Amitabh Pal - Romney's Extremist Foreign Policy

Which Mitt Romney will we see on foreign policy, if he’s elected? The slightly right of center cautious international consensus builder? Or the reckless neocon sock puppet? These questions have been nagging me for the past couple of months, but I think I’ve found the answer.

It’s much more likely that a Romney Administration will be marked by a belligerent attitude toward the rest of the world—a “my way or the highway” approach that blighted the tenure of the previous Republican to occupy the Oval Office.

Romney did a really good job of posturing as a reasonable guy in the foreign policy debate in order to assure the undecideds that he wasn’t a far-right wacko. On Israel/Palestine and Iran, his approach was virtually indistinguishable from President Obama’s. And he was surprisingly conciliatory on Pakistan, asserting that the United States had to work with the country’s security establishment, in spite of its troubling history.

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http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/11/02-4

Greg Kaufmann - Romney Declines as Obama Answers Poverty Questions

Three months ago, anticipating that the media and presidential campaigns wouldn’t focus on the struggles of the poor and near poor in a substantive way, TheNation.com kicked off a new campaign: “#TalkPoverty: Questions for Obama and Romney.”

In an effort to push the issue of poverty into the mainstream political debate, I profiled and polled five experts who have devoted their lives to fighting poverty—and individuals who have lived in poverty—giving them the opportunity to ask the presidential candidates the questions that they want answers to.

A thriving #TalkPoverty community developed online, and the Half In Ten coalition—comprised of 200 national and local organizations across the country—ran an excellent spin-off campaign to pressure debate moderators to ask President Obama and Governor Romney about their plans to address child poverty. Despite this vibrant campaign—and the outsized focus of the debates on the domestic economy—the moderators never asked a single question about poverty.

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http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/11/02-2

Ken Butigan - Challenging the ‘Disposition Matrix’ and Its Ever-Expanding Kill List

Last week The Washington Post published a three-part series on the U.S. government’s dramatic increase in targeted killing, and the steps being taken to institutionalize extra-judicial assassination as standard operating procedure far into the future. “Targeted killing is now so routine that the Obama administration has spent much of the past year codifying and streamlining the processes that sustain it,” the series reports. (See the articles themselves here, here, and here.)

Nicknamed the “disposition matrix” and coordinated by presidential counterterrorism adviser John O. Brennan in conjunction with the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), this new system integrates drone technology, satellite surveillance, massive databases and presumed congressional authorization to target and kill persons of interest globally. While the focus at the moment is killing suspected operatives in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, the system is designed for “flexibility,” with the capacity to cross borders at will.

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http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/11/02-3

Matt Taibbi - Hurricane Sandy and the Myth of the Big Government-vs.-Small-Government Debate

Quite a shock the other day to look out my window in Jersey City, and see the Hudson River rushing over what used to be the street in front of my building. For nearly three days my dog and I played Robinson Crusoe and Friday, sleepily watching from our little apartment-island while we waited for hot water, cell service, the internet, even elevators to come back on line.President Barack Obama speaks as New Jersey Governor Chris Christie looks on as they visit a shelter for Hurricane Sandy victims in Brigantine, New Jersey, on October 31th, 2012.

When I finally got back on the internet and was able to read the news again, I saw that Hurricane Sandy, in addition to being the rare storm to live up to its televised hype, had turned into the last-minute curveball plot twist that always seems to pop up in presidential races.

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http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/11/01-6

Bill McKibben - A Grim Warning from Science

One of the things that makes Sandy different from Katrina is that it’s a relatively clean story. The lessons of Katrina were numerous and painful—they had to do with race, with class, with the willful incompetence of a government that had put a professional Arabian horse fancier in charge of its rescue efforts.Flooded streets under the Manhattan Bridge in Brooklyn, New York, October 29, 2012. (Bebeto Matthews/AP Photo)

Sandy, by contrast, has been pretty straightforward. It’s hit rich, poor, and middle class Americans with nearly equal power, though of course the affluent always have it easier in the aftermath of tragedy. Government officials prepared forthrightly for its arrival, and have refrained from paralysis and bickering in its wake. Which allows us to concentrate on the only really useful message it might deliver: that we live in a changed world, where we need both to adapt to the changes, and to prevent further changes so great that adaptation will be impossible.

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http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/11/01-8

Daryl Hannah - The Battle Against Big Energy's Rush to Ruin Our Planet

Extreme killer superstorms, historic drought, vanishing sea ice, an increase in ocean acidity by 30%, the hottest decade on record and mega forest fires have increasingly become our new reality.One plume of oil from BP's 2010 Deepwater Horizon well blowout produced a slick 22 miles long and a mile wide. 

"That's all happened when you raise the temperature of the earth one degree," says author Bill McKibben, "[t]he temperature will go up four degrees, maybe five, unless we get off coal and gas and oil very quickly." Additional temperature rises could compromise our safety and cause incalculable damage from a large number of billion-dollar disasters in coming years – if we don't address our emissions, insist upon an appropriate climate policy and curtail the rogue fossil fuel industry.

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http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/11/01-1

Sonali Kolhatkar and Vandana Shiva - Why Monsanto Is Fighting Tooth and Nail Against California's Prop 37

A new poll conducted by the University of Southern California and the LA Times has found that Proposition 37, the GMO labeling initiative has slipped a whopping 17 points since the last poll in September. The proposition continues to lead but only by 2 percentage points with less than a week before the election. Thirteen percent of likely voters are still undecided on whether to require mandatory labeling of genetically modified organisms in foods.

The dramatic shift in opinion is likely due to the barrage of dollars spent by vested corporate interests to defeat Prop 37. Chief among them are Monsanto corporation, the leading commercial force behind the creation, promotion, and widespread use of pesticides and genetically modified seeds in farming, and the Grocery Manufacturers Association which represents the world's largest processed food producers and distributors such as Coca Cola, Pepsi Co, and Nestle. Together, they have spent $41 million in advertising and other campaigning, claiming that Proposition 37 is "anti-science," and would lead to huge increases in food prices and the banning of safe foods. At least two newspapers have concluded the No on Prop 37 ads are misleading and deceptive.

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http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/11/01-4

Nicholas Kristof - Will Climate Get Some Respect Now?

President Obama and Mitt Romney seemed determined not to discuss climate change in this campaign. So thanks to Hurricane Sandy for forcing the issue: Isn’t it time to talk not only about weather, but also about climate?

It’s true, of course, that no single storm or drought can be attributed to climate change. Atlantic hurricanes in the Northeast go way back, as the catastrophic “snow hurricane” of 1804 attests. But many scientists believe that rising carbon emissions could make extreme weather — like Sandy — more likely.

“You can’t say any one single event is reflective of climate change,” William Solecki, the co-chairman of the New York City Panel on Climate Change, told me. “But it’s illustrative of the conditions and events and scenarios that we expect with climate change.”

In that sense, whatever its causes, Sandy offers a window into the way ahead.

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http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/11/01-3

Bill McKibben - Sandy Forces Climate Change on US Election Despite Fossil Fuel Lobby

Here's a sentence I wish I hadn't written – it rolled out of my Macbook in May, part of an article for Rolling Stone that quickly went viral:Currie Wagner looks over the debris from his grandmother Betty Wagner's house, destroyed by Sandy, in New Jersey. (Photograph: Julio Cortez/AP)

"Say something so big finally happens (a giant hurricane swamps Manhattan, a megadrought wipes out Midwest agriculture) that even the political power of the industry is inadequate to restrain legislators, who manage to regulate carbon."

I wish I hadn't written it because the first half gives me entirely undeserved credit for prescience: I had no idea both would, in fact, happen in the next six months. And I wish I hadn't written it because now that my bluff's been called, I'm doubting that even Sandy, the largest storm ever, will be enough to make our political class serious about climate change.

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http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/10/31-2

Lizz Winstead - Hey Super PACs, Superstorm Sandy Just Gave You a Great Cause for Your Millions

We are a week out from the presidential election. We have just had 60 million Americans affected by a hurricane. Super Pacs have billions of dollars just sitting lying around.

So, I have an idea.

Super Pacs, how about you force the candidates to spend the next week campaigning on their own and spend some of your limitless funds on the relief effort? It's a win-win for you any way you look at it.

First, for the Republican super pacs, you make Mitt Romney look good. Hell, you fulfill his dream! Remember, how he waxed on about dissolving the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), and even said:

"If we can send it back to the private sector, that's even better."

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http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/10/31-3