I worked the polls in Fairfax, Virginia on election day 2012. I opened the door at 6:00 am, logged voters in, operated the machines, and passed out “I voted” stickers on the way out. At 10:00 pm when our results had been tabulated and machines disassembled, I signed official documents to “certify that this statement of results and write-in certification are a complete record of this election and that all of the information entered here is true and correct.”

I signed it. But it isn’t true. I can certify no such thing.

There was no fraud. I saw none and certainly did none. Indeed, my fellow poll workers were all intelligent, efficient and sincere. The monitors from both sides who watched us appeared concerned about nothing but recording who had voted and the integrity of the process.

But I truly have no idea what happened inside the black box of the electronic voting machines. I don’t know if the machines dropped one of every 100 Obama votes or added it to Romney. I don’t know if the machines periodically stopped recording votes in this relatively Democratic precinct. (Small discrepancies could easily tilt a close election without triggering alarms).

Here’s what I do know.

I know that our touch-screen machines were slow to boot-up and had technical difficulties that made them unavailable when the polls opened at six. I know that the second of our three machines had multiple problems during the day, requiring regular shut downs and re-boots. I know that our optical scanner for paper ballots sometimes rejected ballots for no reason, though a quick kick or vigorous shake would set it working again.

In short, they are machines. They are subject to the same failures and foibles as any machine. They are also subject to hacking, code problems and file corruption.

The ATM at my bank prints out a receipt. The supermarket passes me a receipt after I buy groceries with my credit card. We document plenty of electronic transactions on paper, giving people a chance to examine them for accuracy or file them for later. But not voting?

My friend who worked as an election monitor at the UN and has observed elections in places like Cambodia and South Africa once remarked, “I would never certify electronic touch-screens without a paper-trail as ‘Free and Fair.’”

The solution is easy. The touch-screen could print a receipt, like an ATM. The voter can examine it to ensure that it accurately reflects his or her vote, then drop it in a lock box. We can enjoy the efficiencies and advantages of instant results and real-time electronic calculations … but if anything goes wrong, we have evidence in a lock box. Or we can stick to optical scanners that start with bubbles filled on paper and tabulate results electronically– but keep the paper afterward.

In my precinct on Tuesday I could honestly certify that our touch-screen displayed zero votes when it opened and 815 when it closed, with Obama over Romney by 514 to 294. As for whether that’s “true and correct” — I have no idea and nobody ever will. We’re just trusting the machine.

Sure we need higher-level solutions too. I’d like to see longer voting hours, more days, easier registration and so forth. I’d like to get the money out of politics and end corporate personhood, blah blah blah. But at the very least we need to ensure that a count is a count. Electronics are great. But we need a paper trail.

Some people I respect are agonizing over their Presidential vote. Others are voting third-party, or not at all. Speaking only for myself, my choice wasn’t made lightly: I’ll be voting to re-elect a President whose Administration I’ve often criticized over the last four years. And yet, despite my concerns, I’ll be casting that vote without despair.

Why not? Most Americans agree on a broad range of issues, according to polls. Across party lines and “left/right” boundaries, clear majorities oppose cutting Social Security or Medicare to balance the budget. They want to raise taxes on millionaires and billionaires. They want government to invest in restoring our economy. And they want Wall Street held accountable.

Neither candidate is fighting unequivocally for these majority positions. But like the old cliché says: Despair is not an option.

Which isn’t to say it’s not tempting. What creates despair? According to the informative (if sadistic) dog experiments of Martin Seligman, the culprit is “learned helplessness.” Some of us entered this election season with the same emotions Seligman’s dogs must have felt as they were led to their electrified cubicles, and with a similar analysis of our situation: Nothing I do matters.

But that’s wrong. It does matter. Remember, a relative handful of Americans “Occupied” some public spaces and all of a sudden the political dialogue shifted. (And that movement isn’t dead; it may yet regain its strength.)

Then there’s this: As was later confirmed, the President intended to propose Social Security cuts in a State of the Union address. But then, as the Wall Street Journal reported, “The decision to hold off was made as the White House came under pressure from Democrats and liberal interest groups who oppose any cuts to Social Security benefits.”

That may not sound like much of a victory. But try telling that to the millions of women who are getting by on $850 or so in Social Security checks every month.

Barack Obama and the Democrats will sometimes do the right thing. At other times they can be persuaded or pressured. Mitt Romney and the Republicans are beyond the reach of anything except corporate money.

If any single argument swayed my vote it was Norman Lear’s spin on that Golden Oldie of Presidential politics, the Supreme Court. Lear says that Obama’s appointees will someday vote to overturn Citizens United. Could he be wrong? Sure. But we know what Mitt Romney’s appointees will do.

I live in California, which Obama will win. But if he prevails in the electoral college without winning the popular vote, the right will tie up government and he may never get his nominees confirmed. That’s a scenario from hell. So is the election of Mitt Romney, a man who lacks a moral core and whose “closing argument” was a fusillade of cynicism, puffery, and thinly-veiled threats against our system of checks and balances.

And if that’s not scary enough, remember: His election would leave Paul Ryan a heartbeat away from the Presidency.

I know, I know. I’m sick of the “lesser of two evils” argument too. It’s time we confronted the Evil of Two Lessers, by confronting the systemic corruption in our political system. I can’t keep supporting a party run by corporatist centrists in the Clinton mold.

But my first obligation today is to protect my communities – this country and this world are my communities – from catastrophe. Then comes the next obligation: either changing that party or finding another outlet for political action. Electoral politics is only one front in the nonviolent war for real change. And national elections are only one facet of electoral politics.

That’s not to say that Thomas Franks doesn’t have a point when he says that Obama’s made the left “futile and irrelevant.” Progressives like Matt Stoller and Chris Hedges have argued against voting for Obama, a position that some have greeted with disdain, contempt, and hostility. The disrespect and sarcasm is a mistake, and it’s a poor excuse for an argument. Movements are built on respect, not personal attacks.

Here’s an observation that could be used to support Stoller and Hedges: Progressives always vote Democratic, and the party always dismisses them. Tea Party members threatened to bolt, and the GOP’s at their beck and call.

That’s a reality the progressive movement needs to recognize — and soon — without looking for excuses in the Tea Party’s funding or powerful backers. Sure, they’ve got the money, but we’ve got the numbers. Some of the blame for our “futility and irrelevance” lies not in our stars — or our candidates — but in ourselves.

If we passively turn our fate over to the people we vote into office, the critics may be proven right. But if we vote and then act – clearly, forcefully, and decisively – we’ll have the chance to achieve some genuine victories.

Some have suggested that we refrain from criticizing the President until the election’s over, but I respect people’s intelligence and judgement too much for that. Others have tried to paint Barack Obama as a progressive superhero. But I respect my principles – and, more importantly, yours – too much for that. And hagiography is as disempowering as despair.

Besides, reality is reality: Not one Wall Street indictment in four years. A President who says he suspects he and Romney have a “somewhat similar position” on Social Security. A stimulus plan which was a good first step, but which hasn’t been followed by unequivocal and persuasive proposals for more much-needed investment.

And yet behind Obama’s studied ambiguity lies an inconvenient truth: An Obama victory would be a mandate, not for deficit deals, but for the stemwinding populist rhetoric of his speeches. It would be a victory for the economic plan his campaign promoted with keywords like “jobs,” “manufacturing,” “energy,” “health care,” and “retirement.”

That’s what most people will be voting for when they vote for Barack Obama. He must be held to those words.

We can’t outsource our morals or duties to any elected official. Voting is where our obligations begin, not end. If the President who won my vote acts against my principles, I am morally complicit – in cuts to Social Security and Medicare, in drone attacks, in lost civil liberties, and in a free ride for Wall Street. The only antidote for complicity is political action – which also happens to be an antidote for cynicism and hopelessness. And you know what? It just might make a difference.

You can vote with despair. But if your vote comes with a pledge to act, you can vote against despair.

Steve Earle put a slogan on one of his records: “If you don’t vote, don’t bitch.” He’s right. And here’s a new slogan: “If you do vote, do bitch” – although “bitch,” in this case, means “make your voice heard.” Vote, of course. And after that, the hell with learned helplessness. We can’t let this country go to the dogs.

First, there was Snowpocalypse. Then there was Snowmageddon. That was followed by Thundersnow. This summer brought the derecho. And most recently, we’ve been visited by Frankenstorm. Aside from their odd names, these events all have a few more things in common. Along with this summer’s historic heatwave, epic drought, and western wildfires, these events are part of a recent trend of increasingly extreme weather.

Climate change is certainly a contributing factor to both the frequency and intensity of these events. Most Americans believe extreme weather events are related to climate change, and science backs them up. In the aftermath of every extreme  weather event, activists have raised their voices to demand action on climate change or denounce the lack thereof. Hurricane Sandy, aka Frankenstorm, is just the most recent. The difference is that Sandy arrived on the eve of a presidential election between two starkly different records on climate change and related environmental policies.

Sandy’s winds were still wreaking havoc in New Jersey and New York when bloggers, writers, and activists like Salon’s Natasha Lennard began to ask: “Why Barack Obama and Mitt Romney have been silent on climate change on the campaign trail?”

As NPR’s Adam Frank points out, climate experts have tried to parse the issue of extreme weather events and climate change in two general ways. Some seek to establish “what percentage of an extreme event’s magnitude came from a changing climate.” Others, like British scientist Peter Stott, “look at the odds for a given extreme weather event to occur given human-driven climate change.”

While millions of Americans batten down the hatches and millions more stay glued from afar to Sandy’s ruinous spectacle, no resolution will be found to the climate change/freak storm question. But it is nonetheless the question on millions of minds today, as it is every time an extreme weather event strikes. So why is neither presidential candidate this year exploring the issue with us?

After all, as Peter Beinart writes at The Daily Beast, government has a basic responsibility when it comes to climate change (not to mention the disasters linked to it).

I suspect that in the days ahead President Obama will avoid mentioning Mitt Romney’s proposed disbanding of the Federal Emergency Management Agency for fear of being accused of injecting crass electoral concerns into what should be a pristinely apolitical natural disaster.

The sanctimony is nauseating. In a democracy, politics is not something we stop discussing when tragedy strikes. It’s the mechanism we use, as best we can, to prevent such tragedies.

If there’s one thing that even the Tea Party agrees that government should do, it is protect lives, property, and public order. When government policy allows, and even subsidizes, business and individuals to engage in behavior that heats up the oceans, and that extra heat helps produce killer storms like Sandy, government has failed its most basic responsibility.

While it may be that Barack Obama and Mitt Romney haven’t said much about climate change on the campaign trail, both men talked about it at their party conventions. Romney joked about climate change during his acceptance speech at the GOP convention. Obama rebutted Romney on climate change, curing his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention.

In accepting the Democratic presidential nomination, Obama cited his efforts to boost cars’ fuel efficiency, cut energy waste in buildings and expand solar and wind power. “My plan will continue to reduce the carbon pollution that is heating our planet, because climate change is not a hoax,” he told the delegates in Charlotte, N.C., who cheered loudly. “More droughts and floods and wildfires are not a joke. They are a threat to our children’s future.”

His comments, welcomed by environmentalists who’ve urged him to take more of a campaign stand on climate change, were a rebuke to GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney, who drew laughter and applause at the Republican National Convention last week by poking fun at Obama’s environmental rhetoric.

In fact, Obama went further on climate change than any other speaker at the Dem convention. And while the president may be vulnerable to critics who say he hasn’t had enough to say about climate change during the campaign, the record of what president Obama has done — or tried to do, faced with what was arguably the worst, most obstructionist, most unpopular do-nothing congress ever — makes it clear that if Obama hasn’t said enough about climate change during the campaign, he’s done several things to address climate change during his first term in office.

The White House fact sheet on the Obama administration’s environmental record includes a number of accomplishments related to climate change:

• Passing the stimulus: The stimulus contained about $90 billion in financing for a wide range of clean energy programs, and appears to have boosted wind and solar generation.
• Reducing emissions through regulations and standards: The Administration has made the largest clean energy investment in American history, putting the U.S. on track to double renewable power generation between 2008 and the end of 2011. The Administration has also proposed the first Clean Air Act standard for limiting carbon pollution from new power plants.
• Monitoring Emissions:  Under the Obama administration, the U.S. is for the first time cataloging greenhouse gas emissions from the largest sources. President Obama has also directed the federal government to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions from direct sources.
• Adapting to climate change: Under the Obama administration, federal agencies are drafting their first ever climate change adaptation plans.
• Curbing automobile pollution: Obama proposed fuel economy standards that will nearly double efficiency by 2025.

The Washington Monthly’s list of Obama’s top 50 accomplishments include a few more climate-related items.

• Created Conditions to Begin Closing Dirtiest Power Plants: New EPA restrictions on mercury and toxic pollution, issued in December 2011, likely to lead to the closing of between sixty-eight and 231 of the nation’s oldest and dirtiest coal-fired power plants. Estimated cost to utilities: at least $11 billion by 2016. Estimated health benefits: $59 billion to $140 billion. Will also significantly reduce carbon emissions and, with other regulations, comprises what’s been called Obama’s “stealth climate policy.”
• Invested Heavily in Renewable Technology: As part of the 2009 stimulus, invested $90 billion, more than any previous administration, in research on smart grids, energy efficiency, electric cars, renewable electricity generation, cleaner coal, and biofuels.

Progressives who remain resolutely unimpressed with the president’s accomplishments should familiarize themselves with Mitt Romney’s radical energy plan.

As he seeks the support of undecided voters in key swing states, Mitt Romney is portraying himself as a centrist at heart—not as the “severely conservative Republican” he said he was during the hard-fought GOP primaries. This kinder, gentler Romney was very much on display in his televised debates with President Obama. But a close examination of his energy plan, released on August 23, reveals no such moderation; rather, it is a blueprint for the systematic plunder of America’s farm and wilderness areas, coupled with a neocolonial invasion of Canada and Mexico.

The true content of the Romney plan, titled “Energy Independence,” is not easily deciphered, as it is buried in lofty rhetoric about North American energy independence and the creation of millions of high-paying jobs. “I have a vision for an America that is an energy superpower, rapidly increasing our own production and partnering with our allies Canada and Mexico to achieve energy independence on this continent,” Romney declared.

Read between the lines, however, and the predatory nature of his vision becomes evident. Essentially, the plan is intended to remove most impediments to the exploitation by US energy firms of untapped oil, gas and coal fields in the United States, Canada and Mexico, regardless of the consequences for national health, safety or the environment. In particular, the plan has five key objectives: eliminating federal oversight of oil and gas drilling on federal lands; eviscerating all environmental restraints on domestic oil, gas and coal operations; eliminating curbs on drilling in waters off Florida and the east and west coasts of the United States; removing all obstacles to the importation of Canadian tar sands; and creating an energy consortium with Canada and Mexico allowing for increased US corporate involvement in—and control over—their oil and gas production.

President Obama would do well to sat moreboth his accomplishments and second-term agenda related to climate change, but his record speaks for itself. So, for that matter, does Mitt Romney’s.

The mainstream media and blogosphere lit up like Christmas trees yesterday when 80 CEOs came together to call on Congress and the president to agree on a comprehensive deficit reduction plan that includes revenue increases and spending cuts. Here’s David Wessel’s story from The Wall Street Journal.

(Note: I’m linking to the story on the Fix The Debt website only because you need a subscription to the WSJ to see Wessel’s story there. This definitely is not an endorsement of Fix The Debt.)

As I told Janet Novak of Forbes yesterday, while it’s great to see the CEOs engaged on the issue there’s much, much less here than meets the eye.

The ultimate value in the CEO statement is that it lends credence and provides some political cover for members of Congress who vote for a deficit reduction plan that includes tax increases and Medicare and Medicaid cuts.

But the statement fails to move the needle as much as the hype wants you to believe because its way too general to demonstrate that any of the CEOs are willing to give up spending or tax provisions that are important to their companies.

Yes, as wealthy individuals they are likely to pay more if income tax rates rise.

But it’s not at all clear that they can or will recommend changes in federal tax and spending laws that will hurt their corporate bottom lines. Indeed, their boards and stockholders would likely see support for those types of changes as a violation of their fiduciary responsibilities as CEO and several of them would be facing the corporate equivalent of a recall.

I suspect, therefore, that this will change nothing. At the same time the CEOS take credit for the anti-deficit push, the companies they represent will continue to push behind the scenes for the tax breaks they already have, the new revenue provisions they want, and the spending programs that create profits while the CEOs take credit for this anti-deficit push. That makes this statement more like business as usual in Washington than a major departure from the past.

You’ll know something like this is serious when, for the greater good, one or both of two things happen:

1. A company says its going to stop doing business with the federal government and/or is voluntarily giving up the tax break that is so important to its bottom line

2. A company announces that its political action committee and its executives will no longer financially support candidates, political parties or super PACs that support higher spending and lower taxes.

Way back at the beginning of this summer, an eternity it seems in this exhausting presidential campaign, The College Board launched its Don’t Forget Ed campaign to “get the candidates to prioritize education this election.”

The campaign kicked off, according to an article in USA Today, with two installations. The first stunt was to line up rows of 857 empty school desks on the National Mall to represent the number of students who “drop out of school each hour of every school day.” The second was to pile a six-foot-high stack of fake $100 bills on Wall Street to represent the $1.5 billion that would be put into the economy each year if the high school dropout rate was reduced by 1%.

Months before The College Board’s campaign started, however, The Beltway Class had already determined The Very Serious Issues for this election. And education wasn’t to be one of them.

Now that the three presidential debates have run their course, it’s obvious that education has indeed been relegated to a side issue at best. But it’s not the candidates’ fault.

Candidates Squeeze Education In When They Can

Thanks to the relentless reporting of Alyson Klein and Michelle McNeil on the their Politics K-12 blog at the education trade newspaper Education Week, we know that the candidates had quite a bit to say about education — although they were almost never directly asked about it.

In the first debate, education was inserted into the discussion, unprompted by the moderator, in the context of jobs and the deficit.

As McNeil reported, Obama brought education to the fore “when moderator Jim Lehrer asked him how, exactly, he plans to create more jobs.” And Obama brought up education again “when the candidates squared off on how they would cut the deficit,” referring to his efforts to consolidate education programs that the Republicans in Congress decided to cut anyway.

“Romney, too,” McNeil noted, “stressed the education and jobs connection,” and “that he would not cut federal education funding if elected.”

In the second debate, a town-hall style event, a question came from a college student “who asked what the candidates were going to do to make sure a good-paying job awaited him upon graduation.” This, by the way, was the only question, during all three debates, that even remotely asked the candidates to address the subject of education directly. And both candidates, again, linked education to “jobs” and “economic success.”

The topic of education came up two more times during the debate, when the candidates were asked about immigration and assault weapons. Each time, the candidates pivoted from those difficult, perhaps more confrontational, issues to education policy. Regarding immigration, Romney brought up the DREAM act, which lets undocumented immigrants qualify for permanent residency if they have acquired a college degree or completed at least 2 years.

When the topic of gun violence came up, Romney said “good schools could perhaps bring down violence,” and Obama used it as an opportunity to “allude to the common core standards (although not by name), and his school turnaround program.”

In the final debate, which was supposed to be devoted exclusively to foreign affairs, the candidates became embroiled in arguments “over class size, teachers, and education funding.” Again, as in the two previous debates, the candidates’ brought up education un-promoted by the moderator, when questions about American economic competitiveness and future stature in the world came up.

There are only two ways to look at this.

Either you could be really cynical and conclude that the candidates pivot to education when they are confronted with difficult questions they don’t want to address and grab on to that issue because they assume it’s safer ground to strut their stuff.

Or you could conclude that the candidates bring up education because it has enormous systemic impact on nearly every topic the media aim to address — and because of that influence, people think education is really, really important.

But either way you look at it, you have to conclude, based on the debates, education isn’t a bigger factor in the election because people in the media, other than focused concerns like Education Week, just don’t care.

What The Media Could Learn If They Cared

If major newsprint pundits and TV talking heads cared as much about education as they do about Big Bird and “binders full of women,” they might learn two very interesting things that actually do draw meaningful distinctions between the two candidates.

First, again from the reporters at Education Week, in a less reported series of debates featuring education advisers to the rival campaigns, the discussion revealed that “the campaigns disagree most over how involved the federal government should be” in determining policies and funding for local public schools.

The Obama side clearly supports the federal government’s role in pushing schools toward new standards and certain levels of service, and using increased funding to support those efforts.

The Romney camp clearly breaks from those precedents to allow states more leeway in how they provide education services and how they direct funding to providers — even those who are private concerns.

Questions about the federal role in education are especially important now when many states could be accused of falling short of meeting their constitutional obligations to provide children with an adequate education.

School funding at the state level is woefully short and increasingly looking bleak. According to a study conducted by the Center on Budget and Policy Priority,

States have made steep cuts to education funding since the start of the recession and, in many states, those cuts deepened over the last year. Elementary and high schools are receiving less state funding in the 2012-13 school year than they did last year in 26 states, and in 35 states school funding now stands below 2008 levels — often far below.

Furthermore, many states are short-changing their schools that need money the most. A recent study issued from the Center for American Progress found that there are many states “where combined state and local revenues are systematically lower in higher-poverty districts — that is, states with ‘regressive’ school funding distributions.”

“What makes these patterns more offensive,” the study author Bruce Baker notes, “is that each of these states is taking billions of statewide taxpayer dollars and channeling them back to lower-poverty districts, which are much less in need of state funding support. These states could achieve far more equitable distribution of resources and far more adequate educational opportunities in high-poverty settings if these resources were allocated based on student need.”

The problem of inadequate and inequitable funding is so bad in a state like Texas, for example, attorneys representing around 600 school districts are actually suing the state.

Second, if the media cared at all about education, they would be curious why many of the most ardent critics of the Obama policies, aside from teachers unions, are endorsing him anyway.

It makes sense that teachers unions back the president, because the Romney campaign has so clearly demonized them. But why would other critics of the president’s polices, who have less skin in the game, come to his support?

Within the past two weeks, for example, two of the most prominent critics of the Obama edu-policies — Diane Ravitch and Pedro Noguero, have come out in support of Obama.

While their endorsements of Obama differ somewhat, what they certainly have in common is that, in Ravitch’s words, “as bad as the Obama education policies are, they are tolerable in comparison to what Mitt Romney plans.”

What Romney and the Republicans plan, in particular, that frightens them is, in Noguero’s words, “nothing other than the promise of more cuts because they see education spending as a wasteful social entitlement.”

So dear Media, unless you really wish to “Forget Ed,” how about posing to candidates a couple of questions:

“What is the role of the federal government in education and what should it do about states that are drastically underfunding schools — especially schools serving the most underserved children — to the extent that they violate their constitutional obligations?”

“What kind of education are America’s children entitled to and how much should we spend on it?”

Even with less than two weeks left in the campaign, there’s still enough time t ask.

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TheMiddleClass.org Voter Guide is getting attention this week for its rating 200 members of Congress “zero” on a set of votes it deems reflective of the members’ stands on middle-class concerns. It turns out it was not alone in taking a dim view of the performance of the 112th Congress on kitchen-table issues.

The Institute for Policy Studies has released its own “Congressional Report Card for the 99%” that took an even broader look at how well Congress served the interests of the middle class and low-income people. Its verdict: 48 representatives and 11 senators received an “F” grade, and another 112 representatives and 24 senators got a grade of “D.” Sixty-four representatives and 14 senators received either an “A” or “A+.”

The report is alternatively called an “inequality report card,” and its intent is to look at Congress through the lens of whether votes on a particular bill served to either help eradicate or help worsen economic inequality. The guide’s authors explain in its overview:

Our growing economic divide in America did not just “happen.” No natural disasters or unavoidable dips in the business cycle have created our contemporary top-heavy America. We have become a fundamentally more unequal nation over recent decades largely because those who write the economy‟s rules have rigged those rules — to ensure that wealth and income flow to the top, at the expense of everyone else.

Congress — more than any other institution in American life — has responsibility for the rules that determine how our economy operates. Our lawmakers define tax and trade policy. They decide who gains and who loses when budget dollars get spent. They approve and disapprove the regulations that shape every aspect of our marketplaces.

Members of Congress, in other words, have the capacity to make sure that all Americans, not just a privileged few, share in the wealth that we all together create.

Some of the votes in the IPS report card are also in the TheMiddleClass.org voter guide, such as the House and Senate votes on extending the Bush tax cuts for people earning more than $250,000. But the report card also adds such votes as an attempt to add to a transportation funding bill an amendment that would end abuse of offshore tax havens, a major issue in the presidential campaign because of Republican candidate Mitt Romney’s extensive use of tax-avoidance strategies as the founder of the private equity firm Bain Capital.

“This new inequality report card offers America’s voters a new lens for scoping out the handiwork of the lawmakers who represent us,” the authors write. “Our hope: that Americans come to see the actions lawmakers take on our economic divide as a critically important indicator of our future well-being.”

We’ve had four and a half hours of presidential and vice-presidential debates. We’ve covered a lot of ground. There’s been a lot of substance. Yet it is unconscionable that the biggest crisis the world faces has not yet warranted a mention: global warming.

Will it be mentioned in the last presidential debate on Monday?

It’s not promising. Moderator Bob Schieffer released his planned topics for the debate designed to solely cover foreign policy, and climate was not on the list.

And the media in general seem incapable of bringing up the subject. The broadcast network Sunday talk shows literally spent a total on 9 minutes on climate in 2011 and that include Fox News Sunday’s coverage of the bogus scandal dubbed “ClimateGate.” Not even an msnbc.com piece on the “Five key issues omitted from first two [presidential] debates” could be bothered to mention it.

But climate perfectly fits within two of Schieffer’s broadly worded topics, “America’s Role in the World” and “The Rise of China and Tomorrow’s World.”

Which speaks to the larger point: the foreign policy debate is where the issue of global warming belongs. It is, after all, global. Even Mitt Romney — who, as usual, is all over the map on the subject — has said, “The reality is that the problem is called Global Warming, not America Warming.”

Mr Schieffer, that Romney quote could be your entry point in the debate. You can easily ask: “Both of you agree that the climate is a global problem. What global solution do you believe American should pursue? Does it need to be a formal treaty? Should we build on European, Chinese and American regional ‘cap-and-trade’ systems? Should we instead pursue a carbon tax? Or do you think the private sector will solve this on its own?”

Or there is the national security impact. The American military and intelligence establishment sees climate change as destabilizing, “raising the prospect of military intervention to deal with the effects of violent storms, drought, mass migration and pandemics” per the New York Times.

Of course, the Republican Party deems this issue the one where we shouldn’t listen to our military leadership. One senator said this year, “The Department of Defense should focus on continuing to do what it was created for — to protect the security of our country … It would be a terrible mistake to allow the debate over climate change to distract our military…”

Mr. Schieffer, you could ask the candidates if they agree with the military, or Washington Republicans, whether climate change poses a national security risk that must be addressed.

And there are thorny questions involving our relationship with China. Should we place tariffs on China so they will stop lowballing the price of solar panels and hurting domestic green energy jobs, as President Obama has done? Or should we be embracing cheap green energy wherever it comes from because solving the climate crisis is a higher priority?

Solving the climate crisis is one of the greatest challenges America faces, and it will incredibly difficult to do without a mandate from the public. For the issue to receive zero attention at any of the debates is simply an abdication of journalistic duty.

Yet despite my pessimism, there is one very good reason to believe that Mr. Schieffer will not shirk from this responsibility.

Because when he moderated the last presidential debate in 2008, he made sure to ask a question about climate.

In the debate Mitt Romney heartily endorsed Affirmative Action, claiming he sought out “binders full of women” that he could put in high positions. And it turns out that even that was a lie. Sheesh.

In the second presidential debate Tuesday Mitt Romney came prepared with ammunition in case issues of equality in the workplace for women was brought up. Romney said, “I had the chance to pull together a Cabinet, and all the applicants seemed to be men,” he said. “I went to a number of women’s groups and said, ‘Can you help us find folks?’ and they brought us whole binders full of women.”

So now the facts are beginning to emerge. And once again the facts differ from what Romney said.

According to Maria Cardona writing at CNN,

A study by the University of Massachusetts and the Center for Women in Politics and Public Policy shows that the percentage of women in senior positions during his tenure actually declined. It went from 30% when Romney took office to 27% when he left and up to more than 33% after the new governor took over.

Again: The percentage of women in senior positions went down under Romney. Romney undermined the gains women had made.

But Wait There’s More

Turns out that Romney didn’t even ask aides to look for qualified women as he said in his prepared statement at the debate, women’s groups brought the binders to him. He did not go to a number of women’s groups as he claimed. He did not ask for the binders. They came to him, he did not seek them out.

He just plain lied about it, in an attempt to get votes from women.

But Wait There’s More

Before Romney was elected governor he ran a company called Bain Capital. And what was his record on women there? The Boston Globe looked into this, in Fact check: Romney’s record of hiring women,

Romney, however, did not have a history of appointing women to high-level positions in the private sector. Romney did not have any women partners as CEO of Bain Capital during the 1980s and 1990s.

The venture capital and private equity fields were male-dominated, to be sure, especially during Romney’s time.

No women, male-dominated.

But wait, it gets even worse. At Huffington Post, Christina Wilkie writes in, Mitt Romney On Women At Bain: They Don’t Want To Work There,

In 1994, when Romney challenged the late Sen. Edward Kennedy in Massachusetts, the Boston Globe first raised the question of why there were so few women and minorities employed at Bain Capital Partners, the Boston-based private equity group Romney founded. At the time, all 95 vice presidents of the firm were white, and only nine were women.

All white, only 9 women out of 95. (Bain still all white, by the way, no Hispanic or African Americans.)

And as for those “binders of women” Romney said he asked for?

But as Romney revealed Tuesday night, eight years after Kennedy’s brutal attack, Romney still hadn’t met or worked with enough women to prepare him to staff the governor’s office with capable people.

“It’s shocking to me that after 25 years of experience at the very highest levels of corporate America, Mitt Romney needed our help [to find qualified women],” Jesse Mermell, one of the women who helped prepare the “binders full of women” told HuffPost’s Jen Bendery on Wednesday.

Hey check out what happens when you click these:

Mitt Romney’s bullet-point, detail-free, policy-free economic “plan” contains a section on cutting the deficit. What is Romney’s approach, and what is the effect on our economy and our lives?

The Deficit “Crisis”

Any discussion of the deficit “crisis” should start with this:

1) January 26, 2000, Clinton to Propose Early Debt Payoff,

President Clinton said Tuesday that the budget he will send Congress on Feb. 7 will propose paying off the entire $3.6-trillion national debt by 2013–two years earlier than had been expected even a few months ago.

2) 2001 Alan Greenspan said we needed to pass the Bush tax cuts because we were paying off the debt too quickly.

3) Bush said it was “incredibly positive news” when the budget turned from surplus to deficit because budget deficits meant there would be pressure to cut entitlements. Bush wanted to continue the “strategic deficits” plan to “starve the beast” that was launched in the Reagan years.

We were paying off the debt, and then something changed, and now the deficits are enormous. A discussion of the borrowing ought to perhaps, maybe, possibly, understandably, reasonably begin with a look at the causes of the borrowing: tax cuts for the wealthy, huge increases in military spending, and the effects of the financial collapse and jobs emergency. Does Romney’s? (Hint: it does the opposite.)

Romney’s Deficit Plan

Mitt Romney’s Plan For A Stronger Middle Class is a short collection of bullet points, divided into 5 sections. On Cenk’s show the other day, he was describing the plan, how it is just a few bullet points with no details, but underneath the bullet points it says “Click here for a bigger copy.” So he clicked it and instead of more information, specifics and details it’s the same few bullet points, just BIGGER. (By the way if you aren’t watching Cenk’s show, you’re missing out, it is really good. If you have Cable or satellite TV, see if you get Current TV where you live by going here, entering your zip code at the top…)

Here is the deficit section of Mitt Romney’s Plan For A Stronger Middle Class,

• Immediately reduce non-security discretionary spending by five percent
• Cap federal spending below twenty percent of the economy
• Give states responsibility for programs that they can implement more effectively
• Consolidate agencies and align compensation of federal workers with their private-sector counterparts

Reduce “non-security” means don’t cut military, homeland security and similar spending. In fact, Romney has proposed to increase military spending.

Romney does not specify what to cut to reach the 5% figure. But he does elsewhere say he would accomplish this by passing the House budget proposal — “the Ryan plan” — which eliminates Medicare and cuts the “safety net.”

Cap federal spending below twenty percent of the economy — he means federal spending which by the way includes his military spending increases — is about picking some arbitrary number regardless of the need for government to do certain things.

By tying spending to GDP this is a plan to cut government exactly when it is needed most — when GDP falls. If GDP falls dramatically as it did after the financial crisis, “safety net,” infrastructure investment and other programs would have to fall dramatically at the very time they are needed to help We, the People and the economy!

Give states responsibility for programs that they can implement more effectively: means getting programs off of the federal budget and letting states decide if they want to do them. Note that President Obama recently approved changes in “welfare” that opened up flexibility to the states, and the Romney campaign said the President was “gutting” welfare.

Consolidate agencies and align compensation of federal workers with their private-sector counterparts: means drive down pay and get rid of pensions and other benefits that government workers receive, because Wall Street (and private-equity firms like Romney’s) have been able to drive down pay and eliminate pensions and benefit in the private sector,

Deficit Reduction After He Proposes Cutting Taxes?

Romney’s “Championing Small Business” section of this same plan dramatically cuts taxes on the wealthy. It cuts tax rates another 20% on top of the Bush tax cuts (paid for by raising taxes, fees and costs on 98% of us). It cuts corporate taxes by a third. It eliminates corporate taxes on foreign earnings, encouraging corporations to move profit centers out of the country. It eliminates taxes on income received from having wealthy parents (“death tax”). It eliminates the alternative minimum tax that keeps the rich from using loopholes to avoid all taxes.

So it is important to note that Romney’s promise to reduce deficits follows on the heels of his promise to dramatically increase deficits.

Shifting, Not Cutting

When government eliminates a program the need for the program doesn’t go away. Either the need is left unaddressed — a cost to those with the need — or the cost of addressing that need is shifted from government onto individuals, on their own. This means that the cost to our larger economy is increased, but bearer of that cost is shifted.

One example of this cost-shifting is what happens if Medicare is cut or eliminated, as Republicans have proposed (and passed in the House.) The need for health care for seniors doesn’t go away, but without Medicare the cost is shifted onto the seniors and their families, on their own — as is the burden of locating and choosing coverage and care. And this means that the cost of that care increases. By shifting Medicare costs from government we are actually increasing medical costs in the larger economy, not eliminating those costs. (One study,”Cost of Medicare Equivalent Insurance Skyrockets under Ryan Plan,” says cutting Medicare increases the actual cost sevenfold. This is because the government can negotiate bulk discounts, etc. that we cannot get on our own, and because seniors, on their own without our government handing this will be taken advantage of, especially when they are sick.)

Cutting government is not just shifting these costs onto each of us, the loss of government’s bargaining power means that in the larger economy these costs are magnified, which hurts the economy. They are just shifted from taxpayers onto and at the expense of the larger economy. But why distinguish between taxpayers and the rest of the economy?

Cutting Government Means Cutting What WE Get From The System

In our system those who do the best from the economy pay more taxes back. Those taxes are then used to invest in education, science, health, infrastructure, security, courts and the rest of the things that set the stage for the economy to continue and grow. These are the things that are the soil in which businesses thrive, and some of the gains are then put back into that system through taxes. Those becoming wealthy today are doing so out of the soil that We, the People nurtured yesterday.

Prosperity is what grows out of that soil that nurtures our businesses. It was our mutual contribution as citizens in our democracy that nurtured that soil, and in a democracy we are supposed to see a mutual benefit from that prosperity. WE educated and got educated. WE worked and provided jobs. WE built roads and bridges. WE built the system that creates such great wealth that people can have private jets and many houses. We, the People, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, did ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Since taxes come out of the benefits of our mutual prosperity — in other words the wealthy pay more taxes because they get more from the economy — and government is what We, the People get out of it, then cutting government means that a lesser share of that prosperity goes to We, the People, and an even greater share of that prosperity goes to to top few. In other words, those gaining wealth already get the benefits of society’s gains, and then if we cut government they pay less back in taxes for those things that get cut. In other, other words, those things that We, the People do for each other through our government, like Medicare, education, parks, etc., are reduced, so We, the People are getting less back from our system, while those already benefitting from that system by becoming wealthy are paying less back into the system. That is what cutting government means.

This is the Romney plan for cutting deficits — We get less so a wealthy few can have even more.

“These words were written for the Kohms as well!”

A new Romney ad claims … OK, wow, just watch the ad: