Were they hiding under rocks?

I saw a little bit of the Presidential "debate" the other night - but I'm still mystified where they found 80 undecided voters just three weeks out from the election. Did they dig them out of the Institute for the Profoundly Clueless? Maybe they found a bunch of folks who had suffered short term memory loss (like the Guy Pearce in Memento) and couldn't remember who they were voting for.

How can anyone still be undecided at this point in the process? President Obama has been in office nearly four years. Mitt Romney has been campaigning since the beginning of last year. If anyone has paid any attention at all they know more or less where the candidates stand on most issues.

At this point you either think President Obama has done the best job possible with the hand that President Bush left him or that he's incompetent. Mitt Romney is either a really smart businessman who can translate those skills into managing the government or he's a shill for whoever's pumping big bucks into his campaign coffers.

Maybe you feel that Obama should be rewarded for working to bring back a sense of community in this country after decades of atomization. Or that Obama has sold the core constituency of the Democratic party down the river in his quest to make the party more like the GOP.

Maybe you think Romney could lead a revival of Ronald Reagan's supply-side economics. Or, perhaps, that Romney has no political convictions and will gladly flip a position if he thinks he can snare a handful of votes in Ohio or Florida.

One thing that should be clear is that neither Obama nor Romney give a rat's ass about the poor. Neither one  talks about the poor out on the campaign trail. They're both aiming for the mythical middle class.

When he took office, President Obama continued the very same policies that George W. Bush had instituted while he presided over the economic meltdown. Obama handed money to the banks hand over fist and did everything he could to protect the automobile industry. But, in all of the so-called stimulus plans President Obama introduced, not once did he allocate money for the purpose of directly hiring the unemployed. He gave it to the banks and the car companies. Instead of using the money to create public works jobs, he left his minions at the Fed to reduce interest rates to zero and pretended that it would solve the problem.

We know that it was the complete and utter deregulation of the financial sector that caused the meltdown. So what does Mr. Romney propose? You got it - even more deregulation. His investments created jobs - in China. His running mate will tell you about Mr. Romney's charitable endeavors to aid the poor - but why should the poor rely on charity? Shouldn't the government do something about it?

President Obama has done more harm to our privacy rights than any other president in the history of the Republic. He has done more to harm the rule of law in international affairs than any other president since the height of the Cold War. He inherited President Bush's program of extraordinary rendition and did his damndest to keep its darkest secrets from coming out.

Not that we should expect anything more from Mr. Romney.

Mr. Obama has proven himself to be a fraud. Mr. Romney has proven himself to be the more insincere candidate for the White House since - well, I can't remember.

Neither one of these men is fit to sit in the Oval Office. Unfortunately, one of them will be for the next four years.

Have you decided how you feel about that?

The myth of foreign oil

I've gotten just a bit tired of hearing politicians like Mitt Romney and his ilk arguing that we need to do more drilling off the Gulf Coast, the Pacific Coast and in the Arctic in the name of reducing our dependence on foreign oil.

Guess what? There is no such thing as "foreign oil."

Oil is a fungible commodity. That means oil from Alaska, oil from Venezuela, oil from West Africa and oil from the Middle East is essentially the same and can be exchanged in much the same way as money or gold. Sure, some oil has a higher sulfur content and some oil is more viscous than other oil. But, at its core, oil is oil.

With a global marketplace, the days of the Texas Railroad Commission setting the price of oil are long since gone. These days the price is set by speculators trying to guess what's going to happen in the near-term and long-term futures.

Oil companies will sell their product wherever they can make the highest rate of profit. Exxon, for instance, couldn't care less whether their oil is sold in the U.S., in Europe or in Asia. The same goes for every other oil company.

So it doesn't matter how much oil is taken out of the ground in this country. It's not staying here. It's going into the global pool of oil to be distributed according to market forces throughout the world. It's the reason why trying to prevent Iranian oil from entering the global pool will fail - how are you going to tell the difference between a barrel of oil from Iran and a barrel of oil from Nigeria?

As an example, the Trans-Canada Keystone XL pipeline being built on stolen land in East Texas isn't going to benefit anyone in this country. The idea behind the pipeline was to get the tarsand oil from Alberta down to the Gulf Coast so it could be exported overseas. So,  all of Mr. Romney's rhetoric about President Obama making us more energy dependent by blocking construction of the pipeline through the middle of the country was wholly and completely irrelevant.

If the United States really wants to become energy independent, the only way to do so is to develop energy from sources for which there is no global market. Since no one has figured out how to commoditize sunlight or wind, those are two sources which can reduce the need for petroleum or carbon products to produce electricity.

But since wind and solar generators don't have millions of dollars in cash lying around from their subsidized profit-making operations, Mr. Romney doesn't have the time, nor desire, to pay then any attention.

Twiddle-dee and Twiddle-dum

Forget what you read in the papers or saw on the tube, the real winners from Wednesday's "debate" were Barack Romney and Mitt Obama. They were able to prevent any independent voices from appearing on the stage in Denver as they held their little soundbite-a-thon.

Both candidates deftly avoided talking about the plight of the poor (and the working poor) during the telecast. Mr. Obama raised his not-so populist flag as the champions of the amorphous and undefined middle class. He was concerned with how taxes and healthcare and education and social security would affect the nebulous middle class.

He never once raised Mr. Romney's comment about writing off 47% of the voting population because, well, to put it bluntly, he doesn't give a fuck about them either. They're certainly not the folks who are writing the big checks to the campaign.

As for Mr. Romney, his continued insistence that the market is the best regulator of health care and that the market will provide the means for reducing costs would be comical if people weren't buying it hook, line and sinker. You see, Mr. Romney, the market is what has allowed the cost of health care to escalate at a faster pace than the rate of inflation. To make the claim, with what passes for a straight face, that if we would just leave the market alone the cost of health care would fall to reasonable levels is quite the feat.

Neither man challenged the assumption that defense spending should be cut back significantly. While Mr. Romney calls for cutting every part of the budget except for defense, Mr. Obama is so scared of being labeled "soft" on defense that he refuses to consider serious cuts to the Pentagon's budget. If you want to cut the deficit - just slash the defense budget by 50%. Problem solved.

Neither candidate wanted to talk about the National Defense Authorization Act (and Jim Lehrer wasn't about to ask hard questions). Neither spoke out against the provisions allowing for indefinite detention for American citizens. Neither candidate spoke out about illegal wiretapping and domestic surveillance by the government. Despite a persistently high unemployment rate, neither candidate spoke of using federal dollars to revive the jobs programs of the New Deal.

Of course, had you watched, or listened to, Democracy Now!'s expanded coverage of the debate, you would have heard from the Green Party's candidate, Jill Stein, and the Justice Party's candidate, Rocky Anderson, answer the same questions asked of Obama and Romney. You would have heard two people talking about the real problems that face this country and not just the talking points handed out by the political operatives. You would have heard a discussion about health care and the single payer plan. You would have heard the candidates discussing the NDAA and its implications. You would have heard two candidates who haven't been bought by the corporate interests.

But most folks didn't because they have been socialized that the Republicrats and Democans, the Twiddle-dee and Twiddle-dum of the political world, are the only way to go. Part of the reason we are in this mess is because we have entrusted our future to two political organizations that care about nothing more than preserving their power and privilege in Washington.