mykeystrokes.com

"Do or Do not. There is no try."

Mitt Romney, Son Of “Citizen’s United”

First, a confession. If Mitt Romney becomes president I’m partly to blame.

Ten years ago I ran for the Democratic nomination for governor of Massachusetts — which would have given me the opportunity to whip Mitt Romney’s ass in the general election,

I blew it. In the final week of the primary I was neck and neck with the state treasurer, but then my money ran out, which meant my TV ads stopped. Declining the suggestion of my campaign manager to take out a second mortgage on my home, I frantically phoned anyone I could find who hadn’t yet contributed $500, the maximum state law allowed. I didn’t raise beans. In the end, the treasurer won the primary, Romney won the general election and became governor, and I went back to being a professor.

But my fantasy of beating Romney may be nothing more than a fantasy because Romney had — and still has — something I never did (and I’m not referring to his gleaming white teeth, carefully-coiffed hairline, or height). He has money, and he has connections to much more money.

Mitt Romney was then and still is the candidate of big money.

In the last weeks before the just-completed Iowa caucuses, Romney spent over $3 million relentlessly torpedoing Newt Gingrich with negative ads — cutting Gingrich’s support by half and hurtling him from first place to fourth. But Romney kept his fingerprints off the torpedo. Technically the money didn’t even come from his campaign.

It came from a Super PAC called “Restore Our Future,” which can sop up unlimited amounts from a few hugely wealthy donors without even disclosing their names. That’s because “Restore Our Future” is officially independent of the Romney campaign — although its chief fundraiser comes out of Romney’s finance team, its key political strategist was political director of Romney’s 2008 presidential campaign, its treasurer is Romney’s former chief counsel, and its media whiz had been part of Romney’s media team.

“Restore Our Future” is to Mitt Romney’s campaign as the dark side of the moon is to the moon. And it reveals the grotesque result of the Supreme Court’s decision a year ago in Citizen United vs the Federal Election Commission, which reversed more than a century of efforts to curb the influence of big money on politics.

If income and wealth in America were as widely shared as in the first three decades after World War II, we’d have less reason to worry. But now, with an almost unprecedented concentration of money at the very top, Citizens United invites the worst corruption our democracy has witnessed since the Gilded Age.

And Romney and Citizens United were made for each other. Other candidates have quietly set up Super PACs of their own, and President Obama has his Super PAC already busily tapping into whatever reservoirs of big money it can find. But Mitt’s unique ties to the biggest money pits enable him to take unique advantage of the Court’s scurrilous invitation.

The New York Times reports that New York hedge-fund managers and Boston financiers contributed almost $30 million to “Restore Our Future” before the Iowa caucuses. And “Restore Our Future“‘s faux independence has allowed Romney to publicly distance himself from them, their money, and the dirty work that their money has bought.

More than anyone else running for president, Mitt Romney personifies the top 1 percent in America — actually, the top one-tenth of one percent. It’s not just his four homes and estimated $200 million fortune, not just his wheeling and dealing in leveraged-buyouts and private equity, not even the jobless refugees of his financial maneuvers that makes him the Gordon Gekko of presidential aspirants.

It’s his connections to the epicenters of big money in America — especially to top executives and financiers in the habit of investing  for handsome returns. And there are almost no better returns than those found in tax benefits, government subsidies, loan guarantees, bailouts, regulatory exemptions, federal contracts, and trade deals generating hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars a year.

Romney, in other words, is the candidate Citizens United created, the creature given life by Scalia, Roberts, Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito all playing Dr. Frankenstein.

Given what the Court has wrought, my conscience is less burdened. Had I whipped Romney’s ass ten years ago I might only have delayed his awakening. But I fear for the country.

 

By: Robert Reich, Robert Reich Blog, January 5, 2012

January 7, 2012 Posted by | Campaign Financing, Election 2012 | , , , , , | Leave a comment

A Misguided Appeal For A “Closeted Moderate” Mitt

Nicholas Kristof presents an argument today that I’ve heard before, but which I struggle to understand. As the NYT columnist sees it, Mitt Romney was a “moderate and pragmatic governor,” who, his metamorphoses notwithstanding, may flip “back to his old self” in 2013.

The reassuring thing about Mitt Romney is that for most of his life he probably wouldn’t have voted for today’s Mitt Romney. […]

If we do see, as I expect we will, a reversion in the direction of the Massachusetts Romney, that’s a flip we should celebrate. Until the Republican primaries sucked him into its vortex, he was a pragmatist and policy wonk rather similar to Bill Clinton and President Obama but more conservative. (Clinton described Romney to me as having done “a very good job” in Massachusetts.) Romney was much closer to George H.W. Bush than to George W. Bush.

Kristof says we should “expect” this current version of Romney to revert back to a previous version. I think this is wildly misguided.

The premise here is that the Romney we see running for president is a ridiculous phony. Sure, he’s saying reckless right-wing things, he’s making irresponsible right-wing promises, and he’s completely rejected any sensible positions he once held, but it’s just an act to get elected. Voters should simply pay no attention to what Romney is saying, doing, proposing, and promising, since none this is sincere anyway.

This isn’t a criticism levied by Romney’s detractors; this is a defense offered by Romney’s tacit supporters.

It’s also incoherent.

To accept the premise of the argument, a voter would have to believe that every word out of Romney’s mouth for the last five years — about his policy agenda, worldview, and priorities — has been a deliberate scam. As part of an elaborate scheme to mislead the American public, Romney has chosen to become a closeted moderate. The lie will end and the centrist will reemerge just as soon as the electorate has put the presidency in his hands.

What those making this argument are actually proposing is an incredible gamble with the nation’s future. Sure, Romney says he’ll take a far-right approach to everything from the economy to entitlements, foreign policy to the judiciary, but perhaps we’re witnessing a half-decade-long ruse and everything will turn out fine.

That’s quite a risk with so much on the line.

Let me give Jonathan Bernstein’s piece in the new print issue another plug. The point of the article is important: what candidates say they’ll do is generally what they will do if elected.

Someone might want to send a copy to Nicholas Kristof.

 

By: Steve Benen, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, January 5, 2012

January 6, 2012 Posted by | Election 2012 | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Bordering On Dishonesty: Mitt Romney On Bain, Barack And Jobs

America’s recovery from recession has been so slow that it mostly doesn’t seem like a recovery at all, especially on the jobs front. So, in a better world, President Obama would face a challenger offering a serious critique of his job-creation policies, and proposing a serious alternative.

Instead, he’ll almost surely face Mitt Romney.

Mr. Romney claims that Mr. Obama has been a job destroyer, while he was a job-creating businessman. For example, he told Fox News: “This is a president who lost more jobs during his tenure than any president since Hoover. This is two million jobs that he lost as president.” He went on to declare, of his time at the private equity firm Bain Capital, “I’m very happy in my former life; we helped create over 100,000 new jobs.”

But his claims about the Obama record border on dishonesty, and his claims about his own record are well across that border.

Start with the Obama record. It’s true that 1.9 million fewer Americans have jobs now than when Mr. Obama took office. But the president inherited an economy in free fall, and can’t be held responsible for job losses during his first few months, before any of his own policies had time to take effect. So how much of that Obama job loss took place in, say, the first half of 2009?

The answer is: more than all of it. The economy lost 3.1 million jobs between January 2009 and June 2009 and has since gained 1.2 million jobs. That’s not enough, but it’s nothing like Mr. Romney’s portrait of job destruction.

Incidentally, the previous administration’s claims of job growth always started not from Inauguration Day but from August 2003, when Bush-era employment hit its low point. By that standard, Mr. Obama could say that he has created 2.5 million jobs since February 2010.

So Mr. Romney’s claims about the Obama job record aren’t literally false, but they are deeply misleading. Still, the real fun comes when we look at what Mr. Romney says about himself. Where does that claim of creating 100,000 jobs come from?

Well, Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post got an answer from the Romney campaign. It’s the sum of job gains at three companies that Mr. Romney “helped to start or grow”: Staples, The Sports Authority and Domino’s.

Mr. Kessler immediately pointed out two problems with this tally. It’s “based on current employment figures, not the period when Romney worked at Bain,” and it “does not include job losses from other companies with which Bain Capital was involved.” Either problem, by itself, makes nonsense of the whole claim.

On the point about using current employment, consider Staples, which has more than twice as many stores now as it did back in 1999, when Mr. Romney left Bain. Can he claim credit for everything good that has happened to the company in the past 12 years? In particular, can he claim credit for the company’s successful shift from focusing on price to focusing on customer service (“That was easy”), which took place long after he had left the business world?

Then there’s the bit about looking only at Bain-connected companies that added jobs, ignoring those that reduced their work forces or went out of business. Hey, if pluses count but minuses don’t, everyone who spends a day playing the slot machines comes out way ahead!

In any case, it makes no sense to look at changes in one company’s work force and say that this measures job creation for America as a whole.

Suppose, for example, that your chain of office-supply stores gains market share at the expense of rivals. You employ more people; your rivals employ fewer. What’s the overall effect on U.S. employment? One thing’s for sure: it’s a lot less than the number of workers your company added.

Better yet, suppose that you expand in part not by beating your competitors, but by buying them. Now their employees are your employees. Have you created jobs?

The point is that Mr. Romney’s claims about being a job creator would be nonsense even if he were being honest about the numbers, which he isn’t.

At this point, some readers may ask whether it isn’t equally wrong to say that Mr. Romney destroyed jobs. Yes, it is. The real complaint about Mr. Romney and his colleagues isn’t that they destroyed jobs, but that they destroyed good jobs.

When the dust settled after the companies that Bain restructured were downsized — or, as happened all too often, went bankrupt — total U.S. employment was probably about the same as it would have been in any case. But the jobs that were lost paid more and had better benefits than the jobs that replaced them. Mr. Romney and those like him didn’t destroy jobs, but they did enrich themselves while helping to destroy the American middle class.

And that reality is, of course, what all the blather and misdirection about job-creating businessmen and job-destroying Democrats is meant to obscure.

 

By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, January 5, 2012

January 6, 2012 Posted by | Election 2012, Jobs | , , , , , , | 4 Comments

“Earning Their Hatred”: Exposing Republican Obstructionism

Thank God for elections and election years. An election gives our president, who must face the voters in November, permission to think and act like a partisan. It’s long overdue.

President Obama has boldly made key recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). The Republican strategy has been to destroy these agencies by failing to confirm appointees. In the case of the new CFPB, that meant nobody in charge to make key decisions to make the new bureau operational. In the case of the NLRB, it meant the lack of a quorum would paralyze the agency altogether.

In naming Richard Cordray to head the CFPB, the president has called the Republicans’ bluff. This was the agency that Elizabeth Warren invented and dearly hoped to lead. Republicans made clear they would block her appointment. When Obama passed her over in favor of the less-well-known Cordray, former Ohio Attorney General and also a strong consumer advocate, Republicans blocked his confirmation, too.

The selection of Cordray, an activist very much in the spirit of Warren, is in many ways a tribute to her leadership in fighting both for a strong consumer protection agency and a strong leader to head it. Cordray is that leader. Consumers will finally have an agency to keep watch for abuses that do not only harm small borrowers but aggregate to major threats to the financial system. Had there been a consumer bureau in the Warren spirit a decade ago, it would have noticed that sub-prime loans were not only ripping off homeowners but threatening to take down the economy.

In the case of the NLRB, the agency, which protects the right of workers to organize or join a union free from employer harassment, would have been totally paralyzed. The Republicans said as much. Here’s what Obama said, in naming Richard Griffin, Sharon Block, and Terrence Flynn to vacant seats on the NLRB:

When Congress refuses to act and as a result hurts our economy and puts people at risk, I have an obligation as President to do what I can without them. I have an obligation to act on behalf of the American people. I will not stand by while a minority in the Senate puts party ideology ahead of the people they were elected to serve. Not when so much is at stake. Not at this make-or-break moment for the middle class.

Well said. These actions define a president who is leading, not searching for futile compromises. It exposes both the Republican obstructionism, the unprecedented tactic of destroying agencies by refusing to allow confirmations, as well as the Republican hostility to agencies that defend regular Americans against powerful corporate elites.

Predictably, the Republicans, having invented new forms of obstructionism such as the use of the filibuster on ordinary legislation and not special cases, as well of refusal to consent to routine extension of the debt ceiling, now cry foul when Obama uses a constitutional provision, the recess appointment, which has been conventional for presidents of both parties. Their contrivance of a fake nominal session when Congress is actually in recess is shameless. The more of a fuss they make, the more they out themselves as defenders of the one percent.

As in the case of the extension of the payroll tax cut, this conciliatory president seems to be warming to the concept of maximizing partisan advantage, particularly when the Republicans hand him opportunities on a platter. Just to make sure that message did not lost, Obama chose Cordray’s hard-pressed home state of Ohio for his announcement of the appointment, and painted Republican obstructionists as allies of Wall Street.

The citizenry loves a fighter far more than a punching bag. The right hates Obama. In the spirit of Franklin Roosevelt, he might as well earn that hatred.

By: Robert Kuttner, The American Prospect, January 5, 2011

January 6, 2012 Posted by | Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Consumers | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Missing “Leveling Experience”: Dull Mitt Romney Needs A “Groping” Scandal

Republican front-runner Mitt Romney is so dull that  he could benefit from an eye-popping scandal because it would help tear  down his plastic image and make him look more normal, according to  national pollster John Zogby.

“This is the one instance  where a groping incident could help a candidate,” said Zogby, in a  reference to the scandal that torpedoed former GOP candidate Herman  Cain’s campaign.

He said it could be the missing “leveling  experience” for Romney that would make him look more human. Zogby  explained that many stiff, rich men have run for office and won, but  they typically had a humbling moment that made them more likeable. He  gave former President George W. Bush’s alcoholism as an example of that  leveling experience.

“His problem is an authenticity  problem,” said Zogby of Romney, who today released his New Hampshire  tracking poll that has Romney far in front. “He’s the kid who never  colored outside the lines,” said the pollster.

Zogby said  Romney needs to find a way to connect with an unethusiastic party that  wants to vote with its brain and heart. But, he warned, he shouldn’t try  to do that with a policy speech or new position. “Likability,” he said,  “is a lot more than an issue.”

He echoed charges from  competing campaigns and President   Obama’s advisor David Axelrod that Romney’s 25 percent finish in  the Iowa caucuses was an example of how he’s failed to expand his  personal base of voters from the amount he received in the 2008  caucuses.

Romney, Zogby said, spent “a lot of time, money  and energy to get where he was already.”

 

By: Paul Bedard, Washington Whispers, U. S. News and World Report, January 5, 2012

January 6, 2012 Posted by | Election 2012 | , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

« Previous Entries     Next Entries »