“Democracy Is An Annoying Obstacle”: Plutocrat Bosses To Employees, “Vote For Romney, Or Else”
It’s quickly becoming the story of the election season. Every day there’s a new report of bosses putting pressure on employees to vote for Mitt Romney or very bad things will happen. The threats range from job loss to wage cuts, and the Gilded Age-style strong-arming shows no signs of slowing.
Most recently, we’ve learned that Arthur Allen, CEO of ASG Software Solutions, sent an email to workers with the following subject line: “Will the US Presidential election directly impact your future jobs at ASG? Please read below.”
David Siegel, the billionaire founder of Westgate Resorts, has been playing the worker intimidation game. So have the Koch brothers, sending anti-Obama voter materials to 45,000 employees of their Georgia Pacific subsidiary (thanks to AlterNet’s Adele Stan for bringing us that story). In Michigan, the president of Lacks Enterprises warned his company’s 2,300 employees that their paychecks will shrink if Obama is re-elected.
On a June conference call to the National Federation of Independent Businesses, Mitt Romney himself enthusiastically pushed the tactic:
“I hope you make it very clear to your employees what you believe is in the best interest of your enterprise and therefore their job and their future in the upcoming elections.”
At a time of rampant job insecurity, workers across the country are fearful of doing anything to jeopardize their paychecks. And in a tight race, every vote counts.
Which is what the plutocrats are worried about.
Unfortunately, the history of worker intimidation during election season has a long and sordid history in the United States. Thomas Ferguson, professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, notes that such activity has repeatedly bubbled up during periods of turmoil: “In the 19th century, voting was often public, so manufacturers would sometimes march their workers to the polls to vote as a bloc,” said Ferguson. “In company towns, employers used all kinds of tactics to intimidate workers. During political crises, such as the 1890s or the New Deal, heavy-handed efforts by employers to influence worker votes were rampant. In 1896, for example, factory owners posted signs saying that their businesses would close if Republican William McKinley lost to William Jennings Bryan. Similar efforts also marked the New Deal elections of 1936 and 1940.”
In a nation where children are taught that every citizen has the right to vote, it would be nice to think that voter intimidation was relegated to the history books by the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But that legislation only outlawed the targeting of voters by race or color.
Bosses have little to fear from knowingly misinforming or threatening workers during election season. Calculated and determined efforts at worker intimidation are as brazen as ever this year. Professor Ferguson notes that the waning power of unions, along with non-enforcement of laws, has emboldened employers. CEOs are feeling quite comfortable putting their intimidation efforts into writing and making them public. There is no federal election law that specifically blocks bosses from telling workers they could lose their jobs if they vote for a particular person.
Defenders of the practice like to say that bosses are just expressing their opinions, much in the way a union might expressing political opinions to the owner of a firm. Except for this small difference: a union can’t fire an employee.
The recent voter intimidation frenzy points to the plutocrats’ pesky problem of basic math: They are outnumbered. Citizen United, which unleashed unlimited corporate spending, certainly tilted things in their favor, but even that has not been enough to ensure that the presidency is in their pocket. The 2008 financial crash and ensuing recession have exposed enough of their dangerous and criminal activity to make voters question the idea of putting a financier in the White House. Ironically, a Romney win would likely lead to austerity policies that would weaken the economy and make the products and services of most businesses harder to sell. But plutocrats can see no further than the number represented by their marginal tax rates, and so they must have Romney in Washington. Democracy is merely an annoying obstacle.
By: Lynn Stuart Parramore, Sr. Editor, AlterNet, October 16, 2012
“Bemoaning Their Hardship”: The Billionaire Obama Hate Club Up In Arms Over Obama’s New Tax Plan
So Obama, defending his plan to raise taxes on the rich, says this:
“If you are a wealthy C.E.O. or hedge-fund manager in America right now, your taxes are lower than they have ever been. They are lower than they have been since the nineteen-fifties,” the President said. “You can still ride on your corporate jet. You’re just going to have to pay a little more.”
And billionaire hedge-fund manager Leon Cooperman, a former Obama supporter, responds with this:
“You know, the largest and greatest country in the free world put a forty-seven-year-old guy that never worked a day in his life and made him in charge of the free world … Not totally different from taking Adolf Hitler in Germany and making him in charge of Germany because people were economically dissatisfied.”
Cooperman, like so many of his fellow super-rich, is upset at Obama’s class-warfare “tone.” But in response, as Chrystia Freeland documents in her definitive New Yorker treatment of billionaire Obama hate, Cooperman raises the level of divisive rhetoric light-years beyond Obama’s, straight into a galaxy of ludicrous imbecility. It is beyond irrational to compare Obama with Hitler, or to argue that in any meaningful way his administration has waged class warfare against the rich. If we’ve said it once, we’ve said it a million times, Obama has been great for the rich!
Freeland says it again:
The growing antagonism of the super-wealthy toward Obama can seem mystifying, since Obama has served the rich quite well. His Administration supported the seven-hundred-billion-dollar TARP rescue package for Wall Street, and resisted calls from the Nobel Prize winners Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, and others on the left, to nationalize the big banks in exchange for that largesse. At the end of September, the S. & P. 500, the benchmark U.S. stock index, had rebounded to just 6.9 per cent below its all-time pre-crisis high, on October 9, 2007. The economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty have found that ninety-three per cent of the gains during the 2009-10 recovery went to the top one per cent of earners.
Vein-popping blood-pressure spikes are hard to avoid when one reads about the hurt feelings of America’s billionaires. Seriously, if you’re looking for ways to provoke real socialist revolution in the United States, the behavior investigated by Freeland is surely the best way to go about it, outside of mass-mailing invitations to a storm-the-barricades party to every American on food stamps. Flaunt your entitlement! Bemoan the hardship of your 14.1 percent tax rate! Complain that you are not getting enough credit for endowing the local symphony!
But the real wonder is that Obama doesn’t take more advantage of this obvious public relations bonanza. It is impossible to imagine anything that could play better for Obama with working-class voters than the fact that “hostility toward the President is particularly strident among the ultra-rich.” Franklin D. Roosevelt knew what to do with banker ire — just a few days before Election Day in 1936 he famously told a crowd at Madison Square Garden that “I welcome their hatred.”
Obama should be doing the same.
Or maybe he is. Because if we want to understand why polls show Obama up comfortably in Ohio, at least part of the reason has to be that Wall Street billionaires hate him — and like the other guy.
By: Andrew Leonard, Salon, October 1, 2012
“Victimizing America”: Tax Loophole Benefiting Romney’s Estate Costs U.S. $1 Billion Over Ten Years
According to Bloomberg News, Mitt Romney is taking advantage of a tax loophole to pass off a fortune to his children without paying taxes on it. According to administration figures, this loophole costs the government $1 billion over a ten-year budget window:
In January 1999, a trust set up by Mitt Romney for his children and grandchildren reaped a 1,000 percent return on the sale of shares in Internet advertising firm DoubleClick Inc.
If Romney had given the cash directly, he could have owed a gift tax at a rate as high as 55 percent. He avoided gift and estate taxes by using a type of generation-skipping trust known to tax planners by the nickname: “I Dig It.” […]
While Romney’s tax avoidance is both legal and common among high-net-worth individuals, it has become increasingly awkward for his candidacy since the disclosure of his remarks at a May fundraiser. He said that the nearly one-half of Americans who pay no income taxes are “dependent upon government” and “believe that they are victims.” […]
The Obama administration estimates that closing the loophole Romney used would bring the federal government almost $1 billion in the coming decade.
One analyst said that $1 billion is a “laughable” under-estimate of the loophole’s effect, as “a single billionaire could pay $500 million more in estate taxes if these trusts are shut down.”
It’s unclear whether Romney would close this particular loophole, since he refuses to divulge details about his tax plan. However, he has been upfront about his desire to eliminate the estate tax, which only affects the richest Americans. That tax cut would save the heirs of the Koch and Adelson fortunes billions of dollars. As ThinkProgress detailed, the lion’s share of tax breaks doled out in the U.S. go to the very rich.
By: Pat Garofalo, Think Progress, September 27, 2012
“Mitt Romney, Self-Made Man”: Delusional Millionaire Son Of A Millionaire
Yes, we know that Mitt Romney thinks almost half the nation is made up of welfare-grubbing leeches unwilling to separate their maws from the teat of Big Government. But what’s honestly more remarkable to me (because the “too many non-rich Americans don’t pay taxes” line is an ancient one, and one that the Wall Street Journal editorial page has been repeating since 2002) is that Mitt Romney actually doesn’t understand, apparently, that he is a child of privilege.
Contending that he is a self-made millionaire who earned his own fortune, Romney insisted, “I have inherited nothing.” He remarked, “There is a perception, ‘Oh, we were born with a silver spoon, he never had to earn anything and so forth.’ Frankly, I was born with a silver spoon, which is the greatest gift you can have: which is to get born in America.”
Being born in America is certainly a much bigger leg up than being born in, say, Haiti. But being born in America is a much better gift, on the whole, if you’re born to well-educated parents with a relatively large household income, as Mitt Romney was. As economic inequity has risen, social mobility has declined relative to much of the rest of the industrialized world. In other words, being born in Denmark, Australia, Norway, Finland, Canada, Sweden, Germany, Spain or France would actually have been a better gift. (Especially Denmark.) Of course, that represents a decline since the days of mass unionization and liberal activist government — being born American in the first half of the 20th century really was a nice deal, as long as you survived the wars.
But the important thing is that Romney considers himself wholly a self-made man. He Built That. Hard work and his own merit are what made him a success, and, by implication, made 47 percent of the population useless mooching parasites.
This is very silly and if Romney actually believes this about himself he’s much more delusional than I thought he was.
It’s technically true that Romney “inherited nothing” when his father died, as various conservatives shouted at me on Twitter last night. He “inherited nothing” because by the time his father died, in 1995, Mitt Romney was already a very wealthy man, thanks in large part to the many advantages he enjoyed as the son of a prominent politician and corporate executive. Romney could afford, at that point in his life, to give away his father’s estate. (To charities and, notably, to his children — both common means of avoiding the brunt of the estate tax.) He gave his father’s estate away because he’d already enjoyed its many advantages.
Mitt Romney attended maybe the most prestigious private high school in the Midwestern United States. He was not a scholarship student. His father was an automotive company executive and eventually the governor of Michigan, and, by the early 1960s, a millionaire. (And one who had legitimately started from practically nothing.)
If a theoretical non-rich Mitt Romney had gone to college (57 percent of male high school graduates enrolled in college in 1965), a prestigious private school like Stanford might’ve been out of reach. When Mitt Romney attended Stanford, tuition was $1,575 a year, which is more than $11,000 in today’s dollars, and this was just at the cusp of the age of financial aid. (If Romney were black, going to college in 1965 would’ve been significantly less likely.) And if theoretical working-class Romney had managed to bootstrap himself into a good school, it would’ve almost certainly been with the assistance of the federal government, in the form of the National Defense Education Act or the Higher Education Act of 1965 (the year Romney enrolled in Stanford).
Romney spent only a year at Stanford, and finished his degree at the less prestigious Brigham Young, at which point he was accepted into Harvard Law and then the very exclusive joint law/business degree program. When that happened, his father, by the way, was a cabinet secretary. I’m just saying.
And of course while Romney was getting his degree, he didn’t have to do anything rash like “go into debt” or “work,” because, as Ann Romney helpfully explained in 1994, the young couple survived by selling stock Romney received from his father. At BYU: “Neither one of us had a job, because Mitt had enough of an investment from stock that we could sell off a little at a time.” At Harvard, Ann was able to stay home with their children despite neither parent having a job, because “we had no income except the stock we were chipping away at.”
So, yes, self-made man, no inheritance, only silver spoon was the good old red, white and blue. It’s understandable that rich men enjoy the delusion that their own inherited virtue and work ethic are solely responsible for their success, but in men like Mitt Romney, it’s a particularly bizarre delusion.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, September 18, 2012
“There Is No Real Romney”: Mitt Was Really Saying To Plutocrats, “I’m You”
Whenever we get a glimpse of a candidate speaking in a place where he didn’t know he was being recorded, there’s a powerful temptation to conclude that the “real” person has been revealed. After all, campaigning is almost all artifice, and every other moment at which we see the candidate, he’s acutely aware that he is on stage, with people watching his every expression and listening to his every word. This is how many people are interpreting Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” comments we learned about yesterday, even though Mitt was certainly on stage, even if he didn’t know he was being recorded. For instance, Jonathan Chait says, “the video exposes an authentic Romney as a far more sinister character than I had imagined. Here is the sneering plutocrat, fully in thrall to a series of pernicious myths that are at the heart of the mania that has seized his party.” McKay Coppins reaches the same conclusion, that “Romney seemed to give the closest thing to a candid description of his worldview,” as evidenced by the fact that “his delivery carried none of the discomfort or scripted nature of his stump speeches, and the tone was markedly different from that of the remarks he delivers at fundraisers open to the press.” Our own Bob Moser agreed yesterday.
I’m not buying it. As I’ve maintained for some time, for all intents and purposes there is no “real” Mitt Romney. His political beliefs are the equivalent of Schrodinger’s cat. They exist in every state at once until you open the box to observe them. If the one opening the box is a Tea Partier, they instantly lock into place as a set of Tea Party beliefs; if it’s a bunch of GOP plutocrats staring down, that’s whose beliefs he’ll mirror. Romney has spent the last five years in an intensive period of study, with his subject the contemporary American conservative mind in all its permutations. He’s well aware that the misleading talking point about 47 percent of Americans not paying taxes gets repeated all the time on the right, in private and public. What he was telling the people in that room is what he tells any group of people he speaks to. His message was, in Christine O’Donnell’s immortal words, “I’m you.”
And it just happens that before this particular group, “I’m you” was absolutely true. But it was necessary for Romney to explain to them not just that he’s like them, but he believes everything they believe. And the Randian idea that society is made up of makers and takers, and all those shiftless mooching takers are voting for their patron Obama, is something those funders believe with every fiber of their beings. Does Romney actually believe, as he says on the tape, that “I have inherited nothing. Everything that Ann and I have, we have earned the old-fashioned way”? Maybe, maybe not. But he knows that the ideas that every rich person got rich on nothing but merit, gumption, and hard work, and your wealth is proof of your virtue as a human being, have become absolute gospel among the kind of people who plunk down $50,000 to have dinner with the Republican nominee for president.
I’m not trying to let him off the hook here; “I was only pandering” is no defense for the repetition of abhorrent views (and subsequently, Mitt has insisted that he wasn’t only pandering, but saying what he really thinks). But show me an instance in which Mitt Romney tells a group of people something they don’t want to hear, and then I’ll believe we’ve gotten some insight into the “real” Romney.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, September 18, 2012
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