15 Sobering Similarities Between Obama & Romney

Bruce Dixon, managing editor of Black Agenda Report, in a recent article entitled "Closer Than You Think: Top 15 Things Romney and Obama Agree On" provided a list of the SIMILARITIES between Obama and Romney policies.

A distillation of Mr. Dixon's list:

15. Obama and Romney maintain that only the private sector can or should create jobs.

14. Medicare, Medicaid and social security need to be cut to relieve the “deficit”.

13. Climate change treaties and negotiations are to be avoided at all costs.

12. NAFTA-like “free trade” corporate rights agreements should continue to be established.

11. Banks and Wall Street speculators deserve bailouts and protection from criminal liability. Underwater and foreclosed homeowners deserve no moratoriums or help.

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10. Palestinians should be occupied and dispossessed, Iran should be starved with sanctions and threatened with war, Cuba embargoed, and foreign policy should consist of bombing black and brown populations to expand global empire.

9. Africa should be militarized, destabilized, plundered, invaded by proxy armies or Western power aggression under the guise of “humanitarianism".

8. A US president can kidnap citizens of the US or any nation on the face of the earth and torture and indefinitely detain them or even murder them without trial.

7. Oil and energy companies and other mega-polluters may drill freely offshore almost everywhere, to be allowed to poison land and watersheds with fracking, etc.

6. The FCC should not regulate telecoms to ensure access to the poor or to guarantee network neutrality.

5. “Clean coal” and “safe nuclear energy” are to be promoted despite cancer epidemics and other environmental and medically devastating consequences.

4. Immigrants must be jailed and deported in record numbers, or locked up with little or no due process in atrocious privatized immigration prisons .

3. Private health care must benefit corporate vendors to obscene degrees at the sacrifice of accessible health care for all Americans.

2. There must be no minimum wage increases, no right to form unions, no right to negotiate or strike, no enforcement or reform of existing labor laws.

1. We must escalate the disastrous 40 year war on drugs and keep the prison industrial complex housing a shameful 2.3 million plus people continuing on.

This is what Mr. Dixon came up with but, as he admitted in his comments section, there are additional (equally chilling) similarities to be added to the list.

[cross-posted on correntewire and open salon]