Romney's Speech

Here, courtesy of Democracy Now!, is an excerpt of Romney's acceptance speech at the Republic National Convention. I want to pick it apart. First of all, his comment of ensuring freedom of religion can be translated to imposition of religion, due to his stance on pro-life, thus an agenda to eliminate abortion based on religious fundamentals.

"President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the world's oceans. And to heal the planet. My promise is to help you and your family."

Between those two comments about Obama's enviornmental policy is bouts of laughter, laughter at the enviromental problems we face. It makes me sad to see this ignorance towards environmental destruction and the obvious global deterioration of fragile ecosystems. It's obvious from this quote that Romney's administration, if elected, would entail more environmental deregulation and emphasis on non-eco-friendly energy sources such as coal and oil. He wants to create jobs, apparently, and the Republican record of the approach to this problem is always deregulation and a golden key for corporations.

"America, he said, had dictated to other nations. No, Mr. President, America has freed other nations from dictators."

Like Iraq? To call Iraq free now is would be sorely irresponsible and ignorant. I would challenge Romney to live the life of a common Iraqi for a month and endure the constant bombing and sectarian violence that plagues the country. He makes more hard line comments about foreign policy toward Iran, which I am highly critical of. And saying Obama has thrown Israel under the bus. I wish this was actually true, because it would mean the end of sole support for a racist regime continuously guilty of war crimes.

There was even a comment on relaxing sanctions on Cuba. The old enemy and barrier to American neo-liberalism in Latin America can expect more harsh treatment from the great superpower under Romney. What can also be expected is further arms racing and clashing with Russia, when Romney reverses the "abandonment" of Poland and re-starts the missile defence shield that Bush initiated during his term. And it's not to defend against Iran, that's an outright lie. The purpose of the missile defence shield in Poland is to nullify Russia's nuclear weapon deterrent, thus removing a barrier to American lead NATO foreign policy. This is inherently dangerous, as Russia will have no choice but to invest in further nuclear arms missile and delivery system research to protect their deterrent to American aggression, thus placing the world further under the shadow of total destruction from nuclear weapons. And there the irony is: the threat to the world by nuclear weapons is not from Iran, it's from American foreign policy.

From Romney's speech I can walk away and simply say this man is Bush 2.0. His rhetoric on freeing people from dictatorship, his hard line stance on Iran, his plans for missile defence, his plans for further antagonism of Russia, his environmental stance, and his economic policy on deregulation is parallel to Bush's policies during his two terms. I believe Romney is dangerous, and will surely be an inhibitor to civil rights advances and the progress towards world peace.

If That Wasn't Enough...

My last post highlighted the problem with the amount of power the military industrial complex holds. If that wasn't enough, Romney wants to give it even more: (click on the picture to enlarge)

Courtesy of Bloomberg Insider's Convention 2012 Issue

His proposed defense budget increase is $400 billion more than Obama's, taking it to nearly $1 trillion annually! I'm curious as to what he plans using this build up for, which will certainly be near Cold War levels.

The Military Industrial Complex

As US arms sales tripled in 2011 to $66.3 billion, I give you Dwight Eisenhower's farewell speech at the end of his presidency in 1961, warning the country about how the military industrial complex presented a threat to the liberties and freedom of America. Fifty years later, his fears are very realized. The US maintains, by a huge margin, the largest military in the world. It runs a drone strike program in many nations that kills people without trial. It sells weaponry to governments with questionable human and civil rights records. All of these points are made possible by extensive lobbying and influence by the "defense" contractors that make up the military industrial complex.

Did You Know?

With the upcoming election in the United States months away, it's about time to dig up some dirt on the contenders. Barrack Obama was the first African American to hold the position of president. Eric Holder is the first African American to serve as Attorney General of the United States, under Barrack Obama. This represents a major leap in racial equality, which I am all for. Am I all for Barrack Obama or Eric Holder? NO!

During his law practice at Covington & Burling, an international law firm that has a number of large multinational corporations as it's clients, Holder represented the Chiquita Brands International in a criminal case and later civil suit for the funding of paramilitary death squads in Columbia. In this case the paramilitary group in question is the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), which was at the time, and still is, on the State Department's list of foreign terrorist organizations. I take a quote from an article written here:

"In 2003, an Organization of American States report showed that Chiquita’s subsidiary in Colombia, Banadex, had helped divert weapons and ammunition, including thousands of AK-47s, from Nicaraguan government stocks to the AUC. The AUC – very often in collaboration with units of the U.S.-trained Armed Forces – is responsible for hundreds of massacres of primarily peasants throughout the Colombian countryside, including in the banana-growing region of Urabá, where it is believed that at least 4,000 people were killed. Their systematic use of violence resulted in the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of poor Colombians, a disproportionate amount of those people being black or indigenous."

Holder helped broker a deal between the Justice Department and Chiquita. The deal would include no prison time for Chiquita officials, even though they pleaded guilty to this crime, but would force the company to pay $25 million in fines over five years. Chiquitas annual net income in 2011, 2010, and 2009 is $57 million, $57 million, and $90 million, respectively[1]. 

So there you have it, on Obama's team includes a man that defended financial support of terrorism and the murder of innocent civilians, not to mention the defense of corporate corruption and ethical malpractice. And he's the head of the US Department of Justice...

A Quote On Corporate Environmental Mistreatment

I want to quote a passage concerning corporations I found in a book I am currently reading:

"when I look at corporations, I see a dangerous abberation of our own making. The corporate animal exists only in the two dimensions of paper, yet it feeds on the wet and wild three-dimensional living world. Unlike any other user of the earth's resources, corporations have evolved untouched by the inexorable pressures that have forced each species to coexist with every other.Their growth is cancer-like, but instead of withering on the destruction they cause, corporations escape death by lifting their heads and moving on to another unsullied energy-rich habitat.
      This cannot continue.
      In a not-too-distant future, the natural systems we all depend on will be crippled. They will fail to sustain life. The predatory growth of corporations has eaten gaping holes in the planet's nervous system, fragmented the essential ebb and flow of energy, and ignored the closed-loop nature of our existence.
      Diversity is natures's ace in the hole. Whether it's a forest of trees, a species of salmon, or a herd of caribou, nature has made certain that the organisms are not all the same. If a certain strain of virus or bacteria develops a taste for caribou, the diversity among the species ensures that at least some of the caribou will survive. But corporations value uniformity-uniform species of trees, uniform pools of Atlantic salmon. This seems the height of folly. It assumes that any and all pathogens are under our control. They are not. And if the corporate world continues to defeat the world's natural systems of diversity, one day we will pay an exceedingly high price."

-Alexandra Morton, Listening to Whales pg. 297-298