans have always pretended to
believe. At the 2008 Democratic convention Democrat Barack Obama joined
them, declaring he intended to be the president of “clean coal and safe
nuclear energy.” Obama is building a wave of 33 nuclear plants across the
country, the first two in mostly black and poor communities of Georgia and
South Carolina where leaky existing nukes are causing cancer epidemics. The
people know these things are myths. But Republican and Democratic
candidates for office, all the way down to state and county officials seem
not to.

4

*I**mmigrants must be jailed and deported in record numbers. *To be really
fair, one should note that on this issue Republicans talk a mean game about
sending them all back and jailing tens or hundreds of thousands along the
way. But only President Obama has walked the walk, deporting over a million
immigrants in his term in office, often with little or no due process and
after housing many for months in atrocious privatized immigration prisons.

3

*No Medicare For All. Forget about it eliminating the Medicare age
requirement so that all Americans would qualify..* Republicans never wanted
Medicare even for seniors, let alone everybody. Six or seven years ago
Illinois State Senator Obama was telling audiences that if they elected
Democrats to Congress, the Senate and the White House, they'd get single
payer health care. But once in office he excluded Medicare for All from the
proposals on the table, and enacted a national version of Massachusetts
RomneyCare, requiring everybody to purchase private health insurance or be
penalized.

2

*No minimum wage increases for you, no right to form a union, no right to
negotiate or strike if you already have a union, and no enforcement or
reform of existing labor laws. * Again, Republicans have always opposed
minimum wage laws. Obama promised to boost the minimum wage his first two
years in office, while he still had majorities in the House and Senate. But
he didn't do this, or pass legislation beefing up the right to organize
unions, which has been eroded under Democrat and Republican administrations
alike.

1

*The 40 year war on drugs must continue, and even mention of the prison
state is unthinkable. * There are 2.3 million people in US prisons and
jails today, a per capita total that beats the world. Politicians of both
parties wag their fingers in multiple directions. But as Michelle Alexander
points out, if the US prison population were rolled back to say, only 1
million, the level it was about 1980, this would mean one million jobs, as
contractors, sheriffs, cops, bailiffs, judges and functionaries of all
kinds would have to go out and find real jobs.

The rabbit hole goes still deeper. We didn't have to stop at these fifteen
points of Democrat-Republican agreement, but you get the idea. Just as in
Frederick Douglass's day, the more Democrats and Republicans agree, the
worse it is for the rest of us.

There was a time when black America had its own principles, and formed the
immovable leftmost rock of the American polity. But in the 21st century,
that rock has been dissolved by a tide of corporate money. With the rise of
a cohort of black corporate Democrats and a right wing black Democrat in
the White House there is no longer even any vaguely leftish influence on
Democratic party politics. The House Progressive Caucus is the biggest in
Congress, with over seventy members, but is powerless and irrelevant.
Except for stylistic flourishes, the music they listen to and the color of
some faces, the differences between Republicans and Democrats seem to exist
mostly in political marketing campaigns and inside our own heads.

*Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report, and a member of
the state committee of the Georgia Green Party. He can be reached via this
site's contact page, or at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com.*

On Sun, Sep 2, 2012 at 2:43 PM, Germaine Light <lightport at sbcglobal.net>wrote:

> I admit I have not been to Occupy demos since last October, but I have
> been to almost every labor protest & event that I possibly can & sometimes
> one has to make choices re limited time.  My heart is there with occupy
> still and I am VERY active in this community!
> And of course anyone has the right to protest anything!  But I think I
> have earned a voice in this conversation!
>
> Sent from my iPhone
> Germaine
>
> On Sep 1, 2012, at 6:05 PM, Chris Goodrow <c_goodrow at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> I'm just curious, but the people who are opposed to the focus of a
> protest? Are these people who actually participate in these protests?
>
> How many civilians died in drone strikes this year? How many Americans
> were targeted as enemy combatants and killed in the past two years?
>
> Chris
> (217) 898-5039
>
>
> On Sep 1, 2012, at 17:55, "Gregg Gordon" <ggregg79 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> So how many Americans died in Iraq this week?  And how's the missile
> shield in eastern Europe coming (to cite just two significant differences
> with the Bush Administration)?
>
> Look -- I'm not saying give anyone a pass on anything.  I'm saying make
> your point strategically and intelligently.  It's likely to improve your
> effectiveness.
>
> Frankly, I don't think there's anything a handful of people in C-U are
> going to do in the next two months that will make an iota's difference to
> the outcome of the election *or* the future of Bradley Manning.  I would
> guess 95% of the people who drive by any such demonstration will have no
> idea who Bradley Manning is, and there's nothing you can put on a placard
> that will inform them.  It won't even be covered by the local newspaper.
>  So in that respect, I don't care, but the larger point is worth
> considering.  Do we do these things to fulfill a sense of righteous
> indignation, or are we trying to have an impact on future events?
>
>
>
>   ------------------------------
> *From:* C. G. Estabrook <cge at shout.net>
> *To:* Gregg Gordon <ggregg79 at yahoo.com>
> *Cc:* Jenifer Cartwright <jencart13 at yahoo.com>; Peace Discuss <
> peace-discuss at anti-war.net>; ocCUpy <occupycu at lists.chambana.net>; Peace <
> peace at anti-war.net>
> *Sent:* Saturday, September 1, 2012 10:23 AM
> *Subject:* Re: [Peace] [OccupyCU] [Peace-discuss] Farmer's Market and
> Demonstration on Saturday; and, another on Sept. 6th for Bradley Manning on
> eve of Obama's speech?
>
> It's important to assess how important the difference it makes is. The
> answer seems to be, not much.
>
> Obama - although he campaigned against them - followed Bush's economic and
> military polices, if in a more brutal and efficient fashion.
>
> That may be some slight reason to vote against him, but it's certainly not
> a reason to support him.
>
>
> On Sep 1, 2012, at 10:15 AM, Gregg Gordon <ggregg79 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> I find it mind-boggling that anyone who lived through the years 2000-2008
> really believes "it makes no difference."
>
>
>   ------------------------------
> *From:* C. G. Estabrook <cge at shout.net>
> *To:* Jenifer Cartwright <jencart13 at yahoo.com>
> *Cc:* Peace Discuss <peace-discuss at anti-war.net>; ocCUpy <
> occupycu at lists.chambana.net>; Peace <peace at anti-war.net>
> *Sent:* Saturday, September 1, 2012 10:10 AM
> *Subject:* Re: [Peace] [OccupyCU] [Peace-discuss] Farmer's Market and
> Demonstration on Saturday; and, another on Sept. 6th for Bradley Manning on
> eve of Obama's speech?
>
> I think it's wrong to give Obama a pass on Bradley Manning and hold off on
> condemning his crimes - from the suppression of WikiLeaks to the murders of
> Americans and others - for ostensible fear of a candidate (Romney) whose
> positions on economic and military matters are inherently identical to
> those of the administration.
>
> "Voting for reform-minded candidates should take about five minutes, and
> then we go back to the important work on the ground to change the
> conditions in which the mostly farcical election process proceeds"
> [Chomsky]. --CGE
>
>
> On Sep 1, 2012, at 1:20 AM, Jenifer Cartwright <jencart13 at yahoo.com>
> wrote:
>
> I'm guessing you guys haven't been listening to the Repub Convention
> speeches, but Romney et al are  FAR, FAR, FAR worse than Obama et al... So
> how 'bout we save our protests until AFTER the election, and use our energy
> defeating the LOTS WORSE evils??? It won't significantly affect YOUR lives
> if the Dems are defeated, but it will be devastating to MILLIONS across the
> US and the world.
>
> --- On *Fri, 8/31/12, Stuart Levy <stuartnlevy at gmail.com>* wrote:
>
>
> From: Stuart Levy <stuartnlevy at gmail.com>
> Subject: [Peace-discuss] Farmer's Market and Demonstration on Saturday;
> and, another on Sept. 6th for Bradley Manning on eve of Obama's speech?
> To: "Peace" <peace at anti-war.net>, "Peace Discuss" <
> peace-discuss at anti-war.net>, "ocCUpy" <occupycu at lists.chambana.net>
> Date: Friday, August 31, 2012, 11:26 AM
>
> The wars go on despite the weather and so shall we (at least we'll try).
>
> Expect AWARE and CUCPJ at the Farmer's Market tomorrow morning, 8-noon.
>
> And, from 2-4, the AWARE+OccupyCU demonstration will be at its usual
> first-Saturday site,
>
>    Main and Neil, downtown Champaign
>    2-4 PM Saturday, Sept. 1st
>
> If it turns into a real downpour, we'll retire somewhere nearby for lunch.
>
>
>
> There's also a nationally-coordinated suggestion for groups to hold
> demonstrations on *Thursday, September 6th*, in support of Bradley Manning
> --
>
>     "Show Obama that Bradley Manning is our hero"
>
> Why the 6th?  That's the date of Obama's acceptance speech at the DNC.
>
> To make a definite *proposal*, how about:
>
>    (proposed) Demonstration in support of accused whistleblower Bradley
> Manning
>    5:00PM Thursday, Sept. 6th
>    Urbana Veterans' Memorial
>        (that's Broadway and Main, or, the NW corner of the block where the
> county courthouse is)
>
> What do people think?   (Could also make sense to complain more broadly
> about Obama's unfulfilled promise as a peace, civil liberties, etc.
> candidate from four years ago.)
>
> If you like the idea *and* think you can be there for at least part of
> 5-6PM, please write back (either to peace-discuss at anti-war.net or to
> occupyCU or to me, but not to the peace list please).
>
> If we have at least, say, five people who believe they can do this, then
> let's go for it.  Meanwhile let's consider Sept. 6th as still tentative.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Peace-discuss mailing list
> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net
> http://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss
>
> _______________________________________________
> OccupyCU mailing list
> OccupyCU at lists.chambana.net
> http://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/occupycu
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Peace mailing list
> Peace at lists.chambana.net
> http://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace
>
>
>
>
>
>  _______________________________________________
> OccupyCU mailing list
> OccupyCU at lists.chambana.net
> http://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/occupycu
>
> _______________________________________________
> OccupyCU mailing list
> OccupyCU at lists.chambana.net
> http://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/occupycu
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> OccupyCU mailing list
> OccupyCU at lists.chambana.net
> http://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/occupycu
>
>

-- 
Damián.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.chambana.net/pipermail/peace-discuss/attachments/20120902/2112a409/attachment-0001.html>