Politics’ Dirty Tricks

By Mariusz Zawadzki              10 January 2012
The schizoid situation where the candidates pose as innocents, while at the same time lead a brutal campaign through front men, is new for U.S. politics.     Translated By Anna Rygiewicz
Edited by Steven Stenzler      Origina in Polish

In his campaign adverts, Mitt Romney, the frontrunner in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, does not speak ill of other candidates. He does not even mention them. He is friendly and smiles all the time. He talks about how he will save America and find jobs for millions of unemployed. He talks about the model family he has created with his wife Ann, with whom he has been married for 42 years. He enumerates his achievements in business and politics. The ads also show the cheerful Ann who compliments the qualities of her husband’s character.
In Iowa, where the first Republican primary took place on Jan. 4 Romney spent nearly $1 million on such positive advertisements. But he did not win because of them. He beat his rivals thanks to the aggressive spots made by Restore Our Future, an independent political action committee. These ads attacked Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, who has been leading in the polls since mid-December. The spots reproached him for committing tax fraud at the end of the 1990s, for which he was punished by the Senate Ethics Committee, and for supporting the environmentalists in the fight against the greenhouse effect, which is even more embarrassing for a true American conservative.
The Restore Our Future committee, founded by Romney’s former lawyer, spent about $3 million to destroy Gingrich. The founder does not hide that he supports Romney, but apart from that he does not have anything to do with him. In accordance with the law, he is independent. When Gingrich publicly urged his rival to order the committee to stop the attacks, Romney said that he cannot contact this committee or order it to do anything, because in accordance with the law, it is independent.
The wronged Gingrich is not innocent either. He is backed as well by an “independent” political action committee, even with a similar name: Winning Our Future. Next Wednesday, Gingrich’s committee is starting a TV campaign in North Carolina, where on Jan. 21 the third primaries will take place. Advertisements costing $3.5 million will remind Americans about the history of Bain Capital.
The company, established in 1984 by Romney and his business partners, bought enterprises on the verge of bankruptcy, carried out their restructuring (which usually meant mass dismissals) and sold them at a profit.
Such a business model generated a lot of money for Romney. His assets are estimated around $250 million. They are, however, a burden in the presidential campaign. People call Romney a heartless "vulture capitalist." The candidate defends himself by saying that Bain Capital saved thousands of jobs because thanks to the restructuring of the enterprises, many of them did not go bankrupt. Of course, the Winning Our Future committee’s ads show only the people who were fired by Romney’s company.
The schizoid situation where the candidates pose as innocents, while at the same time lead a brutal campaign through front men, is new for U.S. politics. The Supreme Court of the United States led to this situation when it ruled in January 2010 that private companies may without any restrictions finance the "independent” political action committees. Any such committee (super PAC) can, in turn, without any limitations finance its candidate's advertisements, provided that it does not contact him or her (which means it remains "independent.”)
The justices' decision was a real revolution because in the U.S. private companies cannot finance candidates, and private persons may donate no more than $2,500 to their favorite politician (or $30,800 to a political party.)
The U.S. Supreme Court created a legal loophole thanks to which many corporations can finance candidates without any limitations. And in secret, too! Although the “independent” committees have to disclose the donors, there can be among them a 501(c)4 organization (the name comes from section 501(c)4 of the Internal Revenue Code), and such an organization is not obliged to disclose the donors, provided that supporting a particular candidate is not its principal activity. This regulation is perfect for money laundering. Successfully making use of it is, among others, Karl Rove, the master Republican strategist and the most effective bursar of the Republican Party, who has founded American Crossroads, an independent committee, and a 501(c)4 organization called American GPS. The committee receives money from the organization, which gets it from God knows where.
Many politicians, including President Barack Obama and his Republican rival from 2008 Sen. John McCain, criticized the Supreme Court's ruling. It blurs the already fuzzy connections between business and politics in Washington. Now, when a congressman votes for, let’s say, tax reductions for the oil industry, you never know whether it is because he actually believes them to be good for the U.S., or simply because his campaign was secretly sponsored by the oil industry.
And the elections change sometimes into a cabaret because the "independence" of the PACs is a mockery. In the Saturday candidate's debate transmitted on NBC, Romney and Gingrich swore that they did not even watch their "independent" committees' adverts, but then, unintentionally, they engaged in a surprisingly detailed discussion about what is shown in the spots.

Technorati Tags: Newt Gingrich,Mitt Romney,Politics,2012 Elections,Republican Primary,Citizens United,Super-PACS,Current Events,An American Gothic

Why This Is The Best The GOP Can Do

    By  plf515        Mon Jan 23, 2012

The four remaining candidates for the Republican nomination are a pretty pathetic bunch:
Mitt, Newt, Rick and Ron (alphabetical order)

Mitt is a multimillionaire vampire capitalist who dodged the draft (by living in a mansion in Paris), abused his dog, said his sons serve America by helping him get elected and has parked a lot of his money in the Cayman Islands for some reason. A self-centered man with no center to his self. A perfectly lubricated weather vane.

Newt is a disgraced former Speaker of the House, the only one ever to be removed for ethics violations. He's a philanderer who excused his behavior because of the stress he was under serving in Congress, a racist who barely hides it, and a blowhard.

Rick is, at least, consistent. But he's consistently crazy and mean, with views that ought to have died 50 years ago but are sadly alive.

and Ron is against the federal department of, well, almost everything. He's a darling of Storm Front who thinks racists don't have enough rights and that things like clean water aren't important and who claims to be a libertarian but is really a states-rights person.

Is this the best they can do?

Yes it is.

Not because no one wants to run against Obama.
Not because of some vagaries of this election cycle.
Not because of the harshness of the political spotlight.

No.

The reason this is the best they can do is because this is who they are.

Neocons, lunatics, theocrats and pseudo-libertarians.

The Republican party doesn't deserve to just lose in 2012. They deserve to be destroyed.  This should be the last generation in which such a party is viable.

Technorati Tags: Republican Party,2012 Elections,Mitt Romney,Newt Gingrich,Ron Paul,Rick Santorum,Current Events,An American Gothic,GOP

Mitt Romney’s Tax Returns

By  Georgia Logothetis   for Daily Kos

Tue Jan 24, 2012

First, the facts from the Washington Post:

Mitt Romney offered a partial snapshot of his vast personal fortune late Monday, disclosing income of $21.7 million in 2010 and $20.9 million last year — virtually all of it profits, dividends or interest from investments.

None came from wages, the primary source of income for most Americans. Instead, Romney and his wife, Ann, collected millions in capital gains from a profusion of investments, as well as stock dividends and interest payments.

Yes, you read that correctly. Mitt Romney had zero wage income. Zero.

More from the NYT:

Mr. Romney said last week that his effective rate was “about 15 percent,” a figure lower than that of many affluent Americans. But his returns suggested that he paid an effective tax rate of slightly below that of nearly 14 percent. [...]

Referring to the fact that nearly all of his income is taxed as capital gains at a 15 percent rate rather than as earned income at rates of up to 35 percent, Mr. Romney questioned a proposal by Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, to reduce capital gains taxes to zero.

“Under that plan, I’d have paid no taxes in the last two years,” Mr. Romney said.

Yes, you read that correctly too. Mitt Romney is actually highlighting the fact that all of his wealth comes from capital gains instead of wage income.

Meanwhile, the New York Times on Gingrich's claim that he's an "outsider":

There is lot more than that to be learned from Mr. Gingrich’s documents, starting with the mockery they make of his claim to be an insurgent Washington outsider, the supposed anti-establishment candidate.

After he was drummed out of the House speaker’s office in 1998, Mr. Gingrich set about creating a lucrative living, by trading on his political connections. In 2010, he reported a total income of $3.16 million (including a tidy $76,200 Congressional pension).

Most of Mr. Gingrich’s income has come from helping corporate clients gain access and solicitous treatment from Washington’s power elite.

Frank Bruni:

In Monday night’s debate, Gingrich characterized the end of his Congressional career after the 1998 midterms as wholly volitional, making his exit sound like a self-sacrificing blaze of glory rather than the acrimonious firestorm it was.

With Gingrich, the distance between reality and rhetoric isn’t shrinking but growing, and the incongruities mount. He has lately fallen in love with his rants against “the elites,” and casts himself as their most determined foe, but I can’t for the life of me figure out a definition of elite that doesn’t include him.

Amie Parnes previews the president's State of the Union address:

President Obama won’t be mentioning Mitt Romney by name on Tuesday night. But the subtext of his State of the Union address will be all about him.

Just hours after Romney is expected to disclose his much-anticipated tax returns, Obama will attempt — in a read-between-the-lines way — to portray Romney as an über-wealthy businessman who is anything but a champion for the middle class. [...]

“Every time he says ‘wealthy few,’ it almost implies ‘investor class’ and Mitt Romney,” said Tobe Berkovitz, a professor of communications at Boston University who specializes in political communications and advertising, adding that it’s an “easy” association. One way Obama will implicitly highlight Romney in Tuesday’s speech will be in renewing his call for a tax code rewrite to codify what he calls the “Buffett Rule,” named after billionaire investor Warren Buffett, to ensure wealthier people pay a higher rate than do the middle class and poor.

And then, we have this news nugget from Aaron Blake:

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) said Sunday that he would consider being Mitt Romney’s vice presidential running mate if Romney asked him, but said he remained skeptical that he would ever be on the ticket.

Christie, who previously denied that he was ready to be president but then briefly considered entreaties to run, also appears to have softened his resistance to the idea of being vice president.

Technorati Tags: Mitt Romney,Income Taxes,Taxes,2012 Elections,Chris Christie,Current Events,An American Gothic,Newt Gingrich

Republicans Begin to Doubt Market Economics

By Markus Ziener   19 January                                             Sourced from Watching America

Germany - Handelsblatt - Original Article (German)

Translated By Ron Argentati   Edited by Mark DeLucas

Romney is presenting himself as a successful entrepreneur, but in light of the financial crisis and the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, that doesn't necessarily resonate with many people — not even with those on the right, who are coming to terms with Romney and free markets.

America, the land of almost limitless opportunity, is facing its next existential crisis. After the bailout crisis and the tea party crisis, the nation is now facing a morality crisis. The bizarre thing about it is that it is conservative politicians who have plunged the country into a national debate about whether there should be limits on capitalism or if “anything goes.” In other words, they are asking whether a former private equity manager like Mitt Romney has the proper moral compass to become president.
And it's equally remarkable that the criticism comes not from the left but from the right. It is politicians like Newt Gingrich, who also seeks the Republican nomination to run for president, who are questioning Romney's integrity.
The ex-Speaker of the House calls Romney a plunderer who enriched himself on the backs of working people. Texas Governor Rick Perry, who suspended his campaign on Thursday, went so far as to call Romney's behavior as CEO of Bain Capital Management “vulture capitalism.”
It is correct that as manager of Bain Capital between 1984 and 1999, Romney amassed a fortune estimated today to be around a quarter of a billion dollars. Bain invested in companies, increased their profitability and then sold them off for considerable profit. It is also correct that at times, thousands of workers were fired in the process, many of the companies went bankrupt and Romney's company profited from low tax rates.
But many other companies were strengthened by the restructuring and later hired workers. Mitt Romney calls this process creative destruction and says it is an important element of capitalism, a system that ultimately results in better, more competitive companies.
That may well be, but it is also correct to say that the social costs of doing business this way are very high — so high that it has led to a discrediting of capitalism in the very bosom of its own motherland. Wherever Romney appears publicly, he finds himself confronted by members of the Occupy movement. They call out to him that they are part of the 99 percent. Romney, in contrast, belongs to the 1 percent of Americans who, according to Nobel Laureate for economics Joseph Stiglitz, control 40 percent of the nation's wealth.
Romney's attempts to butter up the common people just makes them more angry.
Romney tries to defend himself with arguments that are often ludicrous. For example, he claims that as the multimillionaire son of a multimillionaire auto executive, he has also had to worry about losing his job on occasion. He has also said that much like the people he's addressing, he's also unemployed.
Such schmoozing just serves to increase the anger directed at him by critics who know they have hit a raw nerve in society. According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, two-thirds of Americans think there is a serious conflict between rich and poor in the United States, an increase of 20 percent since 2009.
Mitt Romney's biggest financial supporters
It is not only leftists and liberals who share that opinion. The strict constitutional constructionists of the tea party movement have an equally large problem with those who profit from the system. Their definition of American success is the entrepreneurial spirit that contains an element of risk and creates additional value. What they don't approve of are those who only know how to get the most out of tinkering with their personal fortunes.
The fact that the Republican Party is preparing to nominate a candidate that is the very antithesis of the capitalist is causing great concern among the ranks of the party conservatives. Gingrich even believes that Romney, if chosen to run against Barack Obama, is unelectable — even if his warnings are nothing more than the crocodile tears of a power politician who milked as much as he could out of the system as an adviser to the quasi-governmental mortgage bank Freddie Mac and as a well-paid consultant for Credit Suisse.
That is what makes this fight so unbearably hypocritical. It isn't being waged truthfully, and it is so exploitative. If these were different times and there was no financial crisis, not one American would get excited about the fact that the made-in-the-U.S. brand of capitalism is often brutal, unfair and demands sacrifices. It was libertarian Ron Paul who leaped to Romney's defense a few days ago. That in itself is remarkable since Paul is closest to Romney in the opinion polls at the moment. Paul says of Romney's critics, “I think they’re wrong. I think they’re totally misunderstanding the way the market works.”
It was a reminder that in the United States, capitalism is market capitalism, not social capitalism, and within those parameters, Romney was absolutely right. If these were different times, Romney would be hailed as a hero.

Technorati Tags: Mitt Romney,Newt Gingrich,Capitalism,Politics,Wall Street,Bain Capital,2012 Elections,Current Events,An American Gothic