Juan Cole: Two Ways Mitt Romney Really Will Kill lots of People
Now, all presidents get people killed. They fight wars, authorize covert actions, and pursue wrong-headed policies. It isn’t useful in my view to engage in a Utilitarian argument about which presidents kill more people and which less. These things are hard to quantify, anyway. The real question to my mind is how many people you kill as president out of cynical calculation about your personal interests and perhaps those of your backers. The thing I most object to in Romney is that he is willing to kill people to get elected, even though he knows better. He believes in Obamacare, obviously, but says he will repeal it. He knows the score on climate change, but is going to deliver us into the scalding clutches of Big Oil.
So here are the ways that Romney is going to kill people:
1. Obamacare cuts women’s premiums (they had had to pay more than men) and provides women with “annual well visits, birth control counseling and supplies, gestational diabetes screening, breastfeeding support and supplies, screening and counseling concerning HIV and sexually transmitted infections, expanded testing for cervical cancer, and screening and counseling for domestic violence.” Studies have shown that doctor visits, especially late in a pregnancy, save lives, but many poor women could not afford them in the past (45 million women were just uninsured).
If Romney repeals Obamacare, he will raise the infant mortality rate compared to what it would be under the Affordable Care Act, and so will be a child-killer. It is probably even possible to calculate exactly how many infants he intends to murder.
2. Heat waves, water shortages, food shortages, declining fish populations, and extreme weather events such as floods and storms, will kill more and more human beings as climate change accelerates under the impact of all the tons of carbon dioxide we are spewing into the atmosphere every year. Even the percentage chance that our current heat wave, drought and corn crop failure is not caused by climate change is vanishingly small, according to James Hansen. Romney intends to remove subsidies for wind and solar energy and to promote burning hydrocarbons. (Note that Big Oil and Gas have received hundreds of billions in tax credits over the years). Romney may as well just line people up and machine gun them down.
http://www.juancole.com/2012/08/two-ways-mitt-romney-really-will-kill-lots-of-people.html