Hey Romney––Disaster Isn't a Business Opportunity

Even Republican governors are praising Obama's handling of Hurricane Sandy. Such a contrast with the guitar strumming response we got from a recent Republican president. Romney has urged shutting FEMA down altogether. There's a difference between the two parties. Mega-disasters like this remind us of the importance of good government that works for everyone. Sometimes we really need it.

At Raw Story.

The Washington Post.

Under a President Romney this hurricane's aftermath would look a lot different. Instead of FEMA being ready, fully equipped and on the ground, Romney would open the devastated areas up to the "magic of capitalism". Disasters are a business opportunity in Romney's eyes. An opportunity for profit, and you can imagine how prices could be affected by sudden mass shortages. Don't worry, his friends on Park Avenue would win a bidding war for bottled water, and would probably do well selling their excess. If you think about it, Mr. Romney, looting is a business opportunity, we just don't condone it.

Worth reading and sharing with your fence-sitting friends.

A very good post on the New York Times blog.

At The New Republic.

Also this, also at TNR.

Want irony? Remember "Heckuva Job" Brownie? The man who ran FEMA for Bush, who fumbled the Katrina response, whose previous experience before his government job was running a horse show association? (Maybe he knows Rufalka...) Brownie has criticized Obama's handling of Hurricane Sandy, saying he responded too quickly... Story reported by The Hill newspaper.

I think it comes down to something I saw on a wall last week:

"ObamaCare. RomneyDon't"

Romney's Party Boat Flew A Cayman Islands Flag

In Tampa there are a lot of exclusive parties where the super rich meet to lay plans for a post-Obama tax climate. It was interesting to learn that the Romney party yacht at the GOP Convention flies a Cayman Islands flag. What's the message here? ABC broke this story.

"I think it's ironic they do this aboard a yacht that doesn't even pay its taxes," said a woman who lives aboard a much smaller boat moored at the St. Petersburg Municipal Marina.

Romney defends his secret bank accounts in tax havens, saying: “There was no reduction -- not one dollar reduction in taxes -- by virtue of having an account in Switzerland or a Cayman Islands investment.” Why not keep his millions in American banks then? And why are these places––the Caymans, Switzerland, Bermuda, the Bahamas, Luxembourg––called "tax havens"? Romney's words don't square with common sense or Americans' sense of fairness. This story appeared in the LATimes.

If you want to look more closely at Romney's complex tax evasions, Gawker has posted the most complete information about Romney's tax schemes online.

Gawker's John Cook: "Almost all of them are affiliated with Bain Capital, the secretive private equity firm Romney co-founded in 1984 and ran until his departure in 1999 (or 2002, depending on whom you ask). Many of them are offshore funds based in the Cayman Islands. Together, they reveal the mind-numbing, maze-like, and deeply opaque complexity with which Romney has handled his wealth, the exotic tax-avoidance schemes available only to the preposterously wealthy that benefit him, the unlikely (for a right-wing religious Mormon) places that his money has ended up, and the deeply hypocritical distance between his own criticisms of Obama's fiscal approach and his money managers' embrace of those same policies. They also show that some of the investments that Romney has always described as part of his retirement package at Bain weren't made until years after he left the company."

All of this may explain Romney's nervous chuckle on the stump.

But as much as we focus on Romney's tax secrecy, it's his plans for our taxes which ought to concern us most. His plan would lower his own already very low tax rate and put the burden onto the rest of us who work for a living. The story appeared in the Washington Post.

Romney responded to the criticism, but his response didn't add up either. A good analysis appeared in the Post.

There's also a very well researched analysis in the August Vanity Fair magazine.

There's a lot here about his various offshore schemes, but the most mystifying may be his IRA account.

"Mysteries also arise when one looks at Romney’s individual retirement account at Bain Capital. When Romney was there, from 1984 to 1999, taxpayers were allowed to put just $2,000 per year into an I.R.A., and $30,000 annually into a different kind of plan he may have used. Given these annual contribution ceilings, how can his I.R.A. possibly contain up to $102 million, as his financial disclosures now suggest?"

How indeed.

Andrew Sullivan, a died-in-the-wool conservative finds the tax evasions of rich people like Romney to be repugnant. (Should we rename them The Repugnant Party?)

Sullivan: "Conservatives, it seems to me, should care about all of America, rather than seceding from it. Social and economic inequality are dangerous threats to social stability and democratic legitimacy. That is a conservative belief - and one utterly alien to the fanatics who now run one of our two major parties. If conservatism is to recover, this version of the GOP must be defeated. It's the only language they understand: the language of power." Amen. Remove this Republican Party and give us back the one Eisenhower presided over.

Tax evasion isn't the only theory about Romney's secret taxes. The other theory, reported in the Guardian newspaper, is that Romney is hiding evidence of voter fraud. Was he really living in his son's basement when he voted in Massachusetts? With six large houses do you really think he lived most of the year in a basement? With six houses it has to be a lot of work establishing residency.

When Will They Call Romney A Liar?

Dear CBS, ABC, NBC, NPR, PBS, CNN, (forget FoxNews, we know what they're in the business of), AP, UPI, major national newspapers,

Watch this, it explains my complaint. It's footnoted.

When are you going to start calling Romney a liar? When do you plan to point out the lies?

And don't pretend both campaigns are lying equally. It's not fair to call a partisan argument or judgment or point of view a lie. Distorting someone's words, though, is a lie in the Mosaic sense. It's bearing false witness.

It would be more correct, more precise, to call Romney a persistent liar, a stubborn liar. Either way, he's a liar who refuses to belief the truth when he doesn't like the truth. He's said that. He knows what he says is untrue and yet he repeats it for personal gain.

Because telling the truth is what newspapers are supposed to do, you should explain that Romney is a liar. Repeat it as often as Romney repeats the lies.

And you should correct the lies, rather than just repeating them. His millions and his friends' millions are already repeating the lies on your air and in your pages.

There is the welfare lie, and there is the "you didn't build that" lie. There is some pretty good debunking out there. Here's an NPR fact check story scolding Romney. But people are busy. They count on the news to explain when someone is lying his way into office.

The "you didn't build that" distortion could, I suppose, be called a stupid misunderstanding. After a month and millions of dollars of ads wrapped around the stupid misunderstanding, you probably should start calling Romney stupid too. For refusing to understand what a normal thinking person would be able to understand after it's been patiently explained to him by people able to think and reason.

To be elaborately bend-over-backwards fair, you could convene a panel of eight year olds with decent grades and ask them if they understood Obama when he said: "those roads––if you have a business––you didn't build that". And then you could say whether Romney is as smart as an eight year old. I'm confident he is, but he behaves and speaks and buys ads that make it look like he isn't.

Participating in stupidity and lies makes a news organization and its reporters and editors into stupid liars too.

Krugman Explains the Ryan Plan

Paul Krugman points out the hypocrisy and dishonesty in Paul Ryan pretending to be a deficit hawk. But he also points out the eager gullibility and laziness of the Washington opinion writers and policy thinkers who are supposed to study and analyze plans like Ryan's. They haven't done this. All they've done is seize Ryan as a plausible "conservative" (which he isn't; he's a radical) and a thoughtful policy person (he isn't; he only pretends to be) with a substantive plan to attack the deficit (it isn't and it doesn't; quite the reverse, it makes the deficit much worse at the expense of working people, while slashing taxes on rich people who own stocks for a living, Friends of Mitt who have already profited enormously from the economic crisis.)

Ryan promises to share key details, crucial mathematics that his plan doesn't explain, at some unspecified future date. I've not seen such empty promises since Nixon's secret plan to end the Vietnam War. Nixon had no plan, and the war did not end until we surrendered Vietnam after he left office in disgrace. What Nixon did do (and it's similar to what Romney and Ryan and the other Republican leaders have been doing for four years) was sabotage LBJ's peace talks, promising the South Vietnam government a better deal if they refused to participate. There was no better deal. In similar fashion the Republicans in this Congress have spent four years sabotaging every effort to repair and restore the economy and their motives are the same: if they can foul the economic gears and talk about secret plans they hope to regain power. There is a word for this kind of cynicism: criminal. Another word comes to mind: treasonous. Like Romney's business model which made him a billionaire: buy companies promising to help them, loot their pensions, gut their employee pay and benefits, borrow heavily against the worth of the company, take enormous management bonuses, then send the shell of the company either to Asia or the bottom of Boston harbor.

Mitt Romney Praises Israel's Socialized Healthcare System

"When our health care costs are completely out of control. Do you realize what health care spending is as a percentage of the GDP in Israel? 8 percent. You spend 8 percent of GDP on health care. And you’re a pretty healthy nation.” ~Mitt Romney praising Israel's socialized healthcare system, reported in FORBES

Between $20 and $30 TRILLION are hidden offshore by the Super Rich

"The very existence of the global offshore industry, and the tax-free status of the enormous sums invested by their wealthy clients, is predicated on secrecy," according to James Henry, former chief economist for the global business consulting firm McKinsey.

This is the financial club Mitt Romney belongs to.

This story broke on the front pages of the British newspapers The Guardian and The Observer over the weekend. The articles discuss the burden wealthy tax evaders place on everyone else, not just by evading taxes but by removing their massive cash hoards from the economies where they earned them (and evaded taxes). The amount of hoarded cash is greater than the GDPs of Japan and the US combined. Need a reason for the global recession? This is it.

The summary in the Guardian

The details, in the Guardian

The world of private banks where our economy is being held hostage

Analysis of the problem

The white paper with all the numbers

Mitt Romney is the poster child for this elite group of super rich. They may have homes in this country, but their wealth is safely offshore where what they earn can't be touched to build roads or schools or hospitals. Or, for that matter, to pay the lifetime of healthcare for wounded veterans. They are above obligation to any country, especially the United States. We all try to minimize our tax bill, but for people like Romney it is a major effort of evasion that employs many banks and very complex schemes.

The article about Romney's tax havens in this month's Vanity Fair

The question then is: should Mitt Romney be running instead for the presidency of Bermuda?

Or the Cayman Islands? Or the Bahamas? Or Switzerland? It doesn't really matter what it says on his birth certificate. What matters is what it says on his tax returns. Where is he invested? Whose economy does he care about? Does he fulfill the basic duty of citizenship, the duty we all fulfill? Does he pay the taxes that pave the roads and educate our kids? Or does he evade them?

This matters.

The collusion of the big banks to rig global interest rates matters.

The involvement of major banks in money laundering for international terrorists and drug cartels matters too.

What's disturbing is they are laundering billions for ordinary American billionaires as well, helping them hide what they earn from the tax obligations that are a vital part of citizenship.

David Brooks Explained

(David Brooks is the New York Times apologist for pure unregulated predatory capitalism, which is the Romney brand. Here's his most recent column, with explanatory footnotes.)

THE CAPITALISM DEBATE

By DAVID BROOKS
Published: July 16, 2012

Let’s say you are president in a time of a sustained economic slowdown. You initiated a series of big policies that you thought were going to turn the economy around, but they didn’t work — either because they were insufficient or ineffective (Or because your opposition and their clients and the trillions of bailout dollars hoarded by Wall Street were dedicated to making sure they didn't work). How do you run for re-election under these circumstances?

Do you spend the entire campaign saying that things would have been even worse if you hadn’t acted the way you did? No. That would be pathetic. (But it would be true. I guess the truth is pathetic if you don't like it.) You go on the attack. (Not an unreasonable thing to do since the Republican opposition has attacked and blocked and ridiculed and filibustered and evaded every proposal and every compromise you've tried in the past three and a half years.) Instead of defending your economic policies, you attack modern capitalism as it now exists. (Capitalism as it exists, as enabled by the extreme deregulation of the Bush years, is a gross distortion of the practical, regulated, moderate and egalitarian capitalism its inventor, Adam Smith, described in 1776.) You blame the system for the economy. (You blame the reckless greed and extreme inequality of wealth and power between Wall Street and Main Street, which is only fair. And honest.) You do this with double ferocity if your opponent (an affable, square jawed, handsome vulture capitalist and exporter of American jobs with unknown millions in secret bank accounts in Switzerland, the Cayman Islands, the Bahamas and Bermuda) happens to be the embodiment of that system.

This is what the Obama campaign appears to have done in recent months. (Finally!) Instead of defending the policies of the last four years (which had started a decent recovery until the GOP retook the House and were able to shut it down again), the campaign has begun a series of attacks on the things people don’t like about modern capitalism. (Why argue with the American people? Give them some credit for intelligence.)

They don’t like the way unsuccessful firms go bust. (Or fairly prosperous firms are seen as vulnerable by takeover artists like Romney, who use the companies' own cash to buy them, then load them up with debt to pay themselves huge bonuses, then plunder their pension funds, slash their workers' pay and benefits, break their unions and ship their jobs overseas, using the proceeds to buy a few more homes and show ponies.) Obama hit that with ads about a steel plant closure a few months ago. They don’t like C.E.O. salaries. (Why should the boss of a company earn more in a day or an hour than an average worker earns in a year by actually making stuff?) President Obama hits that regularly. (Amen!) They don’t like financial shenanigans. (Let's quit mincing words. Call it crime, fraud, looting, corrupt practice, creative tax evasion.) Obama hits that. They don’t like outsourcing and offshoring. (Explain to me how firing people and moving their jobs overseas where you can hire a 12 year-old for a dollar a day is patriotic.) This week, Obama has been hitting that.

The president is now running an ad showing Mitt Romney tunelessly singing “America the Beautiful,” while the text on screen blasts him for shipping jobs to China, India and Mexico. (The text quotes newspaper reports that are actually factual. The singing is Romney's own. This is Politics 101.)

The accuracy of the ad has been questioned by the various fact-checking outfits. (Questioned before new information emerged that indicate Romney either lied to American voters or lied to the SEC about whether he was running Bain Capital during the period it was aggressively shipping jobs to China and India. Or maybe he was lying to Massachusetts election officials about whether he was living in his his Utah home or his Massachusetts home and running Bain. And how many homes does he own? Six?) That need not detain us. (Let's hurry past this because Romney's financial statements are dubious at best.) It’s safest to assume that all the ads you see this year (most of which will be paid for by the billions flowing into Republican PACs) will be at least somewhat inaccurate because the ad-makers now take dishonesty as a mark of their professional toughness. (A standard set by Nixon a generation ago and perfected by the Bush family.)

What matters is the ideology behind the ad: the assumption that Bain Capital, the private-equity (vulture capitalist) firm founded by Romney, should not have invested in (and subsequently looted) companies that (under Romney's/Bain's firm direction) hired workers abroad (after firing their American workers and looting their pension funds and taking away their health insurance); the assumption that hiring Mexican or Indian workers is unpatriotic (it's jolly patriotic if you're Mexican or Indian); the assumption that no worthy person would do what most global business leaders have been doing for the past half-century. (Let's just say it: If you could get away with being completely ruthless and greedy and violate trust and obligations right and left and ruin a lot of lives and make yourself rich in the process, wouldn't you do it? Some wouldn't. Very few people would have the gall to run for president on such a record.)

This ad — and the rhetoric the campaign is using around it — challenges the entire logic of capitalism as it has existed over several decades. (Actually, David. No. Go reread your Adam Smith. Reread your Theodore Roosevelt. Reread your Dwight Eisenhower. I'd recommend you reread Keynes, but you won't.) It’s part of a comprehensive attack on the (utter corruption and destruction of the) economic system Romney personifies. (He's the poster boy for the corporate “shenanigans” that collapsed our economy in the last few months of the Bush administration.)

This shift of focus has been audacious. (And long overdue. Obama has been too polite, too reserved, and too trusting in the age-old democratic rules and traditions in Washington, old traditions like cooperation and polity, which the Republicans have been spitting on for years. A word about audacity: Washington and Ben Franklin were audacious confronting the largest empire in the world. TR was audacious to confront the great powers and monopolies on Wall Street. Audaciousness isn't always a bad thing. Calling Obama audacious is audacious, in the negative sense.) Over the years of his presidency, Obama has not been a critic of globalization. (Globalization isn't necessarily bad. Free trade can also be Fair Trade, benefiting all sides of the trade. When globalization is an excuse to exploit disorganized and unprotected workers in impoverished countries or steal their raw materials or to dismantle workers' rights in your own country, using the infrastructure and institutions and perverting the laws created as part of a fair society to do so, that is bad globalization. That is the Romney model.) There’s no real evidence that, when he’s off the campaign trail, he has any problem with outsourcing and offshoring. (He isn't in the offshoring business. Obama hasn't exported a single job, but none of us can avoid buying tennis shoes made by teenagers in Malaysia or the Philippines.) He has lavishly praised people like Steve Jobs who were prominent practitioners. (He praised their inventiveness and the quality of their products designed here. Like most of us, he no doubt wishes they were made here.) He has hired people like Jeffrey Immelt, the chief executive of General Electric, whose company embodies the upsides of globalization. (If you want someone to advise and manage a complex economy you hire somebody who has experience advising and managing complex international companies. It would be foolish not to hire the most competent people. Sometimes even when they don't entirely agree with you, as FDR did when he created the SEC.) His economic advisers have generally touted the benefits of globalization even as they worked to help those who are hurt by its downsides. (The point of Democratic policy has always been to strengthen our economy while not gutting the source of its energy which is a skilled and well-paid workforce, citizens who can afford to buy the products they manufacture. FDR's rich friends called him a traitor to his class for siding with working people. I'd call that patriotism.)

But, politically, this aggressive tactic has worked. (Americans are lied to a lot by FoxNews and talk radio, but at the end of the day they are not stupid.) It has shifted the focus of the race from being about big government, which Obama represents, (a government big enough to serve a big country and stand up to huge transnational corporations...and by the way, Obama has increased spending less than any president since Truman––look it up) to being about (predatory or vulture) capitalism, which Romney represents.

Just as Republicans spent years promising voters that they could have tax cuts forever (and never pay for anything again), now the Democrats are promising voters that they can have all the benefits of capitalism without the downsides (as their parents and grandparents had in the bad old days of Truman and Eisenhower and JFK, before corporations were people in all respects but personal responsibilities), like plant closures, rich C.E.O.’s and outsourcing. (Funny how productivity gains don't count unless they are paid upward to the people in the executive suite. Workers are greedy if they demand benefits like healthcare but CEOs are shrewd if they demand free dry cleaning, free limos and courtside tickets for life) Just as Republicans used to force Democrats into the eat-your-spinach posture (you need to have high taxes if you want your programs) (Historically, Republicans only wanted the streets paved to their homes, their country clubs, their factory, and, as Leona Helmsley said, thought taxes were for little people), now Democrats are casting Republicans into the eat-your-spinach posture (you need to accept outsourcing and the pains of creative destruction if you want your prosperity). (Creative destruction is what the mob called burning the factory to collect on the insurance.)

The Romney campaign doesn’t seem to know how to respond. (There is no plausible response. Maybe they know this.) For centuries, business leaders have been inept when writers, intellectuals and politicians attacked capitalism (which is why the billionaire class have spent billions buying writers, economists, academics, inviting creative people to their beach homes, creating “think tanks” and buying ad talent and mass-purchasing their dreadfully bad political books onto the bestseller list. It's called bribery.), and, so far, the Romney campaign is continuing that streak. (But how many billionaires can Romney loyalists fit into one 60,000 square foot Hamptons “cottage” for a fundraiser?)

One thing is for sure. As Arthur Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute (see "billionaire funded right wing think tank", above) has said again and again (to appreciative monied audiences who pay for his airfare), it’s not enough to say that capitalism will make you money. You can’t fight what is essentially a moral critique with economics. (Since when has money made you immune to moral considerations? I think Jesus had a few things to say about the morality of the rich. Adam Smith naively assumed the rich would submit to honest, fair regulation.)

Romney is going to have to define a vision of modern capitalism. (As a Bush Jr. advisor once said “We create our own reality.” In the new Republican universe reality can be bought, usually without inconveniencing rich friends with a tax bill.) He’s going to have to separate his vision from the scandals and excesses we’ve seen over the last few years. (Let's walk that back a couple of years and stipulate that the scandals were the most scandalous during the regime of your man George W. Bush. The Obama years have been about uncovering them and re-installing the regulations against scandalous behavior. Over fierce Republican objections.) He needs to define the kind of capitalist he is and why the country needs his virtues. (Assuming you don't mean the “virtues” of firing people and paying those wages to yourself and your fellow investors for your skill at firing people. Firing isn't the best word here. “Firing” assumes cause. Most of the people Romney fired were laid off for the “crime” of earning a living, for making things at a wage American companies used to pay when America's economy got its strength from workers who could afford to be consumers.)

Let’s face it, he’s not a heroic entrepreneur (except in his autobiography, his stump speeches, his reports to shareholders and his statements to the SEC). He’s an efficiency expert. (A CEO tends to define “efficiency” by how little he can pay his workers to work longer and harder and faster.) It has been the business of his life to take companies that were mediocre and sclerotic (or paid a fair wage for good work) and try to make them efficient (make them pay less for more work, by hiring Asian children if need be; slashing benefits) and dynamic (a word possibly adopted by McKinsey to project a robust image onto a company without it actually meaning anything). It has been his job to be the corporate version of a personal trainer: take people who are puffy and self-indulgent and whip them into shape. (Here's where David begins to sound like he's writing a brochure for the Hitler Youth. I don't think that is his intention.)

That’s his selling point: rigor (forcing other people to be rail-thin and rigorous translates into his fat monthly paycheck) and productivity (again, other people's hard work and productivity can be paid directly to him for demanding it. This, if you can avoid throwing up, is called a “business model”.) If he can build a capitalist vision around that, he’ll thrive. (HE will thrive. Other people, not so much.) If not, he’s a punching bag. (Commence punching.)

Oh, heck...Bill Maher said it better than I can:

“America's rich aren't giving you money, they're taking your money. Between the years 1980 and 2005 80% of all new income generated in this country went to the richest 1%. Let me put that in terms that even you fatass teabaggers, I'm sorry, can understand.

“Say 100 Americans get together and order a 100 slice pizza. The pizza arrives and the first guy takes 80 slices. And if someone suggests, why don't you just take 79 slices, that's socialism! I know, I know. I know, I know, it's just a TV show. But it does reinforce the stupid idea people have that rich people would love us and share with us if only they got to walk a mile in our cheap plastic shoes.

“But they're the reason the shoe factory moved to China. We have this fantasy that our interests and the interests of the super rich are the same. Like somehow the rich will eventually get so full that they'll explode. And the candy will rain down on the rest of us.

“Like there's some kind of pinata of benevolence. But here's the thing about a pinata. It doesn't open on its own. You have to beat it with a stick.”

Eat that, David Brooks. Maybe they should hand his column to Bill Maher.

Romney In and Out of Uniform

The Boston Globe reports on a serious contradiction in Mitt Romney's carefully crafted personal saga. Today Mitt Romney says "he longed to be sent to Vietnam" when he was draft age. That he wanted to take an active part in the war he supported so vigorously. Not true. Romney actually sought and received multiple and extended deferments.

Is it a lie to say you longed to take part in the war you supported (and protested in favor of) when you actually did everything you could to avoid serving? What else would you call it? And his story has changed from admitting he didn't want to go to Vietnam to saying he longed to be in combat. His changing stories should raise concerns too.

News media avoid reporting this kind of damaging story about Republican candidates. They stonewalled coverage of Bush's elaborate draft evasions and reporting on it ended Dan Rather's career. They downplayed the stories about McCain's bizarre record as a navy pilot and his erratic behavior since. But you can imagine the blanket coverage a story like this would get if it were about President Obama or any Democrat. Even bogus stories about a Democrat always receive serious attention and refuse to die even when debunked. Real ones about Republicans are barely reported.

This story from the National Memo is potentially more troubling: an alleged history of impersonating police officers. What kind of personality engages in this behavior for kicks? And because it's criminal behavior, what could it mean to Romney's candidacy?

Harder Faster Longer (For Less Pay)

Today's Must Read is from the New York Times. It invites us to be less productive. This sounds like a slacker motto––unhelpful, uncooperative, lacking in the team spirit which is so fashionable these days in workplaces––but consider this: the way we measure productivity requires workers to work longer and harder and better for less pay each year. That's how managers meet their benchmarks. That's why 40 years of productivity gains have been paid upward, not to the workers achieving them. How is that fair?

The same harder/faster/longer ethos has crept into our schools. Each year schools and teachers and students are expected to achieve higher marks, the way a business is expected to. But it's fundamentally stupid and impractical. Teachers start over every year with new kids, at roughly the same level as the kids who came before. Yet the gains of the past year are used to compound the expectations.

I am not adept at figuring compound interest, but I figure that with a yearly rise in student achievement of say 2%, compounded annually, measured over the past 40 years since I was in school, that kids today have to be ten times or a hundred times smarter, quicker and more knowledgeable than they were in 1972. Are their brains larger? I've not noticed it. But the work load is much larger. The kids burn out quicker too. The teachers are teaching 45 in a class on the same pay and lower school funding measured against inflation.

This is what happens when you invite businessmen to run your society. They turn up the speed on the machine and pocket the profits or bank them in the Caribbean. That is the model being sold this year by the Republican Party. It's the package they been selling us for four decades. It burned our economy out in 2007 and 2008, but they're still driving the car.

Romney's Vulture Capitalist Presidency

As brilliant a piece of writing as I've read about this election cycle. Walter Kirn analyzes Romney's campaign as Romney himself does, as a business move, the presidency as an acquirable asset whose obligations can be disposed of, as the seemingly friendly takeover of a company for the purposes of taking its assets and selling them, seizing its pension fund to put to "better uses" (better than paying retired people for their life's toil), downsizing, laying off, offloading, scrapping, exporting facilities, all the while paying huge consulting fees to yourself and your chums in the closely held partnership. The gleam in Romney's eye is a microchip.

The presidential candidate as vulture capitalist, who will take over a company and leave not even bones behind, absorbing what's useful to the private firm and its partners, selling what's sellable, and using up or dumping everything else. George W. Bush was the old fashioned preppy boob MBA, the kind that used to sleep through Ivy League and grad school and accept the desk reserved for them on Wall Street, where they were too obtuse to do much harm.

(Calvin Trillin, a few years ago, wrote an excellent explanation of the old safe kind of Wall Street idiot from Andover and Yale.)

Romney is the newer, more cold-blooded kind, the kind that knows what it's doing and exactly how much it's after in billions, greedy rather than lazy, for whom every person is a number, every working person is a liability and a disposable obligation. A dog to put on the roof of the car. I don't think Romney minded much when the old setter ran away while they were in Canada. And notice the pooch didn't find his way back to the Romney home like in the old Disney movie.

Welfare for Billionaires––Only Billionaires

If you count corporate welfare and tax subsidies of rich people and private companies, the U.S. is a welfare state but one that supports the rich and corporations rather than the poor and working classes. A prof from Washington State University explains it very well.

Moyers & Co discuss how a political system steered by billionaires benefits billionaires.

(Big surprise.)

Meanwhile... The sad and disastrous fact is the billionaires have their money and are content to allow the western economies to collapse rather than forfeit any of it to support such "socialist" schemes as roads and universities and libraries and hospitals. As if the public good is an anarchist plot. A prosperous nation is an insult to their belief system. Infrastructure made it possible for them to get rich, in fact multiplied their wealth-creation with the efficiencies cooperative systems create, but they think nobody else exists in their closed system of spas and resorts and private clubs. Money is created for THEM. People work for THEM. Their idleness is akin to the idleness of the old Roman gods, luxurious and self-justifying. Meanwhile the lives of those who work for a living are growing narrower, shorter, meaner and more unpleasant. To reward actual work––as opposed to dividends on riches–– would inconvenience the lucky 1%. Austerity is killing the European economy rather than inconvenience rich Europeans. Austerity is how the rich teach working people to be poor. It's not happening by mistake. Here's an enlightening article from the New York Review of Books.

How patriotic is it to offshore your millions? Is it worse when those millions are earned from exporting jobs to countries where people work harder and longer for a dollar a day? Is it OK if you sing God Bless America while you are doing it? That's Romney's approach.

The Looting of American Creativity

From Forbes, an important piece about how the captains of our biggest industrial corporations have been looting our creative capacity and pocketing whatever they can take.

You should call it looting. It's the sort of thing we used to read about when mobsters bought a company and hollowed it out before dumping it, but now it's the model used by big capital management companies. (It sounds a lot like how Mitt Romney got rich: by selling off parts of companies he acquired, laying off masses of employees, and pocketing the cash.)

Such single-minded (you might say narrow-minded or short-sighted) pursuit of profits is a loser's game. It's not sustainable, not responsible. (Remember when American business used to be responsible?) In the cases cited here, where capacity is sold off overseas, it's certainly not very patriotic, even if the tycoons involved do wear a flag lapel pin. What's the word I'm looking for? What's the opposite of creative? Sure: destructive. That's the preferred model of the last thirty years in American businessthink. You could write a vampire movie using this business model.

Creative assets have been invented and developed in the U.S. often with large taxpayer investment, collective genius harnessed and supported by universities and government scientific grants. But in many cases the things Americans helped create are no longer American; they've been offshored to evade societal obligations. Obligations that responsible Americans used to be proud to shoulder. And the infrastructure and educational system that nurtured the creativity is left to rot because the profiteers refuse to pay back into the creative cycle. They've looted the creative infrastructure, offshoring our American genius to evade taxes. As if the American genius was theirs to take. What happens to the inventors once their creativity has been mined and sold away? The huge dividends from this process have been pocketed by a very narrow class.

We are taught by the media to distrust migrants, but the multinational corporate model is a migrant too, a much less helpful version, a more dangerous version, without nationality, without any sense of responsibility or loyalty or conscience. Without any wish to be American unless it profits them and doesn't tax them. Here's an interesting 2007 article from investigative journalist Lucy Komisar about how Merck and other companies do their offshore shuffle.

First they came for the blue collar jobs, and I said nothing. Then they came for the white collar jobs... What mid-century cautionary tale am I reminded of here? This warning article was published six years ago by the Economic Policy Institute. Did we listen?

But (and are we surprised?) offshoring doesn't fulfill the promises it makes, as this 2007 article from CIO magazine demonstrates.

"Sixty percent of companies that send their operations offshore fail to meet their operation performance expectations, and more than a third (34 percent) fail to mee their savings expectations, according to a new study from global management consulting firm A. T. Kearney."

Dumb and Dumber-Republicans on Camera

Heck, it's Friday. Here's a short collection of the stupidity of the Republican presidential field. Our allies and friends must really wonder about us.

Rick Perry's goofy speech in New Hampshire

Rick Perry's oops moment in the recent debate

Herman Cain's prolonged inability to answer foreign policy question in Milwaukee

Michele Bachmann's long list of gaffes and misstatements

How do choose one Sarah Palin gaffe from among so many? Here's the goofiest.

Here's some choice Gingrich. The man is funnier when he's wrong because he's so arrogant about it.

Romney, the robocandidate, always seems prepped and memorized. Or is it a microchip? He's still consistently and woefully out of touch with average Americans. Here's a recent instance reported in The Week.

Out of touch? Are we surprised? After all, Romney made his millions by leveraging and downsizing American companies and moving their jobs overseas, as this NYTimes story reported.

We've forgotten how inept a Republican president can be. I wonder sometimes if the ineptness is a blind, a way of diverting our attention so we don't see how hard and effectively Republicans work to degrade the middle class and cater to the very rich.

Bush had many excruciating moments. His father set a low bar when he vomited in the lap of the Japanese president, but Bush Junior had no trouble going lower. I remember his glassy eyed pauses best. I'm remembering one especially long pause in a 2004 debate. I'd describe it as a fugue state. He won re-election anyway, thanks to a few Diebold machines in Ohio.

These Bush gaffes are almost too numerous to catalog.

And another bit of pure Bush, on camera, on mike. Scary.

A carefully reported story about President Bush cheating during the 2004 debates was spiked by the New York Times. Why are Republicans shielded from serious reporting? Maybe the stupidity act makes the news media feel protective.

Romney the Job Killer

From Politico, a condensed description of how Mitt Romney made his half billion dollar fortune. First he inherited many millions. That's important. Then he founded Bain Capital and went into the business of buying up undervalued or struggling American manufacturers, in some cases for the purpose of stripping their assets, laying off thousands of workers, and pocketing millions, leaving the companies in bankruptcy. In these cases Romney's investment firm got very rich and left workers and creditors holding the bag.

The story about Romney was told most fully in the Boston Globe in 2007. If you don't have the $5 to read the full Boston Globe article, you can find key parts of it online, as in this blog. There's also a link to the archived piece.

You have to wonder why this story, published once in the Globe, hasn't been read since by anyone covering Romney's campaign. You don't hear questions asked about it. To hear him talk, Romney created jobs. Do you hear reporters clearing their throats and challenging him? No. At best his record is mixed. He created profits for Bain Capital and its clients, but even the successes have a significant downside. The millions investors gained, others lost.

Romney's job appears to have been to hunt the quarry and stand aside while his company took the quarry apart. Another Boston Globe piece described the Romney method for keeping his hands clean.

The Massachusetts AFLCIO has kept tabs on Romney's record.

Workers who lost their jobs told their stories in a series of ads. It's a shame reporters haven't been interested. But workers' stories are never as interesting as stories told by people with money.

Romney's main success story involves Staples, which Bain Capital bought and grew. It's successful today, but how many Main Streets have been destroyed by this model of big box retail? How many small local retailers were ground out of business? It's a zero-sum story in which big wins and small loses. Why should small businesspeople see Romney as a hero or any kind of ally?

The key to the Romney Republican business model is low prices and low wages, using volume and dominant size to kill competition. Dominance not only helps them suppress wages but also the suppliers' prices. All the money gained is paid out to the people at the top of the company, the owners, the equity partners, the moneymen.

Romney has a cute line he repeats, deploring “lifetime politicians” who “have never run a corner store, let alone the largest enterprise in the world.” But Romney inherited millions and made more by depressing wages, closing down companies and running mom and pop stores out of business. In a nutshell, that is the Republican model and we shouldn't be voting for it.

This neat summary comes from a Republican rival:

"And I would also suggest one needs to look very carefully at what exactly the business record is," Huckabee said. "If it's taking companies who are in serious trouble, buying them when they are in pain, selling off their assets, and then making a huge profit off of it, that's not something a lot of Americans can relate to, except those who have lost their jobs because of those kinds of transactions. If that's the turnaround, there are a lot of Americans who would really not like to see their own lives turned around quite like that."

The New York Times wrote about Romney's career in 2007. The damning material is there, but simply stated rather than analyzed.

Meanwhile Romney the businessman who made his bones by laying off workers jokes about being unemployed.

Left and progressive bloggers find this provocative enough to comment on. Sadly the mainstream media won't touch it. They're too afraid of being called "liberal".