MORE OF THE SAME

It's going to be another four years of Barack  Obama and, for ordinary Americans, nothing will change.

As it stands right now there  is, according to the polls, a 'dead heat' between President Barack Obama and presidential wannabe Mitt Romney.

But this is the national vote and what counts now is the state of the play in the crucial swing seats. Essentially this election has come  seven to nine "swing states"--  and  they mostly  indicate  small but significant leads for Obama. I think Obama will win another four years and do so quite comfortably.  Romney, I guess, will go back to  asset stripping and hiding his ill-gotten gains overseas.  And the opinion poll pundits will have to find something  else to drone on and on about.

Of course there  is no great celebration to be had in the re-election of Obama. If he is the so-called  'lesser evil ' then he is the  'lesser evil' who has been  yet another president of the machine. He has defended and promoted  the interests of America's capitalist class  at the expense of the very people who put him into  the White House.  It's little wonder that Democrat Party workers say that it has  been  harder this time getting people to pledge their vote to Obama. Yes,I want to be beaten me over the head with a big stick for another four years!

Under Obama  there have been trillion  dollar bailouts  for Wall Street while more and more ordinary Americans have been plunged into poverty. And then is  the continuing "war on terror,"  and more  domestic civil liberties shredded. How bad has Obama been?  Let me count the ways.

The politics of "lesser evilism" preached by the liberal establishment  implicitly accepts the shift of the entire political debate to the right, because supporting the lesser evil requires closing down  the criticisms of activists and the left.  So multi-millionaire  Bruce Springsteen sings some songs at an Obama rally and Obama doesn't have to talk about the stunning growth of inequality under his presidency and why he is doing virtually nothing on the issue of climate change  - indeed he's promising to burn more fossil fuels.

It's worth reading Hal Draper's essay 'Who's Going To Be The Lesser Evil in 1968? ' on the politics of lesser evilism and how it applies to the Obama-Romney dichotomy.

For me, one the most interesting thing about this election will be to see how many Americans decide not to vote If its like other presidential elections it will be anywhere between 40 and 50 percent of eligible voters.  This is a indictment of the failure of 'representative democracy' and not an indictment about the 'apathy' of American voters as the political establishment will inevitably claim.

Ten million people who voted for Obama in 2008 were so disillusioned that they didn't vote in the 2010 midterm elections, when the Republicans took back the House and nearly won the Senate

Nearly half of American voters have worked out that neither the Democrats or Republicans represent them.

Given that both Obama and Romney are committed to more austerity polices over the next four years there certainly  there won't be any improvement in the lives of ordinary Americans over the next four years.

The ugly reality is that Americans have few alternatives to the two political wings of corporate America. Voting for Green Party candidate Jill Stein or some other left-wing party is a creditable  option but these are limited campaigns without a large nation-wide  movement behind them.

The job of building a real left wing alternative in 'the land of the free' remains the task at hand.