Honoring a war criminal in Cayman

Upon overhearing a recent conversation in which it was mentioned that former US President George W. Bush would be speaking in Cayman, I thought to myself that certainly that could not be true. After researching further, I found that he is indeed the keynote speaker at the upcoming Cayman Alternative Investment Summit. 

Beyond the obvious dichotomy of having the complacent architect of the 2008 financial meltdown (which was orchestrated and executed by former Goldman Sachs chairman and Bush Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson) come to a country in which the financial meltdown had significant impacts in the lives of ordinary citizens, is that he is a war criminal by all international and domestic measures.

For the organizers to try and attract this criminal is an abomination to the integrity and intelligence of the citizens of this country and the world. I don’t believe they would approve if someone had invited Ayatollah Sayyed Ali Hosseini Khamenei to speak on the inaccuracies of the Jewish Holocaust.

Have we as a society lost all of our moral direction and compass that we just allow war crimes and criminals to just keep on providing public input? Forget the fact that he has not been prosecuted at The Hague; this is merely for the fact that the United States is the only major country to not recognize the International Court (done so under the Bush presidency). How convenient to be torturing people against existing treaties, then to not recognize the courts that are in place to enforce those treaties.

Beyond the war crimes issues, the largest oxymoron shown here is that George W. Bush is the President that presided over and help cause the worst US economy since the Great Depression. He helped the financial giants of Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, etc., create and execute the largest theft of private citizen’s tax money in the history of the Unites States.

This meltdown not only caused the current world depression, but the money was issued with virtually no strings attached and no fiscal responsibility to repay the American citizens, let alone dictate where the money would be used to help revive the economy. And yet, we are going to have him speak on Alternative Investments. At least Richard Branson (the other keynote speaker) has successful businesses. It has been well documented that George W. Bush was handed several family business that he subsequently ran into the ground prior to joining politics.

Let’s take a quick look at the history of President George W. Bush outstanding public service to the people of the United States and the international community.

• Gained the Presidency through legal technicalities on the 2000 ballot even though he lost the popular vote. Citizens protested and threw fruit and vegetables at his motorcade on the way to inauguration.
• Reduced the villagence on terrorist group watches by the spying agencies.
• Did not head warnings of 9/11 prior to the event actually occurring (mounting current calls for independent investigation into 9/11 are at a fervor pitch among intellectuals particularly architects and engineers in the US).
• Negotiated with the Taliban prior to 9/11 for an oil pipeline in Afghanistan.
• Reduced and/or removed family planning education in schools that advocated the use of birth control putting millions of young adults at increased chances of pregnancy and disease.
• Conditioned HIV/AIDS monetary assistance to Africa so that abstinence-only education is used. Abstinence-only education in general, and dramatically so in Africa, has been proven to be ineffective in stopping the spread of HIV/AIDS.
• Approved the use of torture techniques and secret foreign black sites in violation of every major treaty including the Geneva Convention.
• Invaded Iraq under knowingly false pretenses with inaccurate links to al-Qaeda and terrorism as well as WMD’s (Weapons of Mass Destruction). Current authenticated death tolls put the number of innocent civilian casualties to +/- 120,000. (This does not take into account the deaths of civilians that can be attributed to the downstream effects of the Iraqi invasion. Note that the crimes of Saddam Hussein are not forgotten or set aside. He was an equally murderous war criminal, but two wrongs do not make a right as our parents taught us.)
• Destroyed critical infrastructure in Iraq at the behest of major defense contractors and then immediately gave them no-bid contracts to rebuild these items within the first year of the conflict. Current estimates of the confirmed fraud of these companies are over $60 Billion.
• Approved further violations of the Geneva Convention with torture in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
• Enlisted over 18,000 private mercenary security and special ops private contractors with ties to his administration. Did not allow Iraq to prosecute members of the mercenary force that murdered thousands of Iraqi citizens. 
• Suspended Habeas Corpus, the prominent basis of the legal workings of the US Constitution, with the Patriot Act during the paranoia after 9/11.
• Approved domestic wiretapping of US Citizens and data mining of all emails and internet sites by installing servers at all major internet providers. All these activities were illegal under US law.
• Approved the fabricated financial crisis in September 2008 months before leaving office. This caused the global depression severely affecting Cayman in particular. It was the largest government subsidy to the financial sector in the history of the US. The world economy is still being depressed by the crisis and its ripple-effect crisis.
• Implemented the worst economic plan that plunged the US budget from surplus at the end of the Clinton presidency, to the largest deficit in history.
• Had a final approval rating of 22% and a disapproval rating of 73% according to Gallup Poll. This represented the worst ever dating back to the start of the poll in the 1920’s

Consider the list above, and please research this on your own and find out for yourself the even further damning effects of Bush’s presidency. Recent history has proved that his actions against terrorists did not stop terrorism but has actually increased anti-American sentiment in the world. Note that the Arab Spring was mostly an uprising against dictatorships that were supported and/or at least tolerated by the United States. Such dramatically supported militant governments by President Bush are the examples of Bahrain, Tunisia, Yemen, and Egypt.

This is not a conservative vs. liberal issue, nor is it an evangelical Christian vs. secular or Muslim issue. The fact is that this man and his entourage of cronies left over from the equally disastrous Regan years operated the economy and war machines at the behest of his corporate America friends and not for the best of everyday American citizens. The propaganda and media brainwashing, which has now come to light, caused Bush to be elected the second time and as the approval rating above notes, people finally wised up.

What does this all mean to Cayman? Well if you haven’t been paying attention lately, and most mainstream media has not, the international Occupy Movement is real and has not gone away since the major demonstrations of last year around the world. The movement has become more organized and mobilized. The actions can be seen as successful already by being put into the everyday conversations of the ideals of the movement, which include the incomparable shift in inequality in the United States, and the world, under the Bush administration.

This movement includes many people of various religions, ages, and income groups, but is particularly popular among the younger generations (40 and under). These are the next tourists, customers, and investors in the Cayman Islands. By Cayman continuing to guide its policies towards the old world order, it is missing an opportunity to be a global leader and join the movement.

One step to gain credibility is to publicly admonish the Cayman Alternative Investment Forum and object and prohibit people that have knowingly and publicly broken international war crime laws and whose fiscal policies have caused the Global Depression.

We have the opportunity to receive positive international press (are rarity these days) by making this stand instead of all of the negative press we receive almost daily from the ties to Mitt Romney and bad hedge fund administrators. Let’s stand together Cayman and make a stand for the real Christian values that our country and even Bush himself proclaims to defend, and stop the murderous war criminal and financial thief from speaking in our country.

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