If you’re Mitt Romney, it can mean whatever you want.
Mitt Romney is, without doubt, a representative of contemporary capitalism, a spectacularly rich financier who got his money not by making things but by buying and selling companies, exploiting leverage, and a whole bunch of other things folks like you and me will never have the privilege of understanding. So it isn’t surprising that this campaign has featured a debate about the nature of our economic system. That debate could be a salutary and educational discussion that leaves us all more informed and aware. Or it could be an occasion for some of the most vile demagoguery you could imagine. Do you need to ask which course it will take?
By now, we can all agree that a large portion of the Republican party has created in their minds an imaginary Barack Obama, one who is either a literal or philosophical foreigner (Romney has begun dropping the word “foreign” in as often as he can when discussing Obama), who hates America (here’s Rush Limbaugh on Monday: “I think it can now be said, without equivocation—without equivocation—that this man hates this country”), and one who hates success, hates rich people, and hates capitalism itself. And if you can’t find any actual evidence for these propositions—if “Barack Obama hates job creators so much he actually wants to increase the top income tax rate by 4.6 percentage points!” doesn’t have quite the ring you’d like—then it isn’t hard to find words you can twist around to make your point.
Which brings us to the word “that.” If you’ve been to a Mitt Romney speech in the last day or so, or if you’ve watched Fox News or listened to conservative talk radio, or even if you’ve watched some mainstream news*, you would have heard that Barack Obama said that people who own businesses didn’t actually build their businesses. Only a secret socialist could say such a thing, and Romney and his allies assure us that Obama did indeed say that and he is indeed that kind of person. But here’s what Obama actually said:
There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me — because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t — look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.
If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.
The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together. There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don’t do on our own. I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That would be a hard way to organize fighting fires.
So we say to ourselves, ever since the founding of this country, you know what, there are some things we do better together. That’s how we funded the GI Bill. That’s how we created the middle class. That’s how we built the Golden Gate Bridge or the Hoover Dam. That’s how we invented the Internet. That’s how we sent a man to the moon. We rise or fall together as one nation and as one people, and that’s the reason I’m running for President — because I still believe in that idea. You’re not on your own, we’re in this together.
When this quote worked its way up from the conservative media to the Romney campaign, they knew they had something. Sure, it’s obvious that when Obama said “you didn’t build that” he was talking about roads and bridges. But who cares? You can take that one sentence out of context, lie about what “that” in the quote refers to, and you’ve got evidence of Obama’s America-hating heart.
And yes, it is a lie, a word I use carefully. Romney and the people who work for him know full well what Obama was and wasn’t saying. But they decided to go ahead and engage in an act of intentional deception anyway, and I’m sure he’ll be repeating it many times.
There’s actually a discussion to be had about the radical individualism that has taken over the conservative movement, which Obama was responding to in his speech. I’d be interested to hear Mitt Romney’s thoughts on it, not in a “gotcha” kind of way, but because I genuinely want to know what his response to Obama’s arguments would be. Does he think that every rich person got rich completely on their own and owes nothing to the society that created the context that allowed their wealth to be created? I really have no idea. But the deeper into this campaign we go, the more it becomes clear that we’ll never know what Romney really believes about anything. And he may not be the most dishonest presidential candidate we’ve ever seen, but give him time—he’s working on it.
*Last night I saw Peter Alexander on NBC Nightly News do a story in which he showed Obama’s quote clipped exactly as Romney did, making it seem that Romney was being absolutely truthful. It was one of the most maddening acts of journalistic jackassery I’ve seen in some time.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, July 17, 2012
July 19, 2012
Posted by raemd95 |
Election 2012 | Business, Conservatives, Fox News, GOP, Mainstream Media, Mitt Romney, Politics, Republicans |
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Time to give Mitt Romney the dressage-down he so “richly” deserves. And it’s not just about money. Let me count the whys we should send this smug, vapid, preppie packing: power, sex, and religion. Frankly, I don’t give a damn about the dog issue, Gail Collins.
But if President Obama won’t give ’em hell, then allow me.
The best that can be said about the soulless Mr. Romney is that he was better than the field of fools and rogues running in the Republican primary. At first, I was willing to take him at his word as a sensible clean Republican who meant well and dressed the part.
I thought the 2002 Winter Olympics (which he ran) came off fine except for the part when President George W. Bush opened the games, saying to all the athletes assembled: “Welcome to the greatest country in the world!” How gauche and contrary to the spirit of the moment.
But as we got to know Mitt more and more, I liked him less and less. The cruel private school “prank” that he led on a fellow teen struggling with his sexuality, attacking him and cutting off his long hair, showed a darker side. He was leader of a pack. The presidency is absolutely about character and personality, as much as it is about policy. A handsome apology becomes a man, but his ungenerous words fell flat.
A brief confession. As a liberal, I secretly liked Ronald Reagan as an individual, for he had a certain charm and knew how to tell a story. Though I deplored some of his policies (not all), I detected a heartbeat under the presidential aura he displayed like a performance artist. Romney looks the part of an American president, but he doesn’t really act it. His genial side seems forced. Like the younger Bush, he may just want to be president to one-up his father George—who ran and lost. History’s closet rattles with father-son rivalries that turn out tragically. Not on our time, please.
Searching through news pages, debates, live speeches, and interviews in 2012, Romney has not said a thing—and I mean not one—that shows a whit of wit, compassion, charm, or insight. Since challenging (and losing to) the late great Sen. Ted Kennedy, he’s shifted his ground to antichoice with no good reason why. And how craven is it to deny your own healthcare mandate as governor because your opponent managed to make the model pass Congress to become law?
Have you no shame, sir?
Arguably, Romney has not given the electorate or the press reasons “why” for anything. His stance, when it comes to disclosing his robber baron compensation at Bain and tax returns over the years, is that we don’t need to know. Nor do we have the right to question his actions.
In that sense, Romney is behaving precisely like the patriarch he is. In two other roles, he simply hands down his word as a chieftain in the Mormon Church and as a leader in corporate America. What he says goes. Impervious, he does not brook dissent or even comment. His life has been like that, always in the power position, always in authority—or being prepared at Harvard business and law schools on how to brandish and maximize his power and wealth. Let’s give him this. Nobody in his generation did it better.
In San Francisco among subversive women, we had a phrase for a man like Romney: “the patriarchy.” The whole system wrapped up in one man. Romney, the father of five sons, could hardly be more perfect for this dubious title.
Because of the blatantly male lay leadership structure that dominates the Mormon Church, Romney can be counted on by society’s elders to keep the faith with the power distribution as is, between men and women. He is utterly capable of having a cabinet that looks like him, without missing a beat or calling up any new friends at the NAACP.
Such a sincere, lifelong Mormon in the White House would keep women the weaker sex, frozen or pushed back from workplace gains we’ve managed to make, thanks mostly to President Clinton. The Family and Medical Leave Act was a great thing for the women of Obama’s generation. We should be worried about the retro Romney.
Romney’s not just a man’s man. He’s a privileged white man’s man with an outrageous fortune. Power, secrets, compliant women, and nothing but the best of everything else are all the entitlement.
No, he’s not going to change for you and me—or the American people.
By: Jamie Stiehm, Washington Whispers, U. S. News and World Report, July 17, 2012
July 18, 2012
Posted by raemd95 |
Election 2012 | Affordable Care Act, Bain Capital, GOP, Mitt Romney, Mormon Church, Politics, Republicans, Tax Returns |
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Things are getting awkward for Sheldon Adelson, the casino magnate who pledged to spend a “limitless” amount of money to get Mitt Romney elected. Adelson’s latest woes stem from business practices surrounding his lucrative casino in Macau, the only Chinese city with legalized gambling.
The Macau operation has long been under scrutiny but a new in-depth investigation from ProPublica and PBS focused on allegations of improper, and perhaps in some cases illegal, business dealings by Adelson’s Las Vegas Sands company in China. While focusing on the possibility that Sands violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act with a $700,000 payment to a Chinese associate, PBS also released documents that bolstered accusations of business ties between Adelson’s shop and Chinese organized crime figures.
PBS reports that Sands was clear that, in order to drive business from mainland China to their Macau casino, they would need to use “junkets” — trips arranged by private companies to ferry high-stakes gamblers to Macau:
Among the junket companies under scrutiny is a concern that records show was financed by Cheung Chi Tai, a Hong Kong businessman.
Cheung was named in a 1992 U.S. Senate report as a leader of a Chinese organized crime gang, or triad. A casino in Macau owned by Las Vegas Sands granted tens of millions of dollars in credit to a junket backed by Cheung, documents show.
Cheung did not respond to requests for comment.
Another document says that a Las Vegas Sands subsidiary did business with Charles Heung, a well-known Hong Kong film producer who was identified as an office holder in the Sun Yee On triad in the same 1992 Senate report. Heung, who has repeatedly denied any involvement in organized crime, did not return phone calls.
Because Nevada gambling authorities forbid doing any business with organized crime, Sands’s Las Vegas gambling licenses could hang in the balance. (Adelson and his company refused to comment for the PBS story.) But Adelson has other issues with his China operations.
In 2001, Adelson allegedly helped derail House Republican measure opposing Beijing’s Olympic bid due to human rights issues. “The bill will never see the light day, Mr. Mayor. Don’t worry about it,” he reportedly told Beijing’s mayor after phoning then-House Majority Whip Tom Delay. Sands went on to receive its lucrative casino license from China.
Part of Adelson’s Chinese dealings, which came under federal scrutiny in 2011, went through a non-profit called the Adelson Center for U.S.-China Enterprise. According to a WikiLeaks cable flagged by Salon, the association, which was meant to facilitate business between the U.S. and China, was shut down by China after some “missteps” with “funds transfer mechanisms” used by Sands. Unlike competitors, the cable said, Sands lobbied Beijing directly instead of going through Macau authorities. Adelson and Sands deny any wrongdoing related to the federal investigation.
Adelson’s many interests in politics are sometimes business-oriented and, on other issues, purely driven by ideology. Either way, his spending is massive. Adelson pledged to join forces with the Koch brothers to take down President Obama. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) — a top surrogate for Romney’s campaign — said of Adelson’s Chinese business interests and political giving that “maybe in a round-about way, foreign money is coming into an American campaign, political campaigns.”
By: Ali Gharib, Think Progress, July 16, 2012
July 17, 2012
Posted by raemd95 |
Election 2012 | Casino's, China, Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, GOP, Koch Brothers, Las Vegas Sands, Mitt Romney, Politics, Sheldon Adelson |
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Honest question: does anyone think Romney helped himself with this round of television interviews? This is more fact-finding than rhetorical. And the people whose opinions I’d be most curious to hear are those of Republican operatives — people who want the answer to be ‘yes’ but are politically sophisticated enough to know if it’s not.
The headline in the Times is “Romney Seeks Obama Apology for Bain Attacks”.
In the Journal “Romney Defends Bain Capital Tenure”.
This is ‘bitch slap’ politics played with a gusto and coldness seldom seen from Democrats, at least since the Bill Clinton days. Asking for an apology is losing. Saying you want something you clearly have no power to get is losing.
There’s a meta-politics Obama is playing by slashing at Romney with suggestions he might be a felon. He’s wounding Romney, who is clearly rattled and angry about the charges, but just as clearly can’t defend himself or strike back. As I’ve noted many times, a thick layer of presidential politics (in a way that’s distinct from US politics at really every other level) resides at the brainstem level of cogitation — with gambits to assert power and demonstrate dominance. Obama looked in control of this situation; Romney didn’t.
TPM Reader JL could barely contain himself …
Bitch slap politics at it’s finest.Step 1. Obama tells Romney to man up and take responsibility.
Coming soon …
Step 2. Romney whines that it’s beneath the office.
Step 3. BO Surrogates tell Mitt, you’re running for President for God’s sake. Don’t be such a girly man!!
I love it!! Are we sure Obama’s a Dem?
There’s another part of this equation: I’m not sure how many people watching this spectacle even remember that it’s nominally about whether Romney is responsible for outsourcing Bain did post-February 1999 or its investment in a company that serviced abortion clinics. I barely remember it myself. What’s driving this now is that the Obama camp has backed Romney into a position in which he looks ridiculous — something much more lethal for presidential candidates than most people appreciate.
Romney had absolutely nothing to do with Bain after 1999, no responsibility for anything it did, barely even knew what it did. Only he was the owner, the Chairman of the Board and the CEO. At least according to all the official documents, many of which he signed. Only he wasn’t any of those things, says Romney.
Partisans can be walked through the arguments of how this might be true, just as you could explain what John Kerry meant by saying he was for a bill before he voted against it. But it still makes no sense. And doubling down on nonsense makes you look silly and trapped. That’s especially dangerous for someone already saddled with a reputation for shifting his stories and positions to suit the moment.
This is and will remain a low single digit race. But the President’s team is making Romney look shifty and silly and weak. (I half expect them to start goosing surrogates to call him Slick Willard.) And they’re well on their way to defining him in a way that will be difficult to undo.
By: Josh Marshall, Editor and Publisher, Talking Points Memo, July 13, 2012
July 16, 2012
Posted by raemd95 |
Election 2012 | Bain Capital, GOP, Mitt Romney, Outsourcing, Politics, Republicans, Stericycle |
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“Too much money” sounds like an oxymoron, especially when applied to American politics. But in the last week, Republicans are beginning to learn that lots of money can have its downside. Thursday’s story that Romney may have actively directed Bain Capital three years longer than he claimed – a period in which Bain Capital-managed companies experienced bankruptcies and layoffs – caps what must be the worst weekly news cycle of any modern American presidential candidate. From images of corporate raiding, to luxury speedboats, to offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands, to mega-mansions in the Hamptons, this week’s stories suggest that the candidacy of Mitt Romney – poster-boy for the symbiotic relationship between big money and the modern Republican party – is in serious trouble.
Last weekend’s photos of the Romney clan on a luxury speedboat cruising around a lake in New Hampshire, where their multimillion-dollar compound sits, were startling in their tone-deafness. And just to make sure the sentiment wasn’t lost on anyone, at a campaign event the same week, Obama recounted childhood memories of touring the US with his grandmother by Greyhound bus, even the thrill of staying at a Howard Johnson motel. In a smart political calculation, the Obamas chose to forgo their annual summer vacation in Cape Cod (a nice upper-middle class vacation spot, mind you, but nowhere near the same league as the Romney estate). Instead, Obama was photographed visiting a senior citizens’ home in the battleground state of Ohio.
And the hits kept coming. Next, Vanity Fair published an article listing the Romneys’ various offshore investment accounts worth potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in the secretive tax havens of Cayman Islands and Bermuda, as well as a since-closed Swiss bank account. Democrats stoked the predictable outrage from the revelations. On the Sunday ABC news program “This Week”, Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley thundered:
“Mitt Romney bets against America. He bet against America when he put his money in Swiss bank accounts and tax havens and shelters.”
On the same program, Bobbie Jindal, Republican governor of Louisiana, could only lamely respond:
“In terms of Governor Romney’s financial success, I’m happy that he’s a successful businessman.”
While there is no evidence that the Romneys illegally evaded taxes through their various offshore accounts (their secretiveness making it impossible to tell), the reek of entitlement became overwhelming when it was revealed that the Romneys had accumulated somewhere between $20m and $101m in an “IRA”, a tax-advantaged retirement account designed for middle-class savers, limited to a few thousand dollars a year contribution. As one commenter parried, “I may be stupid, but I ain’t no fool.” In other words, we might be too stupid to understand how Romney was able to obtain all these tax breaks legally, but we aren’t fooled about unfairness of it all.
Well, at this point, you might think that the next sighting of Romney would be of him clothed in ash-cloth ladling out soup at an inner-city soup kitchen. But no. Next, we were regaled with the New York Times story of a lavish fundraiser in the Hamptons hosted by the infamous David Koch, the billionaire benefactor of conservative causes. The optics were worse than bad, as the Times recounted how one woman in a Range Rover, idling in a 30-deep line of cars waiting for entry, yelled to a Romney aide, “Is there a VIP entrance? We are VIP.”
Romney was expected to haul in several million dollars from his trip to wine and dine with the billionaires of the Hamptons. But why risk confirming the very message that Democrats have been hammering upon: that Romney is a super-wealthy elitist whose objective is to further the interests of the 0.01%?
Certainly, billionaires for Romney would have given him those millions without the face-time and the photo-ops, the chance to dress up and be seen. And to be heckled by Occupy Wall Street protesters and parodied by reporters. What is so very puzzling about the whole episode is the sheer in-your-face-ness of it.
Yet, perhaps that is the point. As a very perceptive article in the New York Magazine, Lisa Miller describes how new psychological research indicates that wealth erodes empathy with others. In the “Money-Empathy Gap”, Miller cites one researcher who says that:
“The rich are way more likely to prioritize their own self-interests above the interests of other people. It makes them more likely to exhibit characteristics that we would stereotypically associate with, say, assholes.”
Researchers found a consistent correlation between higher income, management responsibility and disagreeableness. One researcher interpreted her findings to imply that money makes people disinterested in the welfare of others. “It’s not a bad analogy to think of them as a little autistic” says Kathleen Vos, a professor at the University of Minnesota.
If this research is accurate (as it seems to be, replicated in various ways by several researches), the synergies between it, the increasing concentration of wealth and the Citizens United ruling, have striking implications for the future of the Republican party. As Newt Gingrich, the uber-southern politician, plaintively explained how he lost the Republican primary: “Romney had 16 billionaires. I had only one.” The domination by the super-wealthy means that Republicans not only have no interest in the welfare of the rest of the 99.9%, they have no understanding of why this is a problem. The noblesse oblige days of the old money, such as the Bushes, the Kennedys and the Roosevelts are long gone, replaced by the new mega-money of hedge funds, corporate raiders and global industrialists.
How else can one explain the allegiance of the Republican party to the profoundly unpopular Ryan tax plan, which would eviscerate Medicare and Medicaid while delivering more tax cuts to the rich? What is the future of a party in a democracy when the powers-that-be can no longer even understand, much less address, the welfare of the vast majority of its citizens?
Taking the hint, the Obama administration is finally positioning itself firmly on the side of progressives, attacking income inequality and holding Republicans accountable for their assaults on the middle and working classes. How ironic it would be if, after all, the other side’s big money is the answer to the Democrats’ prayers.
By: Robin Wells, The Guardian, July 12, 2012
July 15, 2012
Posted by raemd95 |
Election 2012 | Bain Capital, Conservatives, GOP, Middle Class, Mitt Romney, Offshore Accounts, Politics, Republicans, Tax Returns |
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mykeystrokes.com 