President Obama’s DNC speech was pretty good overall. He didn’t take us on an astral trip like Bill Clinton did, but it had its highs—and lows. He mixed in references to Michelle, Malia, and Sasha. He hit the bullseye with a couple of zingers aimed at Romney/Ryan. He ended the speech by turning the DNC/Time Warner Cable Arena into a tent show revival meeting with his preacher’s call and response cadence and the overall power of his oratory gifts.
But as good as most of the speech was, there were certain points that escaped most people and pundits but raised my b.s. antennae big time:
“I've signed trade agreements that are helping our companies sell more goods to millions of new customers, goods that are stamped with three proud words: ‘Made in America.’” The Panama trade agreement enables corporations like Bain Capital and multimillionaires (billionaires?) like Mitt Romney to hide offshore accounts there that the IRS can’t touch, let alone investigate. Neither the South Korean nor the Colombia trade agreements do much if anything to create American jobs. And please check out the pending Trans-Pacific Partnership Free Trade Agreement.
“I will not let oil companies write this country's energy plan or endanger our coastlines or collect another $4 billion in corporate welfare from our taxpayers.” Obama has opened the Arctic Ocean to offshore oil drilling off the Alaskan coast. The oil damage from the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster is still there because the oil companies STILL don’t have in place the oil spill response plans mandated by the federal law, as was amply displayed by the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion (leaving more families with dead relatives but no bodies to bury) in the Gulf of Mexico. This doesn’t faze Obama in the slightest:
http://www.latimes.com/...
But it sure fazes the U.S. Maritime Forces: http://www.usnwc.edu/...
For even more on this, read “Vultures’ Picnic by Greg Palast
“…where we develop a hundred-year supply of natural gas that's right beneath our feet.” In other words, fracking. See below about mountain top removal to learn about the same environmental, human, and wildlife damage caused by fracking.
…”a future where we keep investing in wind and solar and clean coal…” “Clean” coal? Ask Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. about clean coal and he’ll show you his documentary “The Last Mountain” about mountain top removal. Ask the people of West Virginia who no longer have beautiful forested mountains to look at—and they’ll show you scarred, pitted, debris-strewn muddy lands and polluted water, ground and air, about clean coal. They’ll show you their x-rays verifying rampant cancers and diseases of the vital organs. What they won’t be able to show you is the wildlife that disappeared and never came back. Ask the families of the 25 Massey Energy coal miners who died in the 2010 Big Branch Mine explosion about clean coal and they’ll show you 25 gravesites.
Another power source he left out is nuclear. Even after Fukushima, and after Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Irene pummeled the Atlantic and Gulf coasts Obama is pushing for new nuclear power plants in Georgia, South Carolina, Texas and in other states. Japan, France, and Germany are now cutting back or working to eliminate nuclear power from their grids and replace them with safer, renewable energy sources (not so much Japan) but the Obama administration is either eager to fund new plants or re-certifying aging nuclear power plants way beyond their engineered life expectancies.
“From Burma to Libya to South Sudan, we have advanced the rights and dignity of all human beings…” Is he talking about Burma or Myanmar? They are the same country but believe me, they are not the SAME country. Just ask the National Human Rights Commission. Ask the CIA about the SPLA/M in South Sudan and mass torture and genocide inflicted on civilians. Libya? Ask Freedom House about their “7” rating for the new government of Libya’s political rights and civil liberties atrocities.
“…and we certainly don't want bailouts for banks that break the rules.” That’s exactly what TARP was all about. The banks (and Wall Street) broke the rules while gambling with OUR money, not theirs. The Bush Administration may have created the plan but it was Obama’s Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner that the billions of dollars be given to the banks with no strings attached, lest they become a bit nervous from the micromanagement and cause a worldwide panic that would have economies falling like dominoes. He was confident that if you handed banks all that free money, they would do the right thing and hand it over to consumers in the forms of easy-peasy personal, business, and mortgage loans. He was so SURE they would do that…
Make no mistake: I am voting for Obama because there is no other choice. Every complaint I have lodged against him would be a thousandfold worse under a President Romney. I do believe that Obama has a conscious and may be eventually persuaded to do the right thing refusing all the policies I cited here. If Romney ever HAD a conscious, it is locked away in the Cayman Islands keeping his money company.