Will Romney Have the Courage?
The one question everyone across the world needs to be asking, now that Mitt Romney has named Paul Ryan to be his running mate, is: will Romney have the courage to denounce the liars, frauds and corrupting interests that have so far sought to use Ryan as a way to remake the American economy for their own illicit gain?
Paul Ryan is tied to the Koch brothers, and their megamillion-dollar campaign to spread lies intended to undermine public understanding of the scientific consensus on the ongoing process of global climate destabilization. He has taken money from organizations linked not only to the Koch brothers and their secretive private oil empire, but to the big oil companies, which take tens of billions of dollars in subsidies every year.
Ryan’s budget, which purports to be intended to streamline public spending, is laced with massive new cash credits and tax breaks for the world’s wealthiest and most profitable oil conglomerates. Those incentives would send tens of billions of taxpayer dollars to multinational firms whose operations help to fund some of the most oppressive regimes on Earth.
That money no longer needs to be spent funding big oil. We have the technology to power the entire global economy on clean energy; all we need to do is invest in infrastructure and deploy that technology.
The truth is: Paul Ryan’s thinking on economics, federal investment spending and energy, are rooted in 18th-century technology and the logic of the Soviet Union’s mineral-based economy. Russian prime minister Dmitry Medvedev famously warned, when he was president, that Russia’s oil and gas-based economy was too primitive to compete in the hi-tech, globalized 21st century.
The only reason for Paul Ryan’s budget policy to so heavily favor investment in oil and gas is an allegiance to long outdated ideas, Soviet-like industrialization policy or to corrupt big-money interests. Mitt Romney has an absolute moral obligation to denounce those interests and their influence on public policy, and to demand the same of Ryan.
So, people across the world are asking:
Will Mitt Romney have the courage to denounce the big-money interests that want to own his campaign, his party, and—should he win the November election—his government?
It would not be difficult to do. Mitt has long been an advocate of acknowledging extant climate science, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and promoting investment in new technologies. In fact, the very nomination of Paul Ryan, in this respect, appears to be yet another course reversal, on a deeply moral issue, for the famed flip-flopper.
Perhaps worst for the American economy, and for the prospects of fixing the tight budget situation, within one to two decades, Paul Ryan’s primitive big oil budget would revoke funding for clean-energy alternatives. The direct impact of this would be the stunting of entrepreneurship and job creation, the undermining of a vibrant new decentralized Main Street economy, and technological and economic surrender to China, which is steadily ramping up its investments in clean energy technology.
China has now committed over $600 billion in state funds to promote R&D, manufacture, deployment and export of clean energy technology. Even as it heavily invests in progress-dampening coal-fired power plants, it is running away with the race to lead the global market for technologies that will harvest the Earth’s limitless supply of renewable wind and solar power.
Mitt Romney has a choice: he can support Paul Ryan’s primitive and misguided allegiance to big money oil interests, or he can support a vibrant, healthy and thriving clean-energy-based future for the American people. His character must pass this test if he is to be taken seriously as a candidate.
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Originally published August 14, 2012, at WordsAgainstChaos.com
