Are the wedge issues, just a tool to manipulate us into easily manipulated camps, this artilce explores the frightening amount of common ground between the '2' parties.
http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/11289-closer-than-you-think-top-15-things-romney-and-obama-agree-on:
it used to be you could make something of a case for sticking with the democrats...but since Clinton...
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
[5] two years earlier. A wave of thousands upon thousands of terroristic
bombings, shootings, mutilations, murders and threats [6] 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
Climate 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 [7].
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
Immigrants 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.[8]
2012 presidential campaign Democrats Republicans
Source URL: http://blackagendareport.com/content/closer-you-think-top-15-things-romney-and-obama-agree
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