“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.
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
Mitt Romney And The Privileges Of The Very Wealthy: “Thanks, Much Obliged”
What better person than the French-speaking Mitt Romney to lay bare the pure beating heart of noblesse oblige.
Sunday morning’s NBC debate in Concord, N.H. was a vast improvement over the ABC one the night before — it occurred to the non-Romney candidates that they might want to train their fire on the man who’s up 20 points in the New Hampshire polls. Their focus trailed off as the debate progressed, but Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich did manage to produce a revealing exchange at the outset regarding Romney’s motivations to enter politics. They challenged Romney’s oft-repeated claim that he, unlike they, was no career politician but rather a man who saw running for office as the duty of a good citizen who, when his work is complete, returns like Cincinnatus to his plow, or to his carried-interest loophole for private equity investment managers, as the case may be. In the best zinger of the debate, Gingrich chalked this up as a bunch of “pious baloney.” But it is these lines of Romney that should get the attention. From Ben Smith’s writeup:
Mitt Romney suggested in today’s debate that only rich people should run for office, and then quickly celebrated the fact that he’d forced a rival to take out a loan against his house. Romney said his father, Michigan Governor George Romney, had told him, “Mitt, never get involved in politics if you have to win an election to pay a mortgage.”
“If you find yourself in a position when you can serve, why you ought to have a responsibility to do so if you think you can make a difference,” he recalled his father telling him. “Also, don’t get in politics if your kids are still young because it might turn their heads.”
A few seconds later, he bragged about his run against Teddy Kennedy. “I was happy he had to take a mortgage out on his house to ultimately defeat me,” he said.
The exchange with Newt Gingrich brought out Romney at his most tone-deaf, and echoed his offer of a $10,000 bet to Rick Perry in an earlier debate. Romney’s rivals are already looking for ways to turn his wealth — and his tone-deaf treatment of it — into a liability. The Obama campaign regularly blasts him as out-of-touch with the lives of American workers.
So: the person running on the vision of a “merit” and “opportunity” society opposed to Barack Obama’s “entitlement” society believes that politicians should be independently wealthy, not peons who have to rely on the paltry earnings of a U.S. senator or governor. It’s worth noting that this is hardly the first time that Romney has depicted his move into politics in 1994 in this light. In his 2007 piece about Romney’s relationship with his father, who after running American Motors became governor of Michigan and ran for president in 1968, Jonathan Cohn wrote: “George Romney had always said the ideal time to run for public office was after you had achieved financial independence and your children were old enough to put up with the loss of privacy.” So Mitt today was just echoing the advice of the father he revered. But of all the aspects of George Romney that are to be admired — including many lacking in his son — this brand of noblesse oblige wasn’t one of them. Once again, I’m simply amazed that the Republican Party, at a time of heightened consciousness about the privileges of the very wealthy, is on the verge of nominating a quarter-billionaire who, when presented with the notion of running for president, says: thanks, much obliged.
By: Alec MacGillis, The New Republic, January 8, 2012
Forget The Rich: Tax The Poor And Middle Class
Nothing is certain but death and taxes, it used to be said, but in the madcap times we live in, even they’re up for grabs.
No matter what proof the White House provides that Osama bin Laden indeed has had his bucket kicked — and at this point even al Qaeda admits he’s dead — there still will be uncertainty. Whether they ever release those damned photos or not, a lunatic few will continue to insist that Osama’s alive and well and running a Papa John’s Pizza in Marrakesh.
As for taxes, having to pay them is no longer a sure thing either, especially if you’re a corporate giant like General Electric, with a thousand employees in its tax department, skilled in creative accounting. You’ll recall recent reports that although GE made profits last year of $5.1 billion in the United States and $14.2 billion worldwide they would pay not a penny of federal income tax. Chalk it up to billions of dollars of losses at GE Capital during the financial meltdown and a government tax break that allows companies to avoid paying US taxes on profits made overseas while “actively financing” different kinds of deals.
It gets worse. In 2009, Exxon-Mobil didn’t pay any taxes either, and last year, they had worldwide profits of $30.46 billion. Neither did Bank of America or Chevron or Boeing. According to a report last week from the office of the New York City Public Advocate, in 2009, the five companies, including GE, received a total of $3.7 billion in federal tax benefits.
As The New York Times‘ David Kocieniewski reported in March, “Although the top corporate tax rate in the United States is 35 percent, one of the highest in the world, companies have been increasingly using a maze of shelters, tax credits and subsidies to pay far less… Such strategies, as well as changes in tax laws that encouraged some businesses and professionals to file as individuals, have pushed down the corporate share of the nation’s tax receipts — from 30 percent of all federal revenue in the mid-1950s to 6.6 percent in 2009.”
What’s greasing the wheels for these advantages is, hold on to your hats, cash. Over the last decade, according to the NYC public advocate’s report, those same five companies — GE, Exxon-Mobil, Bank of America, Chevron and Boeing — gave more than $43.1 million to political campaigns. During the 2009-2010 election cycle, the five spent a combined $7.86 million in campaign contributions, a 7 percent jump over their 2007-2008 political spending.
“These tax breaks were put in place to promote growth and create jobs, not bankroll the political causes of corporate executives,” Public Advocate Bill de Blasio said. “… No company that can afford to spend millions of dollars to influence our elections should be pleading poverty come tax time.”
And by the way, those campaign cash figures don’t even include all the money those companies funneled into the 2010 campaigns via trade associations and tax-exempt non-profits. Thanks to the Supreme Court Citizens United decision, we don’t know the numbers because, as per the court, the corporate biggies don’t have to tell us. Imagine them sticking out their tongues and wiggling their fingers in their ears and you have a pretty good idea of their official position on this.
Meanwhile, last week Republicans like Utah’s Orrin Hatch, ranking member of the US Senate Finance Committee, grabbed hold of an analysis by Congress’ nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation and wrestled it to the ground. The brief memorandum reported that in the 2009 tax year 51 percent of all American taxpayers had zero tax liability or received a refund. So why, the Republicans asked, are Democrats and others so mean, asking corporations and the rich to pay higher taxes when lots of other people — especially the poor and middle class — don’t pay taxes either?
Hatch told MSNBC, “Bastiat, the great economist of the past, said the place where you’ve got to get revenues has to come from the middle class. That’s the huge number of people that are there. So the system does need to be revamped… We have an unbalanced tax code that we’ve got to change.”
All of which flies in the face of reality. As Travis Waldron of the progressive ThinkProgress website explained, “The majority of Americans who do not pay federal income taxes don’t make enough money to qualify for even the lowest tax bracket, a problem made worse by the economic recession. That includes retired Americans, who don’t pay income taxes because they earn very little income, if they earn any at all.
“And while many low-income Americans don’t pay income taxes, they do pay taxes. Because of payroll and sales taxes — a large proportion of which are paid by low- and middle-income Americans — less than a quarter of the nation’s households don’t contribute to federal tax receipts — and the majority of the non-contributors are students, the elderly, or the unemployed.”
What’s more, ThinkProgress notes, “The top 400 taxpayers — who have more wealth than half of all Americans combined — are paying lower taxes than they have in a generation, as their tax responsibilities have slowly collapsed since the New Deal era.” In the meantime, “working families have been asked to pay more and more.”
So maybe death and taxes are no longer certain, but one thing remains as immutable as the hills. In the words of another golden oldie, there’s nothing surer — the rich get rich and the poor get poorer.
By: Michael Winship, CommonDreams.org, May 10, 2011
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