It really is a guilty pleasure, but I do love it when clever, funny writers take on not so clever, humorless writers. Intellectual slap downs are like junk food to journalists, and Matt Taibbi has provided years of unhealthy food to people like myself, largely at the expense of the New York Time’s resident metaphor butcher Tom Friedman. I try not to poke fun at other writer’s too much, but with Friedman it’s hard to resist.

In his latest Rolling Stone blog, Taibbi takes apart Friedman’s latest attempt to explain the crisis in Syria with a series of metaphors so absurdly convoluted you wonder whether Friedman might be having his readers on. Inexplicably, Friedman seems to have changed his views on the state of Iraq post America’s invasion and occupation, at least in comparison to what we’re now seeing in Syria. Friedman had once used described Iraq as a “pottery barn” that had been “broken” by “1,000 years of Arab-Muslim authoritarianism, three brutal decades of Sunni Baathist rule, and a crippling decade of U.N. sanctions.” Friedman described the pottery barn (Iraq) as being “held together only by Saddam’s iron fist,” that was subsequently smashed by the US invasion. Friedman then argued that Iraq was a disaster in part because the US didn’t give it “political therapy” during its occupation.

But now the emotionally stunted broken pottery barn once held together by Saddam’s iron fist looks rather appealing, at least in Friedman’s eyes. Writes Taibbi:

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In an astonishing segment on his show, Bill O’Reilly goes on a rant about ‘far Left’ elements in America that can only be described as an epic bout of cognitive dissonance. The segment starts with O’Reilly plays a clip of himself pre-election stating that:

“20 years ago, President Obama would be roundly defeated by an establishment candidate like Mitt Romney. The white establishment is now the minority. And the voters, many of them, feel that this economic system is stacked against them, and they want stuff. You’re going to see a tremendous Hispanic vote for President Obama, overwhelming black vote for Obama, and women will probably break President Obama’s way”.

O’Reilly then argues that the Leftist media spun his words to make him look like a white supremacist. Of course, O’Reilly doesn’t explain what he meant by “They want stuff”, and goes on to accuse the extreme Left of a witch hunt. Hilariously, O’Reilly argues that there are ‘Entire media operations that exist solely to promote ideology’ – a statement so brilliantly hypocritical, it can only be described as Orwellian. I lost the will to watch any more after that one (when I stopped he was bringing out Alan Colmes to provide the Leftist perspective), but you can check out the segment below to get the gist of it:

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The distortions flooding the internet and airwaves regarding the latest Israeli assault on Gaza are familiar and depressing. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) has managed to frame the latest episode in the conflict as Israel ‘defending itself’ from incessant rocket attacks from the Gaza strip. The truth of course is far more nuanced and complicated. Predictably, the mainstream media in the US has run with the official Israeli narrative of events towing the line that Israel is merely defending itself from Arab terrorism. The truth is that the latest outburst of violence began when Israeli tanks made an incursion into Palestinian territory, and killed a 12 year old Palestinian boy playing football. Hamas then responded by sending rockets into Israel, and the violence has spiraled since.

My friend Ahmed Shihab-Edlin hosted a discussion on the Huff Post Live this morning discussing the increasingly brutal attack on Gaza, putting the conflict into perspective and looking at both sides of the story. I have to give a huge amount of credit to the Huffington Post for giving Ahmed a prominent platform to air views from a Palestinian perspective – historically a mortal sin in the American mainstream media. I highly recommend watching the very civilized discussion that doesn’t demonize either side:

I’ll be posting a more in-depth analysis about the conflict tomorrow, so stay tuned.

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Richard Nixon: Socialist?(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By Ben Cohen: I’ve been having a series of arguments with a friend of mine about the competing economic theories in mainstream American politics. My friend takes the view that government is not the answer to America’s economic or social problems, and I take the view that in many cases it is. I’m not a fan of labels, but in the American political spectrum, my friend would be viewed as center right with libertarian leanings, whereas I would probably be classified as a socialist. In America, I’m the odd one out with no one in mainstream political circles outside of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders who really represent my views. My friend on the other hand would be right at home in the mainstream of the Republican Party.

In any other industrialized western nation however, I would be considered well within the mainstream. In the UK I’d be fairly mainstream left, in France, the center left, and in Sweden or Norway probably around the center. My friend would be considered far out of the mainstream of political discourse with his views on the role of government in society.

While I don’t want to denigrate my friends views, I think there is a huge misconception in America about where the political center really is, and I believe this makes modern Republican economic theory extremely dangerous. Moderate Republicans today would not only be considered far Right in Europe, but in relation to other Republicans throughout US history. To put it in perspective, the Obama administration is further to the Right on most issues than Richard Nixon’s government was. Writes Eduardo Porter in the New York Times:

The Nixon administration not only supported the Clean Air Act and affirmative action, it also gave us the Environmental Protection Agency, one of the agencies the business community most detests, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to police working conditions. Herbert Stein, chief economic adviser during the administrations of Nixon and Gerald Ford, once remarked: “Probably more new regulation was imposed on the economy during the Nixon administration than in any other presidency since the New Deal.”

Nixon bolstered Social Security benefits. He introduced a minimum tax on the wealthy and championed a guaranteed minimum income for the poor. He even proposed health reform that would require employers to buy health insurance for all their employees and subsidize those who couldn’t afford it.

Just think about how that would go down with politicians like John Boehner or Paul Ryan.

It wouldn’t.

The shifting of the political center is an interesting phenomenon with both Democrats and Republicans offering their competing theories. While it’s unclear why the shift happened exactly, we do know that it has happened. As Porter notes:

The rightward drift in economic thinking becomes apparent in surveys asking about specific issues. In surveys 25 years ago, 71 percent of Americans believed it was the government’s job to take care of those who couldn’t care for themselves, according the Pew Research Center. This year the share is down to 59 percent. And most of the shift reflects a decline among Republicans.

Republicans’ support for labor unions has fallen sharply since the late 1980s, according to Pew’s research, as has their support for protecting the environment. Their drift fits the position of Congressional Republicans, whose views on the economy have been shifting right for the last quarter-century while Democrats’ views have remained roughly still. And as Republicans have moved to the right, economic policy has followed.

The Right believes that its economic theories were better and beat Keynesian economics through the power of free markets and innovation. The Left believes that there has been a concerted effort from the Right to discredit government and minimize its achievements in creating and maintaining economic growth. There is however, a simple way to test the Right’s explanation, and that’s to look at the success of the economy under a neoliberal, orthodoxy and compare it to that under of a more interventionist approach. Sadly for the Right, their argument falls apart pretty quickly. As Noam Chomsky notes, the Bretton Woods system of monetary management that established the highly interventionist rules for commercial and financial relations among the world’s major industrial states from 1945 to the early 1970′s, marked a period of extraordinary economic growth:

From roughly 1950 until the early 1970s there was a period of unprecedented economic growth and egalitarian economic growth. So the lowest quintile did as well — in fact they even did a little bit better — than the highest quintile. It was also a period of some limited but real form of benefits for the population. And in fact social indicators, measurements of the health of society, they very closely tracked growth. As growth went up social indicators went up, as you’d expect. Many economists called it the golden age of modern capitalism — they should call it state capitalism because government spending was a major engine of growth and development.

And when the system fell apart in favor of deregulation and speculation, calamity ensued leaving markets prone to boom and bust, weak economic growth, and spiraling wealth inequality:

In the mid 1970s that changed. Bretton Woods restrictions on finance were dismantled, finance was freed, speculation boomed, huge amounts of capital started going into speculation against currencies and other paper manipulations, and the entire economy became financialized. The power of the economy shifted to the financial institutions, away from manufacturing. And since then, the majority of the population has had a very tough time; in fact it may be a unique period in American history. There’s no other period where real wages — wages adjusted for inflation — have more or less stagnated for so long for a majority of the population and where living standards have stagnated or declined. If you look at social indicators, they track growth pretty closely until 1975, and at that point they started to decline, so much so that now we’re pretty much back to the level of 1960.

The Left’s thesis that the Right embarked upon a sustained effort to discredit regulation, protectionism and intervention is harder to prove, but you only need look at the US corporate media system to see why it is a highly plausible theory. The US media is almost wholly owned by an increasingly small number of ultra wealthy conglomerates (Time Warner, Disney, Murdoch’s News Corporation, Bertelsmann of Germany, and Viacom control most of the US media). They are for profit entities that benefit hugely from the US tax code that favors big corporations, and lax anti trust laws that allow them to destroy or swallow smaller companies. It would be suicidal for any of their news outlets to disrupt the status quo and question the system that keeps them in business, so they don’t. Issues pertaining to poverty, unions, international trade agreements and wealth inequality are given little attention in the mainstream media, and for good reason. If the public were aware of the economic injustices foisted upon them from above, they wouldn’t accept it and the system would come crashing down. Corporate media outlets have no interest in this happening, so they don’t report on it.

The mythology that pure free markets are the key to economic success is then repeated dutifully by reporters and news programs over and over again, to the point where many Americans genuinely believe that the collapse of a highly deregulated Wall St can only be rectified with more deregulation.

This mythology is incredibly dangerous when enacted at the highest level of government. We narrowly avoided a Romney Presidency where austerity and tax cuts would have been implemented to solve the country’s problems, but there is a Republican Congress still bent on ensuring government stays out of the economy. The Republicans claim that government spending is out of control, and markets should be allowed to correct themselves naturally. The damage this would cause would be immense, and only the Democrats stand in their way to ensure minimal levels of regulation and intervention.

The truth is, the center needs to be redefined in America if it is to experience another period of sustained, equitable growth, and avoid another crippling recession.

And it can’t go any further to the Right.

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Rush Limbaugh Cartoon by Ian D. Marsden of marsdencartoons.com (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By Ben Cohen: Listening to the Right wing fallout after President Obama was re-elected has been absolutely fascinating to say the least. From Karl Rove’s extraordinary meltdown live on election night to Sean Hannity’s one-eighty on immigration, it’s fair to say that the GOP is a party with an extreme identity problem. Most people in the party are aware that they have a huge, huge problem going forward – the population is changing in both color and culture, and they are fast becoming demographically irrelevant. If the Republicans want to have electoral success going forward, they are going to have to find a way to attract women, Latinos and African Americans – groups they lost in overwhelming fashion last week.

The problem is that the party is split into so many extreme factions that it will be close to impossible to unify the party under a new, more inclusive platform. The party is comprised of moderates, Libertarians and Tea Party activists, traditional conservatives, neo cons and evangelical Christians. And while there is considerable overlap, each group have their own objectives that are often at odds with each other. Hardcore conservatives don’t want more immigrants while libertarians and moderates understand the need for reform. Evangelicals will never accept gay marriage while moderates and libertarians would, neo cons want more wars, while traditional conservatives do not, and Libertarians vehemently oppose any tax hikes, while moderates understand it to be an occasional necessity.

Most worrying for the Republicans is the prominence of loudmouth media characters like Sean Hannity, Mark Levin and Rush Limbaugh – virulent conservatives who influence millions of voters with their fear mongering rhetoric. Without their stamp of approval, Republican candidates lose a vital marketing tool that can seriously affect voter turn out. Had Limbaugh, Hannity and Levin not gone out to bat for Mitt Romney, it’s likely his loss would have been even worse.

In the wake of defeat, the Right wing noise machine is still out in full force because it is not in the business of self reflection. It is in the business of fear and hate – two tried and tested ratings winners that may destroy the Republican Party, but keep the multimillionaire mega mouths on air for eternity.

Rush Limbaugh went on an epic rant after last Tuesday, sarcastically suggesting that Republicans should advocate pot legalization and start their own ‘abortion industry’. He said on his show:

The youth vote! I tell you what we should do, let’s announce, starting around Christmastime, so that we can get close to being Santa Claus ourselves, let’s announce that we are for the legalization of marijuana, and that as a party we’re in favor of forgiving all student loans . . . Is that how we do it?

All these examples . . . Latinos! We’re not going to get the Latino vote by opening the borders and saying, you know what? Let anybody in who wants to come in.

Women. Let’s start our own abortion industry. Let’s go out and get the women’s vote. I just want you to think, would that work?

Not exactly encouraging. And if you thought that was bad, Mark Levin, one of the most nauseating fear merchants had the following to say about the lessons the Right should take from electoral loss:

We conservatives, we do not accept bipartisanship in the pursuit of tyranny. Period. We will not negotiate the terms of our economic and political servitude. Period. We will not abandon our child to a dark and bleak future. We will not accept a fate that is alien to the legacy we inherited from every single future generation in this country. We will not accept social engineering by politicians and bureaucrats who treat us like lab rats, rather than self-sufficient human beings. There are those in this country who choose tyranny over liberty. They do not speak for us, 57 million of us who voted against this yesterday, and they do not get to dictate to us under our Constitution.

We are the alternative. We will resist. We’re not going to surrender to this. We will not be passive, we will not be compliant in our demise. We’re not good losers, you better believe we’re sore losers! A good loser is a loser forever. Now I hear we’re called ‘purists.’ Conservatives are called purists. The very people who keep nominating moderates, now call us purists the way the left calls us purists. Yeah, things like liberty, and property rights, individual sovereignty, and the Constitution, and capitalism. We’re purists now. And we have to hear this crap from conservatives, or pseudo-conservatives, Republicans.

This ‘purism’ is a recipe for complete disaster, and the sooner the GOP exiles braggarts like Limbaugh and Levin, the sooner it can reform itself into an electorally viable political party. The problem is, letting go of the extremists means taking considerable short term losses. Republicans draw huge support from fearful white Americans who believe they are in imminent danger from marauding Mexicans, gay couples and black Muslims. They are a reliable voting bloc, and losing their enthusiasm would be very detrimental. Their economic platform has to change too – it can no longer be the party of tax cuts and deregulation at all costs – they are no longer trusted to run the economy and their inability to evolve on the issue is becoming a serious electoral burden. Again, the problem is that changing their economic principles would mean massive short term losses. The party is essentially a mouthpiece for big business, and big businesses want tax cuts. Without big business, there is no money to win elections, making it a hit the party cannot afford.

Is there a way out of this conundrum?

Frankly, it’s hard to envision one. The reforms needed will be incredibly painful and will entail some very serious action from prominent Republicans who will have to confront the militants in the party. Tokenism won’t do going forward – the changes will have to be wide reaching and meaningful – and much of the party will hate them. The Republicans will have to redefine conservatism and market it to the new America. We’ve yet to see any evidence that there is serious intention from party members to do so, making their prospects for 2016 all the dimmer.

In short, they’re screwed, and there’s not much they can do about it.

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Bill Maher explains why Romney lost the election:

Mitt Romney lost because of the Republican brand and Republican policies. There are other reasons, of course, like Mitt being unlovable to anyone not named Ann Romney, but nothing trumps the idea that 2/3rds of America thinks the other 1/3 is a frightening conglomerate of Bible-thumpers, xenophobes, and vaginophobes. (Not a word, but should be.)

Take Mitt’s pivot from being “severely conservative” to being “the white Barack Obama.” Sure, everyone tacks to the middle after the primaries, but Mitt’s performance was different: it was a full-scale repudiation of just about every idea that conservatives hold dear. The positions were changed. The rhetoric was completely different. He was basically Barack Obama, Caucasian Edition.

Now I know what you’re saying: this is what Mitt Romney always does. Being a shape-shifting phony isn’t an act; that’s who he is! And this is true.

But it isn’t who Michele Bachmann is. When it comes to nutty right-wing beliefs that are completely false, she’s a true believer. And yet what was Michele Bachmann saying during the waning days of her too-close-for-comfort campaign? She was putting out an ad distancing herself from her own Party — even her conservative district:

“Michele Bachmann is an independent voice working for us, saying no to big spending by both political parties but bringing them together…”

Then Michele pops on the screen and says, “That’s why I’ve been an independent voice working for you…”

Wow. …I’m just saying. When even Michele Bachmann can’t run as a proud Republican, your brand identification has reached “pink slime” territory.

Maher hits the nail on the head here – the Republicans are going to continue to have a hard time electorally because their party has now divvied off into so many extreme factions, there’s no coherence whatsoever. Romney was always going to have a hard time getting elected given the ideological gymnastics he had to play just to get through the primaries. He had to shore up the crazy Right and disown 99% of his record to become the Republican nominee, then pretend that it never happened in the general election in order to pick up votes from the center. The Democrats simply sat back and ran Romney’s own words against him making their job relatively straightforward (bar Obama’s atrocious first debate performance).

Obama has successfully re-branded the Democratic Party to encompass right wing foreign policy with a center left economic platform, giving it electoral coherence that doesn’t require too much shape shifting when running for office. Agree or disagree with what the Democratic Party now stands for (and in regards to foreign policy, I certainly don’t), it’s definitely working.

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Crowd in support of Gay Marriage (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Daily Banter Headline Grab (from Mercury News):

Gay marriage rights were supported by popular vote on Tuesday in Maine and Maryland, and Washington state joined Wednesday afternoon, making it the first time gay men and lesbian rights were approved at the ballot box.

In Minnesota, voters rejected a constitutional amendment that would have banned gay marriage, marking another victory for gay rights advocates, even though gay marriage remains illegal in the state.

“When the history books are written, 2012 will be remembered as the year when [lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender] Americans won decisively at the ballot box,” said Chad Griffin, the president of the Human Rights Campaign. “The dreams of millions of fair-minded Americans were realized as discrimination crumbled and equality prevailed.”

HRC raised and contributed millions of dollars to advance marriage equality in all four states voting on gay marriage rights come Nov. 6. The group contributed at least $800,000 to advance marriage equality in Maine and $2.8 million in Maryland. The group also sent thousands of e-mails to supporters of marriage equality, as well as recruited hundreds of volunteers.

On Tuesday, 53 percent of voters in Maine voted in support of gay marriage versus 47 percent who voted against. In Maryland, the referendum question 6 allowing same-sex marriages passed 52 percent to 48 percent. And in Washington, about 52 percent of voters approved of same-sex marriage, versus 48 percent who voted against it.

In Minnesota, with 95 percent of precincts reporting, 51 percent of voters opposed the constitutional amendment that would have banned gay marriage.

The outcomes in Maine, Maryland and Washington broke a 32-state streak, dating back to 1998, in which gay marriage had been vetoed by voters. The decisions made across the four states could influence the U.S. Supreme Court, which soon will be considering the law that denies federal recognition to same-sex marriages.

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Wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong

By Ben Cohen: If you listened to any prominent right wing media outlet during the week leading up to the election, you would have thought it was in the bag for Mitt Romney. Right wing pundits like Karl Rove, William Kristol  and Charles Krauthammer predicted a close but definitive victory for Romney, Dick Morris boldly predicted the GOP would break 300 electoral votes, and incredibly, George Will thought Romney would take a whopping 326 (Romney won 206 electoral votes). In fact, the Right wing media was positively giddy with excitement believing they had finally unseated the Muslim Communist presiding in the White House.

Meanwhile, the supposedly ‘liberal’ media was projecting a fairly decisive win for the President, in large part due to the predictions of the New York Time’s polling expert Nate Silver.

Why the difference?

In short, the Right used ideology as the intellectual underpinning of their projections, while everyone else used facts. Nate Silver isn’t a mystic or the modern incarnation of Nostradamus – he’s an extraordinarily thorough polling analyst who bases predictions on a formula that accounts for real world margins of error and reporting discrepancies. It isn’t perfect, but the methodology is pretty airtight when it comes to projecting accurate odds. That’s why every half decent political analyst took Silver’s projections seriously and discounted the Right wing noise machine when it came to picking a winner.

This theme of fantasy vs reality goes far deeper than picking the winner in Presidential elections. It goes to the heart of what now constitutes conservatism in America, and why it is in perpetual decline.

As Conor Friedersdorf writes in the Atlantic, conservative ideology in the US is now so far removed from reality that it now only exists as a money making machine for loudmouths like Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity:

In conservative fantasy-land, Richard Nixon was a champion of ideological conservatism, tax cuts are the only way to raise revenue, adding neoconservatives to a foreign-policy team reassures American voters, Benghazi was a winning campaign issue, Clint Eastwood’s convention speech was a brilliant triumph, and Obama’s America is a place where black kids can beat up white kids with impunity. Most conservative pundits know better than this nonsense — not that they speak up against it. They see criticizing their own side as a sign of disloyalty. I see a coalition that has lost all perspective, partly because there’s no cost to broadcasting or publishing inane bullshit. In fact, it’s often very profitable. A lot of cynical people have gotten rich broadcasting and publishing red meat for movement conservative consumption.

How long can this go on? The libertarian economic orthodoxy that has polluted American politics for over 30 years has wrought havoc on the economy, creating gigantic wealth inequality, a dangerously powerful and unregulated financial system, and most impressively, the biggest economic disaster in 80 years. Yet Republicans insist it works and we need more of it to get out of the mess it created. Mitt Romney believed he could present a tax plan to the American public that didn’t add up, because his philosophy of cutting taxes and allowing big business to do as it pleases was self evident. The Right believes that because it believes something, it must be true. And they keep finding out that is doesn’t.

It seems that no matter how hard reality hits, mainstream conservatism finds a way to avoid it and curl back into its ideological ball. The Right has been wrong on climate change, economics, and now their own chances at electoral success, yet they continue to ignore hard facts and proceed selling the same nonsense to an increasingly skeptical public.

I would have paid money to be in the Fox News studio with Karl Rove last night to watch the fallout after it dawned on them that Romney was going to lose, and lose badly. Just watch this incredible clip of Rove, unable to confront reality, as Fox called Ohio for Obama:

Writes Andrew Sullivan:

Last night, Roger Ailes’ walls came tumbling down. Because their foundations were not based in reality, just ratings. Fox deserves a great deal of credit for re-electing president Obama. Because they refused to see who he actually was, they could not effectively counter him. They countered a figment of their imagination – and it was a particularly nasty, bilious, mean figment. Their universe became a black hole last night, sucking almost all of them in.

Perhaps the Republicans will reinvent themselves taking reality into account – it’s a long shot given their recent history, but the only way they’ll maintain any sort of electoral viability in the future.

But it’s about as safe a bet as Romney’s chances were of winning the White House.

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Matt Taibbi: Romney has America's best interest at heart?

Anyone who reads this blog knows I’m a big fan of Matt Taibbi – his mixture of acerbic wit and penetrating insight is a rarity in journalism these days, and I pretty much agree with his stance on most issues. That’s why I was little alarmed to read this from his blog on Rolling Stone today:

When push comes to shove, we all should know most Americans want the same things, but just disagree on how to get there, which is why it should be okay to not panic if the other party wins. If some foreign agent attacks us, I seriously doubt a president Mitt Romney would wave the white flag and invite the enemy in. Right? He’ll try his best as Commander-in-chief, just like Obama has, and just like Bush did, and Clinton did, and Reagan did and so on.

That should be the way we think. We should be confident that whoever wins has our collective best interests at heart, even if we don’t agree with his or her ideology, the same way we reflexively assume that the pilot of any plane we board doesn’t want to fly us into a mountain.

Perhaps the storm has affected Taibbi’s memory a little, but here’s what he wrote about the prospects of a Mitt Romney economy a few weeks back:

Obama ran on “change” in 2008, but Mitt Romney represents a far more real and seismic shift in the American landscape. Romney is the frontman and apostle of an economic revolution, in which transactions are manufactured instead of products, wealth is generated without accompanying prosperity, and Cayman Islands partnerships are lovingly erected and nurtured while American communities fall apart. The entire purpose of the business model that Romney helped pioneer is to move money into the archipelago from the places outside it, using massive amounts of taxpayer-subsidized debt to enrich a handful of billionaires. It’s a vision of society that’s crazy, vicious and almost unbelievably selfish, yet it’s running for president, and it has a chance of winning. Perhaps that change is coming whether we like it or not. Perhaps Mitt Romney is the best man to manage the transition. But it seems a little early to vote for that kind of wholesale surrender.

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Official photographic portrait of US President Barack Obama (born 4 August 1961; assumed office 20 January 2009) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By Ben Cohen: After over a year of campaigning in one form or another, thousands of speeches, ad campaigns, smear tactics, soundbytes, YouTube mashups, rallies, media appearances, and literally billions of dollars, Americans finally get to go to the polls and make their choice for president for the next four years.

The election has largely been a tiresome affair devoid of substance and filled with so many untruths and distractions that it is amazing the population takes it seriously enough to show up to the voting booths.

Americans have been subjected to what really amounts to brainwashing when you add up the number of advertisements and carefully crafted media appearances they have been exposed to. Most Americans have no idea what Barack Obama or Mitt Romney actually stand for, knowing only that one candidate is for ‘Hope’ and the other for ‘America’ — whatever that means. This lack of understanding is deliberate because those who actually take the time to figure out what both parties are really saying are rightfully appalled by the process and the choice they are presented.

Voter apathy is a well known phenomenon, and America has one of the lowest rates of voter turnout in the world. It also spends the most money on the process, indicating the public has an intrinsic understanding that it is a superficial horse race that has nothing to do with real issues.

From a broad perspective, Obama and Romney differ only slightly on all major topics: The economy, health care, Social Security, civil rights, and foreign policy. Obama wants to raise taxes slightly on the rich and cut them for the middle class, while Romney wants to cut taxes for everyone. Obama wants to mandate the purchase of private health insurance, while Romney wants to keep it optional. Both candidates would put Social Security up for the chopping board, and both men have little interest in maintaining civil rights at home or abroad. Their foreign policy plans, at least on paper, are almost identical, differing mostly in tone rather than substance.  Their campaigns have been designed to emphasize the differences in order to appeal to their respective demographics, and the media has largely repeated campaign claims without any real perspective.

While both men have dramatically different social, cultural and philosophical backgrounds, they have both arrived in the middle of America’s extremely conservative political spectrum. They are offering contrasting ideologies that in actual policy terms are almost exactly the same.

So why bother vote if there are no real differences?

Because America is a very big country, and those minute policy differences have a real and tangible effect when applied to the real world. And given the fragile state of both the economy and global political relationships, those contrasts can literally make the difference between life and death.

Small shifts in the tax code can make a huge difference in the ability of the economy to recover from the giant shock it received in 2008. Obama’s tax plan would increase much needed government revenue and allow it to maintain vital social programs and spend money in order to get the economy back on track. The only reason the economy is growing at all is down to the massive injection of taxpayers money into the financial system, and the limited stimulus funds that bailed out the automobile industry, kept teachers, policemen and nurses in work and restored some confidence to the floundering markets. Romney’s economic plan has been slammed by every serious economist because, 1) it doesn’t add up, and 2) after enacting all the tax cuts for the rich, it means the government will have to slash budgets for vital federal programs (like FEMA, social security, and public education) in order to stay solvent.

Obama’s health care plan covers millions more people and stops insurance companies from denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions, while Romney’s would not. The premise is the same — massive inefficient privatized insurance companies continuing to gouge customers – but the difference in outcome is very real and very serious. Romney’s health care plan (or lack thereof) will result in up to 72 million people living without insurance — a catastrophe from both human and economic point of view.

The Obama administration’s foreign policy has been a mixture of hawkish realism, meaning it has followed a pretty nasty doctrine of extra judicial assassinations, drone killings, overt and covert military action in countries it has no business being in, but with far, far more caution than its predecessors. Obama’s global popularity remains high because he has been careful to build international consensus around American action, and pull troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan — two major symbols of failed American foreign policy. The Obama administration has also carefully managed the Israeli/Iranian conflict, ensuring the Israelis do not attack Iran and denying them guarantees of military assistance. It may not seem like much, but a Romney administration would follow the neoconservative doctrine of hawkish fantasy politics where violence is the first option and power projection the priority regardless of real world outcomes. We saw what happened when neo conservatives took control of foreign policy in America, and it wasn’t pretty. 17 out of Romney’s 24 foreign policy advisers are Bush neocons, so it doesn’t require a huge amount of imagination to envision what could happen over the next four years in Romney gets in (think war with Iran and major conflicts with Russia and China for starters).

There are also issues where there real differences between the candidates: women’s rights, gay rights, the environment, and unions being good examples.

In regards to women’s rights, Romney’s appointment of another conservative to the Supreme Court would make it the most conservative in history, threatening Roe v Wade and potentially rolling back women’s rights by 40 years. Romney is running as pro life candidate and he has explicitly stated that he would de-fund Planned Parenthood should he get into office, making contraception far harder to access and abortion a far less safe prospect for vulnerable women. Obama on the other hand, has been a strong advocate of women’s rights, making women’s issues a centerpiece of his healthcare plan and promoting the enforcement of equal pay for equal work.

As far as gay rights go, the Obama Administration is the most progressive in history. Writes Nicholas Teich in the Huffington Post:

Passage of the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act in 2009. The repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” last September. Support for the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act. Support for a transgender-inclusive Employment Nondiscrimination Act. Secretary Clinton’s speech last December in recognition of International Human Rights Day in which she stated the importance of advancing LGBT rights. Then, last May, on Meet the Press, the sitting vice president of the United States personally endorsed marriage equality. Could this all be real? Could a presidential administration really care about advancing LGBT rights? The evidence was overwhelming, but my disbelief continued. Then President Obama followed the vice president with his own declaration of personal support of same-sex marriage.

Romney on the other hand supports a federal marriage amendment to the Constitution that defines marriage as an institution between a man and a woman and has remained typically non-committal on a host of other issues like adoption and hospital visitation rights for gay couples.

On the environment, Romney’s plan for a America would be actively disastrous. Romney plans to slash environmental regulation, boost “clean coal” production, and stop fuel efficiency rules should he get in, rolling back the significant achievements of the Obama administration and operating on the basis that climate change poses no serious threat to our existence.

The Obama Administration should not shy away from its environmental record, despite relentless attacks from Republicans and it being pretty unpopular from a political point of view. Notes the Washington Post:

The day after the November 2010 elections made clear President Obama’s greenhouse-gas legislation was doomed, he vowed to keep trying to curb emissions linked to global warming. There’s more than one way of “skinning the cat,” he told reporters.

Since then, Obama has used his executive powers — including his authority under the 1970 Clean Air Act — to press the most sweeping attack on air pollution in U.S. history. He has imposed the first carbon-dioxide limits on new power plants, tightened fuel-efficiency rules as part of the auto bailout and steered billions of federal dollars to clean-energy projects. He also has proposed slashing mercury emissions from utilities by 91 percent by 2016.

Obama has set out an ambitious plan for the next four years that while not up to the standards of every environmentalist, will make a significant difference if enacted. Romney’s on the other hand, will be actively detrimental to the environment.

The President has a mixed record when it comes to defending of unions, but he has generally supported them and they are overwhelmingly in his camp for reelection. Romney has consistently attacked organized labor in line with his party, targeting teachers and promising cuts for  federal employees under his administration.The preservation of workers rights in America is one of the most important issues confronting the country. Labor rights have been under sustained attack for almost 40 years, making America one of the worst places for workers in the industrialized world.

Romney believes that there should be less regulation in regards to workers rights, and given the US already has one of the least regulated labor markets in the world, it paints a pretty bleak picture for the future.

In short, the choice for the next four years is clear: America can turn the clock back and implement policies further to the right of George W. Bush, or it can continue to progress under the more pragmatic and humane policies of the Obama administration. The hard left believes that the system is broken and neither parties offer a way out of the dysfunctional mess created by Washington and powerful corporate interests. It is true that Obama is not offering a radical plan to revolutionize workers rights, undo decades of imperial foreign policy and dismantle the military industrial complex. But it is also true that no politician or political party could given the structure of government in America. It will take decades of concerted effort to undo the poisonous effects of big business, Wall St and the pentagon system in American politics. There needs to be some sort of basis to move forward, and that means voting strategically to keep the most dangerous politicians out of office and building grassroots pressure to force action from elected officials.

When pushing for health care reform in 2009, Obama echoed FDR and told grass roots activists to “make him do it,” knowing that change comes from below, not from above. Obama is not the change progressives hoped for, but he can be if the electorate pushes him. He is a remarkably intelligent and flexible leader with roots in community organizing and progressive politics. He understands the challenges facing America, and understands he is locked in a system that makes change extremely difficult to enact. Obama will seize opportunity to make positive changes while Romney will seize opportunities to dismantle them.

It’s not a difficult decision to make if you care about the future of America and want it to be a better place to live in for the majority of the population and generations to come. Obama is the only option for President, and you should go out and vote for him.

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