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Mitt Romney (from Massimo Prandi)

Perhaps nothing can stop Mitt Romney’s destiny as the Republican nominee to face Barack Obama in this year’s run for the Presidency of the United States. After his victory in New Hampshire, it seems unlikely that anyone can put up a competitive race against him and by now the Republican aficionados  are meeting and making phone calls to smooth the pathway for a less confrontational nomination process to keep their powder dry for the general election.  In other words the message will go out to Newt Gingrich: stop bringing up Bain Capital and we will go out and buy several hundred thousand copies of your books–isn’t that why you were running in the first place, as a book salesman? But, no matter who the Republicans nominate, this will be a tense election year in which we have to recognize the possibility that the Republican Party could gain control of all three bodies of our national government and further push the agenda of right-wing fanatics, a step that I believe, could put us on the road to an American version of Nazism, through the invention of new enemies galore: think of global climate change theorists and scientists as terrorists. These people are scary, not because they are innately violent (though they certainly approve of violence against people they don’t like and very few disapproved of Sarah Palin putting gun-sight images on electoral maps of Democratic opponents such as Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona in the 2010 election), but because they are extremely naive ideologues, which means they are susceptible to being co-opted and exploited  by the corporate elites–those forces that more directly control Congress and the Presidency than the voters do–people like the Koch Brothers.  This year, the SuperPacs seem to be in charge of primaries and were apparently responsible for shooting down Newt Gingrich’s brief political resurgence in Iowa.  While Obama has often displayed corporatist leanings in many of his decisions and initiatives, including his healthcare bill (which offers a huge subsidy to the for-profit health care industry), his continuation of the Patriot Act and more recently his willingness, through signing the National Defense Authorization Act, to expose American citizens to the possibility that they can be arrested and detained without access to our Constitutionally guaranteed protections (Obama did issue a “signing statement,” but it’s unclear what that really means because the clause about indefinite suspension of citizen’s rights is now written into law; it is one more step along the pathway of confusing war and terrorism, which are two different things and should always be handled in two different ways–to fuse them is to place us on a path of further erosion of our civilization).

You only have to look what happened to the Tea Party movement, which was initially hostile to corporate complicity in our fiscal meltdown, to see how easily that mistrust of corporate greed got re-channeled into a new cause in which Tea Party members now favor gutting the limited oversight of financial institutions provided by the Dodd-Frank bill. The Tea Party members should be supporters of the Occupy Wall Street Movement, but they can’t find the right door to open. The Millennials need to open it for them and perhaps in time they will.

While virtually any Republican candidate can be competitive with Obama for the Presidency (now that Michelle Bachman is out of the race, with Rick Perry soon to follow), it is Mitt Romney that bothers me the most. I believe that if elected,  Romney is capable of promptly sending our country into war against Iran, because he faces the world as a Mormon  ideologue. In my experience (having been a Mormon myself), Mormon ideologues belong to a special class of believers, so inundated with an ideological interpretation of the world, combined with deep suspicions about government, that they coalesce around a belief system that verges on religious hysteria, a mental state that, quite uncharacteristic of the human species in general,  readily accepts the complete absence of any concept of verifiable truth, particularly in their construct of the outside world–they capitulate too easily to their leaders.  I have long accepted the insights of many historical judgements on how naive Presidents have taken us into wars that we had no chance of winning, but, like a child first getting hold of the steering wheel of a super sports car and stepping on the gas pedal, America went zooming into wars that still divide us as a nation and have made an indelible contribution to the polarization of our society. As an indication of the perpetuity of Vietnam into the fabric of American culture, who can forget how John Kerry’s Presidential candidacy was destroyed by the Swift Boat ad campaign that resulted in a majority of voters on election day believing that Kerry did not deserve his Vietnam Medals.

Historian Geoffrey Perret’s book “Commander in Chief: How Truman, Johnson and Bush Turned Presidential Power into a Threat to America’s Future” was the subject of two previous postings here and here. In Perret’s excellent book, he describes how Truman, Johnson and Bush shared a completely naive view of the world and, as a result, failed to understand the nature of the conflicts in which they got us involved (without following our Constitution, which says that only Congress can declare war) and under-estimated the deep cultural divide that controversial wars would create within our society. This was especially true of the Vietnam War, when we had a draft and most young males were vulnerable. But our invasion of Iraq, which was perpetrated purely by propaganda for oil and profit, was equally divided along the American political chasm, whose dimensions now deepen and widen because of more fundamental issues, such as the survival of our species on the planet. America seems a binary country on that single dimension–divided into climate change proponents who accept the science and climate change deniers who support the corporatist interpretation of the world: few seem to be on the fence.

Before GWBush was elected President, we didn’t hear from him on the campaign trail about how he wanted to go to war. It was after his election that we learned about his proclivity for making war and his plans  for invading Iraq. But Romney has consistently beaten the drums of war as he promises a more confrontational policy towards Iran; keep in mind that our own government’s best assessment from the National Intelligence Estimate (a summary of all our intelligence information) is that Iran is not making a bomb. But Romney’s advisers are hawks that want to push this issue and Romney promises to raise the military budget over the projections of Obama’s budget. Never mind that Obama’s military budget will still be larger than that of GW Bush. Romney has no experience with war–he never served in the military (neither did Obama, but we know Obama hates war).  So Romney will be more inclined to listen to his advisers, among whom are hawks who promote this more confrontational stance towards Iran and do not want to see America become a shrinking power.  Any war with Iran would lead to an immediate closure of the Strait of Hormuz and very likely would lead to a much wider war, to say nothing about running the risk of collapse in the global economy. Every day 20% of the world’s oil supply, or 17 million barrels of oil moves through the Strait of Hormuz, making it, economically, one of the most important passageways on the planet. As Michael Klare points out, we are entering the Geo-Energy-Era in which energy demands are escalating and easy access to oil is diminishing, with fever-pitch efforts by countries and companies to secure more oil contracts. Some analysts claim that blocking the Strait of Hormuz for any significant length of time could dramatically increase the cost of oil by 50% and trigger a global recession or depression.  It probably no longer matters whether there is a glut of oil on the market as the futures trading in oil seems permanently hyped into the perception that, as a planet, we are running out of oil at a time of skyrocketing demands needed to serve the exploding economies of China, India and other parts of Asia. Can we afford to elect a President who is so naive that he  is willing to go to war based on false premises about Iran’s nuclear weapons program? This is what I mean about a President that has no clue about the principle of verifiable truth. Of course it doesn’t help that the Obama administration seems to be hyping the Iran/nuclear bomb threat as well: is that for election purposes, like Kennedy’s famous “missile-gap” charge when running for the Presidency against Nixon in 1960?

If there is any advantage in having Mitt Romney run for President, it will be that finally, the American electorate, will get to know what a private equity firm is and how Mitt Romney, as the head of Bain Capital, managed to destroy many companies for the sake of profit.  Private equity firms, while bringing huge profits to the investors, destroy companies by saddling them with debt used to pay off the buyout of the company or give resources back to the investors and managers of the firm. If a company needs to buy plant equipment to improve their productivity, they cannot do it if saddled with debt, forced on them by their new owners. If you believe that Bain Capital has been good for our economy and jobs, then you should read the Think Progress article on Mitt Romney Job Killer. When Romney ran against Ted Kennedy for his Senate seat in 1994, just as in today’s campaign, he advocated his record of job creation and his business experience to challenge Kennedy. But Kennedy won that race by illustrating one of Romney’s “success stories” using the example of American Pad and Paper or AMPAD, a company that under Bain’s ownership, cut jobs and reduced wages. Kennedy played television ads featuring interviews with laid-off AMPAD employees and won the race at a time when Romney might have more easily unseated Kennedy.The AMPAD story continued after the election and according to the data presented in Think Progress, Bain invested $ 10 million in  AMPAD, but pulled $100 million out of the company. AMPAD had to cut 385 jobs and with $392 million in debt in 1999, filed for bankruptcy in 2000.  In our current depressed economy, with millions out of work, shedding light on predatory, private equity firms will not enhance Romney’s chances of unseating Obama, but it may help educate voters on whether it’s more important to have good-paying jobs or highly profitable investment firms that form one of the mechanisms by which the middle class shrinks as the wealthy get richer. Today more than ever before in our consumer-based economy, it is important to have good paying jobs in order for people to maintain consumption, create demand and grow the economy. Right now the imbalance of income distribution is slanted in such a way that consumer demand cannot get off the ground and Mitt Romney has no clue on how to fix the problem, unless of course he takes us into war.

RFM

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Christopher Hitchens (From The Guardian)

Writer Christopher Hitchens has died at age 62 from esophageal cancer. Roy Gleenslade comments on his life in The Guardian. Doubtless many others will weigh-in on Hitchens’  life in the next few days. Most news sources have obituaries for famous people prepared ahead of time.  At one time or another Hitchens alienated just about everyone.  But he went through several iterations of self-rescue. What has always struck me about him is the remarkable range of subjects in which he could find comfort and display at least the veneer of competence.  He appeared to be a quick study. I appreciated his views on religion, perhaps his most enduring contribution, and, provided that he had enough alcohol on board, either with him or in him, his interviews on television could be a delight: Rapid fire responses interspersed with little escape vignettes of reliable composition and always guaranteed to offend someone.  I stopped listening to Hitchens when he got the war in Iraq wrong and tried to excuse water boarding as non-torture. Anyone who wants to defend the American invasion of Iraq is going to have to explain why so many Iraqis died or got dispersed to the countryside or wound up in other neighboring countries. These are the people that Iraq needs to build a functional society. Then too there is the issue of how so many museums and rich discoveries of past civilizations are now buried under American cement and asphalt.  Scholars tried to warn Rumsfeld about the rich archeological sites in and around Baghdad, but Rumsfeld was only interested in where the ministry of oil was located.  I think of Hitchens as an essayist and a writer–a good one. But it was hard to take him all that seriously.

RFM

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From Forrest Wilder's article in Texas Observer

As of today, two of the top three candidates for the Republican Presidential nomination belong to a form of Christian fundamentalism whose radical beliefs are only now surfacing as the extreme right wing views of Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry  come more sharply into focus. For many, the threat of having a black President has contributed to the rise of Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry as national candidates and there is no doubt that when Rick Perry says “a black cloud hangs over America” he is referring to Obama. Race will be the hidden factor in the 2012 Presidential election, but you will not find it mentioned in the press–it’s a national taboo. Although seemingly divergent in political origins, Perry and Bachmann share an emphasis on a form of Christian fundamentalism that is an un-American plan to enslave the United States in a Biblical Theocracy embodied in what’s known as “Dominionism.” Most of us don’t try to make a habit of acquiring carnal knowledge of Christian fundamentalist religious sects. But, it appears that the race for the Republican nomination for 2012 will involve the most theocratic slate of candidates in history, with the theocratic base of both Bachmann and Perry embedded within an anti-democracy, anti-U.S. Constitution thread: indeed they both favor a Biblical, Christian dictatorship, though they won’t admit to it. But, thanks to a few journalists, they don’t have to.  The radical belief system promoted by Perry and Bachmann has not yet entered the stage of visibility, or microscopic examination, except in a few important articles. And, as their story emerges, it is becoming apparent that their radical religious indoctrination has been shared by very few in America and certainly not by most of the supporters whose donations allow their candidacies to flourish, at least for the moment. With Rick Perry now amping up his run for the Republican nomination (he has never lost an election and has been elected three times to the Governorship of Texas), we are likely to hear more about the radical religious views of both Perry and Bachmann, who share similar beliefs. The sooner the better. They are both doctrinaires of Dominionism and their similarities and differences are elaborated in Michelle Goldberg’s article “A Christian Plot for Domination?” appearing a few weeks ago in the Daily Beast.

Although the versions of their radical fundamentalism are slightly dissimilar, with somewhat different historical and regional origins, both Perry and Bachmann share an identity with far right views that include an “End of Days” prediction that wants to account for everything, including the idea that Global Climate Change is God’s punishment for violating Biblical law, primarily because of abortion and same-sex marriage. It thus has nothing to do with science, which they of course denounce but nevertheless incorporate into the relgious doomsday predictions.  In their religious sects, which claim to have many modern day prophets, they aspire to a Biblical theocracy in America and want to impose the death penalty for things like abortion and same sex marriage.   They don’t support public education because they believe in home education and they dislike the constitution of the United States because it promotes the separation of church and state. You will also want to check out Forrest Wilder’s article “Rick Perry’s Army of God” in the Texas Observer, which also has a section called “The Perry Trail,” where a more complete description of his positions on a wide spectrum of issues can be found. But, the press adores Rick Perry, because he makes outrageous, highly quotable statements, such as his suggestion that Ben Bernanke, Chair of the FDIC, was guilty of treasonous behavior and added “I don’t know what y’all would do to him in Iowa, but we—we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas.” Paul Krugman has picked up on the implications and obvious ignorance of Perry’s statements, especially related to the economy. All Republican candidates are now fully insulated from answering any questions posed by those from the political center or from more progressive public figures. The press as well likes Bachmann for many of the same reasons. But rather than quoting these two candidates, reporters should spend more time investigating the origins of their beliefs that helped generate the comments in the first place, mistakenly uttered or not. This is not quite the “devil made me do it” time.

Dominionists believe that the Civil War was fought between the Godly South and the Godless North and that slaves were appropriately treated and should be so treated again someday. Bachmann’s history is also detailed in Ryan Lizza’s article in The New Yorker, “Leap of Faith.” These stories are not those of people who turned to Christian fundamentalism because they attended a megachurch and got hooked on the music. These two politicians, now vying for the Presidency of the United States, have committed themselves to a fundamentally anti-American, anti-democratic, Christianized society ruled by Biblical law. Global Warming will cease to be a problem once the earth has been cleansed of abortion, homosexuality and other competing religions. Neither candidate will admit to these beliefs because their objective is to slip into office under the radar screen, but as the articles point out, they do admit to certain beliefs of Dominionism and not infrequently slips of the tongue reveal the underlying principles of those beliefs. Perry has never ducked the opportunity to mix church and state. Yes, should either one get into office, we will not suddenly become a Biblical Christian country overnight, but the power of the Presidency to create new constituencies in the vast stretches of America should not be treated lightly. Remember how the Swift Boaters turned John Kerry’s candidacy upside down and created an image of him where a significant number of voters concluded that he didn’t deserve his Vietnam war medals. That was the result of an extensive campaign with people like T. Boone Pickens financing the effort. The capacity of wealthy corporations and individuals to sway the electorate has only increased since the 2004 election.

More and more, the election of 2012 is shaping up to be the next chapter in American history and with global climate change denial a part of the Republican platform, the election may turn out to determine the future of our planet and the animals we share it with.  We have probably said many times over that this election is special, especially in recent elections, but never before in our history have we faced a list of candidates, bolstered by free-spending wealthy interests, that do not support our own constitutional rights and want to springboard from America to rule the world on a cleansed Christianized planet. Surely you ask, I am joking. My reply is let’s not run the risk of that experiment.

It appears that the presidential  election of 2012 may well come down to electorate turnout. The conservative wing of the Republican Party is energized, mobilized, and wants to keep the House, win the Senate and the Presidency. And, there are these new photo-ID voter requirements that are present in many states that will bias the state against the liberal and progressive vote. Can Obama re-mobilize the 29 million voters that put him into office in 2008, but stayed home for the mid-term election of 2010? The combination of wild enthusiasm for Perry and Bachmann, combined with apathy over the job that Obama is doing, runs the risk of putting someone utterly foreign to our history in the White House. Perhaps Perry and Bachmann will implode under the weight of a little sunshine projected onto their beliefs, and incompetence. But I fear this is an election where those issues may be masked by the economy and the polls which show that most Americans do not think their children will have a better future in life than the life they have enjoyed.

This election will have components, that fly underneath the radar screen of polling numbers and questions. Will you vote for the Republican candidate because he is white? That may be a motivating factor but how many polls will actually ask that question? Perhaps Obama can get his engine and ours revved up with his Jobs bill that he will announce in September, 2011. But somehow, and I hope it’s not true, I fear that Obama will run with only modest enthusiasm because of unfulfilled expectations and the Republican candidate will be greeted by mad cheering crowds dreaming of a new America that cannot be delivered no matter who is President. Obama has to find a way to reverse this trend, not with speeches, but with actions and determination, done without splitting some imaginary line down the presumed center. The country is not center–as polls have long been demonstrating, but veers towards the left on most social issues. Will the Arab Spring spill over into America as it spilled over into Wisconsin? So far in poll numbers pitting Perry against Obama it is 47 to 47.  But, when it’s all said and done, I believe that Mitt Romney will be the Republican candidate as he seems more like a bobble-headed doll who resurfaces after each drowning.

RFM

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