Mercifully, the insane farce known as the Republican “presidential debates” has long been tossed into the trash heap of history; but the U.S. political climate still stinks of garbage. As Marc Pitzke of Der Spiegel Online (RSN, 12/02/2011) put it regarding the wannabe candidates: “They lie. They cheat. They exaggerate. They bluster.” And the Republican political stench is now embodied w/in the last candidate standing amongst the Republican political wreckage: Mitt Romney, whom Pitzke called, “…the eternal flip-flopper.”

Robert Parry in Consortium News (RSN, 4/24/2012) stated that, “[i]n Campaign 2012, Mitt Romney is…a politician who cuts through the hazy world of political half-truths with the clarity of strategic lying. Indeed, he lies with a confidence that may be a special right of the well-connected rich who are beyond accountability.”Parry cites Romney’s accusation against incumbent president Barack Obama on Fox News, saying, “But I know the president likes to attack fellow Americans. He’s always looking for a scapegoat, particularly those that have been successful like my dad.” This was in reference to Obama’s comments at Lorain County Community College in Elyria, Ohio where he said that he “wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth” and “needed help from others to get the education that allowed me to make his way in the world,” but without no mention of Romney or his dad George, an auto executive turned politician.

Parry himself accuses Romney of displaying “a depth of dishonesty that I have rarely seen in four decades of covering politicians. Not only did Romney invent Obama’s attack on George Romney, but extrapolated that non-existent assault into a pattern of behavior and suggested that Obama was some monstrous alien who ‘like to attack fellow Americans.’” Parry adds, “Romney asserted that the very idea of attacking people was wrong and destructive—though he and his backers have just spent millions and millions of dollars in TV ads to attack and destroy his Republican rivals.”

Parry brings up “Romney’s previous career—as a corporate raider—[where] lying may have been part of the job.” “Arguably, Romney learned his skill as a liar from those days at Bain Capital—and he has put it to good use as a politician taking opposite sides issue after issue…” Romney was indeed the King of Bain. An apt description of his “checkered” career is on the RomneyGekko2012 website, including: “Romney would buy a company and increase its short-term earnings through firing workers and shutting plants in order to borrow enormous amounts of money. The borrowed money was used to pay Bain dividends,” But businesses couldn’t pay their debts. “When they couldn’t, that meant plant closures layoffs, bankruptcies, and in many cases, the end of the business. Yet these bankruptcies meant huge profits for Bain’s investors. Furthermore, Bain continued to collect management fees even as companies failed.”

And Romney made “Mitt loads” of money. “Romney left Bain with a staggering $4 billion in assets.” RomneyGekko2012 concludes, “It’s no wonder Wall Street lobbyists are lining up to throw campaign money Romney’s way…” “Mitt Romney is the poster child for the greed of Wall Street and excess of the 1%. A guy who made hundreds of millions putting profits ahead of peoples’ jobs…”

And Romney has brought back a reactionary “ghost” of Reagan past. People for the American Way “launched a major campaign” to expose “Mitt Romney’s dangerous agenda for America’s courts. The “ghost” is Robert Bork, who is “Romney’s choice to lead his constitutional and judicial advisory team. By allying with Bork, a jurist so extreme he was rejected by a bipartisan majority of the U.S. Senate 25 years ago, Romney has sent a clear signal that he means to drag America’s courts further to the right…” PFAW Senior Fellow Jamie Raskin has a report detailing Bork’s history called RomneyCourt.com which includes Bork’s “[c]onsistently choosing corporate power over the rights of people”; “[o]pposing civil rights, voting rights, reproduction rights, gay rights and speech”; [a]dvocating censorship”; and “[r]ejecting the separation of church and state.” Bork is thus an appropriate caricature for Romney’s regressive agenda.

Parry paraphrases New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, regarding the use of the old Republican scheme where, “Romney is proposing more tax cuts and more banking deregulation. In other words, Romney’s campaign is based on the fundamental lie that the cure for Bush’s economic collapse is a larger dose of Bush’s economic policies.”

Romney would actually continue the disastrous trend that started with the Reagan regime. A documentary entitled, “Inside Job” by director Charles Ferguson provides details of what could now be the Romney version of financial deregulation that started in the 1980s with the “explosion of the financial industry.” The documentary starts out with the caption, “The global economic crisis of 2008 cost tens of millions of people their savings, their jobs and their homes. This is how it happened.” It proceeds to go through the “nuts and bolts” of what became the biggest congame in the world’s capitalist casino. It names major players, like Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan who did virtually nothing to stop the economic “bloodbath” caused by deregulated, cutthroat speculating and betting using, e.g., derivatives which “banks could gamble on virtually anything” and the further creation of complex derivatives called Collaterized Debt Obligations (CDOs) which added fuel to the fire where the system “was [becoming] a ticking time bomb.”

Dominating the financial industry were five investment banks—Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and Bear Stearns; two financial conglomerates—CitiGroup and JP Morgan; three securities insurance companies—AIG, MBIA, and AMBAC; and three rating agencies—Moody’s , Standard & Poor’s, and Fitch. All of these firms made up what was (is) called the “Securitization Food Chain.” And there was certainly a feeding at the trough, over and over, as the documentary shows in its operations.It didn’t matter who was president as the congame carried on under Bush Sr., Clinton (who increased the large firms private power), and Bush Jr. where it exploded in 2008. Democrat or Republican, individual players from both, of which some, or their spouses, would be linked to government posts and then later to posts w/in the private firms of the financial sector, thus further solidifying the ideological link between the politicians and their corporate allies. While Romney wouldn’t have a problem with a recurring nightmare of this kind, given his massive financial buffer, what about President Barack Obama?

During his 2008 presidential campaign, Obama “railed” against the Wall Street/investment banks abuses and saw the need for reform. But early in his presidency, he appointed the same individuals involved, or tolerate of, the deregulated casino game, like Timothy Geithner as Treasury Secretary and Larry Summers as Chief Economic Advisor. Obama reappointed Ben Bernanke in 2009 as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. What reforms there were in 2010 were weak and anemic, not the kind of “change we can believe in.”

Then there’s Obama’s “art of compromise.” In an article by John Aravosis (AmericaBlog, 11/25/2009), there were quotes from the Washington Post about Obama’s “decision-making process” including: “Liberals have zinged [Obama] as being too cautious, too much of a compromiser.” And that “Sean Wilentz, a history professor at Princeton, says Obama has suffered from unrealistic expectations among those who put him in office. ‘They kind of were sold Utopia, and they bought into it, and it didn’t happen.” Aravosis states that, "[a] lot of criticisms of this president has been over his willingness to cave on a promise at the drop of a hat, even when he holds some pretty damn good cards.” Aravosis concludes, “A lot of Democrats are not pleased. And their grievances are real, and merited.”

The editor of the Madame Noire website (2010) also showed disgust: “I have come to find it harder to rationalize away a lot of [Obama’s] policies and politics” adding “what the heck are you doing Mr. President?” The editor goes on to cite “the dismay of folks who are growing weary about the fickleness of the administration [and] “its inability to stand on the principles that got [Obama] elected to office in the first place.” But the editor recognized that”…Republicans and blue dog Democrats have dug in their heels in on issues” comprising many obstacles.But "[t]he more Obama keeps trying to meet ‘in the middle,’ the more the Republicans continue to redefine the line where the middle lay” and in turn “Obama’s political agenda ends up mimicking the far right agenda of his predecessor…” Then, an excellent conclusion: “It makes you wonder what was the point of compromising, when in the end, you still stand to lose the farm?”

Obama’s mimicking of the Right’s agenda became clearer when he signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which Daily Kos member Ralph Lopez (1/29/2012) alludes to it “egregiously violating the U.S. Constitution” with “the military conducting joint exercises with city police departments.” Lopez quotes journalist Chris Hedges, who filed suit against President Obama in Federal District Court, citing the “true impetus” for NDAA: “…I think, without question, the corporate elites understand that things are about to get worse,” and worried about the Occupy movement expanding, “they want to be able to call in the Army.”

Just as bad, Editor Matthew Rothschild wrote about a “creepy” Executive Order Obama signed on March 16, 2012 (The Progressive, 3/20/2012): “The Order relies on a Korean War-era statute, the Defense Production Act of 1950, to further entwine the domestic industrial economy with the military. It talks of fostering ‘cooperation between the defense and commercial sectors’ and ‘strengthen the domestic industrial and technological base’ to ‘respond to the national defense needs of the United States.’”

Rothschild asserts that this power is “along the lines similar to those sketched out by George W. Bush” in his “NSPD-51 and HSPD-20” plans,” and thus “demonstrates the enormous accretion of power in the Executive Branch,” as well as showing “how the entire economy is now in service to the military.” I don’t think Romney would have a problem with NDAA and Obama’s Executive Order, but if he says he does, he’s probably lying.

And the beat goes on with the two tendencies of one capitalist party, but now their differences in tactics are more and more dovetailing. But whether it’s Romney or Obama for U.S. president, the old scenario of it getting worse before it gets better will inevitably happen, only with Romney it could happen sooner whereas with Obama it could be more gradual and happen later. It may be a case of things getting worse and worse for more and more U.S. citizens but upping the chance that more and more will politically wake up to the point of opposing both Republicans and Democrats, and in turn, seeing the need for ideological change, i.e., discarding capitalist rule.

But come voting day, November 2012, I’ll go to my polling station, go to the voting booth, pick up the ballot, totally ignore Romney’s name, and in disgust, and great hesitation, vote for Obama for reelection as the U.S. President of the United States, still seeing a sliver of difference where the Republicans are the bigger threat with their 19th century-medieval-like agenda.

But there’s something else I’ll do: I’ll take a small note and with the ballot, discreetly drop both into the ballot box. The note will read, “Down With the Republicans and most Democrats, two tendencies of the capitalist Republicrat Party!” This sounds weird and insignificant, but I’m fed up and would call this a protest vote. But who Knows? If enough voters did this, if they can, it could send a big enough message to show the elites how disgusted U.S. citizens are. One way or another, this old vicious circle of Republicans and Democrats inevitably has to be broken. Eventually, it can no longer be voting or “voting” for the evil of two lessers, the Republicrats.