Editorial:

A party platform is a document presented at the nominating convention that presents and represents the ideals, vision, goals, and attitudes of that particular political party. This week the Republican Party presented their platform. After reading all 62 pages of it, there wasn’t anything in there that we didn’t already know about the Republican Party.

The Republican Party is anti-immigrant, wants to do away with the DREAM Act and impose stiffer immigration enforcement. Its platform makes no mention of employer sanctions. It wants to reprisal the failed guest worker program. It seeks to make English the official language, supports state laws such as those passed in Arizona, and refers to immigrants in the most draconian of terms:

“Illegal immigration undermines those benefits and affects U.S. workers. In an age of terrorism, drug cartels, human trafficking, and criminal gangs, the presence of millions of unidentified persons in this country poses grave risks to the safety and the sovereignty of the United States.”

The Republican Party is all about big business and lowering taxes, which in turn impacts most if not all social service programs. It seeks to eliminate most if not all regulations and safeguards, in particular the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), while continuing tax breaks for the wealthiest in our country. It protects tax loop holes which allow major corporations that make billions of dollars in profits to continue to pay no taxes at all. The Republican Party wants to repeal Dodd-Frank, the financial reform laws, and go back to the days when banks had free reign to do as they wish.

The list goes on to the benefit of the rich and powerful.

For the poor, Republicans offer the fairytale that “any American who works hard, dreams big and follows the rules can achieve anything he or she wants.” The GOP wants to cut Medicare, Medi-Cal, food stamps and welfare. And of course they want to dismantle the Universal Health Care Program that will insist that everyone has some sort of health insurance.

It is well known that the GOP is against any form of abortion, even in the case of rape, and strongly supports the “one-woman one-man” doctrine for marriage.

This is today’s modern Republican Party, more conservative than the Republican Party of President Ronald Reagan. A party that is dominated by the ultra-conservative, Tea Party leadership that sees no problem with a person having the unfettered ability to own and carry a gun in public, with as many bullets as needed to “defend themselves.”

There are 62 pages of this document, which by the way, barely mentions Latin America with the exception of Cuba and Venezuela. This manifesto is not a binding contract with the party’s presidential candidate, but it does give us a clear idea of where the Republican Party would lead us, if they gained control of the executive office in addition to the congress. This document goes a long way in explaining why, particularly in California, the Republican Party has lost ground to the Democratic Party. Their platform represents a party for the rich, for the racist, and for the sexist. Republicans are clearly out of step with the demographic shift in the United States. Just take a look at the crowd at this convention and you will have a hard time finding any minorities sitting in the audience.

The Republican Convention of 2012 will soon be over and forgotten, but the platform which all Republican candidates must subscribe to provides a good window into the soul of today’s Republican Party. It is not a pretty picture.