Romney Running Religious Campaign for War and Global Economic Collapse
Obama As Evil
Mitt Romney’s campaign for president is a religious, not a political campaign. Obama is the devil and his programs, like Obamacare, are evil. Romney will repeal Obamacare on day one, but replace it with something similar. This is code to Catholics that he will remove the birth control mandate, the item that Catholic clergy misrepresent as a denial of freedom of religion.
The Economy
Romney calls the deficit immoral, reinforcing the idea that Obama is evil (even though George Bush was a major cause of the deficit explosion). This is a subtle appeal to the racist base of the Republican Party. Obama = black = evil. Bush waged two wars while simultaneously cutting taxes. Is it any wonder the economy collapsed, who ever heard of waging war while cutting taxes? Would Romney have let the world banking and payment system collapse in 2008, impoverishing everyone? Romney won’t say. Mitt opposed the bailout of the auto companies. Romney introduces another note of racism when he says he will cancel any program or expenditure that depends on borrowing money from the Chinese. Why the Chinese? Why not the Saudis? This is an appeal to fear of the “Yellow Peril”, the mindset responsible for the Vietnam War.
What’s Romney’s economic alternative? Romney won’t say. Voters need to take it on faith that his program of lower spending, lower taxes and closed loopholes will create jobs. Voters should take a look at how this program worked in New Jersey, where Governor Christie, who has spent a large part of his first term running around the country campaigning for Romney, cut taxes, and cancelled the ARC tunnel (the biggest civilian infrastructure project in the nation), claiming it was unaffordable. New Jersey just lost 1,000 high paying Roche pharmaceutical jobs to New York. Maybe a new train tunnel would have made it possible for the employees in New Jersey to get into New York easily when they needed to collaborate with researchers in the Big Apple.
Romney complains about the Chinese, but the Chinese have bullet trains and the Republicans expect the New York metropolitan area to continue with a 100 year old train tunnel under the Hudson River. Romney calls for energy independence, but he never mentions conservation. A barrel of oil saved is no different from a barrel of oil drilled or imported, except that it is free.
Foreign Policy
Romney calls Obama’s foreign policy weak. He has called for regime change in Iran, arming the insurgents in Syria, sending the Seventh fleet into the Persian Gulf. He is calling for closer cooperation and coordination with Israel. This appeals to the Christian fundamentalists and Zionists, those who see Armageddon as inevitable. With Romney, they’re going to get it. If not total destruction, then oil prices in the double digits per gallon.
Romney was, after all, a missionary, as is required of all Mormons. He spent the Vietnam War proselytizing in France, while supporting the war. Romney is a typical Republican war mongering combat avoider who depicts diplomacy as weakness. Like his economic program, Romney will not give details of his foreign policy program. Again, voters need to take it on faith.
This would not be so bad if, combined with his religiosity, Romney ran an honest campaign. Romney, like many religious fanatics, does not believe in democracy. In many states, the Republicans passed stringent voter photo identification rules that create administrative obstacles to voting for the poor, the sick and the elderly. It was one of the major goals of the Republican National Committee. The Obama campaign was forced to spend millions of dollars and much energy fighting this restoration of the poll tax. Instead of devoting resources to solving the serious economic problems Romney is complaining about, the poorest, most vulnerable people are being forced to fight for their right to vote. There is no proof that there is any significant in person voter fraud. In Pennsylvania, the state could not offer a single instance of in person voter fraud. Yet, the Republican legislature and Governor passed a bill requiring photo voter identification. An estimated 700,000 voters in Pennsylvania lacked such identification. No wonder the economy is in trouble. What a waste of resources.
The Supreme Court
Finally, this movement against voter participation has received a major boost from the least democratic institution in the American government, the Supreme Court. Justice Antonin Scalia claims to be a “textualist” following the original intent of the Constitution. The Constitution clearly omits any mention of the Supreme Court in determining the outcome of disputed presidential elections, yet the court intervened in 2000 to pick the loser. In its decision, the majority claimed in its first sentence that there is no right to vote for president under the United States Constitution. Is it any surprise that two wars and global economic collapse followed?
Then the Supreme Court allowed the voter photo identification requirement to stand in Indiana. Then, the Supreme Court removed all restrictions of corporate and individual expenditures on political advertising as an infringement of freedom of speech, as long as it does not advocate the election of any individual candidate. This is an outrage and an insult to all of the people who have been drafted to fight and die in America’s wars. According to the Supreme Court, they had no right to vote, but corporations have the right to spend virtually limitless amounts of money to influence elections.
Finally, Justice Scalia has committed the ultimate outrage of interfering in the presidential election by publishing a book just weeks before a presidential election. The presidency is the big prize and all the institutions of American government are trying to maximize their influence on choosing the president, even if they have no constitutional role. The House of Representatives through its misuse of the impeachment power, the Supreme Court in abetting the House in the removal of Richard Nixon and in injecting itself into the disputed 2000 election.
Conclusion
The 2012 presidential election is one of the most important in the history of the nation. It is about whether the United States remains committed to separation of church and state, to science and democracy; or whether it will transform itself into a religious fundamentalist state where truth comes, not from facts or history, but from internal beliefs.
If Romney wins on November 6, not only will a regional war in the Middle East be guaranteed, with its attendant multi-billion dollar cost, but the hokus pokus of an unfettered free market and emasculated government will plunge the global economy into a crisis of unemployment and depression that will make the 1930’s look like the roaring ‘20’s.
This is what happened in 2000. Remember 2000? The nation had a surplus. People had jobs. The voters chose Gore. But the Supreme Court intervened to choose Bush who ran on a war platform and bankrupted the country. It is up to you.
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