by ChrisSick

“The ugly fallout from the American Dream has been coming down on us at a pretty consistent rate since Sitting Bull’s time — and the only real difference now, with Election Day ’72 only a few weeks away, is that we seem to be on the verge of ratifying the fallout and forgetting the Dream itself.”
— Hunter S. Thompson, Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72

By the time you read this, if I’ve done my job correctly — and there is little guarantee of that — the polls will already be opening on the East Coast. This endless election is almost over. I’ve only been writing about it, with varying degrees of regularity, since the end of August and I’m exhausted. I have new pity for the professionals who have been writing about this horror show we call an election since May of last year, when the evolutionary throwbacks who made up the Republican Primary contenders first stood tall on a stage in South Carolina, looking more like a well-dressed police line-up than candidates for leadership of this struggling superpower.

To attempt to summarize the strange odyssey of the last four years in under 2,000 words would be an impossible task, and more befitting some grizzled pro journalist ready to sellout from grind of print and into the bright lights of book-length reporting and television appearances than this humble column. That said, looking back I can think of at least three points worth making before we’ve collectively settled (in every sense of the word) who should be the next President:

Point 1: We had it right before we had it wrong, but mostly we are Wrong

In my first Tactical Animal column I wrote:

“Overall, it looked like the President would eek out a largely meaningless win without an electoral mandate and go on to see his second term as stymied by Republican opposition in Congress as the later half of his first has been.”

The conventional wisdom — ahead of the selection of Paul Ryan as Republican Veep — was that the election was going to come down to a narrow win for Obama that would leave him with a weaker electoral mandate and a less cooperative Congress than he began his first term with nearly four years ago. The conventional wisdom in the last days before the election is exactly the same.

The last two to three months since Romney secured the nomination and the race began in earnest have featured myriad ups and downs for both candidates. By the end of September Romney had racked up an impressive series of gaffes, a meandering and largely uninspiring convention, three or four campaign reboots, and a leaked video about how he loves America despite hating nearly half of all Americans. The conventional wisdom then was best surmised by a headline I, and others, ran with declaring that Mitt Romney would never be President.

Then, of course, came the first debate, in which an energetic and forceful Romney hammered a sleepytime-tea Obama. There was much liberal gnashing of teeth and movement of prediction markets. The media narrative of a shambling and useless Romney campaign that had no hope in hell of mounting a serious electoral challenge was discarded in favor of asking if Obama was even trying to win this election.

Just typing that is reminding me of the whiplash feeling I had closely watching the events unfold. But, a month after the Obama crater, we’re back to Intrade predicting a 65% chance for him to win, and Nate Silver going even better predicting an 85% chance for an Obama victory. We’re literally right back where we started, with Obama looking to win by less than two points, but for sure looking to win.

All of the gnashing of teeth, wringing of hands, and general calamitous reactions to every little news story, gaffe, comment, interview, debate, commercial, or event is, really, meaningless. Six months ago it looked like the President was going to beat Mitt Romney by a small margin and that Democrats would narrowly hold the Senate, while Republicans continued to hold the House. Today it looks exactly the same.

Everything between reaching that conclusions six months ago and that conclusion today was almost entirely in service of attracting viewers, clicks, and readers to SELL YOU SHIT. It was all just politics-as-entertainment, and taking part in it has lead me to conclude that I’d be much happier (and most likely more useful) writing about real, actual policy than about the tactics used to get you to buy into a political brand. I have no idea how full time political writers do this without massive amounts of heroin, but the truth is most likely they just have no souls.

Point 2: Whomever wins, cheated

Several times over the last week, I’ve been asked if the President is going to win reelection, mostly by close friends and passing acquaintances, in slightly panicked tones. Mostly my response has been, “How the hell would I know? What do I look like, Nate Silver?” Then I recall that I write this column and am generally acknowledged as Knowing Things about politics, so I gently but firmly reassure them that yes, the President is going to be reelected, and they can stop worrying or start, depending on the political affiliation.

Typically, I’m never asked how I know. Because people, frankly, aren’t much interested in minutia. They want to be comforted, generally, and they want to be Right. Luckily, there’s an entire industry that exists just to do that! It’s called Right Wing Media. So when you wonder how I know, with a large degree of certitude, that the President is going to get reelected, I can helpfully point you to a Fox News story already claiming that massive election fraud is underway.

Although the story in question is related to electronic voting machines in Ohio, the implication is clear. If Obama wins this election, it will be due to a subversion of democracy, not an exercise of it by a populace that largely disagrees with the Right and doesn’t find Mitt Romney to be an appealing candidate. It can’t be that the electorate simply prefers Obama to Romney, at best it implies that Obama somehow duped the country with his big smile, and at worst it means Chicago-style election theft.

To me, and I’m sure many of my readers, these accusations sound utterly ridiculous. But to someone who’s convinced that Nate Silver is trying to game the election for Democrats, that a Romney landslide is coming, and that Democrats only win elections through fraud. And following those links as opposed to taking my word for it might be instructive if you’re wondering how people come to believe all of that:

“I, personally, absolutely believe [that the ‘Romney will win!’ theme] is a de-legitimizing strategy…One can expect legal challenges if the vote is close. I think this push to portray Obama as having zero chance is laying the groundwork. At minimum it works to keep constituents of Republicans in Congress from tolerating any compromises in the event of an Obama re-election because they will have a reinforced sense of being robbed (which they have had about Mr. Kenya his whole presidency)….”
—Reader email quoted by James Fallows, The Atlantic, 11/3/2012

The important takeaway here is that any and all attempts to “de-legitimize” the President are not new, and a smaller margin of victory on the sixth will only give them greater life. In 2008 Obama won by a margin of 7.2% of votes cast and 192 votes in the Electoral College. That didn’t stop the Right’s press and candidates from spending the last four years treating Obama as an illegitimate President. There’s many reasons for such a strategy, but if nothing else, it was vindicated when several Editorial Boards endorsed Mitt Romney because of the idea that Democrats in Congress would be more likely to work with a Romney administration than Republicans have with Obama.

But there is a cost to this. The strategy of stymieing the President for political gain may very nearly have worked this election cycle, and certainly was useful to the 2010 midterm-Tea-Party-takeover. But convincing somewhere between a third and half of the country that the President is illegitimate, and that their political opponents are immoral little fucksaws who care more about accumulating power than serving the citizenry is dangerous for reasons I shouldn’t really have to elucidate.

The Left, of course, worked most of the year to create their own counter-narrative about voter suppression through Voter ID laws. But, speaking of things that should be clear without further commentary, legitimate concerns about voter suppression amplified as an electoral tactic to motivate the base are a far cry from convincing the segment of the populace most fanatical about owning guns that their voting rights are being taken from them by electoral fraud on a massive scale. Which isn’t to say that the Left won’t play the same game as the Right if — somehow, despite all odds — Romney wins the Presidency. It’s just to say that some concerns originate from a more “reality-based” community than others.

Either way, when the voting ends, we can easily find ourselves in a situation where the campaign will not:

“So no matter who wins, the endless partisan arguments are going to continue. And hell, the campaign might continue for a while, too: There is also a chance that the winner of the popular vote loses the Electoral College this year, again, and if Obama ends up the Electoral College winner I bet Romney and the GOP don’t concede quite as politely as the Democrats did in 2000. If Romney wins the Electoral College but loses the popular vote, he will be our next president. In the unlikely event of an Electoral College tie, Romney will again probably be our next president. But we might get to keep Biden.”
—Alex Pareene, Salon, 10/23/2012

Final point: Democracy is beautiful

“Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”
—Winston Churchill, between his eighth and ninth “lunch brandy”

All of the above points aside, forgetting all of the partisan bickering, and media narrative, and politics-as-bloodsport bullshit that I’ve spent the last two months writing about, if you’re reading this on the morning of November 6th and watching the news to see how this all shakes out, you’re watching a tremendous and beautiful moment in the history of human affairs.

Democracy is messy, ugly, and, at times, brutal. Our American version of it has many failings, from lacking a viable alternative to the two-party duopoly, to being vulnerable to fraud and abuse of the system, to the simple fact that we treat it not as a serious exercise in self-determination, but largely as a sporting match. But all those failings aside, in the long view, it’s a pretty incredible thing that every few years the citizenry of this country comes together to decide who their leader should be.

I wish I had more time and space here to address some of the imperfections we have and ways to improve it. Perhaps they’ll be more columns in the future, and those issues can and will be addressed. But the most important thing to remember today is that voting is a right and privilege, and people did and continue to die for those same rights of self-determination. It is a glorious thing to be allowed to step into a voting both and will my opinions into political action that determines the course of my country.

I hope you exercise that right today, regardless of whom you’re voting for. Personally, I plan to vote early, and spend the rest of the day watching the news and laying down as much action as I can before all the betting windows close.

God bless America.

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by Laurie Penny a.k.a. @PennyRed

In the forty-eight hours since I landed in the United States, flying into storm-torn Brooklyn just days after a bunch of cars floated down Wall Street, nobody has mentioned the election to me once. You know, the presidential election, the one that’s happening in – what is it, three days? Right now, New Yorkers have more important things on their minds.

Access to food, fuel and electricity, for a start. People who do have these things are opening up their homes to friends and strangers who don’t. Across the city, volunteers are packing cars and heading to the disaster zones of Red Hook and the Rockaway, as well as to Staten Island, the borough worst hit when Hurricane Sandy battered through to flatten homes and devastate lives.

Like I said, nobody’s talking about the election. The island I always privately think of as Starship Manhattan spent days cut off from the rest of New York state, all of the lights out for days under 34th street, basements choked with brackish water, old people stranded in their homes. There’s an actual crisis taking place: houses have been destroyed, lives lost. The eighteen-month media circus that passes for representative politics in this country seems worlds away from the women in Staten Island weeping in front of the remains of their family homes on the nightly news.

With it being practically impossible for anyone without a car and a full tank of fuel to cross the city, I’ve just come back from volunteering down the street at the Williamsburg Church emergency blood drive. Right now New York is in a blood crisis. When the hospitals were evacuated during the storm, there was no time to collect the blood left in storage banks when the power went out, and by the time they got everyone to safety, that blood had rotted. Now they need new blood desperately.

When me and my friend Veronica Varlow went down to the Church to open our veins for the cause, I was told that my tangy British blood was not acceptable because I might be riddled with mad cow disease (this from people who haven’t even read my Twitter feed). They did, however, need volunteers to help shepherd those donors who were waiting patiently in line for up to three hours to hand over pints of superior all-American hemoglobin. So, I pinned on a badge and spent a few hours buzzing around filling out forms for people, cleaning tables and chairs, handing out snacks and tea and generally making myself useful. Even doing something so small to help the people helping to rebuild the city felt powerful.

Blood: when disasters happen, I’m always struck by the readiness with which people queue up to restock the banks of blood, platelets, and plasma. In the days after September 11, 2001, the donation centers had to start turning people away, and indeed, here at the Williamsburg Church we’re doing the same thing; with the donation line already thirty people deep, we’re running around with sign-up sheets where eager donors can leave their name and number in case we need more blood tomorrow.

There’s something so tender about that impulse. Sure, it says, we could raise money or go and help pump water out of basements in the Lower East Side, but wouldn’t it be simpler just to give you this part of my own body that was pumping in my heart five minutes ago? I’m pretty sure that if the New York blood centre were to put the call out tomorrow asking people to donate a pound of flesh cut from the chest closest to the heart because someone stranded on Staten Island needs it, there’d be plenty of volunteers, and not all of them would be kinky Shakespeare fetishists.

When there’s a crisis on, people want to help. Running around with the snack basket I was reminded of the floods of volunteers who gave their time, money and expertise to the Occupy camps last year. Practical anarchism. Everyone so keen to do whatever they could to help. Not just the kids from all over the country who kicked in their lives to sleep in the cold and be arrested multiple times in the name of a better future, but the shop owners who shipped out their spare produce. The trained nurses who turned up to administer basic medical care to those who had none. The parents who donated freshly-baked pies and soups to the kitchens. The librarians and academics who created an enormous library that, almost a year ago, I watched the NYPD rip apart and hurl into dumpster trucks, just because it was messing up their nice clean corporate dead-zone.

It’s no accident that the original Occupy Wall Street organizers were among the first to set up and co-ordinate volunteering efforts across New York. The group, which has drifted in recent months, immediately set about organizing teams and transportation to the worst-hit areas. The Zuccotti Park protest camp which was evicted last November and the enormous post-Sandy volunteer effort going on this week are different expressions of the same thing: overwhelming human response to crisis.

Crisis is what people in the United States have been living with for at least four years. Active emergency, turning people out of their homes and into the cold, destroying lives. It’s not crass to compare a climate disaster to a juddering crisis of capitalism, because the two are connected, not least because those most responsible are also those most likely to be snugly tucked away in gated compounds shrugging their shoulders when the storm hits. Like the crash, Hurricane Sandy hit the poorest hardest, smashing through Staten Island and Rockaway while the lights stayed on on the Upper East Side.

Nobody expected it to be quite this bad. Last year’s Hurricane Irene was bearable for most. But what I’m seeing here, at least in Brooklyn where I’ve been stuck for two days, is a city coming out of a six-month paralysis: finally, there’s a concrete task that people can put their hands to.

Sarah Jaffe’s brilliant piece at Jacobin draws attention to Rebecca Solnit’s work on the communities that arise in disaster zones:

“There’s a particular opportunity for mutual aid in the void in the aftermath of disaster, particularly in a neoliberal state whose safety net has been shredded, where the state simply isn’t there and people step up to take care of each other (not “themselves” as our libertarian friends would have it, and not the rich handing out charity as Mitt Romney wants you to believe, but communities in solidarity). The idea of mutual aid was at the foundation of Occupy as much as the much-debated horizontalism and the opposition to the banks.”

Volunteerism, of course, can be regressive as well as radical. I am reminded of those “broom armies” in London in the middle of the August riots last year; the sea of white, middle-class faces holding up brooms they’d brought to unfamiliar areas of the city, the sweet intention to mop up after a disaster tempered by the idea that the kids from deprived areas who came out to fight the police could just be swept away like so much filth. Like any desperate human impulse, volunteerism can easily be co-opted, twisted into something violent, calcifying.

Greece, where I spent part of my summer documenting the human effects of economic collapse, isn’t the only developed country where people have been living in crisis for so long they are starting to numb down and accept it. As Imara Jones pointed out in The Guardian today, 50 million Americans, the same number as those in the states hardest-hit by Hurricane Sandy, are living in acute poverty, and nobody in the presidential race has deigned to talk to or about them, despite the fact that they also have votes.

How do we respond to crisis when crisis has become status quo? That’s the question facing the entire developed world this year, and neither of the men jostling to lead the nominally free world appear to have any sort of answer. The Occupy Sandy operation is not an answer either, not even the shadow-play of an answer, but it is deeply radical and compassionate. That means someone’s probably going to try to shut it down reasonably soon, especially if it continues to provide food and assistance to the needy after the floodwaters have receded. A community response to immediate external crisis can be spun as good PR for an administration, but a community response to structural, internal crisis is just embarrassing. In every case though, the most dangerous thing you can do in any crisis – the absolute worst thing you can possibly do – is sit at home and accept it.

Back to blood. Funny thing about blood: until the 1970s, America used to buy it. Blood donation, as the United States quickly discovered, is not something you want to inject with a market incentive when you have to juggle things like infection risks and supply shortages. All that changed when Richard Titmus’ book The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy was published in 1971, explaining why the values of public service beat the private market every time when it comes to social care. The private market in American blood was regulated until it became something like the British voluntary model – people coming in to open their veins for a biscuit and a cup of coffee, just because somebody else needs their blood more than they do. Quite a lot of my job at Billyburg church today was handing out packets of Oreos to younguns waiting in line to do just that – I still have no damn idea who donated those biscuits – and telling the people massing at the door that no, we have all the blood we need for today, thank you, come back tomorrow.

“There is in the free gift of blood to unnamed strangers no contract of custom, no legal bond, no functional determinism, no situations of discriminatory power, domination, constraint or compulsion, no sense of shame or guilt,” wrote Titmus. “In not asking for or expecting any payment of money, these donors signified their belief in the willingness of other men to act altruistically in the future.” There is still enough blood beating in the cynical hearts of New Yorkers to pound out an immediate, compassionate response to crisis. Today that gives me hope.

Occupy Sandy Relief information here can be found at interoccupy.net/occupysandy/ – a website put together by the good folks at OWS, which contains all you need to know about what you can do to help. Click here for the NYC Blood Drive list of donation centers and opening times.

Laurie Penny is a journalist, feminist, and political activist from London. She is a regular writer for the New Statesman and the Guardian, and has also contributed to the Independent, Red Pepper, and the Evening Standard. She is the author of Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism (2011) and Discordia (2012). She has presented Channel 4’s Dispatches and been on the panel of the BBC’s Any Questions. Her blog, “Penny Red“, was shortlisted for the Orwell prize in 2010.

by Lee Camp

Obama and Romney have done a stellar job of ignoring climate change, but why are they not courageous enough to take it a step further?? I’m willing to ask the hard questions that the media backs away from…

[..]

by Rachel Allshiny

Occupy Wall Street has hit the streets of New York in force once again. This time, instead of protesting the symbiotic relationship between big banks and politics, they are organizing relief efforts in the hardest-hit areas of the city in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.

In the immediate aftermath of the super storm, Occupy Wall Street activists began coordinating aid to those in need in conjunction with climate activist group 350.org and recovers.org – a site that offers tools for organizing disaster relief within affected communities. This effort, dubbed “Occupy Sandy,” combines the organizational power, established communication network, and autonomous agility of the Occupy movement to provide direct relief where it is needed the most. Occupy Sandy not only connects those who are able to donate supplies or volunteer their time with those looking for aid, but also fills in the gaps in services that organizations with non-profit status are not able to provide. For example, one recent Facebook post shows a photo of shopping carts full of perishable food that is unusable by Red Hook Initiative due to sanitation codes and the community center’s 501c3 status. The caption recommends picking the food up to redistribute “DIY style,” thus circumventing a frustrating technicality.

Remarkably, the Occupy Sandy effort is not limited to the hardcore Occupy activists who camped in Zuccotti Park and were arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge. The immediacy of the situation at hand and the speed at which Occupy networks were able to mobilize has drawn new recruits into a movement that had recently been losing steam.

Jeremiah Birnbaum, of Astoria, describes himself as apolitical and lives in a collective house with several activists, including some involved with Occupy Wall Street, but is not personally involved with the movement. He joined up with Occupy Sandy as a way to offer immediate help to those in need, particularly in poor communities that are often overlooked. “We asked: Who is not being helped?” Birnbaum explained in a phone interview. “I could have gone to Red Cross and done two hours of training, or I could help people right now.” He is working to coordinate efforts on the ground, matching abilities and resources to meet needs within the community, especially for those without access to the internet or social networking sites.

Birnbaum further described the process of contacting the city or other relief organizations as rife with red tape. “The bureaucracy is insane,” he said. When residents were unable to get in touch with ConEd about getting power restored to a nearby housing project, they turned instead to the Recovers.org network. When delivering the first round of donations to the stricken building, Birnbaum was asked specifically for less clothing and more lighting so that residents could get around the pitch-dark building. He immediately sent a text message asking his partner, who was at home, to request donations of flashlights, batteries, and candles through the local website they’d set up, providing his home address as a drop-off point. By the time he arrived home 15 minutes later, nearly 100 flashlights had been delivered. “I was stunned,” he admitted. “People have been given the ability to help.”

That, ultimately, may be the power of Occupy Wall Street moving forward; Restoring power to the people with their ability to organize and mobilize in a way that empowers individuals to make change within their own communities. “People ask me, are you from the Red Cross?” Birnbaum says. “We tell them no, we’re your neighbors, and we’re here to help you.” This is where a leaderless, horizontal movement can shine. As Birnbaum puts it, “There’s been this organic network created, and it works. It’s time to get away from process to focus on taking action.” Whether or not he will participate in future protests remains to be seen, but working with Occupy Sandy has initiated him into the Occupy community. “It’s made me appreciate what Occupy has been doing behind the scenes for the past year.”

Resources available for coordinating relief efforts through Occupy Sandy include a Google doc volunteer sign-up sheet, a donations page, and recovers.org pages for the communities of Staten Island, Red Hook, Astoria, and the Lower East Side. You can follow @OccupySandy on Twitter or search related hashtags, such as #SandyAid and #SandyVolunteer. You can “Like” the Occupy Sandy Facebook page or even sign up for text alerts by texting “occupysandy” to 23559.

All these resources and more have been collected on an Occupy Sandy hub by InterOccupy.

Photos by Jenna Pope (@BatmanWI), Julia C. Reinhart (@juliacreinhart), and @an0nyc.

by Greg Palast

For Mitt Romney, it’s one scary Halloween. The Presidential candidate has just learned that tomorrow afternoon (November 1) he will be charged by the United Automobile Workers (UAW) and other public interest groups with violating the federal ethics in government law by improperly concealing his multi-million dollar windfall from the auto industry bailout.

At a press conference in Toledo, Bob King, President of the United Automobile Workers, will announce that his union and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) have filed a formal complaint with the US Office of Government Ethics in Washington stating that Gov. Romney improperly hid a profit of $15.3 million to $115.0 million in Ann Romney’s so-called “blind” trust.

The union chief says, “The American people have a right to know about Gov. Romney’s potential conflicts of interest, such as the profits his family made from the auto rescue. It’s time for Gov. Romney to disclose or divest.”

“While Romney was opposing the rescue of one of the nation’s most important manufacturing sectors, he was building his fortunes with his Delphi investor group, making his fortunes off the misfortunes of others,” King added.

The Romneys’ gigantic windfall was hidden inside an offshore corporation inside a limited partnership inside a trust which both concealed the gain and reduces taxes on it.

The Romneys’ windfall was originally exposed in The Nation magazine – see “Mitt Romney’s Bailout Bonanza” – after a worldwide investigation by our crew at The Guardian, the Nation Institute and the Palast Investigative Fund.

The full story of Romney and his “vulture fund” partners is in the New York Times bestseller, “Billionaires & Ballot Bandits,” available from Truthout with a contribution by clicking here.

According to ethics law expert Dr. Craig Holman of Public Citizen, who advised on the complaint, Ann Romney does not have a federally-approved blind trust. An approved “blind” trust may not be used to hide a major investment which could be affected by Romney if he were to be elected President. Other groups joining the UAW and CREW include Public Citizen, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Public Campaign, People for the American Way and The Social Equity Group.

President Obama’s approved trust, for example, contains only highly-diversified mutual funds on which presidential action can have little effect. By contrast, the auto bail-out provided a windfall of over 4,000% on one single Romney investment.

In 2009, Ann Romney partnered with her husband’s key donor, billionaire Paul Singer, who secretly bought a controlling interest in Delphi Auto, the former GM auto parts division. Singer’s hedge fund, Elliott Management, threatened to cut off GM’s supply of steering columns unless GM and the government’s TARP auto bailout fund provided Delphi with huge payments. While the US treasury complained this was “extortion,” the hedge funds received, ultimately, $12.9 billion in taxpayer subsidies.

As a result, the shares Singer and Romney bought for just 67 cents are today worth over $30, a 4,000% gain. Singer’s hedge fund made a profit of $1.27 billion and the Romney’s tens of millions.

The UAW complaint calls for Romney to reveal exactly how much he made off Delphi – and continues to make. The Singer syndicate, once in control of Delphi, eliminated every single UAW job – 25,000 – and moved almost all auto parts production to Mexico and China where Delphi now employs 25,000 auto parts workers.

A version of this story originally appeared on Buzzflash. Forensic Economist Greg Palast’s investigative reports can be seen on BBC Television. His latest New York Times bestseller, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps, contains a comic book by Ted Rall and chapters by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

[..]

by Sandor Stern

Dear Republican Friends,

Regarding Your Hostility Towards President Obama…

I know you claim the hostility arises from his “failed four years in office” – but really? I grant you there wasn’t much publically aired hostility when he ran for the Democratic nomination. No one gave him much chance against Hilary Clinton; but once he won the nomination – boy did the knives come out.

He was accused of being foreign born and therefore ineligible to be president. His birth certificate from the state of Hawaii was deemed inadequate because it was a short form – the same form given out to every baby born in that state. His birth announcement published in the Honolulu newspaper on August 4, 1961 was decried as a hoax, a forgery, or (for some of your wing nuts) a conspiracy established at his birth. Despite the Christian religion he shared with his mother and grandparents, his marriage to a Christian woman and the church they both attended with their baptized daughters, he was branded a Muslim. Even his opponent, John McCain, could not stomach the lies and corrected an addled old woman at one of his rallies who called Obama a Muslim. And the internet was flooded with racist jokes. One that arrived on my computer I recall vividly: “Obama has chosen his vice president. He is Sylvester Stallone. From now on they will be addressed as Rambo and Sambo.”

This was the hostility accorded Barak Obama before he even won the presidency. Since then the questions about his birth and his religion have continued and grown louder as the election of 2012 loomed.

There were so-called learned men who postulated that his years living in Kenya and Indonesia from ages 4 to 10 left him with an anti-colonial outlook, which was not in keeping with a truly American view of the world. When President Obama addressed a joint session of congress on September 9, 2009, South Carolina Congressman, Joe Wilson, shouted, “You lie.” Congressional Republican Speaker, Jon Boehner, on August 31, 2011 became the first speaker in history to tell a sitting president that he would not be permitted to deliver an address to a joint session of Congress on the date specifically requested by the White House.

During the run up to the Republican presidential nomination, the hostility broke the sound barrier. On January 25th, 2012, Arizona Governor, Jan Brewer confronted the president on his arrival in her state with a well televised angry finger in his face. Can you imagine anyone doing that to any previous president? And can you imagine any previous president facing the following attacks?

Newt Gingrich referred to this president as “the most successful food stamp president in American history” and during a November 23rd Republican debate mentioned the President’s name seven times without ever referring to him as President Obama – and was joined in that omission by the other two candidates.

Kansas House Speaker, Mike O’Neil publically cited a Bible verse calling for President Obama to be killed, his wife to be widowed and his children to be orphaned. This is the same man who forwarded an e-mail to state house republicans referring to the First Lady as “Mrs. Yo Mamma.”

Marilyn Davenport, an elected member of the Orange County, California Republican Central Committee in April of 2011, forwarded her own e-mail that included a doctored photo of the President and his parents as monkeys.

Colorado Congressman Doug Lamborn said during a radio interview that he didn’t “even want to have to be associated with.. (President Obama). It’s like touching a tar baby.”

Donald Trump renewed the birther fantasy with his high profile pronouncements about sending investigators to Hawaii to dig up the hidden evidence. When that didn’t pan out, he followed up with an offer to send a $5 million donation to a charity of the President’s choice if he would release his college records and his passport application; a heavy handed way of questioning his birth and his qualifications to attend college. Even Trump’s suggested list of charities promoted his racist bias – the president could choose “inner city children in Chicago” (read African-American) or AIDS research (let’s be reminded of his attitude towards gays).

Ann Coulter tweeted after the foreign policy debate that she approved of “Romney’s decision to be kind and gentle to the retard” and Sarah Palin weighed in with the racially demeaning phrase of “shuck and jive.”

And then there’s Romney’s campaign co-chair John Sununu, who told Piers Morgan in an interview on October 24th that Colin Powell’s endorsement of President Obama was motivated by racial kinship. This is the same Sununu who previously stated that the President needed to “learn how to be an American” and, following the President’s performance in the first debate, referred to him as “lazy.” If you think that his word is innocent, think of any Caucasian president being labeled with that word? The unspoken adjunct is “shiftless.”

If you believe all of this is simply loose cannons within your party, let me remind you that unlike McCain – who stood up against racism in 2008 – Romney has not disavowed either Trump or Sununu. So please, stop the charade of pretending that your hostility towards President Obama is policy based. This is not about policy; this is personal – and ugly. To quote Justice Welch – who presided over another ugly chapter in American history, the Army-McCarthy Hearings on June 9, 1954, which confronted Senator Joe McCarthy’s lies and deceit – Have you no sense of decency?

The question lingers…

Your inquisitive friend,

Sandy

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by Steven Whitney

Mitt Romney has done a good job keeping religion out of this election. . . and for a good reason. Many Americans view Latter-Day Saints (LDS) with some skepticism, mostly because they’re not sure who or what Mormons really are. Are they Christians? Are they a Messianic cult? Are they a hybrid, a little bit of everything – a touch of Masonic ritual here, a little Christianity there, and a little sci-fi way over in the corner? Or are they something else entirely?

A close friend whose opinion I respect warned me that going after someone’s religion might be considered a low blow. Normally, I think he’d be right because until recently most candidates were Sunday-only churchgoers in mainstream religions we’re all familiar with and nothing more. And as long as they weren’t zealots, their religious views were none of my business, just as my personal beliefs are none of theirs.

But recently we’ve been dealing with a whole new breed of cat – particularly an extreme Religious Right that insists that only they know the truth and that everyone else must live by their interpretation of what was heretofore a good book. That is not only an outrageous breach of our 1st Amendment Freedom of Religion rights, it tells us that we need to take longer looks at candidates’ religious choices to gauge whether or not we, the electorate, are comfortable with them.

Besides, I’m not “going after” anyone’s religion – Romney and any citizen can believe anything they want within the laws of our country. But it must be pointed out that he has taken several sacred vows in his ascent to the position of bishop in his church – an office achieved only through strict adherence to Mormon doctrine – that raise serious doubts about his fitness for office.

Much of the LDS religion is, by its own choice, secret both to outsiders and to those within the church who have not achieved certain ranks. As a Constitutional matter, that’s perfectly legitimate. But it also means that many voters don’t know the ins-and-outs of the Mormon sect and, in a political arena, the electorate has the right to full transparency.

The embedded 7-minute video was filmed so people outside the inner circle of the LDS church could look “Behind the Veil” and glimpse just a small portion of secret Mormon beliefs, agendas, and ceremonies. Using a covert remote camera, the filmmakers recorded the hallowed Endowment Ceremony in which Saints (what Mormons call themselves) are given the key passwords and handshakes (called “tokens”) they need to pass by angels guarding the way to heaven.

For much of the last week, I have sourced the video to ensure its accuracy by contacting both its original website and ex-Mormons I know who went through this ceremony. While the entire video is fascinating, two short sections – from 3:30 to 3:45 and from 4:00 to 4:28 – stand out as the most relevant to our election. Watch for them:

If Mitt Romney believes in the god Elohim and the planet Kolob, that’s fine – those are matters of faith. . . and no one should posit definitive views on anyone else’s religious beliefs.

But the video reveals at least two doctrines that are relevant to this election.

First is the LDS notion that our civil government should be replaced by a religious one administered by Mormons. Does Romney himself believe that? And does he consider his candidacy the first step in a LDS grand plan?

If so, it’s a clear violation of the democratic principle regarding the separation of Church and State (and confirmed by our government in the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli). Not to mention the fact that he would then be engaging in the treasonous act of “overthrowing” our government, not a good qualification for the Presidency.

Secondly is the Oath of Vengeance against the United States for the “murders” of Hyrum and Joseph Smith:

“You and each of you do covenant and promise that you will pray and never cease to pray to Almighty God to avenge the blood of the prophet Elohim upon the United States and that you will teach the same to your children and your children’s children unto the third and fourth generation.”

Did Romney himself ever take a vow to wreak vengeance on the United States for any reason whatsoever? If so, it’s not the best back story for someone who wants to be our Chief Executive.

So if he answers yes, he did take both those vows, he remains a good Mormon but his candidacy must be weighed in the light of those promises to the LDS.

Then again, if he swats these issues away in avoidance as he has done so often with other legitimate questions, we have the right to fill in our own answers based on what little we know of the real Romney.

But there’s a third alternative, one buried in LDS tradition and appropriately called Lying for the Lord – an accepted custom of lying to protect the church which has been described by an ex-official of the LDS as “a pattern of institutionalized deception established by Joseph Smith” that has now become “standard practice.” And routine for Romney, as it allows him to lie without sanction about himself and his agendas if he believes it serves the greater good of his church.

The problem, of course, is that 97% of voters are not Mormons and they would rather a President – or any elected official – serve his country rather than the LDS.

Even if he “lies for the Lord” and answers no – that he does not and never has sought or envisioned a religious government nor swore vengeance upon the U.S. – we have to wonder how he became a bishop of the LDS without adhering to two of its principle doctrines. Or if he has expediently forsaken his religious vows to win the political office he now seeks. And if he broke promises to the church he holds sacred, how can he be trusted to keep the oath of office of the Presidency?

It’s the Romney conundrum. No matter how he responds to these specific questions,
red flags are raised. Is his first allegiance to the LDS. . . or to our country? Or, glancing at his personal history, is he just out for himself?

There have been so many deceptions in Romney’s campaign about where he really stands on issues, about his business practices (the phrase “vulture capitalist” keeps raising its ugly head), about his secret plans for tax reform, healthcare, Social Security, and nearly everything else on which he constantly flip-flops, he’s become the Invisible Man of American politics – he’s smack-dab in the middle of the election, but no one can see him clearly.

A participatory democracy mandates an electorate informed by facts. It needs a true understanding of the issues, the candidates and their platforms, and the vision each holds for our sovereign nation.

So a last question must be asked: should anyone trust Mitt Romney, whose true nature and agenda remains deliberately unseen?

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