BLOOD MONEY

I mined these entries from 2012 as the country was running up to the November elections. We wonder how a president can turn his back as the violence escalates. The current occupant claims to be a business man and a man of business was running then. And you know what's kind of funny? I came across bishop Romero totally by accident. He had a tiny part in a biopic of John Paul II quoting another embattled bishop as it turns out.

Just when you think it can't possibly get any worse this headline greets your unbelieving eyes. MITT ROMNEY STARTED BAIN CAPITAL WITH MONEY TIED TO DEATH SQUADS.  Included in the list were the supporters Roberto D'Aubisson's ARENA party. D'Aubisson, trained at the school of the Americas at Fort Benning was finally tied to the assassination of archbishop Oscar Romero. 

Goddess can it get any worse? Drove me to haul out my old Jackson Brown albums. This one is painfully appropriate. I want to take this sorry excuse for a human being, shake him until his teeth rattle and ask him what the hell he was thinking. 

SOLDIER OF PLENTY

God is great, God is good
He guards your neighborhood
Though it’s generally understood
Not quite the way you would
You try to take the slack
Stay awake and watch his back
But something happens every now and then
And someone breaks into the promised land
Ah boy boy
This world is not your toy
This world is long on hunger
This world is short on joy

A-e-i-o
You speak as if you know
What’s good for everyone
What’s good in what you’ve done?
What’s good about a world in which
War rages at a fever pitch
And people die for the little things
A little corn, a little beans

Ah boy boy
This world is not your toy
This world is, this world is
Long on hunger
Short on joy
How much longer
You gonna keep the world hungry boy?

You measure peace with guns
Progress in mega-tons
Who's left when the war is won?
Soldier of misfortune--
Soldier of an angry call
Soldier on foreign soil
I’m not here to fight your war
I know what you're fighting for

Ah boy boy
This world is not your toy
This world is, this world is
Long on hunger
Short on joy
How much longer
You gonna keep the world hungry boy?

I wonder if he can claim he retroactively returned their investments? 

El Salvador. Two words that make it impossible for me to vote for Mitt Romney even if I wanted to. By 1983 several priests, an archbishop and four American churchwomen (three nuns and a lay missionary) had been murdered.The sister's crime? Trying to get refugees out of the killing zones. Running a school and an orphanage for children who had lost their parents in the fighting? Our ambassador to El Salvador, Robert White was fired by the Reagan Administration for not towing the party line.

 In December 1981 the Atlacatl battalion, American trained at the school of the Americas, entered the village of El Mozote. By the time they left about three days later, the people of El Mozote and several surrounding smaller hamlets were dead. The youngest was eight months old. There was more violence to come before the decade was over, but all of this was known before Romney accepted the investments of the El Salvadoran oligarchs. Known, pretty much ignored, and just one of many involving American training and American arms. Mortor rounds came labeled made in the USA.

That Romney and Bain were willing to business with families that either contributed or stood by while these murders took place is more than I can stomach. There's an old saying. All that is needed for evil to flourish is for good men and women to do nothing.