Juan Cole lists ten things we learn from Mitt Romney’s insults to Spain. He leaves one off: isn’t it obvious that Romney is preparing to invade, or at least send drones to buzz the country?
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Yeah, that was one of the big WTF moments in the debate (after the killing of Big Bird), when Romney said we are currently on a path to Spain. Uhm, what? Spain?
The real lesson from Spain’s problems is that austerity only makes things worse. Tax and spend. Get the money out of the hands of useless rich people who won’t spend it and back into circulation. It’s the only way to improve the economy.
Good ol’ Spanish logic. Vote out Aznar because the terrorist are bombing Madrid. Next vote out Zapatero because things are getting tough. Next go on strike because things didn’t work out.
It’s as if we exported too many right-wingers to Europe. Incapable of a balance approach, they are trying to balanced budgets while eschewing all economic stimulus efforts.
Same with Greece. So maybe workers will have to negotiate when it comes to automatic Easter and Christmas bonuses, but the cuts to education and infrastructure (not to mention public safety issues related to police and firefighting cutbacks) are destroying the very foundation needed for growth and stability.
http://dawn.com/2012/10/06/austerity-has-worsened-greek-crisis/“>Link.
Link.
Romney’s comments regarding Spain really bother me, in part because the “Romney is generous” bandwagon is rolling along at full steam.
This is a guy who demonstrates his “I’m human” credentials with mormon stories, told by mormons on the Republican National Convention stage. He presents no, none, nada stories of humanity and generosity involving non-mormons. Link. This is a guy who focuses his limited humanity on his immediate family and on mormons in general. Everybody else, the Spanish lower and middle classes included, he is quite willing to cut off at the knees.
More on mormons at the RNC here: Link.
The other aspect of Romney’s purported generosity that is repeated often is his contribution to “charity,” with charity equalling the mormon church. First of all, he’s required to give 10%. Second, the LDS Church is a monolithic corporation that operates a multi-billion dollar global network of businesses. The LDS Church is the largest rancher in the USA, and they recently built a multi-billion dollar mall in Salt Lake City. And that’s just scratching the surface.
The LDS Church gives a small portion of the approximately $7 billion it takes in annually to charity. By their own accounting, they have spent about $1.4 billion on relief since 1985.
Romney knows how to Build the Mormon Kingdom. He does not know how to give anyone else a fair shake.
I’d like to add another counter argument. Romney said that much spending is bad because look at Spain! 42%!
What he doesn’t mention is that 42% is less than average for the Eurozone! For example Germany’s public spending is around 45%. That’s with 5.5% unemployment. But it would look pretty funny if Romney said he wouldn’t want to have an economy as “bad” as the German one, right?
Cross-posted from the [Lounge] thread:
Salon’s Joan Walsh weighs in on Romney’s foreign policy speech:
Yep, that’s Mitt. His message is, “Do what I tell you to do.” He wants to be President of the USA so that he can run the biggest business of all, planet earth.
Madeleine Albright described Romney’s foreign policy speech perfectly: “shallow.”
Cole is wrong when he says Romney “doesn’t know.” He doesn’t care to know., and doesn’t feel that he needs to know. He’s running the first postmodern campaign for the presidency. Objective reality doesn’t matter to him; the only thing that counts is what he wants reality to be. That’s why, for instance, he says he can eliminate tax deductions, still give everybody a 20% tax cut, and do both while remaining revenue neutral. He can’t, of course; everybody who’s not dependent on the Republican Party for their paycheck says so. But Romney wants it to be true, therefore it is.
cuts to education and infrastructure (not to mention public safety issues related to police and firefighting cutbacks) are destroying the very foundation needed for growth and stability.
sadly, I see the exact same thing happening here in NZ with John Key and the National govt., overwhelmingly approved by the voters in 2008.
-public asset sales (9/10 economists at all universities thought this a very bad idea)
-merging entire government ministries and firing 30-40% of the employees
-no investment in infrastructure whatsoever
result?
last year 40 thousands Kiwis left for Australia alone.
…and yet, you STILL find this policy popular enough here that I think National would easily win re-election.
boggles the mind. The New Zealand that was the socialist gem of the West in the 1970s has slowly degraded away. Well, at least we still have public healthcare.
Hum: No: the spanish logic is:
• Vote out Aznar’s successor because he lied and pretented that the terrorists bombing Madrid were Basques in order to justify making the anti-ETA policies harsher (and also wanted people to forget that he sent spanish soldiers in Iraq in defiance of the public opinion, the European Parliament, and the fact the war was only a costly way to help a guy deal with his daddy issues while catering to his voters’ anti-arabic bigotry).
• Next vote out Zapatero’s successor because he’s not promising anything but austerity. Not really his fault, since at the time half the european elites were openly discussing using starvation as a way to teach a lesson to southern european countries, but still, there are better ways to inspire voters’ enthusiasm
• Next go on strike because the new government does not even try to pretend that they will make the upper-class assume its share of the Nation’s pains.
Spaniards are more logical than people give them credit for.
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Europe’s problem is different in nature: unlike the US, which has a powerful federal government which therefore has to be deliberatly sabotaged by right-winger to not produce the necessary simulus, the EU’s institution simply do not have the budget necessary to produce a stimulus: you have to convince the individual member states to participate, through a process so baroque that the US’ fucked up institutions look like a paradise of simplicity and straightforwardness by comparison, and the last few years have shown that many european “leaders” are like the german princelings of yore clinging to their tiny nugget of power and prestige no matter what happens to the world around them.
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One thing which is so often ignored about Greece, is that when the crisis hit, Papandreou, then prime minister, vowed to deal with it through austerity and a much needed reform of the clownish greek tax code. The Greek Fisc, that is, the fucking tax collectors answered that he could do all the tax reform he wanted, the wouldn’t apply it. Basically, the tax collectors mutined and openly claimed that they were more loyal toward the upper-class than the rest of the country (Remember people talking about how deep nepotism and clientelism ran in Greece: well: that was the result). At the time, some people discussed the possibility of sending public servants from France, Germany, and other countries with a Fisc which, you know, worked, buuuuut, the European executive lacked the authority to decide that on its own and the member states were not enthusiastic about giving up some of their preeeeecious “National Soverainty”.
So it became a choice between austerity and default and starvation, with more than a few non-greek politicians being in favor of the second option.
thanks for that perspective, Laurentwepe
a perspective and history too much lacking in the media coverage of the EU these days.
Huh?
“We are part of an Anglo-Saxon heritage, and he feels that the special relationship is special,”
I’m a fairly typical English Brit and I can tell you the empathy Romney feels for me is not mutual. Anglo-Saxon heritage? It’s meaningless nonsense. The man’s an arse.
I’m a run of the mill, middle-class Brit, born and raised in England. I consider my genealogy and heritage typical: I know for a fact that as well as the English my ancestors of the last two hundred years included Scots, Irish and Welsh. It’s certain that a few centuries further back than that I have some French ancestors. It’s highly probable I have Norman, Viking, Angle, Saxon, Roman, Celtic, Pictish and Brythonic ancestors in equal measure. Since I probably have some Roman genes in me, it’s quite likely I have genes from all over the European and African melting pot… and way back before all that my ancestor were running naked around the plains of Africa…along with Romney’s and everyone else’s!… oh and my wife is Sikh so do my kids share in Romney’s heritage?
I think Romney wants to invade lots of places. He certainly plans to get ready to do so. He wants to add 100,000 troops to the US military, and his plans also include a massive spike in military spending. It took me seeing a graph of past spending, present spending, and Romney’s planned spending to really get how shocking Romney’s plan is.
See the graph and discussion here:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/#49337238
15 more ships per year for Navy? More cash for the military. At least in this case we do have enough details from Romney to figure out about how much money he plans to spend: 4% of GDP, IIRC.
This is what happens when you continue to cut funding for essential services:
Link.
In case you don’t want to watch the video, here’s the text and graph concerning the stark choice between Romney’s plans for military spending and those of Obama: Link.
“People say there’s no real difference between the candidates? Holy mackerel! When you’re talking about the biggest pile of money in the whole world, the largest amount of discretionary money spent on anything by our government — boy, howdy, is there a difference here. Boy, howdy, does this election matter.” — Rachel Maddow
Oh, yeah, I left the submarines out of my previous post. Romney is going to build more submarines. 15 ships per year, plus 3 submarines. I’m wondering if there are a lot of mormon defense contractors.
If you want a source that is not obviously liberal, (as Rachel Maddow is), for the discussion and graph of Romney’s planned military spending — something you can forward to your crazy, conspiracy-bedeviled relatives, here’s the same info presented at Foreign Policy (FP).
I’m not sure I want to learn anymore about the way far-right conservatives think.
I haven’t recovered from Todd Akin’s “legitimate rape” comment yet.
Georgia Rep. Paul Broun said in videotaped remarks that evolution, embryology and the Big Bang theory are “lies straight from the pit of hell” meant to convince people that they do not need a savior. Link. Video: http://bit.ly/TefuyK
Both Akin and Broun sit on a key congressional science advisory committee. Bill Nye had something to say about that.
And now this.
Arkansas state Rep. Jon Hubbard (R) has a written a book to clarify for us what he thinks, how he thinks. Excerpt:
Hubbard goes on to wax nostalgic over those halcyon days before schools were integrated, and so forth. Link.
Lynna #15, you forget one of the most important lessons of the Bush years, money spent on the military is magical, you can spend as much as you want and it doesn’t count toward the deficit.
Oh, right. And furthermore, wars are even more extra magical and special. Wars can be financed on the God-Is-On-Our-Side credit card. On which payment never comes due. There aren’t even any interest charges on the debt.
Just to prove (as if we needed more proof) that there are plenty more fools where Todd Akin came from:
Yeah, let’s encourage the cracked-world drift of the Republican Party by giving the most regressive members money.
Someone should explain this to England. Financing the Allies in two world wars bankrupted the nation and helped to end it’s empire.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/10/08/1141898/-It-s-Not-About-Religion
Redneck Aeschylus has dared to go where few journalists go, under the right-wing religious veneer, and into the heart of the mormon beast.
Excerpt: …
Tactics. With Romney it’s all about the tactics needed to win, not about the truth.
One of Romney’s latest ads pushes my check-your-sources! button. I keep harping on the Romney campaign’s inability to vet their sources, and on their inability to interpret what they read.
http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2012/10/09/14318239-giving-independent-non-partisan-an-entirely-new-meaning
Am I the only one who thought about this?
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You say that like it’s a bad thing. As far as I’m concerned, the end of the british colonial empire (as well as the french, the dutch, the belgian, the portugese, the last bastions of the spanish, the Italian… you get the idea) is one of the good things to happen during the 20th century.
We spend at least two weeks a year in Spain.
If being like Spain means good, cheap wine; decent public transportation; excellent seafood; free medical care even for us guiris; and patxaran and cabrales everywhere; sign me up.