The Romney Campaign is Imploding [Archive] - HungAngels

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BluegrassCat

09-20-2012, 01:23 AM

Insulting the service of civilian and military personnel in harm's way - Check.

Insulting half the country as irresponsible victims, most of whom do work and do pay taxes - Check.

Attempting to defend the indefensible, Romney takes the ridiculous position that he stands behind his statements on the video and also that the video is debunked - Check.

Even Peggy Noonan knows this campaign is circling the drain: "He should peer deep into the abyss. He should look straight into the heart of darkness where lies a Republican defeat in a year the Republican presidential candidate almost couldn’t lose." http://blogs.wsj.com/peggynoonan/2012/09/18/time-for-an-intervention/

And now other high-ranking Repubs are pre-emptively pointing fingers about who's to blame for this fuckup. No one wants the stink of failure sticking to them. http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0912/81280.html

And a CBS poll out today finds Obama leading by 6 points in Wisconsin and by 5 points in Virginia among likely voters. Remember, likely voters are the most favorable group for Romney (all adults < registered voters < likely voters), so for Obama to be leading among them is notable. http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57515519/poll-obama-leads-in-virginia-wisconsin-tight-in-colorado/?pageNum=4&tag=contentMain;contentBody

No wonder OMK is having an emotional breakdown right before our eyes. :dancing::dancing::dancing::dancing:

Willie Escalade

09-20-2012, 02:09 AM

Yet dolts will STILL vote for him.

robertlouis

09-20-2012, 03:08 AM

Yet dolts will STILL vote for him.

Yep. The glory of democracy. :whistle:

Ben

09-20-2012, 03:21 AM

Please...

onmyknees

09-20-2012, 04:01 AM

This is a real knee slapper. You fuckers got your heads so far up your asses you can see your tonsils. Here we have the worst American hate on display in the mid east in a generation. Terrorists scaling the walls. Obama's much touted mid east policy up in flames. A now confirmed terrorist attack on our consulate in Libya leaving 4 Americans dead, despite Susan Rice's and the Administrations lies. No Marines guarding our embassies on 9/11. A National Security failure. The IG's final report in on Fast and Furious ( and 14 will either resign or be will disciplined) Butch Napolitano's Homeland Security shop being run like a lez brothel (another resignation there) . The Egyptian president spitting in our eye and encouraging more demonstrations despite Barry's soft sell about the Muslim Brotherhood. Too busy to meet with Isreal's Prime Minister. Iran moving into Iraq. Another credit downgrade, Another Trillion in debt. Egyptian tanks moving in the Gaza. ,Horrible unemployment numbers. Dismal small bussiness hiring numbers. Barry being embarrassed into making a China speech by Romney. More money printing by the fed to prop up a miserable economy, Barry telling Alfred E. Letterman he doesn't know how much the deficit is, Gas topping 4 dollars a gallon, Barry not attenting a security briefing in months...............and after the funerals and a quick 5 minute speech...it's off to Vegas for a party...then back to NY for a talk show and gala event ...and this is all just this week. And you're talking about the Romney campaign ??????? That's just too rich ....Can you see why you're undeserving of even a small amount of respect? And despite how bad Romney's campaign is according to you all...he's in a virtual tie. Do you assholes ever read what you write?

TempestTS

09-20-2012, 04:22 AM

:wiggle:Im doing the happy dance right now... dont you wish you could see it

robertlouis

09-20-2012, 04:35 AM

Odelay

09-20-2012, 04:35 AM

yodajazz

09-20-2012, 08:16 AM

Here we have the worst American hate on display in the mid east in a generation.

A generation? Seriously, dude? George & Dick's great adventure in the middle east stirred up so much hatred that it cost 4,000 American lives, and only ended 1 year ago. You need some perspective, some fresh air. Your hatred of Obama has caused you to become unhinged. Stop reading whatever it is that you're reading. It's not doing you any good.

I agree with you Odelay, but you missed the key point. The Iraq invasion cost over 100,000+ (?) Iraqi lives. Yet we simply ignore this, and pretend that it has no consequences. Saddams attack on the Kurds was around 1988-89 (?), over twenty years ago. We have all had family members who have passed on and missed, yet we pretend that Iraqi people dont miss their own. Saddam was holding a fragile, coalition of ethnic groups who have been fueding for over 1,000 years. Just the fact that the US coming in, temporarily unleased the security in this situation is important to someone who lost a loved one. I am assuming this, because I see all humanity as essentially the same. Even Obama can't publicaly acknowledge this situation, because is he is, then accused of sympathizising, with Islam.

But to ease the situation, that is to reverse some of the effects of invading someone's country the current administration adapted strategies to make the best of the situation. An example of this, is monies were given to rebuild a Mosque destroyed by other Iraqi ethnic groups. The administration issued a statement, saying they supported those who were attacked, and condemned the mosque's bombers. But small minded people who dont understand, that Muslims are human beings too, only see that this is somehow supporting potential enemies of the US; not the strategy that it is trying to win friends among potential enemies. And it also ignores that the US, had a causal part in unleashing the forces that made the attack possible. Colin Powell, understood the larger context of this situation, when he obejcted to the US invasion of Iraq. I believe he said something like, "if you break it, (meaning take it over), you own it.

Still Odelay, I agree with what you are saying to OMK. I'm just elaborating on it. But in addition to this, I want to give thanks to OMK for speaking in behalf of a real segment of the US/ world population. He's the "Washington Generals" of HA. For those of you that may not know, they are the team that the Harlem Globetrotters, plays every game, to show off their skills. So I'm now passing the ball.

Prospero

09-20-2012, 09:36 AM

Hmmm... and whose legacy was the ongoing trouble in the Middle east. A certain George Bush who led the illegal invasion of iraq springs to mind.

And whose legacy is the current financial crisis. A certain eight years of GOP residency?

A straw man now grasps at straws with his sad little supporters here cheerleading him to electoral catastrophe.

Do you really like the man your party nominated? I would say he is certainly offering us great entertainment. He has a future in showbiz.

Stavros

09-20-2012, 10:25 AM

I agree with you Odelay, but you missed the key point. The Iraq invasion cost over 100,000+ (?) Iraqi lives. Yet we simply ignore this, and pretend that it has no consequences. Saddams attack on the Kurds was around 1988-89 (?), over twenty years ago. We have all had family members who have passed on and missed, yet we pretend that Iraqi people dont miss their own. Saddam was holding a fragile, coalition of ethnic groups who have been fueding for over 1,000 years. Just the fact that the US coming in, temporarily unleased the security in this situation is important to someone who lost a loved one. I am assuming this, because I see all humanity as essentially the same. Even Obama can't publicaly acknowledge this situation, because is he is, then accused of sympathizising, with Islam.

But to ease the situation, that is to reverse some of the effects of invading someone's country the current administration adapted strategies to make the best of the situation. An example of this, is monies were given to rebuild a Mosque destroyed by other Iraqi ethnic groups. The administration issued a statement, saying they supported those who were attacked, and condemned the mosque's bombers. But small minded people who dont understand, that Muslims are human beings too, only see that this is somehow supporting potential enemies of the US; not the strategy that it is trying to win friends among potential enemies. And it also ignores that the US, had a causal part in unleashing the forces that made the attack possible. Colin Powell, understood the larger context of this situation, when he obejcted to the US invasion of Iraq. I believe he said something like, "if you break it, (meaning take it over), you own it.

Still Odelay, I agree with what you are saying to OMK. I'm just elaborating on it. But in addition to this, I want to give thanks to OMK for speaking in behalf of a real segment of the US/ world population. He's the "Washington Generals" of HA. For those of you that may not know, they are the team that the Harlem Globetrotters, plays every game, to show off their skills. So I'm now passing the ball.

Excellent post. In case you don't know it, the Iraq Body Count website is here, and your figures are close to the mark.
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/

Marts

09-20-2012, 02:05 PM

1. "Corporations are people, my friend… of course they are. Everything corporations earn ultimately goes to the people. Where do you think it goes? Whose pockets? Whose pockets? People's pockets. Human beings, my friend." —Mitt Romney to a heckler at the Iowa State Fair who suggested that taxes should be raised on corporations as part of balancing the budget (August 2011)

2. "I like being able to fire people who provide services to me." –Mitt Romney, using an unfortunate choice of words while advocating for consumer choice in health insurance plans (January 2012)

3. "I'm not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there." —Mitt Romney (January 2012)

4. "There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. ... My job is is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives." -Mitt Romney, in leaked comments from a fundraiser in May 2012

5. "It's hard to know just how well [the 2012 London Olympics] will turn out. There are a few things that were disconcerting. The stories about the private security firm not having enough people, the supposed strike of the immigration and customs officials, that obviously is not something which is encouraging." –Mitt Romney, insulting Britain on the eve of the Olympics by suggesting the country is not ready, NBC News interview, July 25, 2012

6. "He [Obama] says we need more firemen, more policemen, more teachers. Did he not get the message of Wisconsin? The American people did. It's time for us to cut back on government and help the American people." —Mitt Romney at a campaign event in Council Bluffs, Iowa, June 8, 2012

7. "I'll take a lot of credit for the fact that this industry's come back." –Mitt Romney, –Mitt Romney, on the American auto industry, despite having written a New York Times op-ed in 2008 titled "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt," in which he said if GM, Ford and Chrysler got a government bailout "you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye"

8. "No one's ever asked to see my birth certificate. They know that this is the place that we were born and raised." —Mitt Romney, speaking about his Michigan roots during a rally in Commerce, Michigan, Aug. 24, 2012

9. "I should tell my story. I'm also unemployed." —Mitt Romney, speaking in 2011 to unemployed people in Florida. Romney's net worth is over $200 million.

10. "I believe in an America where millions of Americans believe in an America that's the America millions of Americans believe in. That's the America I love." –Mitt Romney (January 2012)

Lord help us should this guy become US President. http://www.getsmile.com/emoticons/energizer-smileys-51935/freezing.gif

Ben

09-21-2012, 03:00 AM

As MIT professor Simon Johnson points out: "If only Romney had turned popular disdain for subsidies against the global megabanks, he would now be coasting into the White House."

Mitt and the Moochers (http://www.project-syndicate.org:80/commentary/mitt-and-the-moochers-by-simon-johnson)

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/mitt-and-the-moochers-by-simon-johnson

Ben

09-21-2012, 03:03 AM

THE COST OF THE CRISIS CAUSED BY WALL STREET = NO LESS THAN $12.8 TRILLION DOLLARS:

http://bettermarkets.com/reform-news/cost-crisis-caused-wall-street-no-less-128-trillion-dollars

buttslinger

09-21-2012, 03:58 AM

Bad week, Mitt

yodajazz

09-21-2012, 07:03 PM

Excellent post. In case you don't know it, the Iraq Body Count website is here, and your figures are close to the mark.
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/

And not only do we ignore the the cost of Iraqi lives, we ignore the money spent, so that no one had to sacrifice financially, or even think much about meaning of war. I had this revelation, when I found some old WW II, war ration books, while moving. The rationed things like coffee, and America's most abused drug, sugar. You had to think about the war, when ever you made a cake, had a cup of coffee, got gas, and other things. So the point that, the war rations book drove home, was that everyone had to sacrifice, everyone. Compare that to Iraq where we were told, to go shopping. The rich got tax cuts, the middle and lower class, got things like expanded child tax credits. The whole cost of the war was pushed down the road. And were still igonoring it, to this day, with the rich inronically, claiming that, 'they're under attack'. I see this ignorance of the cost of war, as a major cause of the spread of the spiritual disease of Greed. Someone in speech in the DNC used the word 'citizenship'. It is used rarely today, but when I was in elementary school, so long ago, there were classes, called citizenship.

Now today, we are told by, our corporate rulers, that the marketplace will solve all our needs, and that government should get out of the way. The ironic thing about that, is that many industries use that same government to protect them from competition. And at the same time, under the name of 'job development' our state and local governments, are using our taxpayer dollars to fund the building of business facilities, which are privately owned. Yes it helps to maintain jobs, but the bottom line adds profits to the investors. The business can also be given tax credits, which translates into the fact, that they can keep monies that their employees think are going to roads and schools. After giving 'blackmail' money to corporations, government think of ways to squeeze residents for money, such as charging for waste collection, that had previously been a free service, or by raising traffic penalties. It seems to me that both parties are doing this, but at least the Democrat's approach seems to be to balance some of it with programming for the middleclass and poor.

Stavros

09-21-2012, 07:19 PM

An interesting and important post, Yoda. Rationing was still in place in the UK when I was born, although I personally have no experience of it. Nevertheless, we only ate meat twice a week in our house when I was growing up, whereas these days people expect to be able to to eat what once was an expensive food, every day. If there was a downside to rationing it was the exploitation of luxuries -sometimes even basics- by criminals, there has in recent years been some interesting history on the criminal underworld during the war in London.

But your point about the effective subsidies that your Federal government gives to businesses makes it difficult for Mitt Romeny to criticise Federal programs if he then only cherry picks the ones that he doesn't like. I wonder how many businesses in the US would go bust without federal contracts, tax breaks or support from their congressional representatives writing in commitments in those Bills that actually make it onto the statute book.

The cost of war, though, has always been a subject politicians ought to be held accountable for: can you put a cap on military costs if a politician then says you are placing limits on freedom and defence? Wars must be the most expensive modern activity I can think of that involves states -human cost, financial cost, environmental damage -it makes you wonder why anyone still chooses it as an option, or maybe its because there is always someone benefiting from it all, arms manufacturers in particular (rather in the way that the people who benefit most from domestic disputes are lawyers). Yet Romney's belligerent comments on Russia and Iran suggest he hasn't figured out how much wars cost. But then the cost of his campaign would have supported a few wars in years gone by, so no rationing there...! And where does all that money go?

Did I read somewhere this will be the first billion $ election in the US?

buttslinger

09-21-2012, 07:32 PM

Wise old Yoda speaketh TRUTH, he does, too bad he's in with that goddam MAINSTREAM MEDIA!!!!!!!
What happened this week is that maybe some of those 47%ers that are republican, maybe had a moment of clarity. Maybe they're figuring out that their Fearless Leader, Mitt Romney, considers THEM the THEM!!

BluegrassCat

09-21-2012, 09:04 PM

And as the Romney campaign demonstrates its incompetence fewer and fewer donors are willing to part with their money to back a loser. The once-dominant Romney fundraising apparatus is starting to sputter:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/decision2012/romney-campaign-hits-a-financal-snag/2012/09/20/b31c568c-0334-11e2-91e7-2962c74e7738_story.html

And more polls out today from battleground states have Obama up in Virginia, Colorado, North Carolina and Ohio. If those numbers hold, this election is gonna be an electoral blowout.

http://www.politico.com/blogs/burns-haberman/2012/09/purple-poll-obama-gains-momentum-in-swing-states-136287.html?hp=r2

BluegrassCat

09-21-2012, 09:07 PM

fred41

09-22-2012, 01:19 AM

It seems to me that both parties are doing this, but at least the Democrat's approach seems to be to balance some of it with programming for the middleclass and poor.

Wise old Yoda speaketh TRUTH, he does, too bad he's in with that goddam MAINSTREAM MEDIA!!!!!!!
What happened this week is that maybe some of those 47%ers that are republican, maybe had a moment of clarity. Maybe they're figuring out that their Fearless Leader, Mitt Romney, considers THEM the THEM!!

Yes...but accordingly then, the Obama campaign should then run on the slogan: I'm an asshole too, just not as big an asshole as Romney. Vote for the lesser of two assholes in 2012!

(unimportant point though...I don't remember waste disposal to ever be free..it's either covered by your taxes or private pickup)

Ben

09-22-2012, 02:55 AM

Anyone seen the flick: The Game starring Michael Douglas? He, essentially, reprises his role as Gordon Gekko. Basically: Mitt Romney....
Quoting American radio host and author David Sirota: "Like every corporate scoundrel dragged before Congress, (Nicholas) Van Orton describes his soul-pulverizing work in anodyne terms. “I move money from one place to another,” he tells one acquaintance. Contrary to such bromides, though, he is as recognizable to us as today’s pampered Wall Street executives who exist in a hermetically sealed bubble of privilege and power. In Fincher’s caricature of this timeless brute, Van Orton’s $2,000 loafers almost never touch the macadam. Indeed, as a CNBC soundtrack thrums in the background, he floats from his manse, to his BMW, to his towering Van Orton Building to the scotch-and-cigar city club — all while orchestrating hostile takeovers via his cellphone."
Essentially they -- the likes of Van Orton and, too, Romney -- don't see and experience the policies they put in place.
This doesn't mean to say they're necessarily bad people. They've simply INTERNALIZED the corporate structure. I'm sure Romney is nice to his wife, kids, friends etc. But at Bain, again, well, money/capital takes precedence over people. And has to.
Much like the CEO of McDonald's can't care about pigs, cows, chickens. I mean, he or she has to see them as having no value. Well, only monetary value for him/her-self and the stockholders. They've value. Whereas chickens don't. Cows don't. Pigs don't. They're valueless.
Same with any oil company executive. Pollution, cancer rates, global warming are mere externalities. (Externalities are costs to others. Like, say, a chemical factory emits wastage as a by-product into nearby rivers and into the atmosphere. This creates negative externalities which impose higher social costs on other firms and consumers. e.g. clean up costs and health costs. Another example of higher social costs comes from the problems caused by traffic congestion in towns, cities and on major roads and motorways.)
Companies would be IRRATIONAL if they were to take that into account. Plus it'd go against actual market principles. In order for MARKETS TO WORK: you need sellers to BEAR the full -- the FULL -- costs of what they produce. Never happens.
So, therefore markets are a big sham.
As Adam Smith, again, wrote: Merchants and manufactures (today: corporations and essentially executives) put in place policies that serve their interests regardless of the "grievous" impact on others.
That applies to outsourcing &/or offshoring, to global warming, to pollution and cancer rates.
An executive has to be pathological. Has to. And, too, it goes against who we are. The core, the absolute core, and it's hardwired into us, is empathy. Human beings are empathetic creatures. Well, again, an executive cannot be empathetic.
Again, you cannot be empathetic when you're a CEO. You can't be. Capital is important. People aren't. Nor should they be. To care about other people is simply irrational.

THE GAME - Trailer - HQ - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kqQNBR09Rc)

Pamela Lampros job is being outsourced by Mitt Romney's Bain Capital - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6cU_ieUL6s)

Freeport, IL Implores Romney to Halt Bain's Outsourcing of 170 Sensata Workers - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hc7Smm6jbqE)

Dot Turner's job is being outsourced to China by Mitt Romney's Bain Capital - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=se9CxfL0x7A)

Ben

09-22-2012, 03:00 AM

Michael Douglas interview "The Game" - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McOtKSiwpwA)

Gekko's new mantra - 'Greed is not good' - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fgVlJyzCJs)

Willie Escalade

09-22-2012, 06:22 AM

I love that movie! CRS just kept fucking with him!

flabbybody

09-22-2012, 06:47 AM

The night of November 6 when Romney gives his concession speech is the last time I ever want to see his scumbag face.

end of post

Prospero

09-22-2012, 12:18 PM

Pawlenty quits Republican Presidential campaign

His new job? Why, lobbying for the deregulation of investment banks.

Pawlenty to Lead Wall Street Lobbying Group

By ALAN ZIBEL And VICTORIA MCGRANE

Tim Pawlenty, a top Mitt Romney backer and onetime presidential hopeful, will lead a major Wall Street lobbying group, giving up the chance for an administration position if Mr. Romney is elected president.

The 51-year-old Republican former governor of Minnesota will become chief executive of the Financial Services Roundtable effective Nov. 1, the group said Thursday. He succeeds Steve Bartlett, the former Dallas mayor and Texas congressman who announced plans to retire earlier this year.

Mr. Pawlenty said that as a condition of his hiring he agreed to resign his post as national co-chairman of the Romney campaign and not to serve in the administration if Mr. Romney is elected. On the short list to be Mr. Romney's running mate, Mr. Pawlenty was seen as a candidate for a plum post in a Romney administration.

The timing of Mr. Pawlenty's move led some observers to speculate that he chose to leave Mr. Romney during a difficult time for the campaign. But a friend of Mr. Pawlenty said the former governor had been looking for a private-sector job since abandoning his bid for the White House. Mr. Pawlenty was in talks with the Roundtable for at least four months, said Scott Talbott, the group's head of government affairs.

Mr. Pawlenty will likely raise the profile of the Roundtable, which represents the 100 largest U.S. financial-services companies, including banks like J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and Citigroup Inc. The Roundtable is among the industry groups pressing lawmakers to undo or alter parts of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial-overhaul law, a push that will intensify after election season passes.

Regardless of who wins the White House, the financial industry will almost certainly need bipartisan support for any changes to pass CongressMr. Pawlenty, a conservative from a largely liberal state, is seen by the chief executives who selected him and others as someone who can work with both sides of the aisle.

"People have been used to seeing him in somewhat of a partisan prism for the last year or so, but the reality is as governor of Minnesota he worked very effectively with Republicans and Democrats," said Phil Musser, a friend and former political adviser to Mr. Pawlenty.

The new role also represents a change in fortunes for Mr. Pawlenty, whose income has been modest during a career in public service. Mr. Bartlett, the outgoing CEO, made about $1.8 million in 2010, according to a tax filing.

Observers in Washington have noted Mr. Pawlenty's lack of a financial background, but some see his outsider status as an advantage. "He understands the bigger problem the banks have, which is a huge PR problem, a huge political problem," said one Republican operative.

In a break from the financial industry, Mr. Pawlenty urged lawmakers not to raise the federal debt ceiling last summer while the Roundtable lobbied Congress the other way.

One of his top priorities will be to restore the industry's tarnished reputation, he said. Asked in his job interview how the industry should improve its image, Mr. Pawlenty said he responded, "Stop doing stupid things."

Mr. Pawlenty said his new organization seeks to modify the Dodd-Frank law rather than repeal it outright as some Republicans—including Mr. Romney— have pledged to do.

The son of a truck driver, Mr. Pawlenty made his working-class appeal the centerpiece of his presidential campaign last year. But his campaign didn't gain much traction, and Mr. Pawlenty dropped out of the race in August 2011.

He has called himself as a "Sam's Club Republican," a term he coined to differentiate himself from his opponent for the GOP gubernatorial nomination, who Mr. Pawlenty said was more comfortable in a country club.

Mr. Pawlenty said he saw no contradiction between his blue-collar background and his new job, saying that a healthy financial sector is vital to spurring job growth. Financial institutions, he said, provide "the fuel that goes into that engine."

flabbybody

09-22-2012, 02:17 PM

Pawlenty fits perfectly the profile of a bank lobbyist. Middle aged white guy with a decent golf game. last original idea, college. Sense of social obligation, below zero. Does he know anything about banking? well maybe he took some economic course back in his university days. Probably the less you know the better.
Old Republicans are all the same. After a few years of mediocre public service they feel entitled to cash in on the notoriety they've managed to attain. I'm sure Gov Perry of Texas will take the same path.

onmyknees

09-22-2012, 04:23 PM

From the Chicago Sun Times.. ( not Fox News, not the Wall Street Journal)

Media cover for Obama’s failures

BY STEVE HUNTLEY shuntley.cst@gmail.com September 20, 2012 5:52PM

http://www.suntimes.com/csp/cms/sites/dt.common.streams.StreamServer.cls?STREAMOID=nUCeI CmhSaovxmJrH8KVL8$daE2N3K4ZzOUsqbU5sYuFwZWUcA7kAl9 sPO4CYNvXWCsjLu883Ygn4B49Lvm9bPe2QeMKQdVeZmXF$9l$4 uCZ8QDXhaHEp3rvzXRJFdy0KqPHLoMevcTLo3h8xh70Y6N_U_C ryOsw6FTOdKL_jpQ-&CONTENTTYPE=image/jpeg President Barack Obama participates in a town hall hosted by Univision and Univision news anchors Jorge Ramos (left) and Maria Elena Salinas (center) at the University of Miami, Thursday in Coral Gables, Fla. | CAROLYN KASTER~AP

Election news: Conventions, local races, more (http://www.suntimes.com/news/elections/index.html)The Sun-Times Politics blog (http://blogs.suntimes.com/politics/)
Updated: September 21, 2012 11:29AM

Each new day seems to bring further evidence of the unremitting failure of President Barack Obama’s economic and foreign policies. Yet the presidential contest remains even, due in large part to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s failure to articulate a specific economic reform agenda and to the mainstream media’s obsession with what Obama-friendly commentators see as Romney’s gaffes.

The media narrative is Romney has had a bad couple of weeks with less-than-artful or ill-timed remarks about the growth of government dependency and Obama’s failed foreign policy. Still, Obama has had his own bad couple of weeks, on the economic front as well as abroad — though the media haven’t spotlighted it as they have with Romney.
New Census Bureau figures show median household income fell or was flat last year in 37 states — mirroring data released a week ago showing national median household income is down to mid-1990s levels. This drop came amid the Obama recovery, the weakest rebound from a recession in modern history.
Another report filled in details behind the nation’s persistently high unemployment, 43 months above 8 percent. Small businesses are a prime generator of jobs, yet fewer new firms are being established. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of startups peaked at 667,000 in 2006 and has declined ever since, reaching 548,000 in 2009 and dropping again to 505,000 in 2010, the first full year of the recovery.
“The state of entrepreneurship in the United States is, sadly, weaker than ever,” observes Tim Kane of the Hudson Institute who analyzed the numbers. He cites “anecdotal evidence that the U.S. policy environment has become inadvertently hostile to entrepreneurial employment.” That includes uncertainty over taxes and regulations, among them the looming new taxes and rules from ObamaCare.
Further fallout from ObamaCare: It will raise taxes on 6 million Americans for failing to meet its insurance mandate, reports the Congressional Budget Office. That’s 50 percent higher than the previous estimate. Most of that tax hike will fall on the middle class.
More evidence of the failure of Obama’s economic policies was the Federal Reserve’s announcement of a third round of “quantitative easing” — Fedspeak for printing money to boost Wall Street trading in hopes that will trickle down to more jobs. How effective it will be remains to be seen, but it will keep interest rates at near zero, a disheartening blow to seniors trying to live off their life savings. The Fed policy also will likely fuel commodity prices, meaning higher food and energy costs further eroding household budgets. That is, unless a possibly looming global downturn — meaning more unemployment — depresses oil prices.
The news is no better on foreign policy. Even the administration is backing away from U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice’s farcical claim that the wave of anti-American riots were a spontaneous reaction to an obscure Internet video. And Obama’s “reset” with Russia is faring no better than his outreach to the Muslim world. Moscow kicked out the U.S. Agency for International Development, which promotes democracy and human rights, claiming it meddles in Russian politics.
From the American kitchen table to the U.S. business environment to the unemployment line to the Arab street to Russian diplomacy, Obama’s policies have been a failure. Who wants four more years of that?

Yet none of these facts deter you all from your blind loyality...which by the way is fine.....you'll vote for Barry if the unemployment is 15% (which in reality it is) because he's black, because he's smooth, because he's generational, because he's entertaining on Letterman, and hip.....again that's all fine, it's your
prerogative as an American voter. What I find utterly disingenuous and downright intellectually dishonest when you come on here and try to defy facts and real life evidence that he's done a good job, or that the hill suddenly has been just to hard to climb. Judge him by his own promises and assurances, by his own words ....but Just be honest about your reasons for voting and I might have some respect for you. Slick Willie has proven to be a bit of a political sage when it comes to Barry. He is in fact a rank "Amateur". Deal with it....vote for him by all means, but don't bullshit me about the reasons.... It's comical in light of all the facts and the misery we're enduring on a daily basis.

Prospero

09-22-2012, 05:38 PM

And OMK sincerely believes Romney and his band of fools will do a better job. They will - for the top four per cent of the US population.

The trillions of dollars of debt the US is now saddled with was in large part because of the criminal war in Iraq prosecuted by Bush and the neo-cons. Funny how dear old George W is never mentioned these days. You ashamed of him?

Prospero

09-22-2012, 06:14 PM

What you don't mention is that the piece from the Sun Times is a think piece. Perfectly legitimate for that - but an opinion piece. Not objective reportage. Many of the better informed American liberals on this board would argue with the claims and assertions made in that piece of polemic.

Prospero

09-22-2012, 06:31 PM

Another view....

buttslinger

09-22-2012, 07:00 PM

[QUOTE=onmyknees;120382Yet none of these facts deter you all from your blind loyality...which by the way is fine.....you'll vote for Barry if the unemployment is 15% (which in reality it is) because he's black, because he's smooth, because he's generational, because he's entertaining on Letterman, and hip.....again that's all fine, it's your prerogative as an American voter. What I find utterly disingenuous and downright intellectually dishonest when you come on here and try to defy facts and real life evidence that he's done a good job, or that the hill suddenly has been just to hard to climb. Judge him by his own promises and assurances, by his own words ....but Just be honest about your reasons for voting and I might have some respect for you. Slick Willie has proven to be a bit of a political sage when it comes to Barry. He is in fact a rank "Amateur". Deal with it....vote for him by all means, but don't bullshit me about the reasons.... It's comical in light of all the facts and the misery we're enduring on a daily basis.[/QUOTE]

Attacking your opponent for your own weaknesses is straight out of the Rove handbook, it brings the fight down to a schoolyard level, My Dad is better than your Dad.
But the porcine Karl isn't in the White House, He's doing color commentary over on Fox with Sarah Palin and Liz Cheney.
The smart money has already bailed on Romney. The true conservative journalists are skewering him. The Republicans in tight Senate races are dis-avowing him. You never hear anyone say what a fantastic President Williard would be, Not even on Fox. He's REALLY the best guy you could come up with!!?????? ha ha ha ha ha
If you really want to convince someone that Romney is The ONE, maybe you better go over to the Nascar site and not a Transgender site. Maybe you should just ignore the 47%ers over here.
Knees- admit what your buddies are thinking - Romney is a JOKE!!!!
He lost the Election when he wouldn't release his tax returns.

Romney is a convincing Debater, but he's got a handicap. He has to please the Fat Cats AND the White Trash. It's not going to be a rehearsed edited Sean Hannity interview. They're coaching him to answer questions about Women, Gays, Blacks, Hispanics, George Bush, secret $50,000/plate dinners, Bain, Massachusetts, 14% taxes, Medicare, Romneycare, and all those other Lamestream Media Lies. I can hardly wait.

BluegrassCat

09-22-2012, 07:49 PM

The facts are that Obama has a positive, though not stellar, record to run on. Brought the economy out of a tailspin and got the private sector growing, saved the American auto industry, ended the Iraq War, ended DADT, stopped enforcing DOMA, got Osama Bin Laden and vastly improved America's standing in the world. Has he fallen short in some areas? Of course, but in every case the failure was to be too conservative. The stimulus was too small, the bailout too one-sided in favor of big banks, his economic advisors too close to Wall St. So with Romney you get all the failures of Obama and none of the successes. Sounds like a great plan.

Chaos on Bullshit Mountain - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=km4BfW2836Y)

Stavros

09-22-2012, 08:38 PM

From the Chicago Sun Times.. ( not Fox News, not the Wall Street Journal)

Media cover for Obama’s failures

Each new day seems to bring further evidence of the unremitting failure of President Barack Obama’s economic and foreign policies. Yet the presidential contest remains even, due in large part to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s failure to articulate a specific economic reform agenda and to the mainstream media’s obsession with what Obama-friendly commentators see as Romney’s gaffes.

The media narrative is Romney has had a bad couple of weeks with less-than-artful or ill-timed remarks about the growth of government dependency and Obama’s failed foreign policy. Still, Obama has had his own bad couple of weeks, on the economic front as well as abroad — though the media haven’t spotlighted it as they have with Romney.
New Census Bureau figures show median household income fell or was flat last year in 37 states — mirroring data released a week ago showing national median household income is down to mid-1990s levels. This drop came amid the Obama recovery, the weakest rebound from a recession in modern history.
Another report filled in details behind the nation’s persistently high unemployment, 43 months above 8 percent. Small businesses are a prime generator of jobs, yet fewer new firms are being established. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of startups peaked at 667,000 in 2006 and has declined ever since, reaching 548,000 in 2009 and dropping again to 505,000 in 2010, the first full year of the recovery.
“The state of entrepreneurship in the United States is, sadly, weaker than ever,” observes Tim Kane of the Hudson Institute who analyzed the numbers. He cites “anecdotal evidence that the U.S. policy environment has become inadvertently hostile to entrepreneurial employment.” That includes uncertainty over taxes and regulations, among them the looming new taxes and rules from ObamaCare.
Further fallout from ObamaCare: It will raise taxes on 6 million Americans for failing to meet its insurance mandate, reports the Congressional Budget Office. That’s 50 percent higher than the previous estimate. Most of that tax hike will fall on the middle class.
More evidence of the failure of Obama’s economic policies was the Federal Reserve’s announcement of a third round of “quantitative easing” — Fedspeak for printing money to boost Wall Street trading in hopes that will trickle down to more jobs. How effective it will be remains to be seen, but it will keep interest rates at near zero, a disheartening blow to seniors trying to live off their life savings. The Fed policy also will likely fuel commodity prices, meaning higher food and energy costs further eroding household budgets. That is, unless a possibly looming global downturn — meaning more unemployment — depresses oil prices.
The news is no better on foreign policy. Even the administration is backing away from U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice’s farcical claim that the wave of anti-American riots were a spontaneous reaction to an obscure Internet video. And Obama’s “reset” with Russia is faring no better than his outreach to the Muslim world. Moscow kicked out the U.S. Agency for International Development, which promotes democracy and human rights, claiming it meddles in Russian politics.
From the American kitchen table to the U.S. business environment to the unemployment line to the Arab street to Russian diplomacy, Obama’s policies have been a failure. Who wants four more years of that?

Yet none of these facts deter you all from your blind loyality...which by the way is fine.....you'll vote for Barry if the unemployment is 15% (which in reality it is) because he's black, because he's smooth, because he's generational, because he's entertaining on Letterman, and hip.....again that's all fine, it's your
prerogative as an American voter. What I find utterly disingenuous and downright intellectually dishonest when you come on here and try to defy facts and real life evidence that he's done a good job, or that the hill suddenly has been just to hard to climb. Judge him by his own promises and assurances, by his own words ....but Just be honest about your reasons for voting and I might have some respect for you. Slick Willie has proven to be a bit of a political sage when it comes to Barry. He is in fact a rank "Amateur". Deal with it....vote for him by all means, but don't bullshit me about the reasons.... It's comical in light of all the facts and the misery we're enduring on a daily basis.

I am not an American citizen so obviously I don't have a vote. I also don't have a problem with the opinion piece above, but think it could have been more objective in its assessment of Obama's record.

For example, median household income was falling before Obama came into office, and is part of a downward trend across the western industrialised world as it tries to compete with substantially lower labour costs in Asia. The low rate of small business start-ups may well be due to additional burdens on potential employers other than basic tax rates and wage commitments -but are Federal policies on tax and issues like environmental regulation, health and safety reimges, the only issues that make entrepreneurs nervous? The article doesn't say.

The article critices quantitative easing, but this is the policy that is being followed by the politically different British government, admittedly a coalition of Conservatives and Liberal-Democrats, but as the Chancellor is a Conservative with a big C, it would seem the policy of printing more money and holding interest rates low is not exclusive to the Obama administration -how different would it be under Romney?

A reminder again of the dire situation in 2008 when nobody knew if their bank was going to collapse taking their savings with it. In the UK when the Labour Government left office, the Chief Financial Secretary to the Treasury, Liam Byrne, left a note on his desk for his new replacement, Vince Cable. It read: Dear Chief Secretary, I’m afraid to tell you there's no money left. Kind regards – and good luck! Liam.

Was it so different in the US when the Obama administration took office?

The policies followed by the Obama administation, not so different from the UK's, had the effect of stemming a tide of bank closures -the policy worked. If the US has not experienced stunning economic growth since then, and it is has performed better than the UK, the article could have mentioned the overall slow down in the world economy, especially in China.
Some things are not in control of the Federal government.

On Foreign Policy, the article could have looked deeper into what has been happening in Russia, where there are contradictory messages. On the one hand, the Russians still want foreign capital and technical expertise in industry to overhaul existing and create new industries, but on the other hand Putin clearly thinks the holiday from regulation that enabled the Oligarchs to become billionaires at the expense of the Russian people has ended. I think Putin wants a more controlled economy, but not a centrally planned one -as for human rights, the US lost its moral right to lecture other countries on human rights a long time ago. If history shows anything, it is that no foreign state gets very far when trying to impose itself on Russia. I wonder what would happen if Vladimir Putin started lecturing the US about human rights, interest rates, employment law, and its support for states it doesn't like?

Yes, Obama's administration has looked feeble and incoherent on the Middle East, but so has everyone else, including the Arabs who live there! The Arab Spring when it began seemed limited to Tunisia and Egypt, when it began to spread to Libya, the Yemen, Bahrain and now Syria, people began to realise we might be living through the most important phase of change in the region since -depending on your perspective- the 1950s nationalist revolutions, or even the creation of the modern Middle East after 1918. In which case there is much more left to come. Obama is in the same position as everyone else.

The single most important facet of US policy in the Middle East is to remain the principal agency for external change that the Arab states rely on: it is the US that has brokered the treaties between Israel and its Arab neighbours, in both cases through Democrat Presidents; it is the US that (like it or not) retains good relations with the key states of the region: Israel, Saudi Arabia and the Emirates; its relations with Egypt remain solid, notwithstanding the kind of vox populi that erupts with fury at a moment's notice; I don't know precisely how its relations with Iraq feel, but the hostility of earlier years has lessened, but is complicated by the influence of Iran in some areas of Iraqi politics. Syria's rejection front, established by Hafez al-Asad has produced absolutely nothing in real terms in 40 years -he was in command of he air force in 1967 when Israel annexed the Golan Heights (Jebel al-Awlan), and failed in his time in office as President to get back a single inch of it. Rejection, no compromise, call it what you want, has failed. The US is still preferred over other powers as an honest broker, in spite of all that has happened. I think that in view of the changes taking place in the region, that is an achievement.

As for the Arab Street erupting to the now infamous 'film' which turns out to be the incoherent rage of a partisan voice, none of that was in the control of the Federal government, or should the Fed have the right to veto everything a US citizen posts on YouTube? If you have the right of free speech, and it includes the right to abuse and insult people in as deliberate a manner as you can, does that make Obama responsible for what happens on the streets of Pakistan when they react accordingly?

Thus, the summary which reads:
From the American kitchen table to the U.S. business environment to the unemployment line to the Arab street to Russian diplomacy, Obama’s policies have been a failure. Who wants four more years of that?

Does not offer a meaningful context for the problems that the US economy has, symptomatic of the problems we have in the UK, and can be found across many parts of the world; it does not offer alternative policies; it also makes no serious mention of the Affordable American Health Care Act which may yet be ranked as legislation as profound as the Civil Rights Act.

Plus the insghts in Bluegrass Cat's more succinct defence above this post

BluegrassCat

09-23-2012, 04:18 AM

#Winning

robertlouis

09-23-2012, 05:42 AM

#Winning

Strikes me that the only women likely to vote for Romney are Stepford Barbies like his own wife.

It's partly GOP policy, but more their rhetoric, which is violently misogynistic and could take back the advances of sexual equality to the early years of the 20th century and the battle for women's suffrage.

Surely no thinking woman with any sense of self-worth could seriously contemplate voting for them.

Ben

09-25-2012, 04:11 AM

I'm not entirely sure where Howard Stern stands politically.... Well, he's socially ultra liberal -- :)

Howard Stern on Mitt Romney 9 17 12 - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvvKvI3nr4k)

Dino Velvet

09-25-2012, 04:59 AM

I'm not entirely sure where Howard Stern stands politically.... Well, he's socially ultra liberal -- :)

Howard Stern on Mitt Romney 9 17 12 - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvvKvI3nr4k)

Didn't he run for Governor as a Libertarian?

Howard Stern Exposes Dumb Obama Supporters 2012 - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpv0lPz-pd4)

Ben

09-25-2012, 05:04 AM

Didn't he run for Governor as a Libertarian?

Howard Stern Exposes Dumb Obama Supporters 2012 - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpv0lPz-pd4)

Dino, you're right.... He did run under the Libertarian banner.

Ben

09-25-2012, 05:37 AM

Reagan Warned Us About Mitt Romney:

Reagan Warned Us About Mitt Romney Backs Obama Buffett Rule - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mp1nuEVOoc)

danthepoetman

09-25-2012, 08:49 AM

Great video, Ben! Quite surprising!

yodajazz

09-26-2012, 10:34 AM

I'm not entirely sure where Howard Stern stands politically.... Well, he's socially ultra liberal -- :)

Howard Stern on Mitt Romney 9 17 12 - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvvKvI3nr4k)

Well there are plenty of uninformed people to go around. For example the birther movement. Obama's birth has nothing to do with direction of what's good for America. Or the half baked theory running around, that that Housing Act caused the housing crisis, rather than the financial industry. Saying that banks were forced to give out bad loans, etc. Anyway, lots of times people are very nervous being interviewed, by a celebrity, and are half listening.

Prospero

09-26-2012, 11:07 AM

Interesting tirade by Stern - and on the money I'm afraid. Romney' behaviour at Bain was disgraceful. He made people jobless by moving money around - put simply. Not an industry creating things but making money simply by destroying industry.
The article from Rolling Stones referenced in the broadcast is here.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/greed-and-debt-the-true-story-of-mitt-romney-and-bain-capital-20120829

Prospero

09-26-2012, 11:08 AM

Another good piece from the Rolling Stone archive... how the republicans became the party of the Rich.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-the-gop-became-the-party-of-the-rich-20111109

Prospero

09-26-2012, 11:45 AM

Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital
How the GOP presidential candidate and his private equity firm staged an epic wealth grab, destroyed jobs – and stuck others with the bill

By Matt Taibbi

The great criticism of Mitt Romney, from both sides of the aisle, has always been that he doesn't stand for anything. He's a flip-flopper, they say, a lightweight, a cardboard opportunist who'll say anything to get elected.

The critics couldn't be more wrong. Mitt Romney is no tissue-paper man. He's closer to being a revolutionary, a backward-world version of Che or Trotsky, with tweezed nostrils instead of a beard, a half-Windsor instead of a leather jerkin. His legendary flip-flops aren't the lies of a bumbling opportunist – they're the confident prevarications of a man untroubled by misleading the nonbeliever in pursuit of a single, all-consuming goal. Romney has a vision, and he's trying for something big: We've just been too slow to sort out what it is, just as we've been slow to grasp the roots of the radical economic changes that have swept the country in the last generation.

The incredible untold story of the 2012 election so far is that Romney's run has been a shimmering pearl of perfect political hypocrisy, which he's somehow managed to keep hidden, even with thousands of cameras following his every move. And the drama of this rhetorical high-wire act was ratcheted up even further when Romney chose his running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin – like himself, a self-righteously anal, thin-lipped, Whitest Kids U Know penny pincher who'd be honored to tell Oliver Twist there's no more soup left. By selecting Ryan, Romney, the hard-charging, chameleonic champion of a disgraced-yet-defiant Wall Street, officially succeeded in moving the battle lines in the 2012 presidential race.

Like John McCain four years before, Romney desperately needed a vice-presidential pick that would change the game. But where McCain bet on a combustive mix of clueless novelty and suburban sexual tension named Sarah Palin, Romney bet on an idea. He said as much when he unveiled his choice of Ryan, the author of a hair-raising budget-cutting plan best known for its willingness to slash the sacred cows of Medicare and Medicaid. "Paul Ryan has become an intellectual leader of the Republican Party," Romney told frenzied Republican supporters in Norfolk, Virginia, standing before the reliably jingoistic backdrop of a floating warship. "He understands the fiscal challenges facing America: our exploding deficits and crushing debt."

Debt, debt, debt. If the Republican Party had a James Carville, this is what he would have said to win Mitt over, in whatever late-night war room session led to the Ryan pick: "It's the debt, stupid." This is the way to defeat Barack Obama: to recast the race as a jeremiad against debt, something just about everybody who's ever gotten a bill in the mail hates on a primal level.

Last May, in a much-touted speech in Iowa, Romney used language that was literally inflammatory to describe America's federal borrowing. "A prairie fire of debt is sweeping across Iowa and our nation," he declared. "Every day we fail to act, that fire gets closer to the homes and children we love." Our collective debt is no ordinary problem: According to Mitt, it's going to burn our children alive.

And this is where we get to the hypocrisy at the heart of Mitt Romney. Everyone knows that he is fantastically rich, having scored great success, the legend goes, as a "turnaround specialist," a shrewd financial operator who revived moribund companies as a high-priced consultant for a storied Wall Street private equity firm. But what most voters don't know is the way Mitt Romney actually made his fortune: by borrowing vast sums of money that other people were forced to pay back. This is the plain, stark reality that has somehow eluded America's top political journalists for two consecutive presidential campaigns: Mitt Romney is one of the greatest and most irresponsible debt creators of all time. In the past few decades, in fact, Romney has piled more debt onto more unsuspecting companies, written more gigantic checks that other people have to cover, than perhaps all but a handful of people on planet Earth.

By making debt the centerpiece of his campaign, Romney was making a calculated bluff of historic dimensions – placing a massive all-in bet on the rank incompetence of the American press corps. The result has been a brilliant comedy: A man makes a $250 million fortune loading up companies with debt and then extracting million-dollar fees from those same companies, in exchange for the generous service of telling them who needs to be fired in order to finance the debt payments he saddled them with in the first place. That same man then runs for president riding an image of children roasting on flames of debt, choosing as his running mate perhaps the only politician in America more pompous and self-righteous on the subject of the evils of borrowed money than the candidate himself. If Romney pulls off this whopper, you'll have to tip your hat to him: No one in history has ever successfully run for president riding this big of a lie. It's almost enough to make you think he really is qualified for the White House.

The unlikeliness of Romney's gambit isn't simply a reflection of his own artlessly unapologetic mindset – it stands as an emblem for the resiliency of the entire sociopathic Wall Street set he represents. Four years ago, the Mitt Romneys of the world nearly destroyed the global economy with their greed, shortsightedness and – most notably – wildly irresponsible use of debt in pursuit of personal profit. The sight was so disgusting that people everywhere were ready to drop an H-bomb on Lower Manhattan and bayonet the survivors. But today that same insane greed ethos, that same belief in the lunatic pursuit of instant borrowed millions – it's dusted itself off, it's had a shave and a shoeshine, and it's back out there running for president.

Mitt Romney, it turns out, is the perfect frontman for Wall Street's greed revolution. He's not a two-bit, shifty-eyed huckster like Lloyd Blankfein. He's not a sighing, eye-rolling, arrogant jerkwad like Jamie Dimon. But Mitt believes the same things those guys believe: He's been right with them on the front lines of the financialization revolution, a decades-long campaign in which the old, simple, let's-make-stuff-and-sell-it manufacturing economy was replaced with a new, highly complex, let's-take-stuff-and-trash-it financial economy. Instead of cars and airplanes, we built swaps, CDOs and other toxic financial products. Instead of building new companies from the ground up, we took out massive bank loans and used them to acquire existing firms, liquidating every asset in sight and leaving the target companies holding the note. The new borrow-and-conquer economy was morally sanctified by an almost religious faith in the grossly euphemistic concept of "creative destruction," and amounted to a total abdication of collective responsibility by America's rich, whose new thing was making assloads of money in ever-shorter campaigns of economic conquest, sending the proceeds offshore, and shrugging as the great towns and factories their parents and grandparents built were shuttered and boarded up, crushed by a true prairie fire of debt.

Mitt Romney – a man whose own father built cars and nurtured communities, and was one of the old-school industrial anachronisms pushed aside by the new generation's wealth grab – has emerged now to sell this make-nothing, take-everything, screw-everyone ethos to the world. He's Gordon Gekko, but a new and improved version, with better PR – and a bigger goal. A takeover artist all his life, Romney is now trying to take over America itself. And if his own history is any guide, we'll all end up paying for the acquisition.

Willard "Mitt" Romney's background in many ways suggests a man who was born to be president – disgustingly rich from birth, raised in prep schools, no early exposure to minorities outside of maids, a powerful daddy to clean up his missteps, and timely exemptions from military service. In Romney's bio there are some eerie early-life similarities to other recent presidential figures. (Is America really ready for another Republican president who was a prep-school cheerleader?) And like other great presidential double-talkers such as Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, Romney has shown particular aptitude in the area of telling multiple factual versions of his own life story.

"I longed in many respects to actually be in Vietnam and be representing our country there," he claimed years after the war. To a different audience, he said, "I was not planning on signing up for the military. It was not my desire to go off and serve in Vietnam."

Like John F. Kennedy and George W. Bush, men whose way into power was smoothed by celebrity fathers but who rebelled against their parental legacy as mature politicians, Mitt Romney's career has been both a tribute to and a repudiation of his famous father. George Romney in the 1950s became CEO of American Motors Corp., made a modest fortune betting on energy efficiency in an age of gas guzzlers and ended up serving as governor of the state of Michigan only two generations removed from the Romney clan's tradition of polygamy. For Mitt, who grew up worshipping his tall, craggily handsome, politically moderate father, life was less rocky: Cranbrook prep school in suburban Detroit, followed by Stanford in the Sixties, a missionary term in which he spent two and a half years trying (as he said) to persuade the French to "give up your wine," and Harvard Business School in the Seventies. Then, faced with making a career choice, Mitt chose an odd one: Already married and a father of two, he left Harvard and eschewed both politics and the law to enter the at-the-time unsexy world of financial consulting.

"When you get out of a place like Harvard, you can do anything – at least in the old days you could," says a prominent corporate lawyer on Wall Street who is familiar with Romney's career. "But he comes out, he not only has a Harvard Business School degree, he's got a national pedigree with his name. He could have done anything – but what does he do? He says, 'I'm going to spend my life loading up distressed companies with debt.' "

Romney started off at the Boston Consulting Group, where he showed an aptitude for crunching numbers and glad-handing clients. Then, in 1977, he joined a young entrepreneur named Bill Bain at a firm called Bain & Company, where he worked for six years before being handed the reins of a new firm-within-a-firm called Bain Capital.

In Romney's version of the tale, Bain Capital – which evolved into what is today known as a private equity firm – specialized in turning around moribund companies (Romney even wrote a book called Turnaround that complements his other nauseatingly self-complimentary book, No Apology) and helped create the Staples office-supply chain. On the campaign trail, Romney relentlessly trades on his own self-perpetuated reputation as a kind of altruistic rescuer of failing enterprises, never missing an opportunity to use the word "help" or "helped" in his description of what he and Bain did for companies. He might, for instance, describe himself as having been "deeply involved in helping other businesses" or say he "helped create tens of thousands of jobs."

The reality is that toward the middle of his career at Bain, Romney made a fateful strategic decision: He moved away from creating companies like Staples through venture capital schemes, and toward a business model that involved borrowing huge sums of money to take over existing firms, then extracting value from them by force. He decided, as he later put it, that "there's a lot greater risk in a startup than there is in acquiring an existing company." In the Eighties, when Romney made this move, this form of financial piracy became known as a leveraged buyout, and it achieved iconic status thanks to Gordon Gekko in Wall Street. Gekko's business strategy was essentially identical to the Romney–Bain model, only Gekko called himself a "liberator" of companies instead of a "helper."

Here's how Romney would go about "liberating" a company: A private equity firm like Bain typically seeks out floundering businesses with good cash flows. It then puts down a relatively small amount of its own money and runs to a big bank like Goldman Sachs or Citigroup for the rest of the financing. (Most leveraged buyouts are financed with 60 to 90 percent borrowed cash.) The takeover firm then uses that borrowed money to buy a controlling stake in the target company, either with or without its consent. When an LBO is done without the consent of the target, it's called a hostile takeover; such thrilling acts of corporate piracy were made legend in the Eighties, most notably the 1988 attack by notorious corporate raiders Kohlberg Kravis Roberts against RJR Nabisco, a deal memorialized in the book Barbarians at the Gate.

Romney and Bain avoided the hostile approach, preferring to secure the cooperation of their takeover targets by buying off a company's management with lucrative bonuses. Once management is on board, the rest is just math. So if the target company is worth $500 million, Bain might put down $20 million of its own cash, then borrow $350 million from an investment bank to take over a controlling stake.

But here's the catch. When Bain borrows all of that money from the bank, it's the target company that ends up on the hook for all of the debt.

Now your troubled firm – let's say you make tricycles in Alabama – has been taken over by a bunch of slick Wall Street dudes who kicked in as little as five percent as a down payment. So in addition to whatever problems you had before, Tricycle Inc. now owes Goldman or Citigroup $350 million. With all that new debt service to pay, the company's bottom line is suddenly untenable: You almost have to start firing people immediately just to get your costs down to a manageable level.

"That interest," says Lynn Turner, former chief accountant of the Securities and Exchange Commission, "just sucks the profit out of the company."
Fortunately, the geniuses at Bain who now run the place are there to help tell you whom to fire. And for the service it performs cutting your company's costs to help you pay off the massive debt that it, Bain, saddled your company with in the first place, Bain naturally charges a management fee, typically millions of dollars a year. So Tricycle Inc. now has two gigantic new burdens it never had before Bain Capital stepped into the picture: tens of millions in annual debt service, and millions more in "management fees." Since the initial acquisition of Tricycle Inc. was probably greased by promising the company's upper management lucrative bonuses, all that pain inevitably comes out of just one place: the benefits and payroll of the hourly workforce.

Once all that debt is added, one of two things can happen. The company can fire workers and slash benefits to pay off all its new obligations to Goldman Sachs and Bain, leaving it ripe to be resold by Bain at a huge profit. Or it can go bankrupt – this happens after about seven percent of all private equity buyouts – leaving behind one or more shuttered factory towns. Either way, Bain wins. By power-sucking cash value from even the most rapidly dying firms, private equity raiders like Bain almost always get their cash out before a target goes belly up.

This business model wasn't really "helping," of course – and it wasn't new. Fans of mob movies will recognize what's known as the "bust-out," in which a gangster takes over a restaurant or sporting goods store and then monetizes his investment by running up giant debts on the company's credit line. (Think Paulie buying all those cases of Cutty Sark in Goodfellas.) When the note comes due, the mobster simply torches the restaurant and collects the insurance money. Reduced to their most basic level, the leveraged buyouts engineered by Romney followed exactly the same business model. "It's the bust-out," one Wall Street trader says with a laugh. "That's all it is."

Private equity firms aren't necessarily evil by definition. There are many stories of successful turnarounds fueled by private equity, often involving multiple floundering businesses that are rolled into a single entity, eliminating duplicative overhead. Experian, the giant credit-rating tyrant, was acquired by Bain in the Nineties and went on to become an industry leader.

But there's a key difference between private equity firms and the businesses that were America's original industrial cornerstones, like the elder Romney's AMC. Everyone had a stake in the success of those old businesses, which spread prosperity by putting people to work. But even private equity's most enthusiastic adherents have difficulty explaining its benefit to society. Marc Wolpow, a former Bain colleague of Romney's, told reporters during Mitt's first Senate run that Romney erred in trying to sell his business as good for everyone. "I believed he was making a mistake by framing himself as a job creator," said Wolpow. "That was not his or Bain's or the industry's primary objective. The objective of the LBO business is maximizing returns for investors." When it comes to private equity, American workers – not to mention their families and communities – simply don't enter into the equation.

Take a typical Bain transaction involving an Indiana-based company called American Pad and Paper. Bain bought Ampad in 1992 for just $5 million, financing the rest of the deal with borrowed cash. Within three years, Ampad was paying $60 million in annual debt payments, plus an additional $7 million in management fees. A year later, Bain led Ampad to go public, cashed out about $50 million in stock for itself and its investors, charged the firm $2 million for arranging the IPO and pocketed another $5 million in "management" fees. Ampad wound up going bankrupt, and hundreds of workers lost their jobs, but Bain and Romney weren't crying: They'd made more than $100 million on a $5 million investment.

To recap: Romney, who has compared the devilish federal debt to a "nightmare" home mortgage that is "adjustable, no-money down and assigned to our children," took over Ampad with essentially no money down, saddled the firm with a nightmare debt and assigned the crushing interest payments not to Bain but to the children of Ampad's workers, who would be left holding the note long after Romney fled the scene. The mortgage analogy is so obvious, in fact, that even Romney himself has made it. He once described Bain's debt-fueled strategy as "using the equivalent of a mortgage to leverage up our investment."

Romney has always kept his distance from the real-life consequences of his profiteering. At one point during Bain's looting of Ampad, a worker named Randy Johnson sent a handwritten letter to Romney, asking him to intervene to save an Ampad factory in Marion, Indiana. In a sterling demonstration of manliness and willingness to face a difficult conversation, Romney, who had just lost his race for the Senate in Massachusetts, wrote Johnson that he was "sorry," but his lawyers had advised him not to get involved. (So much for the candidate who insists that his way is always to "fight to save every job.")

This is typical Romney, who consistently adopts a public posture of having been above the fray, with no blood on his hands from any of the deals he personally engineered. "I never actually ran one of our investments," he says in Turnaround. "That was left to management."

In reality, though, Romney was unquestionably the decider at Bain. "I insisted on having almost dictatorial powers," he bragged years after the Ampad deal. Over the years, colleagues would anonymously whisper stories about Mitt the Boss to the press, describing him as cunning, manipulative and a little bit nuts, with "an ability to identify people's insecurities and exploit them for his own benefit." One former Bain employee said that Romney would screw around with bonuses in small amounts, just to mess with people: He would give $3 million to one, $3.1 million to another and $2.9 million to a third, just to keep those below him on edge.

The private equity business in the early Nineties was dominated by a handful of takeover firms, from the spooky and politically connected Carlyle Group (a favorite subject of conspiracy-theory lit, with its connections to right-wingers like Donald Rumsfeld and George H.W. Bush) to the equally spooky Democrat-leaning assholes at the Blackstone Group. But even among such a colorful cast of characters, Bain had a reputation on Wall Street for secrecy and extreme weirdness – "the KGB of consulting." Its employees, known for their Mormonish uniform of white shirts and red power ties, were dubbed "Bainies" by other Wall Streeters, a rip on the fanatical "Moonies." The firm earned the name thanks to its idiotically adolescent Spy Kids culture, in which these glorified slumlords used code names, didn't carry business cards and even sang "company songs" to boost morale.

The seemingly religious flavor of Bain's culture smacks of the generally cultish ethos on Wall Street, in which all sorts of ethically questionable behaviors are justified as being necessary in service of the church of making money. Romney belongs to a true-believer subset within that cult, with a revolutionary's faith in the wisdom of the pure free market, in which destroying companies and sucking the value out of them for personal gain is part of the greater good, and governments should "stand aside and allow the creative destruction inherent in the free economy."

That cultlike zeal helps explains why Romney takes such a curiously unapologetic approach to his own flip-flopping. His infamous changes of stance are not little wispy ideological alterations of a few degrees here or there – they are perfect and absolute mathematical reversals, as in "I believe that abortion should be safe and legal in this country" and "I am firmly pro-life." Yet unlike other politicians, who at least recognize that saying completely contradictory things presents a political problem, Romney seems genuinely puzzled by the public's insistence that he be consistent. "I'm not going to apologize for having changed my mind," he likes to say. It's an attitude that recalls the standard defense offered by Wall Street in the wake of some of its most recent and notorious crimes: Goldman Sachs excused its lying to clients, for example, by insisting that its customers are "sophisticated investors" who should expect to be lied to. "Last time I checked," former Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack sneered after the same scandal, "we were in business to be profitable."

Within the cult of Wall Street that forged Mitt Romney, making money justifies any behavior, no matter how venal. The look on Romney's face when he refuses to apologize says it all: Hey, I'm trying to win an election. We're all grown-ups here. After the Ampad deal, Romney expressed contempt for critics who lived in "fantasy land." "This is the real world," he said, "and in the real world there is nothing wrong with companies trying to compete, trying to stay alive, trying to make money."

In the old days, making money required sharing the wealth: with assembly-line workers, with middle management, with schools and communities, with investors. Even the Gilded Age robber barons, despite their unapologetic efforts to keep workers from getting any rights at all, built America in spite of themselves, erecting railroads and oil wells and telegraph wires. And from the time the monopolists were reined in with antitrust laws through the days when men like Mitt Romney's dad exited center stage in our economy, the American social contract was pretty consistent: The rich got to stay rich, often filthy rich, but they paid taxes and a living wage and everyone else rose at least a little bit along with them.

But under Romney's business model, leveraging other people's debt means you can carve out big profits for yourself and leave everyone else holding the bag. Despite what Romney claims, the rate of return he provided for Bain's investors over the years wasn't all that great. Romney biographer and Wall Street Journal reporter Brett Arends, who analyzed Bain's performance between 1984 and 1998, concludes that the firm's returns were likely less than 30 percent per year, which happened to track more or less with the stock market's average during that time. "That's how much money you could have made by issuing company bonds and then spending the money picking stocks out of the paper at random," Arends observes. So for all the destruction Romney wreaked on Middle America in the name of "trying to make money," investors could have just plunked their money into traditional stocks and gotten pretty much the same returns.

The only ones who profited in a big way from all the job-killing debt that Romney leveraged were Mitt and his buddies at Bain, along with Wall Street firms like Goldman and Citigroup. Barry Ritholtz, author of Bailout Nation, says the criticisms of Bain about layoffs and meanness miss a more important point, which is that the firm's profit-producing record is absurdly mediocre, especially when set against all the trouble and pain its business model causes. "Bain's fundamental flaw, at least according to the math," Ritholtz writes, "is that they took lots of risk, use immense leverage and charged enormous fees, for performance that was more or less the same as [stock] indexing."

'I'm not a Romney guy, because I'm not a Bain guy," says Lenny Patnode, in an Irish pub in the factory town of Pittsfield, Massachusetts. "But I'm not an Obama guy, either. Just so you know."

I feel bad even asking Patnode about Romney. Big and burly, with white hair and the thick forearms of a man who's stocked a shelf or two in his lifetime, he seems to belong to an era before things like leveraged debt even existed. For 38 years, Patnode worked for a company called KB Toys in Pittsfield. He was the longest-serving employee in the company's history, opening some of the firm's first mall stores, making some of its canniest product buys ("Tamagotchi pets," he says, beaming, "and Tech-Decks, too"), traveling all over the world to help build an empire that at its peak included 1,300 stores. "There were times when I worked seven days a week, 16 hours a day," he says. "I opened three stores in two months once."

Then in 2000, right before Romney gave up his ownership stake in Bain Capital, the firm targeted KB Toys. The debacle that followed serves as a prime example of the conflict between the old model of American business, built from the ground up with sweat and industry know-how, and the new globalist model, the Romney model, which uses leverage as a weapon of high-speed conquest.

In a typical private-equity fragging, Bain put up a mere $18 million to acquire KB Toys and got big banks to finance the remaining $302 million it needed. Less than a year and a half after the purchase, Bain decided to give itself a gift known as a "dividend recapitalization." The firm induced KB Toys to redeem $121 million in stock and take out more than $66 million in bank loans – $83 million of which went directly into the pockets of Bain's owners and investors, including Romney. "The dividend recap is like borrowing someone else's credit card to take out a cash advance, and then leaving them to pay it off," says Heather Slavkin Corzo, who monitors private equity takeovers as the senior legal policy adviser for the AFL-CIO.

Bain ended up earning a return of at least 370 percent on the deal, while KB Toys fell into bankruptcy, saddled with millions in debt. KB's former parent company, Big Lots, alleged in bankruptcy court that Bain's "unjustified" return on the dividend recap was actually "900 percent in a mere 16 months." Patnode, by contrast, was fired in December 2008, after almost four decades on the job. Like other employees, he didn't get a single day's severance.

I ask Slavkin Corzo what Bain's justification was for the giant dividend recapitalization in the KB Toys acquisition. The question throws her, as though she's surprised anyone would ask for a reason a company like Bain would loot a firm like KB Toys. "It wasn't like, 'Yay, we did a good job, we get a dividend,'" she says with a laugh. "It was like, 'We can do this, so we will.' "

At the time of the KB Toys deal, Romney was a Bain investor and owner, making him a mere beneficiary of the raping and pillaging, rather than its direct organizer. Moreover, KB's demise was hastened by a host of genuine market forces, including competition from video games and cellphones. But there's absolutely no way to look at what Bain did at KB and see anything but a cash grab – one that followed the business model laid out by Romney. Rather than cutting costs and tightening belts, Bain added $300 million in debt to the firm's bottom line while taking out more than $120 million in cash – an outright looting that creditors later described in a lawsuit as "breaking open the piggy bank." What's more, Bain smoothed the deal in typical fashion by giving huge bonuses to the company's top managers as the firm headed toward bankruptcy. CEO Michael Glazer got an incredible $18.4 million, while CFO Robert Feldman received $4.8 million and senior VP Thomas Alfonsi took home $3.3 million.

And what did Bain bring to the table in return for its massive, outsize payout? KB Toys had built a small empire by targeting middle-class buyers with value-priced products. It succeeded mainly because the firm's leaders had a great instinct for what they were making and selling. These were people who had been in the specialty toy business since 1922; collectively, they had millions of man-hours of knowledge about how the industry works and how toy customers behave. KB's president in the Eighties, the late Saul Rubenstein, used to carry around a giant computer printout of the company's inventory, and would fall asleep reading it on the weekends, the pages clasped to his chest. "He knew the name and number of all those toys," his widow, Shirley, says proudly. "He loved toys."

Bain's experience in the toy industry, by contrast, was precisely bupkus. They didn't know a damn thing about the business they had taken over – and they never cared to learn. The firm's entire contribution was $18 million in cash and a huge mound of borrowed money that gave it the power to pull the levers. "The people who came in after – they were never toy people," says Shirley Rubenstein. To make matters worse, former employees say, Bain deluged them with requests for paperwork and reports, forcing them to worry more about the whims of their new bosses than the demands of their customers. "We took our eye off the ball," Patnode says. "And if you take your eye off the ball, you strike out."

In the end, Bain never bothered to come up with a plan for how KB Toys could meet the 21st-century challenges of video games and cellphone gadgets that were the company's ostensible downfall. And that's where Romney's self-touted reputation as a turnaround specialist is a myth. In the Bain model, the actual turnaround isn't necessary. It's just a cover story. It's nice for the private equity firm if it happens, because it makes the acquired company more attractive for resale or an IPO. But it's mostly irrelevant to the success of the takeover model, where huge cash returns are extracted whether the captured firm thrives or not.

"The thing about it is, nobody gets hurt," says Patnode. "Except the people who worked here."

Romney was a prime mover in the radical social and political transformation that was cooked up by Wall Street beginning in the 1980s. In fact, you can trace the whole history of the modern age of financialization just by following the highly specific corner of the economic universe inhabited by the leveraged buyout business, where Mitt Romney thrived. If you look at the number of leveraged buyouts dating back two or three decades, you see a clear pattern: Takeovers rose sharply with each of Wall Street's great easy-money schemes, then plummeted just as sharply after each of those scams crashed and burned, leaving the rest of us with the bill.

In the Eighties, when Romney and Bain were cutting their teeth in the LBO business, the primary magic trick involved the junk bonds pioneered by convicted felon Mike Milken, which allowed firms like Bain to find easy financing for takeovers by using wildly overpriced distressed corporate bonds as collateral. Junk bonds gave the Gordon Gekkos of the world sudden primacy over old-school industrial titans like the Fords and the Rockefellers: For the first time, the ability to make deals became more valuable than the ability to make stuff, and the ability to instantly engineer billions in illusory financing trumped the comparatively slow process of making and selling products for gradual returns.
Romney was right in the middle of this radical change. In fact, according to The Boston Globe – whose in-depth reporting on Romney and Bain has spanned three decades – one of Romney's first LBO deals, and one of his most profitable, involved Mike Milken himself. Bain put down $10 million in cash, got $300 million in financing from Milken and bought a pair of department-store chains, Bealls Brothers and Palais Royal. In what should by now be a familiar outcome, the two chains – which Bain merged into a single outfit called Stage Stores – filed for bankruptcy protection in 2000 under the weight of more than $444 million in debt. As always, Bain took no responsibility for the company's demise. (If you search the public record, you will not find a single instance of Mitt Romney taking responsibility for a company's failure.) Instead, Bain blamed Stage's collapse on "operating problems" that took place three years after Bain cashed out, finishing with a $175 million return on its initial investment of $10 million.

But here's the interesting twist: Romney made the Bealls-Palais deal just as the federal government was launching charges of massive manipulation and insider trading against Milken and his firm, Drexel Burnham Lambert. After what must have been a lengthy and agonizing period of moral soul-searching, however, Romney decided not to kill the deal, despite its shady financing. "We did not say, 'Oh, my goodness, Drexel has been accused of something, not been found guilty,' " Romney told reporters years after the deal. "Should we basically stop the transaction and blow the whole thing up?"

In an even more incredible disregard for basic morality, Romney forged ahead with the deal even though Milken's case was being heard by a federal district judge named Milton Pollack, whose wife, Moselle, happened to be the chairwoman of none other than Palais Royal. In short, one of Romney's first takeover deals was financed by dirty money – and one of the corporate chiefs about to receive a big payout from Bain was married to the judge hearing the case. Although the SEC took no formal action, it issued a sharp criticism, complaining that Romney was allowing Milken's money to have a possible influence over "the administration of justice."

After Milken and his junk bond scheme crashed in the late Eighties, Romney and other takeover artists moved on to Wall Street's next get-rich-quick scheme: the tech-Internet stock bubble. By 1997 and 1998, there were nearly $400 billion in leveraged buyouts a year, as easy money once again gave these financial piracy firms the ammunition they needed to raid companies like KB Toys. Firms like Bain even have a colorful pirate name for the pools of takeover money they raise in advance from pension funds, university endowments and other institutional investors. "They call it dry powder," says Slavkin Corzo, the union adviser.

After the Internet bubble burst and private equity started cashing in on Wall Street's mortgage scam, LBO deals ballooned to almost $900 billion in 2006. Once again, storied companies with long histories and deep regional ties were descended upon by Bain and other pirates, saddled with hundreds of millions in debt, forced to pay huge management fees and "dividend recapitalizations," and ridden into bankruptcy amid waves of layoffs. Established firms like Del Monte, Hertz and Dollar General were all taken over in a "prairie fire of debt" – one even more destructive than the government borrowing that Romney is flogging on the campaign trial. When Hertz was conquered in 2005 by a trio of private equity firms, including the Carlyle Group, the interest payments on its debt soared by a monstrous 80 percent, forcing the company to eliminate a third of its 32,000 jobs.

In 2010, a year after the last round of Hertz layoffs, Carlyle teamed up with Bain to take $500 million out of another takeover target: the parent company of Dunkin' Donuts and Baskin-Robbins. Dunkin' had to take out a $1.25 billion loan to pay a dividend to its new private equity owners. So think of this the next time you go to Dunkin' Donuts for a cup of coffee: A small cup of joe costs about $1.69 in most outlets, which means that for years to come, Dunkin' Donuts will have to sell about 2,011,834 small coffees every month – about $3.4 million – just to meet the interest payments on the loan it took out to pay Bain and Carlyle their little one-time dividend. And that doesn't include the principal on the loan, or the additional millions in debt that Dunkin' has to pay every year to get out from under the $2.4 billion in debt it's now saddled with after having the privilege of being taken over – with borrowed money – by the firm that Romney built.

If you haven't heard much about how takeover deals like Dunkin' and KB Toys work, that's because Mitt Romney and his private equity brethren don't want you to. The new owners of American industry are the polar opposites of the Milton Hersheys and Andrew Carnegies who built this country, commercial titans who longed to leave visible legacies of their accomplishments, erecting hospitals and schools and libraries, sometimes leaving behind thriving towns that bore their names.

The men of the private equity generation want no such thing. "We try to hide religiously," explained Steven Feinberg, the CEO of a takeover firm called Cerberus Capital Management that recently drove one of its targets into bankruptcy after saddling it with $2.3 billion in debt. "If anyone at Cerberus has his picture in the paper and a picture of his apartment, we will do more than fire that person," Feinberg told shareholders in 2007. "We will kill him. The jail sentence will be worth it."

Which brings us to another aspect of Romney's business career that has largely been hidden from voters: His personal fortune would not have been possible without the direct assistance of the U.S. government. The taxpayer-funded subsidies that Romney has received go well beyond the humdrum, backdoor, welfare-sucking that all supposedly self-made free marketeers inevitably indulge in. Not that Romney hasn't done just fine at milking the government when it suits his purposes, the most obvious instance being the incredible $1.5 billion in aid he siphoned out of the U.S. Treasury as head of the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake – a sum greater than all federal spending for the previous seven U.S. Olympic games combined. Romney, the supposed fiscal conservative, blew through an average of $625,000 in taxpayer money per athlete – an astounding increase of 5,582 percent over the $11,000 average at the 1984 games in Los Angeles. In 1993, right as he was preparing to run for the Senate, Romney also engineered a government deal worth at least $10 million for Bain's consulting firm, when it was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. (See "The Federal Bailout That Saved Romney")

But the way Romney most directly owes his success to the government is through the structure of the tax code. The entire business of leveraged buyouts wouldn't be possible without a provision in the federal code that allows companies like Bain to deduct the interest on the debt they use to acquire and loot their targets. This is the same universally beloved tax deduction you can use to write off your mortgage interest payments, so tampering with it is considered political suicide – it's been called the "third rail of tax reform." So the Romney who routinely rails against the national debt as some kind of child-killing "mortgage" is the same man who spent decades exploiting a tax deduction specifically designed for mortgage holders in order to bilk every dollar he could out of U.S. businesses before burning them to the ground.
Because minus that tax break, Romney's debt-based takeovers would have been unsustainably expensive. Before Lynn Turner became chief accountant of the SEC, where he reviewed filings on takeover deals, he crunched the numbers on leveraged buyouts as an accountant at a Big Four auditing firm. "In the majority of these deals," Turner says, "the tax deduction has a big enough impact on the bottom line that the takeover wouldn't work without it."

Thanks to the tax deduction, in other words, the government actually incentivizes the kind of leverage-based takeovers that Romney built his fortune on. Romney the businessman built his career on two things that Romney the candidate decries: massive debt and dumb federal giveaways. "I don't know what Romney would be doing but for debt and its tax-advantaged position in the tax code," says a prominent Wall Street lawyer, "but he wouldn't be fabulously wealthy."

Adding to the hypocrisy, the money that Romney personally pocketed on Bain's takeover deals was usually taxed not as income, but either as capital gains or as "carried interest," both of which are capped at a maximum rate of 15 percent. In addition, reporters have uncovered plenty of evidence that Romney takes full advantage of offshore tax havens: He has an interest in at least 12 Bain funds, worth a total of $30 million, that are based in the Cayman Islands; he has reportedly used a squirrelly tax shelter known as a "blocker corporation" that cheats taxpayers out of some $100 million a year; and his wife, Ann, had a Swiss bank account worth $3 million. As a private equity pirate, Romney pays less than half the tax rate of most American executives – less, even, than teachers, firefighters, cops and nurses. Asked about the fact that he paid a tax rate of only 13.9 percent on income of $21.7 million in 2010, Romney responded testily that the massive windfall he enjoys from exploiting the tax code is "entirely legal and fair."

Essentially, Romney got rich in a business that couldn't exist without a perverse tax break, and he got to keep double his earnings because of another loophole – a pair of bureaucratic accidents that have not only teamed up to threaten us with a Mitt Romney presidency but that make future Romneys far more likely. "Those two tax rules distort the economics of private equity investments, making them much more lucrative than they should be," says Rebecca Wilkins, senior counsel at the Center for Tax Justice. "So we get more of that activity than the market would support on its own."

Listen to Mitt Romney speak, and see if you can notice what's missing. This is a man who grew up in Michigan, went to college in California, walked door to door through the streets of southern France as a missionary and was a governor of Massachusetts, the home of perhaps the most instantly recognizable, heavily accented English this side of Edinburgh. Yet not a trace of any of these places is detectable in Romney's diction. None of the people in any of those places bled in and left a mark on the man.

Romney is a man from nowhere. In his post-regional attitude, he shares something with his campaign opponent, Barack Obama, whose background is a similarly jumbled pastiche of regionally nonspecific non-identity. But in the way he bounced around the world as a half-orphaned child, Obama was more like an involuntary passenger in the demographic revolution reshaping the planet than one of its leaders.

Romney, on the other hand, is a perfect representative of one side of the ominous cultural divide that will define the next generation, not just here in America but all over the world. Forget about the Southern strategy, blue versus red, swing states and swing voters – all of those political clichés are quaint relics of a less threatening era that is now part of our past, or soon will be. The next conflict defining us all is much more unnerving.

That conflict will be between people who live somewhere, and people who live nowhere. It will be between people who consider themselves citizens of actual countries, to which they have patriotic allegiance, and people to whom nations are meaningless, who live in a stateless global archipelago of privilege – a collection of private schools, tax havens and gated residential communities with little or no connection to the outside world.

Mitt Romney isn't blue or red. He's an archipelago man. That's a big reason that voters have been slow to warm up to him. From LBJ to Bill Clinton to George W. Bush to Sarah Palin, Americans like their politicians to sound like they're from somewhere, to be human symbols of our love affair with small towns, the girl next door, the little pink houses of Mellencamp myth. Most of those mythical American towns grew up around factories – think chocolate bars from Hershey, baseball bats from Louisville, cereals from Battle Creek. Deep down, what scares voters in both parties the most is the thought that these unique and vital places are vanishing or eroding – overrun by immigrants or the forces of globalism or both, with giant Walmarts descending like spaceships to replace the corner grocer, the family barber and the local hardware store, and 1,000 cable channels replacing the school dance and the gossip at the local diner.

Obama ran on "change" in 2008, but Mitt Romney represents a far more real and seismic shift in the American landscape. Romney is the frontman and apostle of an economic revolution, in which transactions are manufactured instead of products, wealth is generated without accompanying prosperity, and Cayman Islands partnerships are lovingly erected and nurtured while American communities fall apart. The entire purpose of the business model that Romney helped pioneer is to move money into the archipelago from the places outside it, using massive amounts of taxpayer-subsidized debt to enrich a handful of billionaires. It's a vision of society that's crazy, vicious and almost unbelievably selfish, yet it's running for president, and it has a chance of winning. Perhaps that change is coming whether we like it or not. Perhaps Mitt Romney is the best man to manage the transition. But it seems a little early to vote for that kind of wholesale surrender.

This story is from the September 13, 2012 issue of Rolling Stone.

BluegrassCat

09-26-2012, 11:47 PM

Romney is getting so pathetic it's becoming hard for conservatives to watch him. Joe Scarborough can't help but wince with embarrassment.

Joe Scarborough Reacts To Romney-Ryan Chant: 'Sweet Jesus' - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CSVSwSaypg)

If you don't cringe or laugh at this, well, you're probably Mitt Romney.

yodajazz

09-27-2012, 04:27 AM

Great article, by Tabibi, Propsero! Not only does it it details how Romney makes his millions, it actually goes a long way in explaining how the US moved away from manufacturing. In this view, the massive debts incurred by takeover, had toxic weight to the bottom lines, making firms inoperable. The other side blames the American worker, and unions. But the taker-over bottom line is pure profit, no matter if the company cuts 10,000 jobs (Hertz). The actual product is irrelevant, unless they can prepare the company for sale and move on. The KB Toy company is, is a fitting ironic illustration of the differences in the era. They were successful because they made products mainly for kids. But their end was paying out millions to execs, consulting (centered of finance, not the products), and fees related to being taken over. The whole article makes it clear why wealth is being more concentrated to the top income percentiles.

I will add, to hide their activities, there is a network of propaganda which makes villians of everyday people, who just want to live modestly and support thier families. I believe its the Mitt Romney's of the world who see, and treat them as victims, not the people themselves.

Thanks again Propero. I might not have read it, as just a link, but I couldn't stop once I started reading it here.

Ben

09-27-2012, 04:48 AM

Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital
How the GOP presidential candidate and his private equity firm staged an epic wealth grab, destroyed jobs – and stuck others with the bill

By Matt Taibbi

This story is from the September 13, 2012 issue of Rolling Stone.

Thanks for the article Prospero.
Another interesting article by Matt Taibbi:

This Presidential Race Should Never Have Been This Close:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/this-presidential-race-should-never-have-been-this-close-20120925

yodajazz

09-27-2012, 06:27 AM

Ben

09-27-2012, 07:14 AM

One more important thing: This article supports my assertion that more money to the wealthy class, does not nescessarily create jobs. Bain profitted whether jobs were created or not. And in fact their taker overs created more company debt ,that put jobs in jeapordy. In addition investors have the opportunity to make money off commodities which include oil. This has the effect of possibly driving up the costs of everyday goods such as gas or wheat, since they typically try to sell at a higher price. I consider "tax cuts for the wealthiest" to be a the center of the Republican ideas for creating a stronger economy. I disagree with their premise. It's not about 'class warfare', it's about a healthy society in balance.

Romney, nor any corporate officer or CEO, is in business, as we know, to create jobs.... It's profits, high profits.
I mean, terms like competitiveness, economic growth and creating jobs means: profits, profits and profits -- :)
Nothing inherently wrong with that. I mean, corporations are designed to do that.
I mean, if Mitt Romney were serious about job creation, well, he'd press for getting out of all these so-called free trade agreements.
Get back to markets. Which corporations work to undercut.
And, too, corporations were designed to destroy markets. I mean, maybe Romney, if he were serious, would talk about this. But he won't.
He is, as the actor Woody Harrelson said, typical of most politicians. You serve yourself and your close buddies. That's Mitt.
He's like the typical NFL owner: he doesn't care. He cares about big bucks for himself. That's about it.
Is there hope. Well, yeah. The hope is in people. Not politicians.
People have to get away from this assertion: that if we only elect the right guy or gal. Ain't gonna happen.
Even Ron Paul would've been constricted by the Congress, the banking establishment and the rest of the corporate oligopoly....

buttslinger

09-27-2012, 09:34 PM

The first presidential debate between Republican nominee Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama will focus almost exclusively on the economy, according to the list of topics announced by PBS journalist Jim Lehrer, the first debate's moderator. The first three of six 15-minute segments will be focused solely on the state of the US economy, followed by sections on governing, healthcare, and the role of government.

All Obama has to do is act Presidential, not say anything, and hope Mitt bets him ten grand on the World Series.

Tuned into Rush on the car radio today. He's gone WFO RACIST.

BluegrassCat

09-28-2012, 03:26 AM

robertlouis

09-28-2012, 06:22 AM

The Republican extremists are panicking as it becomes more clear America can't wait to re-elect President Obama. The bubble conservatives have constructed for the past 4 years is getting closer and closer to being popped and all the socialism/muslim/kenyan/anti-american rhetoric is revealed for the Fox News invention it is.

From http://election.princeton.edu/electoral-college-map/

Interesting term. It seems to describe the GOP mainstream these days, so "extreme" might be the wrong word. "Moderate" Republicans must be more or less disenfranchised these days, unless they vote for a third party candidate.

Come back Ike.

yodajazz

09-28-2012, 08:55 AM

Interesting term. It seems to describe the GOP mainstream these days, so "extreme" might be the wrong word. "Moderate" Republicans must be more or less disenfranchised these days, unless they vote for a third party candidate.

Come back Ike.

Yes, I think Ike truly believed in American ideals, that included all Americans. But I think he was also used to the 'top down' military approach of leadership, and eventually became disenchanted with the relationship of government, and big business. Within his administration the rise of the CIA began to gather momentum. I dont see the CIA as something that Ike was particularly encouraging of. If one looks in depth at the direction of the CIA, especially in those days one will find that many of its operations, were really in support of big business interests. If you have extra time, look up the political connections of the Becthel Corporation on Wikipedia. The even have ex-CIA directors on the payroll as consutants, as well as other US Cabinet level , people in their employ,(mostly Republicans). But an example of inventention of foreign nations, under Ike, was the over throw of Iran's new democratic government, and the installation of the Shah, most notably because they nationalized a large British oil company.

But the person Ike had to deal with, was CIA director Allen Dulles, and his brother John Foster Dulles, who was Secretary of State. A big part of his background was connection with business interests, who made money in Germany rebuilding after WW I, though the period, after Hitler's rise to power, and invasion of Europe, including war related industries. They did not directly support Hitler, but had partnerships with business's who supported him. This is an article where I got this information from:
http://www.enter.net/~torve/trogholm/secret/rightroots/dulles.html (Note the prominent mentions of the Bush family).
So I think Ike began to see that the interests of big business did not always coincide with what is best for the American people. Thus his final legacy, in his farewell address was a warning of this.

Now today we have Mitt Romney, promoting the vision that what is good for big business, and the wealthiest, is the only answer to US progress. I think that back in Reagan's day, Romney would be consdered a traitor for going into China to build businesses, but for Romney it's inconsequential.

hippifried

09-28-2012, 07:10 PM

buttslinger

09-28-2012, 08:01 PM

A bit off topic, but yeah, before WW II, the US had NYC, and the rest of the country was Mayberry RFD. They didn't even have sub-divisions yet. The A-bomb was and is the reason the US went from the depression to the highest standard of living there is. (kinda)

When Obama wins, the Republicans have already admitted they will back the fuck up on taxes, because they have to. The Bush tax cuts are set to expire, and they don't want the manditory cuts on the Military that are scheduled from the last budget fiasco.

It will never happen, but I wouldn't be adverse to a two year college/military stretch for every kid when they're 18 and 19 like Israel. They could patrol the borders or inspect sea and airports for illegal activity. Or build Parks and clean up the garbage. Get the kids out of the house and see the world, whatever.

It seems that whatever policies the Republicans stand for, however the planets line up, there's always a billionaire profiting from it somehow. Romney's secret speech unmasked that to the dopey American people, I think. Even in Idaho. For alot of rural America, Conservative TV and Radio is their college. Someone needs to offer Shepard Smith 500 million for a tell-all book.

buttslinger

09-29-2012, 09:22 AM

smoke em if ya got em

hippifried

09-29-2012, 10:22 AM

The bomb? Nah. It was the intense government spending coupled with removal of such a large part of the labor force. All out war is Keynesianism on steroids.

yodajazz

09-29-2012, 08:13 PM

Ike was a bag man for the military & the "defense contractors". Yeah yeah I know, I'm going to hear all kinds of "But he warned us about the military industrial complex! Blah blah ad -nauseum...". He created it to keep the WWII profiteers in business. Even the interstate highway system was/is a "defense" project. The fiasco in Korea was already going on, but he set up the open ended cease fire that has become the perpetual war with a permanent threat of escalation. We've kinda been in that mode all over the world ever since. There's always something going on, & the Pentagon always gets top priority. Now we've developed this quasi-religious hero worship of the military to shut up the gripes over the stupidity of our interventionist policies. "What?!? You don't support the troops?!?" Pffffft!

Yeah thanks Ike, for making us unAmerican.

I get the feeling more that Ike was riding top a big machine over which he had little control. More of a figurehead, so to speak. I vaguely recall jokes near the end of his terms about spending so much time on the golf course. But think about his situation, where one brother was Secretary of State, and the brother was head of the CIA. All the brothers have to do is agree on a consistant story, and they could get what ever they wanted, probably. And then stuff is fed to the media about the "communist meance" and the public is contolled also. So then Ike's warning in this context, was speaking out on who's really running the show. So we end up in the situation where, the US, as the symbol of. the great democracy, supports brutal dictatorships. The public is told that they are 'strategic friends', that is allies against the enemy of the day. But the truth, is it's most about some US corpoartion's private business dealings.

Let's use a specific situation. The US is attacked on 9/11 and 19 of 21 hijackers are from Saudi Arabia, (if you believe, the official story). But the Becthel Corp is over there building shopping malls and the major projects. They have major government connections, with a former head of the CIA, as a paid consultant, and cabinet level people on their board, etc. And Bin Laden's wealthy family has investments, in the Carlyle Group (?), who also has business dealings with Bush Sr. You see where I'm going with this?

buttslinger

09-29-2012, 10:05 PM

You guys are reaching. During the Cuban Missle Crisis, Kennedy sat down with all the top men of the Military. He didn't even know who they were! The number one responsibility of the President is to prevent nuclear war. And nucular war. I just read an article in the Post that said we're going to spend a few billion removing the rust from our ICBM program, literally there's rust in the missle silos. Pakistan will never attack India, and North Korea will never attack South Korea, because we'd melt them in 20 minutes. That's called LEVERAGE.
Presidents come and go, but the lights in the Pentagon have been on since 1945.
If Hitler had the BOMB in spring of '44, we'd be dancing Polkas and all be driving Volkswagens.

Ben

09-30-2012, 02:26 AM

Is What Mitt Romney Said About the 47% True?

Reality Check: Is What Mitt Romney Said About the 47% True? - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5CL_FbRNDU&feature=plcp)

Ben

09-30-2012, 02:29 AM

Was Rep. Paul Ryan For Defense Cuts Before He Was Against Them? - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Al2HAxRTJRU&feature=plcp)

onmyknees

09-30-2012, 05:37 AM

Saw this today on Women for Obama.com (an official arm of the Obama-Biden campaign) This is the same bullshit Sandra Fluke was peddling at the convention. It's common knowledge that a healthy woman with prescription in hand can get birth control for under 10 bucks a month at Wal-Mart. In New York a pack of Marlborough's will set you back about the same amount. Liberals use fear and decption as a campaign tactic, and the truth just isn't something you're all that familiar with, and you do it with apparent impunity...Maybe you could tell me how they arrive at the 18,000 figure? Is that per year...or over the course of a lifetime? Does it include dinner, a movie and a cell phone with each doctor visit? Are they counting a few abortions as "birth control" ?

Barry told some huge unchallanged whoppers to Steve Croft on 60 minutes about the debt last week, (after telling David Letterman he couldn't remember how much it was) lying has become such a habit and so successful on huge issues like ObamaCare and the deficit, it's become apparent the liars thought they could get away with a big lie about Benghazi. And why not try it? Maybe Univision will challenge him, but until now no one else has or will. This time, the deception might just be to grand even for the sycophants in the dinosaur media . Let's see if the Deceivers can pull this one off.

trish

09-30-2012, 03:32 PM

Dear Mom and Dad,

Thanks for the Silver Spoon.

Love,
Your Son, Mitt

Prospero

09-30-2012, 05:58 PM

King midas in reverse...

Everything Mitt and Bain touched turned to gold for him (thanks to considerable financial help from the US tax payer) but in the majority of cases meant unemployment and suffering for thousands who used to work for the firms he killed.

BluegrassCat

09-30-2012, 05:58 PM

Saw this today on Women for Obama.com

No you didn't, liar. You saw it on newsbusters or dailycaller. You can't even be honest about where you get brainwashed.

Let's see if the Deceivers can pull this one off.

Doesn't look like it. After running the most dishonest campaign in modern politics, Lyin' Ryan & Romney are getting shellacked in the polls. So no, "the Deceivers" don't appear to be pulling it off.

That 18K figure is the average lifetime cost of birth control without Obamacare. So looks like their ad was accurate and you were duped by the right-wing bubble again. LMFAO

pantybulge69

09-30-2012, 09:07 PM

Interesting term. It seems to describe the GOP mainstream these days, so "extreme" might be the wrong word. "Moderate" Republicans must be more or less disenfranchised these days, unless they vote for a third party candidate.

Come back Ike.

the GOP can talk about Romney "go large" on the debates as much
as they like but he will be no different than the GOP primaries and even just breaking even with a great debater like Obama himself won't do it for Mitt who Americans know by that 47% video alone that he's not in it for for the middle class,elderly,military vets and college students.

And the latest polls are simply pissing them off and driving their asses nuts.!!!
such that they are even turning on each other. Obama lighting up the key swing states and primarily Ohio (to which no GOP president has won without winning Ohio)

what's funny is that they are trying to go back to Jimmy Carter/Regan election polls to try to convince themselves differently than what polls
are indicating ( including their own FOX poll)
Romney is certainly no Ronald Reagan .....and Obama is certainly no Jimmy Carter!

only way i think the very non-appealing Romney can win the election with this kind of lame momentum is 1) a cheating voter fraud scam .and 2) polls an unusual number of complacent voters.

Ben

09-30-2012, 09:15 PM

Sadly, Schwarzenegger can't run for President. One: he wasn't born here. And two: he cheated on his doting -- and liberal :) -- wife:

Schwarzenegger bucks GOP: I performed same sex weddings as governor:

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/09/30/schwarzenegger-bucks-gop-i-performed-same-sex-weddings-as-governor/

Thus they went with the old tax evader Gordon Gekko.... I mean, Mitt Romney:

Ben

10-19-2012, 03:19 AM

Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney's approval rating is way up after a prostitute reveals she paid Romney to sleep with her, not the other way around:

Romney's Numbers Skyrocket After Prostitute Reveals She Paid Him To Sleep With Her - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHWAeSmSlB0)

onmyknees

10-19-2012, 04:43 AM

Well here we are 4 weeks after the OP was doing a little chest pumping and spiking the football and all the sycophants joined the parade.
Kinda looks foolish now doesn't he?
This race is a dead heat.

Hey speaking about imploding...did ya hear Dopey Joe's latest gaffe today...."how many of you out there know somebody who was injured or lost in Iraq or Iran ??" :dancing::dancing:

Prospero

10-19-2012, 09:24 AM

blah blah blah.....

Willie Escalade

10-20-2012, 01:34 AM

Romnesia and Paulzheimers...they're covered by Obamacare since they are both pre-existing conditions...:whistle:

Obama warns of "Romnesia" symptoms - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2nupmbvlEo)

Ben

10-20-2012, 08:59 PM

Why ObamneyCare is Two Versions of the Same Thing
Turning Health Care Into Corporate Profits

by PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

Dr. Robert S. Dotson argues that Obamneycare is two versions of the same thing. A person has to be gullible and uninformed to believe the claims of Obama and Romney that their replacements for Medicare will save money and improve care. What the schemes do is convert public monies into private profits.
The exploding costs described by Dr. Dotson and the rising profits for private corporations are paid for by reducing health care. For example, Betsy McCaughey, former lieutenant governor of New York, writing in Investors Business Daily (http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials-perspective/101212-629190-obamacare-medicare-cuts-danger-to-senior-citizens.htm?p=full) reports that “On Oct. 1, the Obama administration started awarding bonus points to hospitals that spend the least on elderly patients.” The result will be fewer knee and hip replacements, angioplasty, bypass surgery, and cataract operations. These procedures transformed aging by allowing the elderly, who formerly languished in wheelchairs and nursing homes, to lead active lives.
Obamacare rolls back the clock. “By cutting $716 billion from future Medicare funding over the next decade and rewarding the hospitals that spend the least on seniors, the Obama health law will make these procedures hard to get and less safe.”
Doctors will be paid less to treat a senior on Medicare than to treat someone on Medicaid, a poverty program that is not financed by the payroll tax. McCaughry reports that doctors will be paid only one-third as much for treating Medicare patients as for treating a patient with subsidized private insurance and that Obamacare means that hospitals will have $247 billion less over the next decade to care for the same number of seniors.
According to McCaughey, prior to Obama raiding Medicare in order to subsidize the price of health policies sold by private insurance companies, Medicare was already paying hospitals only 91 cents for every dollar of care provide. The way Obamacare saves money is by cutting back care for the elderly and shortening their lives.
As I pointed out in my last article, Obamacare is a death panel.
This doesn’t mean that Romneycare is any better. Conservatives like to pretend that the private sector is always more efficient and less corrupt than the public sector, and that replacing Medicare with vouchers toward the purchase price of a private insurance company will lower costs and improve care.
As Romney’s scheme has not appeared in federal legislation, we don’t know all the ways the interest groups would game the voucher system. However, the voucher system would add to costs by adding another level of profits. Unless the private insurance companies are to become administrators for the government and be protected from Wall Street organized takeovers for not earning high enough profits, the policies sold by the insurance companies will have profit in them.
Also, conservatives make a great deal to do about Medicare being unfunded, but what is there to fund Obamneycare except the payroll tax that funds Medicare? Obamneycare depends on the government handing out subsidies or vouchers for the purchase of private insurance policies. Neither scheme is any more funded than Medicare.
Some conservatives seem to think that because private policies are involved that health care becomes funded. What Obamneycare does is to steal from Medicare in order to finance Medicaid and private insurance policies. Both plans raise costs, reduce care for the elderly, and divert tax dollars away from health care to private profits.
Let’s examine the erroneous conservative belief that if health care is provided privately, without any government subsidies, it is funded, whereas Medicare is not funded. To pay the premium on a private policy, a person has to have an income. The premiums are thus funded by the earned income stream. If the person loses his or her job, or becomes incapacitated and cannot work, the person cannot pay the premium and the policy can no longer be funded. If the person is elderly and lacks sufficient retirement income to pay the high cost of private health insurance for the elderly, the person’s health care is no longer funded.
Medicare is funded by the same earned income stream that funds private insurance policies. Instead of paying a premium to a private company, the worker pays a payroll tax that funds his health care regardless of his employment or level of retirement income.
Conservatives claim that under Medicare, the young have to pay for the elderly. However, the young become old in turn, so the intergenerational aspect is simply a part of the human life cycle. It is the same with private medical coverage. The healthy (usually the young) pay for the sick (usually the elderly). Private insurance has an actuarial basis. Actuaries calculate premiums and risk so that the total premiums can accommodate the claims of the percentage of policyholders who become ill. The notion is false that a person with a private policy is paying for his own health care unlike a person on Medicare.
A favorite “cost-saving” scheme is to raise the retirement age for Medicare. As Dave Lindorff points out in CounterPunch (printed edition, Oct. 1-15, 2012), 90% of the cost of the Medicare program each year goes to pay for the care of the oldest 10 percent of Medicare patients. Those aged 65-70 are the most fit and cost the least. Moving the retirement age up doesn’t save any real money. It just violates the contract and takes away the coverage for which people paid during their working life.
Obamneycare takes decisions out of the hands of patients and health care providers. It reduces care for the elderly. It imposes intrusive controls and data collecting and reporting. As care providers witness care withheld and the elderly confined to wheelchairs and nursing homes and early graves, health care providers will have to become as hardened as workers in slaughter houses, or the system will implode. Already 59% of US doctors say that they prefer a single-payer national health care system to the corporate form of medicine that has turned them into wage slaves who have to ration the time they spend with patients and the amount of care that they prescribe.
If Obama’s subsidies and Romney’s vouchers are not indexed to medical inflation, Obamneycare will provide diminishing care as the years go by. As jobs offshoring has stripped the country of middle class job growth, the incomes earned by waitresses, bartenders, hospital orderlies, and Walmart’s part-time workers will not cover shelter, food, transportation, and health care.
When Obama sold out his supporters to the insurance companies, Obama supporters lined up with the pretense that diverting Medicare money to private profits was an improvement over the current system. Obama supporters have now invested so much emotional capital in Obama’s assault on Medicare that they pretend there is some meaningful difference between Obamacare’s government subsidized private insurance policies and Romneycare’s government subsidized private medical insurance vouchers.
While the two sides yell and scream at one another, the concrete hardens around the new common policy of shorter lives for the elderly and more profits for private corporations.
Although no one in either party can define the US mission in the seven countries in which the US is conducting military aggression, wars of choice that according to Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes have already cost US taxpayers $6 trillion in out of pocket and already incurred future costs, there is no discussion of halting the wars and diverting armaments industry profits to the health care of the US population.
Thus, we are left with Dr. Dotson’s conclusion that Americans are governed for the benefit of corporate profits. Americans’ lives, health, incomes, careers, prospects, none of this matters. Only corporate profits.

Paul Craig Roberts is a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. His latest book, Wirtschaft am Abgrund (Economies In Collapse) has just been published.

BluegrassCat

11-06-2012, 03:00 AM

It's Election Eve and every vote model has Obama as the favorite. Conservative commentators who care about their reputations are predicting an Obama victory (http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/05/prediction-time-obama-survives/ (http://"http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/05/prediction-time-obama-survives/")) while those who long ago quit caring continue to sputter the Mittmentum nonsense. (http://www.foxnews.com/on-air/oreilly/2012/11/01/dick-morris-romney-will-win-landslide)

Chris Christie refuses to be seen in public with Romney. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/05/chris-christie-mitt-romney_n_2079371.html?utm_hp_ref=politics (http://www.hungangels.com/vboard/%22http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/05/chris-christie-mitt-romney_n_2079371.html?utm_hp_ref=politics)

And Romney's own words come back to haunt him in the face of Sandy's devastation.

Romney vs. Sandy - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZENtH3psXl4)

Willie Escalade

11-06-2012, 03:10 AM

What an asshole.

robertlouis

11-06-2012, 06:54 AM

What an asshole.

Succinct and to the point as always, Willie. ;)

Willie Escalade

11-06-2012, 08:32 AM

Succinct and to the point as always, Willie. ;)
And I wasn't referring to the one President Obama is looking at in my avatar...THAT asshole I don't mind lol (it's Jizelle's)

danthepoetman

11-06-2012, 08:58 AM

This guy? mm?

negaf01

02-09-2013, 12:35 PM

You're funny.

Prospero

02-09-2013, 01:18 PM

Who was this guy Romney anyway?

robertlouis

02-09-2013, 01:25 PM

Who was this guy Romney anyway?

Is it a parish council election in Kent?

Prospero

02-09-2013, 01:27 PM

Romney Marsh.... sounds like a columnist for farmers Weekly

robertlouis

02-09-2013, 01:48 PM

Romney Marsh.... sounds like a columnist for farmers Weekly

Didn't he play for QPR? I know that'll pass you by, old chap. Ask someone who knows. :wink:

Prospero

02-09-2013, 01:59 PM

Rodney Marsh you mean? lol... I used to live near the QPR ground, old fellow

Stavros

02-09-2013, 04:23 PM

I tend to associate Romney Marsh with anarchic politics, witches, and malaria...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/england/sevenwonders/southeast/romney_marsh/

Prospero

02-09-2013, 04:44 PM

Yes witches - and a legendary ghost rider I recall

Stavros

02-09-2013, 07:57 PM

Did he have any gold plates in his sack, I wonder?

robertlouis

02-10-2013, 04:35 AM

I tend to associate Romney Marsh with anarchic politics, witches, and malaria...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/england/sevenwonders/southeast/romney_marsh/

And a rather cute relic of a miniature railway that still provides a public service 80 years on....

Prospero

02-10-2013, 08:48 PM

It is a great little railway. I filmed on it once. And Derek Jarman used to live on the edge of Romney marsh at Dungeness.