“It’s All About Bucks,The Rest is Conversation”: Mitt Romney And ‘Envy’ Versus ‘Greed’
The 2012 presidential race is shaping up as a battle not just between candidates, but over which of the Seven Deadly Sins is most offensive to voters.
On the one side, we have envy, which GOP front-runner former Gov. Mitt Romney identified as a distasteful by-product of income inequality—or, Republicans argue, the “class warfare” provoked by Democrats. The United States “already has a leader who divides us by the bitter politics of envy,” Romney said after winning the New Hampshire primary. The line was obviously meant to undermine Obama’s 2008 pledge to bring people together, as well as to cast restless middle-class and poor people as possessing un-mannerly envy.
On the other side, however, we have greed, and that is a Deadly Sin that may haunt the eventual Republican nominee. The Occupy Wall Street movement may be dismissed (unfairly) by some as a bunch of Starbucks-sucking, whiny kids who won’t look for jobs, but it is undeniably true that a broad swath of Americans is getting more than a little resentful at the fact that the very wealthy have come through the recession quite profitably, while the low-and-middle income workers are still struggling. Many of those who managed to keep their jobs are working at lower pay and reduced benefits, further aggravating the situation.
According to a recent Pew Research Center poll, about two-thirds of the public now believes there are strong conflicts between the rich and poor. The percentage has grown by 19 points since 2009, suggesting that voters are growing far more aware of the economic division as the election approaches. The Pew report notes, even more notably:
…in the public’s evaluations of divisions within American society, conflicts between rich and poor now rank ahead of three other potential sources of group tension — between immigrants and the native born; between blacks and whites; and between young and old. Back in 2009, more survey respondents said there were strong conflicts between immigrants and the native born than said the same about the rich and the poor.
How much political capital can a candidate gain by dismissing the unemployed malcontents as immorally envious? It’s a risk, especially this year.
We all feel envious sometimes, and most of us are not proud of it (which is a good thing, since pride is another one of the Seven Deadly Sins). But that sort of envy comes from feeling ungraciously jealous when a friend gets a promotion or a new car or a charming boyfriend. Feeling resentful of Wall Street investors and bankers who made terrible economic decisions that affected the entire national economy—then continued to be extremely well compensated despite the failures—is not jealousy. It’s a reaction to what many Americans see as a basic question of fairness.
Americans are aspirational; this is why even those who will never in their lives amass $1 million still oppose the estate tax. And there is a strong sense in this country, among liberals and conservatives alike, that enterprise and creativity should be rewarded, financially and otherwise. What gets missed in the silly verbal jousting, in which President Obama has been declared a “socialist” and enemy of free enterprise, is that Wall Street itself wasn’t willing to submit to the uncertainty of capitalism. They wanted to privatize the profits. But they wanted to socialize the risk. And it was 401K holders and middle-class workers who bore the brunt of that bad risk.
There was a time when Americans could chuckle good-naturedly at the line in the movie Wall Street that “Greed is good,” and even agree with it, somewhat. But that was when envy was about who had the bigger car. The enviers now are the ones who have no health insurance and are losing their houses to foreclosure. And they vote.
“Breathtaking Dishonesty”: Romney Revives The Big Republican Lie
As Mitt Romney and the GOP’s merry band of private-equity foes take their delicious war over “good” vs. “bad” capitalism to South Carolina, don’t expect Romney’s triumphalist New Hampshire victory speech to shut his rivals down. With the slugfest heading south, the real shocker is that Romney’s chipper “I like being able to fire people” line — which will now become permanent background noise in our world, like the hum of the air conditioning — is actually much worse in context than it was when taken out.
Aficionados of this Romney gaffe know by now that Romney was referring to being able to “fire” health insurance companies that aren’t providing adequate care and coverage. But the terrible fraud in his explanation hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves.
“I don’t want to live in a world where we have Obamacare telling us which insurance we have to have, which doctor we can have, which hospital we go to,” Romney said in a rare news conference Monday afternoon to clarify his remarks. “I believe in the setting as I described this morning, where people are able to choose their own doctor, choose their own insurance company. If they don’t like their insurance company or their provider, they can get rid of it.”
On Tuesday he added: “I was talking about, as you know, insurance companies. We’d all like to get rid of our insurance companies — don’t want Obama to tell us we can’t.”
Romney’s dishonesty here is breathtaking. I used to think Republicans had taken chutzpah to unsurpassable new heights when they refused on principle to lift the debt ceiling last summer – despite having passed the Paul Ryan budget, which added more than $5 trillion in debt over the next decade.
But Romney may have topped that. He’s saying that President Obama’s Affordable Care Act — which offers people precisely the choice among competing private insurers that Romney’s own health-care reform did in Massachusetts — is instead some cartoon version of socialized medicine.
It’s a blatant falsehood. The Big Republican Lie.
Now, if Rick Perry had said this, you might say that the man just doesn’t know whereof he speaks. When Rush Limbaugh makes such bogus claims, you put it down to the ravings of an entertainer and propagandist. But Romney is a smart man. He’s also supposed to be a serious man, not a huckster. He knows better. Yet he’s made these outrageous false claims repeatedly. So this is a conscious, premeditated Big Lie.
What should we make of all this?
Let’s review. A candidate makes an obviously insensitive, unattractive remark that makes him sound like a callous, coldhearted boss, but the remark has been taken out of context. That “fire” sound bite will nonetheless become a staple of rivals’ ads and part of the Democratic onslaught if Romney is the nominee. (Look for it to be paired with Mike Huckabee’s perfect quip from 2008 that Romney “looks like the guy who fired you.”)
A fairminded citizen might feel a pang of sympathy for a politician who has to watch every word, lest it be taken out of context and turned against him. That’s why we get such robotic candidates and officials, after all.
But such sympathy dries up when it turns out that Romney’s actual meaning involves the Big Republican Lie on health care. When, in fact, Obama’s law offers exactly the same choices, via exactly the same kind of insurance exchanges, that Romney brought to Massachusetts.
Here’s another wrinkle. Romney’s passage of that health-care law – the one he’s mischaracterizing when he’s not busy running away from it – was a landmark achievement. He was the only governor who passed a bipartisan universal health-care bill. Facts are facts.
So what are we supposed to think of this man?
Here’s what we know. Romney will very casually tell the Big Lie if he thinks it will help him win. He’ll also work to enact universal health coverage if he thinks it’s a sensible path for his constituents and serves his own political ambitions once in office. Does this make him shameless and untrustworthy? A problem-solver? Both? Is belief in his own claim on power the only core conviction we can count on from Mitt Romney? Is any other presidential contender — or president — any different?
Just some questions to mull as you microwave the popcorn and settle down to watch the 30-minute video on Romney’s time at Bain in the days ahead. In the meantime, if the dictionary defines “misfire” as “to fail to ignite when expected,” and “spitfire” means “a quick tempered or highly emotional person,” I’m betting that by the time South Carolina votes, we’ll be looking at a “Mittfire” — a candidate whose loose talk on firing means he hasn’t wrapped things up when he’d hoped and who’s hopping mad about it. There’s a twist or turn left in the Grand Old Party yet.
By: Matt Miller, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, January 11, 2012
Mitt Romney: “A Remarkably Reactionary Extremist Candidate Camouflaged In Corporate Pinstripes”
Mitt Romney’s dead heat with Rick Santorum in the Iowa caucuses bolstered the media narrative that Mitt Romney may not be conservative enough for Republican primary voters. This characterization serves Romney well. His rivals carve up each other, hoping to emerge as the conservative “alternative” to Romney. And vast swaths of the media discount his reactionary views, anticipating his “pivot” to more moderate positions once the nomination is secured. In reality, Romney is a remarkably reactionary candidate, camouflaged in corporate pinstripes.
On social issues, Romney embraces all of the right’s litmus tests. He pledges to repeal President Obama’s health-care reform, even though it was modeled on the plan Romney signed as Massachusetts governor. He favors repealing Roe v. Wade, outlawing women’s right to choose. He supports an amendment to make same-sex marriage unconstitutional. He’s for building a fence on the U.S.-Mexican border, opposes any path to legal status for the millions of undocumented immigrants in this country and rails against the Texas policy to offer in-state college tuition for the children of undocumented workers. Advised on legal matters by the reactionary crank Robert Bork, he repeatedly calls for more judges in the activist right-wing tradition of the gang of four — Scalia, Thomas, Roberts and Alito.
On national security, he is far more bellicose than former ambassador Jon Huntsman and somewhat to the right of Newt Gingrich. He says he’d add 100,000 troops and hundreds of billions of dollars to the military budget. He promises war with Iran if it proceeds toward a nuclear weapon. He joins George W. Bush in claiming that waterboarding is not torture.
But it is on economic policy where Romney’s extremism is most apparent — the extremism of the 1 percent, reflecting the zealotry of a former corporate raider at Bain Capital who made his fortune preying on U.S. companies.
Romney calls for returning to the same conservative policies — deregulation, financialization, corporate trade — that generated Gilded Age inequality and a declining middle class even before driving the economy over a cliff. He supports repealing Dodd-Frank, the Wall Street reform act. He favored the Republican effort to cripple the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the National Labor Relations Board by blocking Obama’s nominations to those agencies. He wants a weaker Environmental Protection Agency, calling regulation “the invisible boot of the state.” Not surprisingly, he agrees with Rick Perry that anti-union “right-to-work legislation makes a lot of sense for New Hampshire and for the nation.”
Like Gingrich, Romney summons up a dark vision of the United States at an ominous crossroads. “This is a defining time for America,” he says, “We have on one side a president who wants to transform America into a European-style nation, and you have on the other hand someone like myself that wants to turn around America and keep America American.”
Romney would savage programs that serve the vulnerable. He’s been more specific about supporting various parts of the infamous Paul Ryan budget than his rivals. That’s the budget House Republicans passed that ended Medicare as we know it while cutting funds from education, food stamps and other programs. Romney proposes restructuring Medicaid and food stamps as block-grant programs while slashing overall spending. He’d cut funding for Pell grants, which provide (inadequate) scholarships to poor students. And he’d trim funding for Head Start, the Children’s Health Insurance Program and programs that support the disabled.
When Chris Wallace of Fox News, of all places, asked Romney whether, given his proposed cuts — $700 billion from Medicaid, $127 billion from food stamps, half of the funds for Pell grants — he was concerned that “some people are going to get hurt.” Romney replied without hesitation, saying he didn’t think we hurt the poor “by cutting welfare spending dramatically,” so these cuts wouldn’t hurt either.
These cuts would not be used to reduce deficits — despite the fact that Romney has signed the risible “cut, cap and balance” pledge — but to pay for tax cuts skewed to the wealthiest 1 percent. Romney would eliminate the estate tax, which applies only to multimillion dollar estates like his own, and he’d lower corporate tax rates, give multinationals a tax holiday to repatriate profits sheltered abroad and sustain the top- end Bush tax cuts. The result, according to a detailed analysis by the Tax Policy Center, would give those earning more than a million dollars a year an average annual tax cut of about $295,000 by 2015.
With Europe on the verge of a recession and the United States still struggling to recover from the Great Recession caused by the financial collapse, Romney’s trickle-down economic plan is exactly wrong for the United States. It would add to unemployment, increase poverty and accelerate the decline of the middle class.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Romney, as Mike Huckabee once famously noted, “looks like the guy who laid you off.” At Bain, he was the guy who fired you. In a review of 77 major deals that Bain capital did when Romney headed the firm, the Wall Street Journal found that “22% [of the businesses that Bain invested in] either filed for bankruptcy reorganization or closed their doors by the end of the eighth year after Bain first invested, sometimes with substantial job losses.” Of course, Bain produced remarkable returns for its investors, including Romney.
Romney trumpets an agenda that would benefit the few at the expense of the many. This isn’t the plan of a moderate. The conservative garb isn’t something Romney has donned for the primaries. These policies are not popular with most Republicans, much less with most voters. They are consistent with Romney’s background as a corporate raider. And as his fundraising shows, they play well in the plush offices of big finance where Romney made his fortune. He is a champion for the 1 percent, peddling a program that will ensure that working Americans bear the cost for the mess left by Wall Street’s extremes while the buccaneer bankers, corporate raiders and private equity gamblers are free to go back to preying on America.
By: Katrina van Heuvel, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, January 10, 2012
Remember When Newt Gingrich Pretended To Hate GOP Infighting?
In recent days, Newt Gingrich has been excoriating Mitt Romney in television ads and attacking his business background in language that President Obama would likely repeat in a general election.
“The most significant campaign news of the last few days was not the debates over the weekend, or even today’s New Hampshire primary,” Brendan Nyhan wrote. “Rather, it was the report that a super PAC backing Newt Gingrich will air millions of dollars in negative ads against Romney in South Carolina, the site of the next Republican primary after New Hampshire.”
Amusingly, it wasn’t so long ago that Gingrich got all sanctimonious about what he cast as a principled refusal to attack fellow candidates for the Republican primary. As he put it in September 2011:
JOHN HARRIS: Speaker Gingrich, it sounds like we have a genuine philosophical disagreement. In Massachusetts, a mandate, almost no uninsured–in Texas, a more limited approach, about a quarter uninsured. Who’s got the better end of this argument?
GINGRICH: Well, I’m frankly not interested in your effort to get Republicans fighting each other. The fact is–
HARRIS: Speaker Gingrich, we’ve got–
GINGRICH: No, no we don’t–
HARRIS: We’ve got a choice between the individual mandate or not. Anyway, go ahead.
GINGRICH: You’d have, you would like to puff this up into some giant thing. The fact is, every person up here understands Obamacare is a disaster. It is a disaster procedurally. It was rammed through after they lost Teddy Kennedy’s seat in Massachusetts. It was written badly, it was never reconciled. It can’t be implemented. It is killing this economy. And if this president had any concern for working Americans, he’d walk in Thursday night and ask us to repeal it because it’s a monstrosity. Every person up here agrees with that. And let me just say– since I still have a little time left, let me just say–
HARRIS: Sure.
GINGRICH: I for one, and I hope all of my friends up here, going to repudiate every effort of the news media to get Republicans to fight each other to protect Barack Obama who deserves to be defeated. And all of us are committed as a team, whoever the nominee is, we are all for defeating Barack Obama.
Then there’s the statement the Gingrich campaign made last month: “Negative attacks on fellow Republicans will not create a single new job or help rebuild America… The Gingrich campaign has a different approach than some other Republican campaigns: Newt Gingrich has only one opponent — Barack Obama.”
Even in a race with Romney, Gingrich is as phony as they come.
By: Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic, January 11, 2012
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So, Should We Start Calling Gingrich A Socialist?
You mean the wealthy on Wall Street aren’t benevolent “job creators” after all and that one of the pirate captains flying the Jolly Roger of buccaneer capitalism is a “predatory corporate raider” who goes by the name of Mitt Romney? Who knew?
In boardrooms across America, the plutocrats are freaking out. Their carefully plotted strategy of making the 2012 election a referendum between economic “freedom” and suffocating “big government” is being blown to smithereens by that infamous bomb-thrower, Newt Gingrich, who is detonating the idea that unsupervised laissez faire capitalism is the unmitigated blessing its cheerleaders at the Wall Street Journal have always claimed it to be.
I guess I spoke too soon when I wrote the other day that an entire philosophical tradition of conservative anti-capitalism had been lost now that the Republican Party has made itself into the wholly-owned subsidiary of Wall Street. But how was I to know Newt Gingrich was about to launch a jihad against the black magic of compound interest?
Gingrich is the guy, remember, who closed down the government in order to stick it to President Clinton for a perceived slight he suffered on Air Force One. So, why should we be surprised that Gingrich would lay waste to 30 years of supply-side mythology if doing so let him get back at that spoiled rich kid who used daddy’s money to torment him in Iowa?
This is what everyone in the Republican Party was afraid from the start Gingrich would do to them given his well-known MO, says Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum: “Destroy them utterly if they declined to nominate him.”
And with a $5 million in the bank thanks to right-wing casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, Gingrich now has lots of money to put to use the Karl Rove strategy of inflicting maximum pain by hitting an opponent right where he’s strongest. And in South Carolina Gingrich intends to hit Mitt Romney where he is strongest, specifically by pulling down all those statues erected to “The Job Creator from Bain Capital.”
The political effect of these attack ads, says New York magazine’s Jon Chait, is to tear down Romney’s carefully-crafted image in such a way that “his private-sector experience becomes an indicator — not that he will fix the economy — but that he will help the already-rich. It’s a smash-you-over-the-head blunt message, with ominous music and storybook dialogue.”
And according to the transcript of the ad Gingrich plans to run: “Mitt Romney was not a capitalist during his reign at Bain. He was a predatory corporate raider. His firm didn’t seek to create value. Instead, like a scavenger, Romney looked for businesses he could pick apart. Indeed, he represented the worst possible kind of predator, operating within the law but well outside the bounds of what most real capitalists consider ethical…..He and his friends at Bain were bad guys. Any real capitalists should disavow Romney’s ‘creative destruction’ model that made him wealthy at the expense of thousands of American jobs.”
This is brutal stuff that plays right into President Obama’s hands as he portrays the GOP as the Party of the One Percent unconcerned with the fate of the other 99%, says Drum. It also undermines the whole trickle-down rationale underpinning finance capitalism.
The supply-side oligarchs who rule the Republican Establishment are beside themselves as they circle the wagons against this madman from Georgia, who not only says Wall Street plutocrats who preach the virtues of capitalism have no clothes but that the clothes they do have on order are being imported from Chinese sweat shops which pay slave wages to child coolie labor.
The day before voters went to the polls in New Hampshire’s primary, the Wall Street Journal reported that the right wing Club for Growth reflected the shock among conservatives when it went after Gingrich for his “disgusting” attacks against Romney and his record at Bain Capital.
The group’s president, former Rep. Chris Chocola (R-Ind), said in a written statement: “Attacking Governor Romney for participating in free-market capitalism is just beyond the pale for any purported ‘Reagan conservative.'”
Like smart traders who buy low and sell high, America’s plutocracy has profited spectacularly from the yawning gap which exists between the values used by the public to judge and reward economic behavior and the public’s understanding of the revolutionary changes in the economy over the past 30 years that have made those values obsolete.
When conservatives talk about the virtue of competition and “entrepreneurship,” for example, they are exploiting the ignorance of a public that still believes America’s economy is dominated by people who make things and so thinks rewards should naturally go to those who can make things faster, better, cheaper.
As a reader on Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Beast site put it: “Most Americans appreciate a free market system in which those that produce the best goods and services at the best value should be successful and become wealthy. However, when people become fabulously wealthy at the expense of others while producing nothing but investment gain for the investors, I think most Americans take pause.”
Yet, as economic historian Kevin Phillips notes, Wall Street is no longer the servant of Main Street where profits are confined to the earnings it can make by providing capital to entrepreneurs and businesses to invest in real things and good ideas. Today, financial firms earn more than 40% of all corporate profits and command a quarter of stock market capitalization — up from just 6% when Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980 – largely because of the powers Wall Street’s been given from deregulation to create debt and to earn fees from the distribution of that debt.
Historically, says Phillips, this transformation from a making to a papering economy “is as momentous as the emergence of railroads, iron and steel and the displacement of agriculture during the decades after the Civil War.”
And the problem for Mitt Romney is that he embodies these fundamental if poorly understood changes, which is why Republicans are so furious with Newt Gingrich for putting this all up in lights.
All Republicans talk about free markets, says Kevin Drum, but Mitt Romney has actually lived it. “That makes him a more concrete messenger, someone who can credibly say that he not only believes in free markets, but has lots of experience in making them work.”
Chances are that when Americans hear about free enterprise from conservatives “it’s usually accompanied by images of sunrises over wheat fields, hardworking farmers, and small-town construction workers heading home after a day of honest labor,” says Drum. “It is very definitely not accompanied by images of well-coiffed guys in suits and green eyeshades, making millions by sitting in boardrooms and approving mass layoffs by adding a quick line to a spreadsheet before they head out to lunch.”
Someone like Newt Gingrich can get up on his soapbox and keep things “fuzzy” by delivering a stem-winder about free markets, the glories of competition and keeping government off our backs “and then just walk off the stage — mission accomplished,” says Drum.
Not so Mitt Romney. When Romney talks about free markets the stakes are much higher, says Drum.
“He can’t get away with platitudes,” says Drum. “His experience at Bain Capital will inevitably be Exhibit 1 in just what he means when he talks about free markets.”
Short of being the CEO of Goldman Sachs, “this is quite possibly the worst possible face you can imagine for a conservative message about the glories of free enterprise and wealth creation,” adds Drum. “Romney, whether he likes it or not, won’t be able to talk about those glories without also facing up to the human destruction that often follows in its wake.”
Americans may say they are for free markets. But at the end of the day they are just regular folks who believe in a regular day’s pay for a regular day’s work. So, “if you rub their noses in the true face of modern capitalism, they aren’t going to like what they see,” Drum insists.
And that is what Gingrich is threatening to do. So, you can understand why Republicans and their wealthy benefactors are so uneasy — and incensed — by what Gingrich is about to do.
The revolutionary bomb-thrower who once brought down a House Speaker and ended 40 years of consecutive Democratic rule is now poised to blow up the Republican Party’s designated heir apparent and with him the Republican Party’s name-brand issue.
Wouldn’t it be ironic, then, if Newt Gingrich’s final act as America’s most famous radical was to squander the profits Republicans have so regularly earned — both economically and politically – through the arbitrage which exploits the gap between fact and fiction, reality and myth, in America’s system of free market capitalism?
By: Ted Frier, Open Salon, January 11, 2012
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