US president Barack Obama and Republican nominee Mitt Romney clash in a heated second presidential debate in New York Reuters

In Tuesday night's debate, President Obama delivered a bold, powerful, aggressive performance that has Democrats across the land cheering. One of his most effective lines about the oligarchical fraud known as Mitt Romney was this one:

"Governor Romney says he's got a five-point plan. Governor Romney doesn't have a five-point plan; he has a one-point plan. And that plan is to make sure that folks at the top play by a different set of rules."

It would be terrible indeed if "folks at the top" were able to "play by a different set of rules". It might mean that Wall Street tycoons could perpetrate a massive fraud that virtually collapses the world economy and causes massive economic suffering, yet suffer no consequences of any kind thanks to a subservient Justice Department - all while ordinary Americans are subjected to the world's largest and one of its most unmerciful penal states. It might mean that the nation's largest telecoms could enable illegal spying on millions of their customers and then be retroactively immunized from all civil and criminal liability.

Such a state of affairs could permit the nation's most powerful political officials to be able to institute a worldwide torture regime, and systematically spy on the conversations of Americans without the warrants required by the criminal law, only to be aggressively vested with full-scale immunity by the President. It could even send the rich-poor gap to heights not seen in the US in many decades.

In sum, we simply cannot afford as a nation to allow "folks at the top" to "play by a different set of rules". That would be a violent breach of everything America stands for.