There’s a serious battle going on in Las Vegas that encapsulates the ongoing conflict between capital and labor in the US, the consequences of which could even determine the Presidential election. Reports the Guardian:

On one side the Culinary Union, representing Lawrence and 55,000 other casino cooks, bell hops and chambermaids, is investing its formidable organisational power in a get-out-the-vote drive for President Barack Obama.

On the other side the gaming moguls Sheldon Adelson, Steve Wynn and Donald Trump, with a combined worth greater than $25bn, are investing their reputations and chequebooks to promote Mitt Romney.

At stake are the state’s six electoral college votes, a small but potentially decisive prize in a tight presidential race. Opinion polls suggest a virtual tie in Nevada, Obama with 47%, Romney with 46%, meaning just a few votes could determine the result.

Unions have long known how to fight the mega rich – they use on the ground campaigns based around community that can be incredibly effective given the disparity in funding. But with the emergence of Super Pacs, the rich are finding new and creative ways to destroy unions and beat them at their own game:

Newly formed conservative groups such as Nevada Hispanics canvass voters at home, at supermarkets and at community events – mimicking a venerable Democratic and union strategy.

“We have very different ideologies but our campaigns have become more similar,” said Yvanna Cancela, political director of the Culinary Union. “Republicans used to stick to television and mail drops but they’ve learned being out in the field works. This means we need to be even more organised and to knock on every door.”

Which is why dozens of shop stewards and activists like Lawrence have taken unpaid leave – with employers’ permission – to campaign full time until election day even though their union pay tends to be less than regular salaries and overtime.

The vitriol with which billionaires like Wynn, Trump and Adelson have attacked President Obama with in regards to his economic policies is truly scary. The myth that Obama is a far left ‘wealth re-distributor’ is simply not borne out by the facts – his tax policies are more conservative than Ronald Reagan’s, and his proposals for his second term are to raise taxes to rates slightly lower than those of Bill Clinton’s. Wynn, Trump and Adelson all made their billions during the 80′s and 90′s, so why they believe Obama’s kinder tax scheme will destroy their ability to make money is anyone’s guess.

Using grassroots campaigns to convince working Americans that they should vote for less rights and more tax cuts for the rich is an amazing feat if you think about it given how effective they are – and if it wasn’t so disgusting you could even give them credit for creativity.

The battle for Las Vegas is an important one as President Obama represents the last hope for unions and the labor movement at the Presidential level. Obama isn’t exactly going out to bat for unions on a daily basis, but he does support them and is no doubt a better friend to labor than a Romney Presidency would be. If the Culinary union manages to beat back Wynn, Trump and Adelson in Vegas it will prove that all is not lost in America’s beleaguered labor movement, and that people can still win against money no matter the odds.

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Hands down the best moment in the vice Presidential debate last night was Joe Biden’s evisceration of Mitt Romney for the 47% comments:

The entire country was waiting for the topic to be brought up given President Obama’s inexplicable decision to avoid it in his debate with Romney last week – and boy did Biden drive the point home. “These people are my mom and dad – the people I grew up with, my neighbors” said Biden. “They pay more effective tax than governor Romney does in federal income tax”.

I’m not sure how it could have been said better.

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French Bulldogs. More traffic worthy than Romney's hidden fortune

After several days of doing research, interviewing sources and writing up the two pieces we put out on Mitt Romney’s hidden fortune (part 1 here, and part 2 here), we received a fair amount of traffic on the site. The two pieces we put out generated in excess of 3000 views which isn’t too bad.

However, given youtube videos titled “i are cute kitten” generate over 42 million views and posts about Paris Hilton’s breasts become headline news around the world, 3000 hits for a considerable amount of research and effort (intricate financial data doesn’t exactly come easily to me), made me feel a little hard done by.

Anyhow, I was discussing this with a friend today and I explained I would probably generate more traffic if I put a headline up like “Mitt Romney Likes Cute Puppies”. It would of course be completely misleading as we don’t know whether Romney does like cute puppies (given he strapped his dog to the roof of his car for a 12 hour journey, he may well not), but I thought I’d run the experiment to see what would happen anyway.

I’m hoping when I go into the site stats later tonight that the majority of traffic comes from search and not from our core readers (seriously Banter readers, if you’re reading this, shame on you…), but it will prove my point if we generate a decent amount of traffic. This post took approximately 15 minutes to write and post as compared to three solid days for the serious pieces (or 96 x longer), so as a rough estimate it should only generate 31.25 page views.

Let’s see what happens….

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Presidential debates: An exercise in vanity (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By Ben Cohen: The general consensus within media and political circles as that Joe Biden must relentlessly attack Paul Ryan in tonight’s Vice Presidential debate if he is to make up for President Obama’s desultory performance last week. There is no doubt Biden needs to take it to Ryan tonight, but there’s a lot more that the Vice President needs to do to put right what Obama put wrong.

Presidential debates are basically an exercise in branding and marketing – and thus far, the Obama/Biden brand has been damaged pretty badly.

Part of me feels pretty ridiculous for commenting on the whole process given how completely insane it is  – the mere fact that they have a ‘spin’ room where media strategists try to re-frame the debate after the event to the salivating press should be enough to make the entire debacle irrelevant – but that is the reality of modern elections. It is a gigantic image contest that requires insane attention to details that don’t have anything to do with actual policy, and whoever masters the detail usually wins.

This election, and this debate is an important one, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. The Romney/Ryan ticket is about as lethal a duo as you could possibly imagine given the fragile state of the economy and volatility in the Middle East, and the only thing left preventing both blowing up are President Obama and Vice President Biden. Another Republican victory tonight could be disastrous for the Democrats and it rests on Biden’s shoulders to save the proverbial day.

So what does Joe need to do tonight? Here’s our somewhat superficial guide to the Vice Presidential debate:

1. Look sharp. Biden must reassure voters that he knows how to dress like a Vice President. This means shirt tucked in, tie folded in perfect symmetry and hair coiffed perfectly. Biden should use Robert Redford as a model.

2. Speak in soundbytes. The more zingers from Biden the better, regardless of what pundits say. Zingers get turned into youtube clips that can often go viral. Given America’s attention span is close to zero, the shorter the better.

3. Point out how young Paul Ryan is and insinuate he’s nowhere near mature enough to be Vice President. Biden must come across as a slightly elderly statesman and put Ryan in his place.

4. Encapsulate in as few words as possible the main reason why Ryan and Romney should not be trusted by the American public. A suggestion: “You have both lied and changed your positions so many times it is impossible to know where you stand on anything”. Nothing fancier.

5. Attack Ryan on his extremely dubious math. Again, this needs to be done pithily – Americans don’t want to hear long winded calculations and intricate policy details. “Your sums don’t add up and you have failed to present details on your tax plan for America.” This must be repeated often.

6. Highlight the differences between Obama and Romney. Biden needs to get the base excited again so mentioning gay marriage, women’s rights, and healthcare is an absolute necessity. Biden must go out of his way to portray Romney and Ryan as extremists and not allow his opponent to claim the center as Romney successfully did against Obama last week.

7. No long winded speeches. Biden is like the uncle you wish would shut up at Christmas – he loves the sound of his own voice, and he must be extremely self conscious about this for tonight.

8. No gaffes. Biden is about the most gaffe prone politician around – thankfully they are largely harmless (unlike Romney’s, which have been life threatening), but the stakes are high and a polished performance is an absolute necessity.

——

We’ll be doing a live blog of the debate tonight, so please join us at 9pm ET, 6pm PT for what could be another defining moment in this Presidential election.

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I’ve been receiving mail and comments in regards to our piece on Romney’s dishonesty regarding his personal fortune, some of which was critical of the headline we put up. “Mitt Romney is being fundamentally dishonest about how much money he has” was apparently misleading according to several readers because we didn’t provide conclusive evidence that Mitt Romney is hiding hundreds of millions of dollars in bank accounts and investments around the world. Wrote one reader:

The charge in your headline is definitive. Nothing in the story is, and you have no empirical data with which to base that claim.

We thought long and hard about the title of the piece, weighing up just how accusatory we wanted it to sound. Given there is no way of knowing exactly how much Romney is worth – because he won’t disclose it – we couldn’t flat out accuse him of hiding money. However, given the unprecedented measures he has taken to protect that status of his wealth (as outlined in the piece) the one thing we know for sure is that Romney is being completely dishonest about how much money he has. Otherwise he would, like every other Presidential candidate for the past 40 years, have released his tax returns over the past decade. George W. Bush released 13 years worth of tax returns in 2004, and John McCain 23 years in 2008. Romney has released just two. Romney would have also disclosed where he keeps his money (he hasn’t), and his continued investing relationship with Bain (he didn’t).

Asserting that Romney is being fundamentally dishonest about how much money he has, is quite frankly, stating the obvious.

Looking at all the evidence, it seems highly unlikely that Romney is worth the $250 million his campaign is claiming he is, and we were not afraid to point that out. At no point did we directly state that Romney is far richer than he is claiming – we stated that it is extremely likely that he is given the other theories don’t add up. There is a difference. From the piece:

The end result of going through the numbers, comparing Romney to his former peers and looking at what is publicly available on how he has set up the management of his money leads to one conclusion: Mitt Romney is most definitely hiding something.

We don’t know exactly what Romney is hiding, but we do know for a fact he is hiding something, which actually makes our headline rather tame.

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This was Andrew Sullivan’s reaction to the bad poll numbers that came in yesterday:

Sullivan is a self confessed drama queen, but this really is taking it too far. He writes:

Look: I’m trying to rally some morale, but I’ve never seen a candidate this late in the game, so far ahead, just throw in the towel in the way Obama did last week – throw away almost every single advantage he had with voters and manage to enable his opponent to seem as if he cares about the middle class as much as Obama does. How do you erase that imprinted first image from public consciousness: a president incapable of making a single argument or even a halfway decent closing statement?……Maybe if Romney can turn this whole campaign around in 90 minutes, Obama can now do the same. But I doubt it. A sitting president does not recover from being obliterated on substance, style and likability in the first debate and get much of a chance to come back. He has, at a critical moment, deeply depressed his base and his supporters and independents are flocking to Romney in droves.

I’m not sure whether Sullivan really does think Obama has blown the entire election because he looked bored at the debate, or he’s sending a plea for help directly to Obama to get his act together. The President is known to read Andrew Sullivan’s blog, so there’s a good chance Sullivan is being over dramatic in order to get his attention.

However, I don’t think this type of public panic from Sullivan is helpful. Sure, Obama looked pretty bad in the debate and Romney looked pretty good, but so what? It was one debate on one night with one week of decent polling numbers for Romney. It’s way too early to assess the long term effect of the debate, the good jobs numbers that came out on Monday and Romney’s brand new persona he’s rolled out 4 weeks before voters go to the booths.

The more panic that is spread the more excited the Republicans get and the better the chance they have of winning. Sullivan may think he’s being helpful here, but he’s only adding to the chaos of an enormously complicated process that requires level headedness and strategy rather than wild swinging instinctiveness.

I certainly think that the poll numbers should alarm the Obama campaign, and a strong performance from Joe Biden in his debate against Paul Ryan this Thursday is an absolute necessity. But Obama has most certainly not thrown ‘the entire election away’ as Sullivan believes he may have.

Nate Silver, who is generally regard as the authority on polls and how to interpret them warns against taking one or two polls from a specific day too seriously:

It’s one thing to give a poll a lot of weight, and another to become so enthralled with it that you dismiss all other evidence. If you can trust yourself to take the polls in stride, then I would encourage you to do so. If your impression of the race is changing radically every few minutes, however, then you’re best off looking at the forecasts and projections that we and our competitors publish, along with Vegas betting lines and prediction markets.

I worked as a boxing journalist for several years so understand exactly how accurate Vegas betting lines are when it comes to picking fights. To correctly pick a fight, you have to be able to match intricate styles, have a detailed understanding of the history of the fighter, the trainer he has, the type of training camp he’s had, who he has been sparring with, what weight the fight is taking place at, the size and brand of the glove, the size of the ring, the location etc etc. It is an intricate art that requires an understanding of many different and seemingly unrelated events that can often interplay and change the odds of a fight. It is sometimes incredibly difficult task, but Vegas odds are almost entirely correct. And if they can accurately assess odds in a sport as unpredictable as boxing, a Presidential election is pretty easy to figure out. The information available to Vegas bookies is astonishing – they have multiple national and local polls, decades of history, inside info on candidates, their team, their strategy, detailed demographics by age, race, gender etc etc. And as it stands, Obama is still the favorite.

Maybe it’s time for Andrew to take a break from the 24/7 Presidential election blogging cycle. It looks like it’s getting a bit much for him.

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Politicians today could learn a thing or two from JFK. In this excellent speech, the 35th President of the United States lays out a forceful defense of government and its positive role in society:

This is what we need to hear from Obama in the next debate. The poll numbers are really not looking good for the President and he needs to come out swinging big time. How does he do that? By appealing to his base and reminding everyone he’s a Democrat, not a centrist like the (again) re-tooled Romney. Instead of having Obama practice zingers, maybe his team should have him sit in front of JFK speeches for a couple of days in preparation for the debate. It may reignite some sorely missing passion.

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Christopher Columbus: Hero or Murderer? (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Spanish explorer Christopher Columbus is regarded in American culture as the first Westerner to discover the Americas, and he will forever be remembered as a pioneer and a hero. The historical record however, shows Columbus to be a brutal murderer who participated in indescribable crimes against Americas indigenous population, calling into question the need to celebrate him every year.

Howard Zinn captured the spirit of Columbus’s escapades in America in his phenomenal book ‘A People’s History of the United States’, using details from Columbus’s own journal and eye witness accounts, where theft, murder, rape and torture were used to subdue the indigenous population. This is  an account completely contrary to the one taught in high schools around the country and celebrated on a yearly basis – a fact that should cause great concern. He writes:

In his quest for gold, Columbus, seeing bits of gold among the Indians, concluded that there were huge amounts of it. He ordered the natives to find a certain amount of gold within a certain period of time. And if they did not meet their quota, their arms were hacked off. The others were to learn from this and deliver the gold.

Documenting an eye witness account of the Spanish soldiers by Bartolome de las Casas, a Dominican Priest, Zinn continues:

Las Casas saw soldiers stabbing Indians for sport, dashing babies’ heads on rocks. And when the Indians resisted, the Spaniards hunted them down, equipped for killing with horses, armor plate, lances, pikes, rifles, crossbows, and vicious dogs. Indians who took things belonging to the Spaniards—they were not accustomed to the concept of private ownership and gave freely of their own possessions—were beheaded, or burned at the stake.

Las Casas’ testimony was corroborated by other eyewitnesses. A group of Dominican friars, addressing the Spanish monarchy in 1519, hoping for the Spanish government to intercede, told about unspeakable atrocities, children thrown to dogs to be devoured, new-born babies born to women prisoners flung into the jungle to die.

Forced labor in the mines and on the land led to much sickness and death. Many children died because their mothers, overworked and starved, had no milk for them. Las Casas, in Cuba, estimated that 7000 children died in three months.
The greatest toll was taken by sickness, because the Europeans brought with them diseases against which the natives had no immunity: typhoid, typhus diphtheria, smallpox.

So yes, Columbus discovered America (although he actually didn’t, the Vikings did), but he was also a monstrous killer who should probably be remembered for the enormous crimes he committed rather than the land he stumbled upon.

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From the Independent:

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez promised to deepen his socialist revolution after a comfortable election victory that could extend to 20 years his polarizing leadership of the South American OPEC nation.

Tens of thousands of ecstatic supporters thronged the streets around the presidential palace overnight, pumping fists in the air after the former soldier beat opposition candidate Henrique Capriles by 9 percentage points.

The new six-year term will let Chavez consolidate his control over Venezuela’s economy, possibly by extending a wave of nationalizations, and continue his support for left-wing allies in Latin America and around the world.

The reaction in the West has been entirely predictable – dismay – as the controversial Chavez held onto power. It is hard to get a balanced picture of the Chavez government given the extraordinary propaganda leveled against the former soldier and self styled ‘socialist revolutionary’. Contrary to popular opinion, Chavez is not a dictator and has never rigged an election (he has now been democratically elected three times, all monitored and verified by international institutions). He has not, as many believe, nationalized all of Venezuela’s industry, or taken over the private media. What he has done though is to attempt to drive a better bargain for Venezuela with US oil companies, distribute money to the poor, and set up trading agreements that help rather than hurt regular Venezuelans. The US has viewed this as being unacceptable, attempting to help overthrow the Chavez government in 2002, and doing their best to undermine him at every given opportunity.

There are many worrying elements about Chavez and his style of government – the cult of personality, the extension of Presidential terms, and inflammatory and unhelpful rhetoric against the West. The Chavez government also has a patchy human rights record, and the President has done himself no favors with his bombast and narcissism, drawing attention away from his many achievements (economic growth, and the highest literacy rates in the region to name two). But the West’s overwhelmingly negative portrayal of his government are unwarranted, particularly given the atrocious human rights record of neighboring Columbia – the biggest recipient of US aid in the region – and the complete lack of media attention it is given.

There are many, many problems in Venezuela, and Hugo Chavez is not perfect by any means. But Venezuelans have chosen socialism over American style free markets again, and their choice must be respected.

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In a thoughtful piece about the choice Americans have this election, Gary Younge concludes that despite Obama’s many flaws, a vote for Romney leads to quantifiably worse outcomes:

Insisting it makes no difference who wins is not tenable. Last year Chelsea Shinneman of Roanoke, Virginia, had a baby, Harrison, who was born with a congenital heart defect. Were it not for the new healthcare act, Harrison would have been destined for a lifetime of sky‑high insurance premiums.

In Fort Collins, Colorado, the head of the Homelessness Prevention Initiative, Sue Beck-Ferkiss, could point to 36 families in the area who had been helped by stimulus money. Had there been any Latinos at the table in Akron, they might have added to Obama’s achievements his executive order to halt the deportation of young undocumented immigrants. Had there been soldiers, they might have talked about the withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq.

Younge is no shill for Obama, but he understands that whoever is President is hamstrung by an increasingly corrupt political system that makes significant change extremely difficult. Obama may want to bring about change in America, but political reality dictates that he can’t. He must play the game and make adjustments where he can, or be replaced by a Republican who will not only play the game, but further rig it.

We keep hearing from the Glenn Greenwald/Jane Hamsher Left that a vote for Obama is an endorsement of all his policies – a position that simply defies logic. There will never be a candidate whose policies you agree with 100%, so unless Greenwald himself throws his hat into the political arena (and he’d last about 4 seconds if he did), voters have to face reality and go for the candidate whose policies net the better results. As Younge reminds us:

The case against the Republicans is not difficult to make. Their numbers don’t add up, their arguments don’t make sense, and their record in office contradicts virtually every one of their professed principles. During the eight years prior to Obama’s presidency they ballooned the deficit, crashed the economy, increased the power of the state over the individual, and sent America’s standing plummeting throughout the world. They built that.

In a corrupt political system you vote for the less corrupt candidate and you vote for the candidate who actually understands that the system is corrupt. Mitt Romney believes in the system – after all, it favors rich white men like himself – so he’ll do his best to maintain it. There isn’t a huge amount President Obama can do to change the system, but you get the feeling that if there was a window to do something, he’d at least try (and judging by the banking crisis, there’s evidence he already did).

Sure, the choice isn’t great, but it shouldn’t be hard either because of how serious the outcomes are.

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