Some Difference! 1/17

Trey Smith

Last week I ended a mini-series that looked at the article Meet Barack Obama by Rob Urie paragraph by paragraph. I'm going to run the same drill with Closer Than You Think: Top 15 Things Romney and Obama Agree On by Bruce A. Dixon, Managing Editor of the Black Agenda Report.

The point of parsing articles of this nature is to expose the kind of vital information that is lacking both in the mainstream media and from the campaigns themselves.

Every four years we're told that the present election is the most critical one in history. It's a battle between two bitter adversaries. It's a battle between two divergent perspectives. It's a battle for the soul of America. Is that accurate?

Too much agreement between Republicans and Democrats has always been bad news for those at the bottom of America's class and racial totem poles.

Back in 1875, Frederick Douglass observed that it took a war among the whites to free his people from slavery. What then, he wondered, would an era of peace among the whites bring us? He already knew the answer. Louisiana had its Colfax Massacre two years earlier. A wave of thousands upon thousands of terroristic bombings, shootings, mutilations, murders and threats had driven African Americans from courthouses, city halls, legislatures, from their own farms, businesses and private properties and from the voting rolls across the South. They didn't get the vote back for 80 years, and they never did get the land back. But none of that mattered because on the broad and important questions of those days there was at last peace between white Republicans and white Democrats --- squabbles around the edges about who'd get elected, but wide agreement on the rules of the game.

Like Douglass, the shallow talking heads who cover the 2012 presidential campaign on corporate media have noticed out loud the remarkable absence of disagreement between Republican and Democratic candidates on many matters. They usually mention what the establishment likes to call “foreign policy.” But the list of things Republicans and Democrat presidential candidates agree on, from coddling Wall Street speculators, protecting mortgage fraudsters and corporate wrongdoers to preventing Medicare For All to so-called “foreign policy,” “free trade,” “the deficit” “clean coal and safe nuclear power” and “entitlement reform,” is clearly longer and more important than the few points of mostly race and style, upon which they disagree.

Unlike the previous mini-series, I won't be listing the links to the previous installments as I go. You can see a list of the links to all parts at the bottom of the last installment.