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Re: Mitt Romney -- whaddaya think???
The people at the top (the, say, 0.01 percentile) will do very well under Romney. (Anyway, Romney doesn't concern me. It's the Republican Party -- who are moving more and more to the right. And, too, will Romney bring back the Neoconservatives... into his administration.)
A so-called economy hinges on demand. Demand comes from a burgeoning middle class. The middle class in America is shrinking and shrinking.
So, where does the demand come from?
Well, there's about 300 million middle class in China.
And 200 million middle class in India.
Remember these are transnational companies. They've no allegiance to any specific country. Nor should they.
I mean, why should they rationally care about America or any country for that matter when their objective is profits. I mean, it ain't: we're in business to be concerned about America and American workers.
Romney has to appeal to and show concern for working class and middle class Americans -- and Obama too -- because they vote.
It's acting. It's performance. But their objective is to serve the interests of capital. Not Americans.
Is it worrisome? Yes. But these corporations are rational entities. And when a corporation is rational it doesn't care about borders or people or anything but maximizing money.
Sheldon Adelson's Tax Cut If Romney Is Elected Is... - YouTube
As Jenna Jameson said:
Porn Star Jenna Jameson: If You're Rich, Vote Republican, Romney - YouTube
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Re: Mitt Romney -- whaddaya think???
Does this explicate Romney?
http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2012/02/27/greed/
One should acknowledge that corporate culture does change one.
I, too, found this when I was playing, well, semi-competitive sports. I became aggressive. I, actually, didn't like myself.
Plus the homophobia/transphobia/misogyny was quite rampant, too:
Noam Chomsky has an interesting take on sports:
Noam Chomsky on the role of sports in propaganda-based authority - YouTube
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Re: Mitt Romney -- whaddaya think???
despite koch brothers,special interest lobbyists and casino owners pledging, dishing out 100 of millions to combat obama, it's going to be about the middle class of america,that's gonna decide the true presidency. mitt & co are not going to get away with simply "buying" the presidency.
with a very unfavorable,non-appealing candidate (who has openly said he doesn't care about the very poor)...that's not going to help him win this.
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Re: Mitt Romney -- whaddaya think???
Closer Than You Think: Top 15 Things Romney and Obama Agree On:
http://blackagendareport.com/content...nd-obama-agree
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Re: Mitt Romney -- whaddaya think???
Quote:
Originally Posted by
pantybulge69
despite koch brothers,special interest lobbyists and casino owners pledging, dishing out 100 of millions to combat obama, it's going to be about the middle class of america,that's gonna decide the true presidency. mitt & co are not going to get away with simply "buying" the presidency.
with a very unfavorable,non-appealing candidate (who has openly said he doesn't care about the very poor)...that's not going to help him win this.
Now, of course, it's merely about who raises the most money. The financial sector backed Obama in '08. Now, it appears, they're -- the financial establishment -- are siding with Romney. As he is one of them.
Does anyone think we live in a meaningful democracy???????
So-called elections are simply about ratifying elite decision-making. Obama and Romney are the elites.
So, by casting our votes we merely ratify that the elites will make the decisions. That's not meaningful democracy.
Much like corporations are elite institutions. As they're run by the elites. Well, the senior executives etc.
As Noam Chomsky pointed out: "Concentration of executive power, unless it's very temporary and for specific circumstances, let's say fighting WWII, is an assault on democracy." I don't think Americans care that much about democracy. We're too busy watching MOB WIVES and football and baseball.
It's Bread and Circuses. Give the people enough food and plenty of entertainment and they won't give a damn about politics.
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Re: Mitt Romney -- whaddaya think???
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Re: Mitt Romney -- whaddaya think???
15 Issues This Election is Not About
Neither Candidate
by BILL QUIGLEY
Neither candidate is interested in stopping the use of the death penalty for federal or state crimes.
Neither candidate is interested in eliminating or reducing the 5,113 US nuclear warheads.
Neither candidate is campaigning to close Guantanamo prison.
Neither candidate has called for arresting and prosecuting high ranking people on Wall Street for the subprime mortgage catastrophe.
Neither candidate is interested in holding anyone in the Bush administration accountable for the torture committed by US personnel against prisoners in Guantanamo or in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Neither candidate is interested in stopping the use of drones to assassinate people in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen or Somalia.
Neither candidate is against warrantless surveillance, indefinite detention, or racial profiling in fighting “terrorism.”
Neither candidate is interested in fighting for a living wage. In fact neither are really committed beyond lip service to raising the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour – which, if it kept pace with inflation since the 1960s should be about $10 an hour.
Neither candidate was interested in arresting Osama bin Laden and having him tried in court.
Neither candidate will declare they refuse to bomb Iran.
Neither candidate is refusing to take huge campaign contributions from people and organizations.
Neither candidate proposes any significant specific steps to reverse global warming.
Neither candidate is talking about the over 2 million people in jails and prisons in the US.
Neither candidate proposes to create public jobs so everyone who wants to work can.
Neither candidate opposes the nuclear power industry. In fact both support expansion.
Bill Quigley teaches law at Loyola University New Orleans and is Associate Legal Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights.
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Re: Mitt Romney -- whaddaya think???
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Re: Mitt Romney -- whaddaya think???
Romney is too rational for the Republican Party - Gary Younge in Monday's Guardian.
http://http://www.guardian.co.uk/com...ans?CMP=twt_fd
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Re: Mitt Romney -- whaddaya think???
The other day Mrs. Romney's plane was forced to land, apparently because of an electrical fire on board.
Talking out loud after the event Mitt wondered why "...the windows don't open. I don't know why they don't do that. It's a real problem. So it's very dangerous." Apparently he never heard about cabin pressure and the lack of oxygen at high altitudes. Worse, Mitt proceeded to explain that letting in more oxygen from outside would have alleviated the electrical fire.
Is this guy stupid or what? The only thing dumber than roll down windows on a jet airplane is trickle down economic theory. Romney and Ryan now have to wear matching Tees that say, "<- I'm with Stupid ->"
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Re: Mitt Romney -- whaddaya think???
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Re: Mitt Romney -- whaddaya think???
Quote:
Originally Posted by
trish
The other day Mrs. Romney's plane was forced to land, apparently because of an electrical fire on board.
Talking out loud after the event Mitt wondered why "...the windows don't open. I don't know why they don't do that. It's a real problem. So it's very dangerous." Apparently he never heard about cabin pressure and the lack of oxygen at high altitudes. Worse, Mitt proceeded to explain that letting in more oxygen from outside would have alleviated the electrical fire.
Is this guy stupid or what? The only thing dumber than roll down windows on a jet airplane is trickle down economic theory. Romney and Ryan now have to wear matching Tees that say, "<- I'm with Stupid ->"
According to the reporter...it was a joke.
http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/09...e-windows.html
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Re: Mitt Romney -- whaddaya think???
Quote:
Originally Posted by
fred41
Thank the Angel Moroni is was only a joke and thank you fred for the correction. If HA would let me, I'd delete the post.
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Re: Mitt Romney -- whaddaya think???
Quote:
Originally Posted by
trish
Thank the Angel Moroni is was only a joke and thank you fred for the correction. If HA would let me, I'd delete the post.
Your welcome Trish.
I try to follow the physics/religion debate between you and Jamie but it's a bit over my head. I do believe you clearly won the debate about religion in the "Discussion" section of the site a while back.
(...just say you got the Romney story from a set of golden plates buried in your back yard and it's all good..)
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Re: Mitt Romney -- whaddaya think???
Hey tea party supporters. Why look, your spiritual fathers, the Koch brothers, are joint fourth on the richest people in America list.
http://www.forbes.com/forbes-400/#pa...l%20categories
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Re: Mitt Romney -- whaddaya think???
And the Waltons from Arkansas who champion anti-union rights in education are high up there too - along with the casino boss Sheldon Adelson who has pledged all the money Romney needs to win the election.
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Re: Mitt Romney -- whaddaya think???
Hopefully your guys will keep the President and dump the guys who've blocked everything since the midterms.
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Re: Mitt Romney -- whaddaya think???
Four score and seven years ago -Abraham Lincoln.
I wanna be rich and famous -Mitt Romney
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Re: Mitt Romney -- whaddaya think???
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Re: Mitt Romney -- whaddaya think???
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Ben
And Beck is the work of God only knows what....
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Re: Mitt Romney -- whaddaya think???
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Re: Mitt Romney -- whaddaya think???
US Politics: Illusion of Choice...
RT: "Abby Martin interviews Bruce Dixon of the Black Agenda Report about the state of American politics and the false illusion of choice when it comes to electing our leaders."
Addendum (from me -- :)): Under Dems Wall Street do better. And, too, Obama is more bellicose than Bush. Bush, I believe, is a moderate. Cheney, the de facto President, was the hawkish one. That doesn't excuse ol' Bush....
US Politics: Illusion of Choice | Interview with Bruce Dixon - YouTube
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Re: Mitt Romney -- whaddaya think???
I think that if Romney gets in he is going to cause you guys all sorts of political problems with other countries. However Obama needs to realise that you cannot spend your way out of an economic crisis!
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Re: Mitt Romney -- whaddaya think???
Quote:
Originally Posted by
sexyasianescorts
However Obama needs to realise that you cannot spend your way out of an economic crisis!
Why not? The current rate on 10-year U.S. treasuries is 1.732% That's pretty much exactly the current rate of inflation in the U.S.
Lenders are currently willing to loan funds to the U.S. government for free. Why would we not take that free money and use it to employ people in public works?
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Re: Mitt Romney -- whaddaya think???
Quote:
Lenders are currently willing to loan funds to the U.S. government for free. Why would we not take that free money and use it to employ people in public works?
Exactly:iagree::iagree:
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Re: Mitt Romney -- whaddaya think???
Romney needs to realize that you cannot tighten fiscal and monetary policy during a recession. The national debt has not been the cause of our current crisis but in part (that part that has grown) a result of the severe recession. One needs to carefully calibrate the use of tax benefits that do not cost too much revenue and useful spending as a stimulus.
But recessions are often exacerbated by a lack of demand. There is a limit to how much you can encourage capital owners to produce without customers with disposable income to sell to. If there is nothing fundamental underlying the economic crisis and it continues because of low consumer confidence and little new home development then you absolutely need to spend your way out of it. By tightening fiscal and monetary policy right now you paralyze the system. Thombergeron is right, the government should increase the size of its own workforce; they not only get useful things done with a low borrowing rate but they employ people and this is crucial to breaking the cycle of continued depressed demand.
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Re: Mitt Romney -- whaddaya think???
Maybe Romney should listen to the Green Party presidential nominee Dr. Jill Stein. I don't support her or the Green Party. But we certainly need a viable 3rd. -- or even 2nd. -- party.
I mean, the Republican Party is barely a political party. And the Dems are moving in that direction.
Point being: we need to eradicate the stark democratic deficit. The democratic deficit is: the wide gap between American public opinion and American public policy. Public policy does not reflect public opinion.
American public opinion is way to the left of both the Dems and the Republicans. But, of course, they don't serve the American people. They serve corporate power. Which Americans know -- and understand.
More parties would hopefully address this longstanding democratic deficiency....
Politics and Money: Jill Stein Offers Green Party's Solution to U.S. Economic Issues - YouTube
Or even Rocky Anderson:
Rocky Anderson "Obama Has Betrayed The American People On The MIC, Afghanistan, Medical Marijuana... - YouTube
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Re: Mitt Romney -- whaddaya think???
This is a review from a british newspaper of a book I've been reading these last few days - which has made my bleak view of your American future even more bleak. A collective insanity now seems to grip a large part of the US population - many of whom would put back into power the very people who took your nation and the world to the brink of economic disaster and who will, if returned to power, topple it further towards catastrophe with their still greater ideological fervour.
This review gives only a hint of the appalling situation its' author chronicles - further evidence of what most people here feel and fear (though the rabid ideological right wingers where will scoff. Anything that challenges their headlong tumble into a collapse of civilisational values is simple "lies" by the Liberal media - the loathed elite).
Pity the Billionaire by Thomas Frank - review
The evil roots of the American right
Does anyone know how truly evil Ayn Rand was? I once tried, a long time ago, to get through Atlas Shrugged, but gave up pretty quickly, on the grounds that life was too short to spend a chunk of it in the company of a wicked lunatic who can't write "bum" on a wall. So I missed this bit, summarised here by Thomas Frank, who has read the book so we don't have to: at one point, in what would appear to be the most clunking symbolism, a train crashes because – this is always happening on trains – a powerful politician insists on the crew driving into a dangerous tunnel.
"And then, in a notorious passage, the narrator goes through all the other passenger cars on the train and tells us why each casualty-to-be deserves the fate that is coming to him or her. One of them, she points out, received government loans; another doesn't like businessmen; a third is married to a federal regulator; a fourth foolishly thinks she has a right to ride on a train even when she doesn't personally own the train in question."
I am going to trust Frank's precis; it certainly does not contradict what I already knew of Rand's opinions, even though it seems improbably extreme. (But it's not. It really is in the book, and our own George Monbiot was recently denounced by a Randian – frighteningly, former ambassador George Crawford – for taking issue with the passage. The problem with Rand is that she is still hugely popular among Americans of certain political convictions. This is also our problem, too, as Frank, in his astute assessment of her, shows.
The title and subtitle of his book give you a pretty good idea of what to expect: a horrific catalogue of the Tea Party's hijacking of populist outrage at the crash of 2008, when audiences were invited – in true Randian fashion – to save their pity and their sympathy for the very architects of that crash. There are also plenty of revealing asides. Because we are nice herbivores on this paper, we have been sheltered from, for example, the spending advice given in a 2007 edition of Trader Monthly, which gave as one compelling reason for buying a $300,000 turntable, the opportunity to give "a huge middle finger to everyone who enters your home".
Frank does not pussyfoot around the implications we can draw about the soul of such a person. "A trader was not just an überconsumer but a bullying, self-maximising, wealth-extracting he-man: a lout, in full."
It is, for some chapters, an extremely depressing read, but a very compelling one, and useful to place the otherwise mystifying ascendancy of the Tea Party movement, and its subsequent near-takeover of the Republican party, in context. Frank has a breezy way with comparative history: his description of the differences between how Roosevelt managed the 1929 crash, and how the 2008 disaster was handled, is concise – and enough to make you weep. As, too, is his explanation of how it came about that the Democrats have become so removed from what should have been their grass-roots support. (This, admittedly, is not a phenomenon we are unaware of over here.)
There is hope – the Occupy movement, the reclamation of some level of proper populist outrage (the 99% v the 1%), and – although Frank's book came out too early for this – the astonishing stupidity and crassness of just about everything Mitt Romney has said during his election campaign. Then again, when you have people claiming that universal healthcare is tantamount to communism or euthanasia, or both, or that Europe, in its adoption of "socialism" after the second world war, became, in its entirety, a stranger to freedom of speech and thought ever after; and when you have any number of flat-earthers and Fox news ranters who peddle similar distortions – you really have to worry. This is a deeply troubling book, and at times I felt like the Jewish kids in Howard Jacobson's Kalooki Nights, with their fascination for books about the Third Reich; but as a clear picture of the problem, it's important.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012...s-frank-review
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Re: Mitt Romney -- whaddaya think???
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Prospero
This is a review from a british newspaper of a book I've been reading these last few days - which has made my bleak view of your American future even more bleak. A collective insanity now seems to grip a large part of the US population - many of whom would put back into power the very people who took your nation and the world to the brink of economic disaster and who will, if returned to power, topple it further towards catastrophe with their still greater ideological fervour.
This review gives only a hint of the appalling situation its' author chronicles - further evidence of what most people here feel and fear (though the rabid ideological right wingers where will scoff. Anything that challenges their headlong tumble into a collapse of civilisational values is simple "lies" by the Liberal media - the loathed elite).
Pity the Billionaire by Thomas Frank - review
The evil roots of the American right
Thomas Frank is a very good writer. All his books are worth reading. Especially What's the matter w/ Kansas?
Papantonio: What's STILL The Matter With Kansas? - YouTube
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Re: Mitt Romney -- whaddaya think???
His Kansas book was the last one he wrote before this
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Re: Mitt Romney -- whaddaya think???
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Prospero
His Kansas book was the last one he wrote before this
The Wrecking Crew (how the right wing, the ultra right, have effectively taken the reins of government to serve their own parochial interests -- and why wouldn't they, eh? ;)) came out in '08....
The majority of Americans are social democrats -- if you look at public opinion polls -- and big business knows this.
So, unleashing propaganda helps their interests. And ultimately controlling government REALLY helps their interests -- :)
Anyway, it's for our benefit that the Koch brothers, the Pritzker family and the Hilton clan are in charge. Paris for President, anyone -- ha ha! :)
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Re: Mitt Romney -- whaddaya think???
Don’t Feel Bad, Mitt Romney Never Wanted to be President:
http://gawker.com/5970853/dont-feel-...o-be-president
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Re: Mitt Romney -- whaddaya think???
Mitt never had a chance. In order to win the Republican nomination he had to become in his own words a "severe conservative".
What entertains me is the aftermath of the general election defeat and the various reactions amongst the GOP.
Some of them realize that if you demonize people of color, women, LGTB community that you may have trouble with a base mostly made up of the 1% and angry old white folks.
But there are many who think they lost because they did not bash people of color, women, the LGTB community enough and they did not do enough to supress there votes.
The food fight in the party should make for fun TV.
As for Mitt if he ran as the Governor of MA instead of the guy just right of Rick Perry and then tried to swing to the center in the debates he might have had a decent shot at Obama who through no fault of his own was presiding over the worst economy since the Great Depression (fairly well actually) and who had found that his most lofty goals whether they be eliminating Gitmo or creating bi-partsainship were pipe dreams.
BTW I don't by for a minute Tagg's BS about Willard not wanting to be President, the dude ran for 6 years, spent over $40M of his own money in "08" and change positions more often than his underware trying to get the job. He may have never wanted the work but he sure did want the power IMHO.
