Romney: Increase Defense Spending – Reverse Obama’s Cuts
In the year 2012, the U.S. Defense Department spent $530 billion -- that's $1,095,403 per minute and $18,256 per second.
President Barack Obama cut $1 Trillion from defense, but Romney wants to increase the military budget by $2.3 trillion over 10 years.
Former President Jimmy Carter once said we spend about as much as the whole world put together on defense.
When we consider military spending, we also must figure in the interest on the debt caused by such high military expenses. When this is included, the United States spends 55 cents of every dollar on the military, according to Charles Hauss in his book "Comparative Politics: Domestic Responses to Global Challenges -- third edition."
It is very expensive to maintain a permanent war economy.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower once said, "The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its labors, the genius of its scientists and the hope of its children."
Consider what was wasted in Iraq. The total budgetary and economic cost of the Iraq War was around $3 trillion when everything is figured in, including future retirement compensation, disability payments, replacing worn out equipment etc, according to Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize- winning economist at Columbia University, who was chairman of President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers, senior-vice president and chief economist at the World Bank, and Linda J. Bilmes, an economist at Harvard University, who is an expert in government finance. She is a former assistant secretary and chief financial officer of the U.S. Department of Commerce.
If our brightest and best prepared minds ran our political parties -- our college professors -- rather than vested interests -- we probably would have spent that money -- more than 3 trillion -- ending the causes of war.
Stone Age: Romney Speaks Out FOR Coal Burning Power Plant!
Mitt Romney, who is running for president, has spoken out against "environmental extremism" that would keep us from utilizing our coal resources and other fossil fuels "to the fullest extent."
And in a debate, Romney said to Obama, "By the way, I like coal. People in the coal industry think they are getting thrushed by your policies."
He is so out of touch with our environmentalists.
In a speech, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a powerful environnmental attorney, said:
“The National Academy of Sciences published a five-year study that showed that every fresh water fish in America is now contaminated with mercury. It's coming from coal burning power plants.
“This industry has essentially privatized all the fish in New York State in order to make themselves richer, they have stolen something from the public and made it so that we can't use it anymore.
“The constitution of New York says the fish belong to the people. Everybody has a right to use them.
"Nobody can use them in a way that will diminsh or injure their use and enjoyment by others. It's called the Public Trust Doctrine.
"It's 2,000 years old, it's in the Code of Jestinium, it's in the Magna Carta. ... It's in the constitution of every state.
"It applies to the waters and all the commons -- the fish, the water, the air, the public lands, wondering animals etc.
"According to the Centers for Disease Control, one out of every six women has so much mercury in her womb that her children are at risk for a grim inventory of diseases, including autism, blindness, mental retardation, heart, liver and kidney disease."
Kennedy, who fishes a lot and eats the fish, said tests reveal that he has 10 times what the Environmental Protection Agency considers to be safe.
He said Dr. David Carpenter, the national authority on mercury toxicity, told him that a woman with his level of mercury would have children cognitive impairment and permanent brain damage.
"I said to him she might have it," said Kennedy. "No, no, no. The science is very certain today. Her children would have some level of permanent neurological injury, probably, at my levels, an I.Q. loss of 5 to 7 points."
Below is a youtube video about people who had eaten fish contaminated with mercury in Minimata, Japan: BE ALARMED
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihFkyPv1jtU
MOTHER’S need to RISE UP against coal mining! We need solar and wind.
In Sweden, it is mother’s who go to the government complaining of the environmental pollution. “We can not have it, “ they say.
Poisons accumulate in a woman’s body fat over the years and pass from her maternal cord blood to the young infant and from her breast milk to the baby. The body fat is tapped when breast milk is made.
The babies are very vulnerable to pollutants because they are developing their bodies.
A wrong chemical signal can cause development to go awry.
We need to remake the way we make things using appropriate technologies. This is one of the agendas of ecological economics – the right livelihood movement -- also called Buddhist economics.
COAL MINING AND OUR MOUNTAINS:
Another reason to be deeply alarmed by coal mining is that it is destroying our mountains.
Below is an article I wrote on the need to protect MOUNTAINS:
If future generations are to have adequate water supplies, mountains must be carefully protected, for all of the world's major rivers and many of the smaller ones start off as streams in the mountains, according to the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO.
Mountains are up there in the clouds and get more rainfall than lower elevations.
There are various ways mountains produce water. In some places, water penetrates into a mountain and travels along the coal seam or along other rocks, then trickles out of the side of the mountain forming springs and streams.
In other places, water penetrates into mountains and is stored in huge natural storage tanks. For instance, in the Himalayan Mountains, these natural storage tanks are formed by cracks, fissures and dissolved areas within limestone rocks.
Enormous quantities of water from the Monsoon Rains get stored, which means there is water for the dry season. Water trickling out of these aquifers feeds thousands of springs and hundreds of streams, which pour enormous quantities of water into the great Ganges River and many other major rivers, according to Dr. Vandana Shiva.
Though limestone in the Himalayas plays a critical role in hydrology, it is being mined for use in the production of cement, steel, chemicals, sugar, textiles and other industries.
And in spite of the great hydrological importance of mountains, in the Appalachian Mountains, aquifers formed by coal and other rocks are being exploded by a coal mining technique called "mountaintop removal" that has blasted away the peaks of 500 mountains in just over a decade in the Appalachian Mountains.
About half of the mountain is removed.
Removing the coal seams removes the aquifers and replaces them with mine spoil, according to the National Research Council's Committee on Ground Water.
Furthermore, when the mountain tops are exploded, millions of tons of soil, rock and toxic heavy metals within the earth bury the streams in the valleys, impeding their flow to the rivers. These streams are permanently lost, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
since 1992, 2000 miles of streams have been buried due to surface mining in the United States, said Peter Harrison, who is with the Clean Energy Campaign with the WaterKeepers Alliance in New York, New York.
If you dry up the streams that feed our rivers and so other things that dry up the rivers, the country will become a desert. Indeed, our planet is drying up.
Also significant, the heavy metals in the mine spoil poisons the water with acid mine drainage so that the steams become dead -- fish can not live in them -- and the water is undrinkable. (The acid rain from coal burning power plants change the mercury in the exposed rocks and soil to methyl mercury, which washes into the streams and rivers and is taken up by fish.)
Thousands of streams in the United States are dead, nothing can live, not only from acid mine drainage, but also from acid rain.
Dr. Nicholas Robinson, a professor at the Pace University School of Law, said, "Mountaintop removal has only been allowed in the United States. It hasn't been used in other countries."
A typical coal burning power plant burns through a train car load of coal every 12 hourse.
The typical American consumes about four tons of coal per person per year and nearly 700 pounds of metal, according to David Simpson, a professor of international policy at Johns Hopkins University.
Auto dependency has a great impact on mountains. For example, molybdenum, which is used in making high strength steel, occurs in "very very very low concentrations -- one percent, maybe. In order to get it, you pretty much have to grind up the entire mountain," said Dr. Anne Ehrlich, a biologist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. Yet molybdenan is just one of many metals used in making steel.
In the United States, One hundred thousand ore deposits have been mined and abandoned, according to Robin McCulloch, state mining engineer with the Montana Bureau of Mines and Geology.
(Some abandoned mines may still contain resources that are not easily obtained and mining companies may go back in them at some point, according to McCulloch.)
(Technical note: two hundred thousand mines have been abandoned, but you might have two mines for one ore deposit, explained McCulloch, adding that a mine is just an opening.)
"We're seeing an end of many industrial minerals," he said, adding that a recent paper out of Yale University said even if we were doing 100 percent recycling, "we are short 30 percent of the mineral
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