Obama V Romney

When it comes to the presidential election, choice is governed by information and knowledge and like Henry Ford's Model T, which was available in any colour providing it was black, current “democratic” practice is to allow us the widest possible choice as long as it is for capitalism's representative.

Multi-billionaire George Soros thinks that, if Mitt Romney wins the presidency, there will be "little difference" between him and Barack Obama in the White House. SOYMB thinks that says it all!


Obama - the flip-flopper

Obama's commitment to the investor class was reflected among other things by his “yes” vote in the U.S. Senate on the Class Action Fairness Act of 2005. A Republican bill backed and signed Bush, that favored banking, creditors and other corporate interests over and against workers, public consumer groups, by making it more difficult for ordinary people to sue corporate abuse. The bill had been long sought by a coalition of business groups and was lobbied for aggressively by financial firms, which constitute Obama’s second biggest single bloc of donors, a five-year effort by 475 lobbyists, in defiance of appeals from every major civil rights group. Thanks to the passage of that legislation, when defrauded homeowners of the housing bubble and defrauded investors of the bundled mortgages try to fight back through class-actions , they will come up against new corporate-friendly legal defences. Obama proved what his loyal supporters thought impossible on both domestic and foreign issues, he has governed to the right of George Bush.

At times, it has seemed that Obama went out of his way to prove he was truly the post-partisan president that he claimed to be. Obama’s willingness to bargain with Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits, willing to put them on the chopping block before he gained concessions or quid quo pro sacrifice from the wealthy and well-connected in the budget balancing debacle. Obama extended the Bush tax cuts for the rich (in exchange for Republicans allowing an extension of unemployment benefits and aid to cash-strapped states) and he promotes "shared sacrifice" to force ordinary people to sacrifice for his Wall St backers. He signed "Free Trade" Agreements designed to prioritise corporate "rights", reducing or eliminating protections for various developing countries and giving larger multinational companies a clear advantage, thanks to the backing of a majority of Republicans. Especially troubling was Obama's enthusiastic support for the Colombia FTA. because during the presidential campaign, Obama said he opposed a FTA with Colombia and proclaimed: "We have to stand for human rights and we have to make sure that violence isn't perpetrated against workers who are just trying to organise for their rights". He has escalated the Afghanistan War, waging multiple wars and planning others. The harsh sanctions he imposed on Iran can be considered acts of war. He promoted regime change in Libya and now in Syria. After the earthquake, he militarised and occupied Haiti. He conducts illegal drone attacks inside foreign countries such as Pakistan,Yemen and Somalia. "A no greater friend has Israel got " Obama proudly claims, while pretending to be the honest broker in any Middle East peace talks. He authorised indefinite detention without trial and carried out summarily execution of US citizens, accepting Bush-era limits on civil liberties from the Patriot Act. He fails to defend the environment by withdrawing strong EPA rules on clean air and with his compromises with the oil industry concerning off-shore drilling. When the Obama Administration agreed to subsisise the auto companies, he did so on the condition that future worker wages and benefits would be substantially diminished, so what you now have in the auto industry is a two-tier wage/benefits scale, with older workers getting better wages and benefits than the new workers. No such wage or compensation limits were hoever placed on the bankers in return for their bail-out.

He hasn't given a single major speech on the subject of workers’ rights. Obama’s last State of the Union address did not mention the attacks on workers’ rights in places like Wisconsin, Ohio and Indiana. He has instead actually questioned union rights and demonstrated that this is not man of the people but a representative of the corporations. United Electrical Workers union Political Director Chris Townsend argues that the most high-profile comments the Obama administration has made regarding labor law have been speeches attacking teachers unions. Townsend points to a speech by Obama at the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in March of 2009 calling on teacher unions to allow more flexibility in their contracts; he also points to the president’s remarks endorsing the mass firing of unionized teachers in Central Falls, R.I., in March 2010. Townsend, (whose union is not endorsing Obama for re-election) worries that by white-washing Obama’s deficiencies, the unions hurt their own credibility with their members. The Communications Workers of America union leader condemned Obama legislation for making it harder to organize workers in the airline and rail industries. As here in the UK, Obama has increased federal workers pension contributions. Health and safety legislation has been delayed. Employee Free Choice Act which would have made it easier for all workers to unionize by allowing them to bypass secret ballot election if they so choosed, he allowed to die entirely. He to raises the issue of trust. “Why should union leaders—from shop stewards right up the national union president —why should we sacrifice our hard-earned credibility with our members for the sake of some politician? Do they sacrifice any of their precious credibility for us, in our battles with the bosses? Rarely, if at all, and only at election time. The membership knows this, and there’s no point in trying to conceal it or gloss over it with good-news-only press releases. It’s bad enough we are locked in this two party trap. We don’t have to make it all worse by not leveling with the members about what we are really facing.”

It is argued that Obama will be the lesser evil than Romney in regards to the unions, a view South Carolina AFL-CIO President Donna Dewitt (who has refused to endorse Obama) disagrees and who again says that unions hurt their credibility with their own members when they go all out for Democrats, who are lukewarm at best in their support for organized labor. "I spend half of my time trying to talk to membership upset with their international. We have to act like labor leaders and not corporate labor leaders,” Dewitt says. “We don’t have strong labor leaders. They are always making a deal on something. I don’t know how we keep [union members] in places like South Carolina if we don’t truly represent them.” Voting for the lesser evil breeds illusions which ultimately leads to disillusionment.

In 1996, the Clinton administration enacted Temporary Assistance for Needy Families which created time limits and work rules, capped federal spending and allowed states to turn poor families away. Critics had warned that it would create mass destitution. To-day, nearly one in every four low-income single mothers is jobless and without cash aid - roughly four million women and children - and just one in five poor children now receives cash aid, the lowest level in nearly 50 years. Paul Ryan the top Republican on budget issues, calls it “an unprecedented success.” Mitt Romney said he would place similar restrictions on “all these federal programs.” Rick Santorum, calls the welfare law a source of spiritual rejuvenation. Ron Haskins of the Brookings Institution, who helped draft the 1996 law as an aide to House Republicans argues that it has worked well. And, of course, Obama also spoke favorably of the program in his 2008 campaign, promoting his role as a state legislator in cutting the Illinois welfare rolls.

Obama has backed initiatives that Republicans in the past helped originate. Obama healthcare is a very conservative program, based entirely on Republican principles and ideas developed in conservative think tanks and endorsed by a long line of Republicans. Obamacare is based on the individual mandate, an idea pioneered by the Heritage Foundation and, of course, Mitt Romney. In fact, Obamacare is“remarkably similar to Nixon’s 1974 proposal. It provides a huge new client base to the insurance companies. It is a law that forces American citizens to buy a deeply defective product from private insurance companies. It is a law that is the equivalent of the bank bailout bill. And it is a law by which President Barack Obama, and his corporate backers, extinguished the possibilities of both the public option and Medicare for all Americans. It brings 30 million involuntary customers and $500 billion per year of new revenues to the private health insurance industry which will profit from it, with no public healthcare competition and no meaningful cost controls, a bonus for the drug companies, despite the fact that in 2008 Obama had campaigned against the individual mandate and for a public healthcare option. Obamacare will, according to figures compiled by Physicians for a National Health Plan (PNHP), leave at least 23 million people without insurance, a figure that translates into an estimated 23,000 unnecessary deaths a year among people who cannot afford care. The array of loopholes in the law means, in essence, that the healthy will receive insurance while the sick and chronically ill will be priced out of the market. But as long as corporations determine policy, as long as they can use their money to determine who gets elected and what legislation gets passed, we remain hostages. It matters little in our corporate state that nearly two-thirds of the public wants single payer and that it is backed by 59 percent of doctors.

The 99%, the unions, the poor and the minorities, in an economy of growing poverty and unemployment, Obama has thrown them all overboard and wages class war against them to serve wealth and power interests alone. The apologists for Barack Obama say forget the issues and actual performance, now is the time for cheer-leaders, not critics. Should we permit a similar courtesy to the Republican candidate and place expediency before principle.

Romney - the American Patrician

Mitt Romney is a rich man. A very rich man. Last year, he spent most of his time campaigning, and he still had pretax income of $42 million. Every day of the year, he had another $115,000 to spend. He dismissed his speaking fees for one year as “not very much,” although they turned out to be $374,000. Yet his wife Ann Romney can assert “I don’t even consider myself wealthy”. Romney is solidly within that elite 0.006 percent of all U.S. taxpayers. How does Romney stand next to an average voter? He’s roughly 1,800 times richer. A wealthy financier becomes a major presidential candidate in a nation of extreme inequality. How surprising, whatever next?

Romney earned most of his $21 million 2010 income, not from direct earnings, but from gains accrued off his investments. Romney make his millions by something called "leveraged buyouts". Romney, at Bain Capital, a private equity firm, knows little other way of doing business. Bain Capital's sole aim was to maximise shareholder value. If workers needed to be laid off to make a profit, then so be it: those workers were laid off. Nothing personal. What made him a success was an ability to make heartless decisions in the pursuit of profit. Unlike Obama he'd screw the poor and the powerless, but he'd do it without telling them it's for their own good. Romney wants spending on anything that's not defence and not Social Security to be 1.7 per cent of gross domestic product by 2021 - half of current outlays. It's reminiscent of Wall Street firm flipping a company for profit. You can take Mitt Romney out of Wall Street but you can't take Wall Street out of Mitt Romney

Economist Dean Baker explains the process.

"It's standard practice that they buy a firm, they borrow against the firm, so it's not their own borrowing... then they pay themselves back from the borrowing." This is the key: the company bought pays back the buyer, even while taking on debt itself. (And the key to the key is that debt payments are tax-deductible.) But then it gets worse, Baker said, "Then they sell off assets, so they sell off their real estate, and they often set up a REIT (Real Estate Investment Trust) and that will hold the real estate and then they rent it back to the stores. So here, they have these stores, they have been a viable, profitable company, now they have all this debt, plus they don't have any assets. They have to come up with the rent each month to stay in business. At the end of that, if they still have a company they can sell off, they're golden. If they don't, well, they just go into bankruptcy, and they tell the creditors: 'Hey, too bad, you're out of luck.' And if they've already gotten their money out, the private equity company's OK. So what they manage to do is create a heavily leveraged bet where they pretty much could only win. It's a one-sided bet."

Indeed, it's so attractive that private equity firms frequently buy and sell companies back and forth to one another, making money with each transaction underwritten by taxpayers. Brand-name companies, with decades, even a century or more of public goodwill, have been taken into bankruptcy, then purchased by another private equity firm multiple times.

As already indicated, there's a huge political/tax policy point to all this, Baker explains. "A lot of what's going on is that interest is tax-deductible, whereas dividends are not. So a lot of their gains are simply replacing dividend payments with interest payments. Which comes from the taxpayers. You're not creating value. Mitt Romney - if he loads up a company with debt - he hasn't created value, he's just basically found a way to bilk the taxpayers. You can get rich, but that's not creating value for the economy." That's the initial stage, the tax law that gets the ball rolling. The second stage, the asset stripping, which frequently leads to bankruptcies, involves ripping off creditors. "There, too, it's not a case where you're creating value. You're basically creating risk for other people, getting rich in the process."

Financial journalist Josh Kosman wrote a whole book on the topic. "The original leveraged buyout firms saw that there were no laws against companies taking out loans to finance their own sales, like a mortgage," Kosman said. "So when a private equity firm buys a company and puts 20 per cent down, and the company puts down 80 per cent, the company is responsible for repaying that." It became common practice to use short-term profits to take on more debt, while paying dividends to the private equity firm. "If you look at the dividends stuff that private equity firms do, and Bain is one of the worst offenders, if you increase the short-term earnings of a company, you then use those new earnings to borrow more money," Kosman said. "That money goes right back to the private equity firm in dividends, making it quite a quick profit. More importantly, most companies can't handle that debt load twice. Just as they are in a position to reduce debt, they are getting hit with maximum leverage again. It's very hard for companies to take that hit twice.".

Mitt Romney berates the concept of “class warfare.” According to Romney, the nation's growing focus on income inequality is all about envy.The idea that the U.S. is a full-blown meritocracy is at the center of Mr. Romney’s belief system. Romney like most wealthy individuals believes that their personal fortitude, grit, and savvy made them rich. It is uncomfortable for many of the capitalist class to admit that family connections, inherited wealth usually play far more substantial roles. It is undeniable that wealth and family privilege were vital to his eventual success.

Let’s look at some facts about Mitt Romney. His father was a wealthy and well-connected man: CEO at American Motors Company (AMC), Governor of Michigan, a presidential candidate, and eventually a member of Richard Nixon’s cabinet. Meanwhile, Mitt Romney was able to attend a private prep school, which in the present day has nearly one-quarter the size of the endowment for the entire University of Alabama system. From there, he attended Stanford and the Mormon Brigham Young University for undergraduate and a joint law and business professional program at Harvard. Romney was clearly blessed with an elite and expensive education. Did he get there solely on intelligence and hard work? Or did issues of opportunities by social class contribute to Mr. Romney’s success story?

Research suggests that private prep schools have an extraordinary track record of graduates’ eventual placement in elite positions of power. 3 of our last 4 presidents attended one of these schools. The overwhelming majority of those attending come from privileged social backgrounds. Research shows that there are massive disparities in who goes to the most elite universities. If intelligence and merit were randomly distributed across the social class spectrum and the U.S. were a true meritocracy, we would expect that 25% of students enrolled at the most elite universities would come from the top 25% of the income distribution, just as 25% would come from the bottom 25% of the income distribution. However, the truth is that data from the past two decades suggest that nearly 80% of the students enrolled in elite universities like Stanford, Harvard, and Yale come from the top 25% of the income distribution. Only 5% of students come from the bottom 50% of the income distribution at these schools. The most unfortunate part of this “meritocratic” process is that the advantages and disadvantages afforded to individuals through the system are compounded over time, both within and across generations.

Let’s consider a hypothetical John Doe. John is just as intelligent and hard working as Mitt but his father was not a CEO, governor, presidential candidate, or cabinet member. John’s family can’t afford an elite prep school and the scholarship slots are so few and the applicants so many that he misses the cut based on statistical probability and bad luck rather than merit. Thus, as opportunities close for John at the high school level, such as attending an under-funded high school instead of an elite prep school, the opportunities at higher education levels slip further out of his reach. Although John goes on to obtain a community college degree, works hard for his family, and hopes for a better life for his children, how can the children of John Doe's compete with the children of the Mitt Romneys of our society? From the second these children are born into their respective families, their opportunity structures are completely different. How do merit and envy explain that?

The Romney campaigners run continuous advertisements telling the same big lies over and over, such as “don’t tax the wealthy because they create the jobs” and “don’t tax corporations or they’ll go abroad” and “government is your enemy” and “Obama wants to turn America into a 'socialist' state.” And because big lies told repeatedly start sounding like the truth and many citizens begin to believe them. A politician’s trade is to get into power to run the administrative side of capitalism. To do this, they must get elected and, to get elected, they must promise to do things for people; they must find out what’s worrying people and then promise to do something about it. This is why parties don’t need principles. Or, put another way, they only need one principle (if it can be called that) and that’s “get elected”.

Romney has been called a vulture capitalist. He counters by accusing Obama of being a crony capitalist. Both men are simply different cheeks on the same capitalist butt. It is the job description and not the person appointed to do the job which is the real issue. Just as there is no substantial difference between Obamacare and Romneycare, there is no substantial difference between Obama and Romney. They are abject servants of the corporatist state. And if you vote for one you vote for the other. Both have been pimping their policies for drooling billionaires to purchase by means donations.

But there’s a real alternative. People have increasingly awakened to what is happening to the economy and democracy. It has ignited a movement among the citizens to take it all back. They repudiate the politicians and the parties that nominated them. Things can change but it’s not going to be through conventional politics, only through a quite different kind of politics. A politics which rejects and aims to change the status quo. A politics which involves people participating and not leaving things up to others to do something for them. When more and more people realise this they will begin organising for it, in the places where they work, in the neighbourhoods where they live, in the various clubs and associations they are members of, but, above all, they will need to organise politically. If you want a better world, you are going to have to bring it about yourselves. That’s our basic message. It’s no good following leaders, whether professional politicians or professional revolutionaries. In fact, following anybody (not even us) won’t get you anywhere. The only way is to carry out a do-it-yourself revolution on a completely democratic basis. Democratic in the sense that that’s what the majority want. And democratic in the sense that that majority, rather than following leaders, organises itself on the basis of mandated and recallable delegates carrying out decisions reached after a full and free discussion and vote.