“Some
will rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen”
-Woody Guthrie
The
contrasts between the recent political conventions were very telling. As befits a party that has embraced
diversity for several decades, the Democratic Convention was a big happy extended
family, a rainbow coalition in the crowd and onstage. Antonio
Villaraigosa, the Latino mayor of Los Angeles, chaired the event. Tammy Baldwin
(running to become the first open lesbian in the Senate) had a turn at the lectern, as did many other strong, independent
women, including Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren, who had a prime-time speaking slot.
The faces at the Republican Convention were predominantly white, other than a small number of token minority speakers with little or no power in the party. Female speechmakers mouthed the same ideological platitudes as the males, and gays and lesbians were out of sight, out of mind. The monochromatic nature of the GOP’s convention unwittingly revealed a 21st century political party at war with America’s changing demographics and social evolution that stubbornly clings to the dying paradigm of straight white male Christian rule.
Though
there’s no evidence of serious voter fraud in the United States, Republican state legislatures
across the country have made a coordinated effort to put the future on hold
with laws to restrict voting rights. These laws (written by the right-wing corporate
lobbying group ALEC)
disproportionately impact Democrats:
students, the disabled, low-income Americans who move frequently, and in
particular, racial minorities.
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| Disenfranchising voters makes Wisconsin Republicans smile |
This
is no coincidence. As Bob Greer (the former chairman of Florida’s Republican
Party) recently testified,
GOP strategists in his state openly discussed strategies to keep blacks from
voting in private meetings. If
implemented, these laws would disenfranchise millions of Americans, including 700,000 minority voters under the age of 30, according to the Black Youth
Project.
To make matters worse, a Koch Brothers-funded Tea Party group called True the Vote plans to swarm swing states on election day, to dispute voters’ identification and generally gum up the works in crowded urban (read: minority) districts.
The
Obama Administration’s Justice Department has challenged many of the Republican voter
suppression laws, but a Romney-Ryan Administration would gladly stand back and
let millions of American citizens be robbed of one of their most fundamental
rights.
Republicans
in Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, and South Carolina have also attacked people of color with harsh anti-immigrant laws. The
Obama Administration has gone to court to blunt these brazen plays to white
resentment, and taken executive action (since conservative Republicans in
Congress have blocked the DREAM Act immigration reform bill) which allows more than 800,000 residents - people with clean records, who came to the U.S. as children - to avoid deportation and get driver’s
licenses, work permits, and student aid.
Where Barack Obama
wants to assimilate immigrants in the grand American melting pot tradition,
Mitt Romney gets excited about a big, impenetrable, very expensive high-tech fence on the border. Romney’s lurch to the
right in the Republican primaries gained him the endorsement of Kris Kobach, author of the Arizona law which allows police officers to check
Latino residents’ papers without cause. Following the endorsement, a gleeful
statement appeared on Romney’s website: “I’m so proud to earn Kris’s support…I look forward to working
with him to take forceful steps to curtail illegal immigration and to support
states like South Carolina and Arizona that are stepping forward to address
this problem.”
Romney has also
vowed to veto the bi-partisan DREAM Act if it crosses his desk.
In
another bid to cozy up to the bigot wing of the Republican Party, Mitt Romney is
scapegoating gays and lesbians. While running for the Senate in left-leaning Massachusetts
in 1994, Romney told the LGBT publication Bay Windows that he would be more supportive of gay rights than his opponent,
Ted Kennedy.
But Massachusetts
Mitt discarded tolerance as he began the transformation into Presidential
Candidate Mitt. In 2004, after the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled in favor
of gay marriage, then-Governor Romney “[resurrected] a 90-year-old state law, aimed in part at preventing
interracial marriage, to keep same-sex couples from flocking to Massachusetts
for weddings,” according to the Los Angeles Times.
By contrast, Barack Obama has been a watershed
president in the area of LGBT rights. He has named more LGBT appointees in less than four years than any president in U.S. history. He signed the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and allowed military chaplains to perform same sex marriages. He inked a hate crimes bill (opposed by Paul
Ryan) that includes protections for gays and lesbians, and became the first
president to openly support gay marriage. His Employment and Opportunity
Commission ruled that discrimination against transgender employees violates the
Civil Rights Act. And Obama supports a version of the Employment
Non-Discrimination Act that prohibits job discrimination against gays and
lesbians; Massachusetts Mitt supported this legislation in 1994, when running
for the Senate, but Presidential Candidate Mitt is comfortable with employment discrimination.
Republican
dehumanization of “the other” also extends to the 51% of Americans who happen to be female. After the Republican
landslide of 2010, hundreds of barefoot-and-pregnant bills appeared in Republican state
legislatures, from attacks on Planned Parenthood to countless laws restricting
reproductive choice, in some cases without regard for rape, incest, or the
health of the mother.
Like
their Republican brethren around the country, Romney-Ryan believe that women’s most
personal decisions should be made by white male legislators.
In 2009, Romney’s running
mate Paul Ryan co-sponsored a "personhood" bill with current Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin, who
recently claimed that women couldn’t get pregnant from rape. The personhood bill would have given fertilized
human eggs legal standing, a backdoor tactic to eliminate a woman’s right to
choose. Ryan and House Republicans
also tried to weaken the Violence Against Women Act, which funds domestic abuse
programs, and robbed thousands of women without healthcare coverage
of contraception, and breast and cervical cancer screenings, by gutting federal funding for Planned Parenthood.
Should Mitt Romney assume the presidency, any or all of these
measures could become official United States government policy. Massachusetts
Mitt, who "Invested in [a] Medical-Waste Firm That Disposed of Aborted Fetuses" in 1999, was firmly
pro-choice. Pro-choice Mitt said “You will not see me wavering on [the right to
choose]” in large part because his cousin had died from a botched abortion
before Roe v. Wade.
But
Massachusetts Mitt took a 180-degree turn on reproductive rights when he became Presidential Candidate Mitt. Romney-2012 is against a woman’s right
to choose other than in cases of rape, incest, or the life of the mother. As
president, he would back draconian state laws and ensure more unwanted
pregnancies by doing his part in the Republican War on Contraception. He has
said he will “get rid of” Planned Parenthood. He has also promised to re-impose a global gag rule that blocks U.S. family planning assistance for millions of desperately poor women abroad, if the aid organizations "[provide] information, advice, referrals or services for legal abortion....even [with their own money]."
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| President Obama signs the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act |
President Obama has taken a very different tack.
The first bill Obama signed was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act (opposed by Paul Ryan), which lifted rigid statutes of limitation on equal-pay lawsuits. Obama’s Justice Department has increased enforcement of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act to keep abortion protesters from disrupting clinics, and his administration has fought state and congressional efforts to de-fund Planned Parenthood. Moreover, Obama’s healthcare reform measure, the Affordable Care Act, provides a host of benefits to women, including universal contraception.
In
addition, Obama has appointed a record number of female judges, including two pro-choice
female Supreme Court justices, equaling the total number of women appointed to
the high court by the 43 previous presidents. Obama would continue to appoint
pro-choice judges in a second term, which would save Roe v. Wade if any of the five pro-choice Supreme Court members (such
as 79-year-old cancer survivor, Ruth Ginsburg) retires in the next four years.
On
the other hand, if Mitt Romney chooses the next justice, Roe v. Wade could be overturned, which would allow red states to
return to the days of back alley abortions.
Judicial appointees will be critical in many other policy areas where the current five-vote Republican majority on the Supreme Court have been extreme. Two years ago, the Republican Five handed corporations an even tighter chokehold on our democracy with the Citizens United decision. In the recent term, they further eroded 4th Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure with a 5-4 decision to "[allow] strip searches for any arrest," and supported the Chamber of Commerce 100% of the time.
A
Romney Supreme Court appointment would push the U.S. further off the deep end, giving
even more control of our legal system to corporations and Big Brother.
***
“…it was Republican policies during the Bush administration that brought on the sickness and Republicans in Congress who have denied the economy an adequate dosage of the cure. Now they want to implicitly blame President Obama for causing the recession and the failure of stimulus to fix the problem, asserting that fiscal stimulus is per se ineffective.
There is a word
for this: chutzpah.”
-Bruce Bartlett, a former employee of Republicans Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Jack Kemp, and Ron Paul
Apart
from racism, the one thing in Romney’s favor is the state of the economy. But the
entirety of his case for how he would turn things around is his libertarian shibboleth
that “Washington has become an impediment to growth,” though experience shows
the opposite is true.
In
the midst of the 2008 crash, Senator Obama supported the bailouts of the banks
and General Motors. Romney, who had benefited from the bailout of Bain Capital
in 1990, opposed the rescue of GM, a wildly successful government action which saved 1.45 million jobs.
The
Obama Administration also conducted stress tests to keep tabs on the financial health of wobbly American banks.
Together,
these measures reassured investors and pulled us back from the brink - a leadership
feat of major magnitude - but Romney is trying to exploit voters’ short
memories and understandable frustration that the economy hasn’t rebounded more
vigorously.
It
isn’t for lack of trying on Obama’s part. The Recovery Act was smaller than
necessary and heavily tilted toward tax cuts with little stimulative effect
because Obama needed Republican votes.
And as growth stalled in 2011, Obama submitted a bill estimated to
create up to 1.9 million new jobs. Republicans blocked it.
After
nearly doubling the cumulative debt of the first 42 presidents during George W.
Bush’s presidency with two tax cuts for the rich, two wars, and a lavishly expensive pharmaceutical company-written prescription drug entitlement, congressional Republicans
took a fervent interest in the national debt when they assumed control of the House
of Representatives in January 2011.
 |
Paul Ryan shows his concern for the disadvantaged
by scrubbing a clean pan at a soup kitchen photo op |
The public face of the GOP’s 11th-hour concern about our fiscal future is none other than vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan. Though Ryan's budget numbers don't add up, he has been drooled over by gullible/lazy members of the mainstream media for his “seriousness” about our long-term debt.
Ryan is an equally bizarre choice for an anti-government tribune. He went to a public high school, a public college, and received Social Security survivor benefits which helped pay his college tuition. He hails from a well-to-do family whose fortune was largely made from government contracts, and has received a paycheck and comprehensive health benefits most of his adult life from the U.S. federal government. He profits from investments in energy companies whose subsidized tax breaks he has protected as head of the House Budget Committee. It would be hard to find a 42-year-old legislator in the history of Congress who has spent more time clamped to the government teat.
Mitt Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan - a foreign policy greenhorn with little life experience outside of Washington - hints that Ryan’s avowed congressional budgets are a good indicator of the budget priorities we could expect in a Romney Administration.
Barack Obama has proposed deficit-slashing measures that cut both social services and our trillion-dollar annual defense/security budget (nearly half the total defense spending in the world), and has asked for limited sacrifice from wealthy Americans. Ryan, a strict Catholic on social issues, is a libertarian sadist on economic issues with a Race to the Bottom agenda. Almost two-thirds of his budget cuts come from underfunded safety net programs used by those on the bottom economic rungs, which only increases America’s near-third world rates of child poverty, infant mortality, number of uninsured, and income inequality.
Democratic control of the White House and the Senate have tempered House Republicans’ Social Darwinist impulses to some degree, but if Romney wins, and the Republicans take over the Senate, Ryan’s Dystopian vision is likely to become a reality.
Ryan’s budget also takes a sledgehammer to Medicaid, negatively impacting the poor and the disabled (
14-28 million people would be abandoned under Ryan’s plan, according to the New York Times). Piggy-backing on this thought, Romney supports the long-time Republican dream of ending Medicaid’s nationally uniform entitlement standards - which guarantee health coverage for people who meet specific criteria - in favor of state block grants.
The block grant would be a lump sum sent to states with no strings attached, increased just one percent per annum. Medicaid costs tend to increase by much more than one percent annually, meaning millions would lose their health coverage, including many seniors who are dual-eligible for Medicaid and Medicare.
Given a Republican Congress, Romney-Ryan might also try to turn Medicare into Vouchercare. Seniors on fixed incomes would receive a set amount of money, regardless of healthcare inflation, inevitably leading to increased out-of-pocket expenses and an inability to pay for medically necessary care.
The Romney-Ryan healthcare nightmare doesn’t end there. Romney has also promised to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA), a measure very similar to the bill Massachusetts Mitt signed as governor. He has made vague promises to “replace” the law, but in order to repeal ACA, he’d need Republican majorities in both bodies of Congress, and if Congress was Republican-controlled, Romney would be unlikely to get any kind of health reform passed.
Repeal of the Affordable Care Act (sections of which are being implemented, or have already gone into effect) would be an administrative nightmare. Not only that, but arbitrary annual and lifetime caps and pre-existing condition discrimination that punish people who need care the most would return. Seniors would face increased out-of-pocket costs for premiums and prescription drugs. Premiums for families in non-group coverage would roughly double, according to a study by Families USA. Insurance companies would no longer have to justify rate increases or spend 80% of their budget on patient care. Taken together with Romney-Ryan’s Medicaid cuts, 45,000,000 fewer people would have coverage than under ACA, according to a Commonwealth Club study. 45,ooo Americans would continue to die each year for because they had no coverage.
And after a brief, great step forward, the United States would once again have the dubious distinction as the only developed country without a national healthcare system.
Apart from the cruelty of kicking people when they’re down, Romney-Ryan’s Race to the Bottom agenda – if enacted as written - would kill four million jobs over the next two years, according to the Economic Policy Institute. In fact, the combination of Ryan’s budget cuts and Republican opposition to economic stimulus have been so radical that conservative stalwarts like the Wall Street Journal and the American Enterprise Institute have chimed in about the harm GOP austerity measures have done to our economy.
***
“We're not going to beat Barack Obama with some guy who has Swiss bank accounts, Cayman Island accounts, owns shares of Goldman Sachs while it forecloses on Florida, and is himself a stockholder in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac while he tries to think the rest of us are too stupid to put the dots together to understand what this is all about....People matter more than Wall Street."
-Republican Newt Gingrich, talking about Mitt Romney, on January 26, 2012
Romney
hasn’t explained how he’d pay for the tax cuts because his math doesn’t add up. As the
Washington Post recently pointed out, “…we are back to counting on magic — to ‘dynamic
scoring,’ the voodoo economics of the Reagan era, the wishful thinking of
President George W. Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts that helped turn a surplus
into the deficit now weighing the nation’s economy.”
And
though the 2008 crash was clearly the result of too little government oversight of financial markets, vulture capitalist Mitt Romney vows to do the banks’ bidding by curtailing
regulation.
In
2010, Barack Obama signed the Dodd-Frank law, which was intended to pre-empt
another bubble-and-crash of the kind we witnessed in 2008. Like healthcare reform and the stimulus plan, Dodd-Frank was watered down in the legislative process because the
Democrats had to get sixty votes to overcome a Republican filibuster, but it’s
a substantial step in the right direction. Dodd includes protections for homeowners from predatory mortgage loans
and transaction fees, limits on credit card fees, more transparency in
derivatives trading, stronger capital requirements, and oversight of debt
collectors and credit agencies.
Hostility
to regulation in a Romney-Ryan Administration would extend across many areas of
government. IRS enforcement would be cut back, mainly for the benefit of tax-dodging
corporations and multi-millionaires. On-the-job
safety would decline under a gelded OSHA. The Environmental Protection Agency
would likely be staffed with pollution-and-extraction industry lobbyists, and
efforts to combat climate change would be dead.
As
governor, Massachusetts Mitt eagerly supported a cap-and-trade bill to combat
climate change, and collaborated with eight other East Coast governors on a regional
initiative. But he sharply reversed course on the issue when he decided to run in the 2008 GOP presidential race, where hostility to
science was a virtue. Not coincidentally, Romney declared
his sudden opposition to the regional initiative and his decision not to run for
re-election as governor of Massachusetts (so he could focus on the 2008 presidential race) on the same day.
Romney-2012
continues to cling to climate change denial. Just weeks ago, on “Meet the
Press,” Romney expressed his indifference to the future of human civilization with
the words “I'm
not in this race to slow the rise of the oceans or heal the planet.”
More specifically, Romney opposes Barack Obama’s regulation of carbon dioxide. Last November on the campaign trail, making light of record temperatures, droughts, and the decline of our oceans, food stock, and forests, a jocular Romney said "I exhale carbon dioxide" and "I don't want those guys following me around with a meter to see if I'm breathing too hard."
And
if Romney has a Republican Senate and House, he would likely sign the bill House Republicans just passed, which lowers
gas mileage standards and lets coal companies pollute to their hearts’ content.
In
other words, Romney-Ryan's regulatory policies would be more or less a reprise
of the look-ma-no-hands Bush Administration approach that fouled our air and water and tanked our economy.
***
“This is a man without a core. This is a man without substance. This is a man that will say anything to become president of the United States."
-Rudy Giuliani, the former Republican mayor of New York City, on Mitt Romney (November, 2011)
During
the last presidential campaign, Mitt Romney ridiculed candidate Obama for suggesting a unilateral strike into Pakistan in search of
Osama bin Laden.
Fortunately, Obama ignored Romney’s sniping, acted on
intelligence, and achieved in just over two years what George W. Bush had failed
to do in seven - kill Osama bin Laden. In the process, the U.S. snared massive amounts of vital information about al Qaeda’s plans and whereabouts, which significantly
weakened their operations.
Upon
taking office, Obama signaled a new direction from the previous administration by
ending torture and making respectful gestures and speeches on the international
stage (while also stressing that his number one priority was U.S. national
security). When run through the Republican spin machine, Obama’s civilized, diplomatic
tone represented an “apology.” In the World According to Mitt, being American
means never having to say you’re sorry; Romney even shoehorned this shabby talking
point into the title of his recent foreign policy book, “No Apology:
The Case for American Greatness.”
Rice
and McCain posed as hard-headed foreign policy experts, though they
were among the biggest and most flagrantly dishonest cheerleaders for a
completely unnecessary invasion that greatly
weakened American interests abroad. One would be hard-pressed to name a
bigger post-Vietnam foreign policy fiasco than the invasion of Iraq, which
stretched our military to the breaking point, re-empowered the Taliban in Afghanistan,
gave Iran a Shiite ally next door, and pissed away three trillion dollars just
as Baby Boomers started to retire (to say nothing of the four-five million refugees, hundred thousand-plus dead civilians, four thousand-plus dead troops, and the tens of thousands of
walking wounded).
Rather
than making a clean break from his party’s Iraq catastrophe and treating international
affairs with the nuance and care they deserve, Mitt Romney is doubling down. Romney,
who supported the invasion of Iraq in 2002, has attacked President Obama (who
had the good judgment to oppose the invasion) for withdrawing troops from Iraq,
as he’d promised to do. And Romney has repeatedly accused Obama of being soft
on Iran (a country Romney invests in), though the president has taken shrewd
steps - such as backing sanctions, isolating Iran in the world community, and brokering a peaceful dialogue - that
get a lot more bang for the buck than an invasion which could be disastrous on
many levels.
Continuing a hallowed Republican tradition of recycling their garbage, Romney is staffing his foreign policy brain trust with many of the same people who pushed pre-emptive war on Iraq and torture, which might be re-instituted by a Romney Administration.
The takeaways: Romney won’t make us any safer than Obama has, and may entangle us in a futile, bloody war with Iran. But on the bright side, he promises to exponentially increase flatulent rhetoric about America’s greatness so we can feel good about ourselves. And we’re sure to feel safer knowing that Winston Churchill’s bust has been returned to its rightful place.
---
”It should have been
evident to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming less and
less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and
becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological
authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe”
Four years ago, America was in the toilet. Our economy was in freefall, bleeding hundreds of thousands of jobs a month. There were concerns that the bottom would drop out, as it did during the Great Depression, when America had ten-fifteen years of economic stagnation and unemployment reached 25%.
We had no national healthcare system, seemingly interminable wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a disgraced image abroad, and Osama bin Laden was alive and well, plotting to kill more innocent human beings.
Rarely has the question “are you better off than you were four years ago?” been so easy to answer, but this is still a close election. Due to a national outbreak of Stockholm syndrome, roughly forty-five percent of Americans – including many of modest means - think it makes sense to give the party of McCarthyism, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and bloodbaths based on imaginary WMDs more power. A more astute and diverse forty-five percent want the United States to continue to heal and evolve.
To the ten percent left, who may decide the election, there’s a simple choice.
If
you want a divided and rancorous America that treats women like second-class
citizens, bars minorities from the ballot box, handcuffs immigrants who don’t
have their papers, shoves gays and lesbians back in the closet, and kicks the
elderly and poor to the curb while lavishing windfalls on millionaires and
defense contractors, led by a callow, reactionary vice president and a plastic,
comically out-of-touch patrician president with no core principles, then Romney-Ryan are
your men.
If not, vote for Barack Obama on November 6.
