A Bad Day for Mitt Romney To Call The President A Liar

So here's Mitt Romney's new ad defending his record on outsourcing by saying President Obama "doesn't tell the truth" and calling him "dishonest" for questioning Romney's activities at Bain Capital:

Romney Ad

The ad even uses the 'L' word, inexplicably accusing Obama of having "lied" about Hillary Clinton in 2008. I don't think any voter anywhere is going to be swayed by old clips from the 2008 primary, but I guess they wanted to play the video of Hillary saying "shame on you, Barack Obama." Whatever, I guess.

Anyway, that strange blast from the past aside, Mitt Romney really couldn't have picked a worse day to defend his Bain record by calling the president a liar.

First, the Boston Globe reported that contrary to Mitt Romney's claim to have left Bain in February of 1999, documents filed with the government described Romney as Bain's "sole stockholder, chairman of the board, chief executive officer and president" as late as 2002. So Romney is either lying now or he was lying then about his affiliation with Bain.

Second, David Corn of Mother Jones reports that in 1998—during which time even Romney admits he was still running Bain—Romney invested millions in a Chinese company whose business model was to help U.S. companies outsource manufacturing. And not only that, Romney used his Bermuda shell corporation to handle a portion of the investment. So he invested in outsourcing ... while using an offshore company domiciled in an international tax haven.

So with reports like these, you can see why I say this was a bad day for Mitt Romney to call President Obama a liar. And it might be time to start asking this: is it too late for Mitt Romney to end the bleeding by releasing his tax returns? Even if the returns don't lead to further revelations, aren't the facts that are already coming to light damning?

7:53 AM PT: The Obama campaign points out that the "evidence" in Romney's ad is entirely based on news reports that accept as given that Romney left Bain in February of 1999, but as today's Boston Globe report once again documents, that is not the case. In addition, Corn's story obviously puts the lie to Romney's claim.

7:55 AM PT: Also, it's amusing to note that while Romneyland tries to use February 1999 as a cutoff date to argue that nothing that happened after that point can be blamed on Romney, the centerpiece of Romney's argument that Bain created jobs is Staples. And much of that job creation took place ... after February of 1999. So even if Romney were telling the truth about when he left Bain, he's still tried to have it both ways.

Originally posted to The Jed Report on Thu Jul 12, 2012

Technorati Tags: Mitt Romney,Bain Capitol,Barack Obama,Current Events,Politics

Mitt Romney: Is He The Best That The Mormons and Republicans Have To Offer?

   Mr. Romney, the Mormon man of deep convictions and principles, does the same thing that all of the Republican’s in the primaries have done. That is, they have spouted off about their faith and about their Christianity, only to turn around and “ bear false witness “ against each other, and against President Obama. When it comes to Romney though, even his Mormon principles get brushed aside during pursuit of the almighty…dollar, that is. I have to wonder just exactly which God it is that he theoretically worships. I say that it is the “ father of lies “ since Romney has that characteristic down to a science.

The discovery of Mitt's Boson

By  Jon Perr aka Avenging Angel on Sun Jul 08, 2012

Even with four months to go until Election Day, Mitt Romney's shameless lying has already become one of the defining storylines of the 2012 campaign. Theories abound as to why Romney has emerged as a reverse George Washington, a man who cannot tell the truth. Jonathan Chait turned to Freud, explaining there's a clinical term for Mitt's compulsive aversion to the truth known as "fundamental attribution error." Rick Perlstein suggested Romney's pathological dissembling could be viewed in Shakespearean terms, with Mitt playing an undoubting Hamlet determined to avenge his father's defeat most foul in 1968. Meanwhile, Paul Krugman and Mark Kleiman applied deconstructionist theory to Romney's "post-truth campaign" and "post-modern way with the facts." And in "A Quantum Theory of Mitt Romney", "The Romney Uncertainty Principle" and "Schrödinger's Romney," analysts turned to particle physics to explain why on almost any issue, Mitt Romney's position changes when observed.

But how Mitt Romney is able to get away with his effortless dishonesty has remained one of politics' enduring mysteries—until now. Steve Benen, whose series "Chronicling Mitt's Mendacity" has already reached volume XXIV, posited:

"Romney gets away with it because he and his team realize contemporary political journalism isn't equipped to deal with a candidate who lies this much, about so many topics, so often."

Put another way, Mitt Romney's falsehoods occur faster than can be observed, measured, reported and, most importantly, understood by the media charged with investigating them. The result is that voters, or at least some of them, are attracted to rather than repelled by the Republican nominee. And it's that elusive force and the distortion field it produces which give Romney's presidential campaign its critical mass and threaten to turn back the hands of time.

Call it Mitt's Boson.

Continue reading below the fold.

Like the CERN Large Hadron Collider, for months Romney has been producing a seemingly limitless number of collisions with the truth. But his falsehoods aren't merely generated faster than the speed of the news cycle, but come in all sizes as well. After all, the son of American Motors magnate and Michigan Governor George Romney, Mitt fondly recalled being with his father for Detroit's Golden Jubilee, a celebration marking the 50th anniversary of the American automobile which occurred on June 1, 1946, "fully nine months before Romney was born." Years later, Mitt would similarly "remember" seeing his dad march with Martin Luther King, Jr.

While time (and the capacity of the internet) prohibit listing them all here, Romney's frauds are of the greatest magnitude on health care and the economy, the two issues Republicans claim are most important in the 2012 election.

This week, Romney denied the individual mandate in his signature Massachusetts health care law constituted a tax, despite having repeatedly described the fees for noncompliance as "free-rider surcharges," "tax penalties," "tax incentives" and sometimes just as "penalties." (For its part, the state of Massachusetts uses the term "tax penalty.") The former Bay State governor has also pretended that he never called his 2006 Massachusetts reform "a model for getting everybody insured. "

But those two misdirections pale in comparison to Romney's health care uber lie. As he put it during a Republican debate back in December:

"Am I proud of what we did for our state? Yes. But what the president has done is way beyond what we envisioned. We were trying to take of the 8 percent of the population that didn't have insurance. The President is not just worried about the people without insurance. Obamacare is about taking over 100 percent of the people's insurance in this country."

Romney's repetition of the lie doesn't make it any more true.

The Affordable Care Act passed by Congress and signed by President Obama in the spring of 2010 targets the 17 percent of people (over 50 million people) who are uninsured. As Politifact explained in deeming Romney's fraud another "Pants on Fire" lie:

According to the Census Bureau, the percentage of Americans without health insurance nationally was slightly under 17 percent in 2009, the year Obama began pushing for the bill. According to a Congressional Budget Office estimate, the number was about the same in 2010, when the measure was signed into law. Other estimates have pegged the national number at about 15 percent.

As Henry Aaron, a senior fellow with the centrist-to-liberal Brookings Institution right noted, comparing 8 percent to 17 percent "would have been apples to apples" when it comes to the impact of the individual mandate at the center of both the Massachusetts and national plans.

But Romney's chicanery (which Politifact branded "a felony case of comparing apples and oranges") hardly ends there:

Both laws leave in place the major existing insurance systems -- employer-provided insurance, Medicare for seniors and Medicaid for the poor. They reduce the number of uninsured by expanding Medicaid and by offering tax breaks to help people with moderate incomes buy insurance, using voluntary "exchanges" that individuals and small businesses can use to purchase private-sector health insurance. Under both laws, individuals are required to have insurance or pay a penalty, a mechanism called the "individual mandate." And companies that don't offer insurance to employees must pay fines, with exceptions for small business and a few other cases.

MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber, who helped design both Romneycare and the Affordable Care Act signed by President Obama, dismissed Mitt's cynical effort to put distance between the two laws:

"The problem is there is no way to say that," Gruber said. "Because they're the same f--king bill. He just can't have his cake and eat it too. Basically, you know, it's the same bill. He can try to draw distinctions and stuff, but he's just lying. The only big difference is he didn't have to pay for his. Because the federal government paid for it."

On the economy, Mitt Romney's lying is similarly laughable. And the duplicity of the "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt" author hardly ends with his jaw-dropping declaration that "I'll take a lot of credit for the fact that this industry's comeback."

After he formally announced his candidacy a year ago by declaring when President Obama "took office, the economy was in recession, and he made it worse, and he made it last longer," fact checkers quickly demolished Romney's obvious falsehood. But despite his subsequent denial just days later that "I didn't say that things are worse," Governor Romney has never stopped regurgitating some version of his "Obama made the economy worse" lie.

Then in advance of the President's major address on the economy last month in Cleveland, Mitt Romney unveiled a new formulation of his fraud:

"The reason it has taken so long for this recovery to gain traction and to put people back to work is in large measure because of the policy choices the President made. He is not responsible for whatever improvement we might be seeing, instead he is responsible for the fact that it's taken so long to see this recovery and the recovery is so tepid."

Unfortunately for Romney, the facts and the overwhelming consensus of economists—including the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and John McCain's 2008 brain trust—flatly contradict Mitt's mythmaking.

The data are straightforward. Barack Obama entered office in 2009 as the Bush recession was in full swing. GDP had plummeted by a shocking 8.9 percent the previous quarter. In January alone, 820,000 jobs were lost; all told, 2.2 million evaporated in the three months before Obama's stimulus was passed in February. (That might explain why even three years after he left office, Americans still blame George W. Bush for the economic calamity he bequeathed to Barack Obama.) Now, even with the difficult recovery, the U.S. has produced 28 months of private sector job gains and a return to economic growth. And despite Romney's charge that President Obama's are "the most anti-investment, anti-business, anti-jobs series of polices in modern American history," the Dow Jones has jumped by over 50 percent since January 20, 2009 and corporate profits are at record highs even as firms' tax burden continues to drop.

Nevertheless, in June Governor Romney told a Missouri audience that the President "slowed the recovery and harmed our economy," a result Romney insisted constituted "a moral failure of tragic proportions." Sadly for him, just 24 hours earlier, the director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office blew Romney's bogus claim out of the water.

As the Washington Post reported, the House Budget Committee heard testimony from CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf to answer simple question: Did the $787 billion Obama stimulus work? Unfortunately for Republican propagandists, Elmendorf clearly refuted Mitt Romney's claim that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) was "the largest one-time careless expenditure of government money in American history."

Under questioning from skeptical Republicans, the director of the nonpartisan (and widely respected) Congressional Budget Office was emphatic about the value of the 2009 stimulus. And, he said, the vast majority of economists agree.

In a survey conducted by the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, 80 percent of economic experts agreed that, because of the stimulus, the U.S. unemployment rate was lower at the end of 2010 than it would have been otherwise.

"Only 4 percent disagreed or strongly disagreed," CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf told the House Budget Committee. "That," he added, "is a distinct minority."

Of course, you can fool some of the people all of the time, and that's Mitt Romney's target market.

Besides the elusive Higgs Boson, particle physics and cosmology also provide other helpful analogies for understanding Mitt Romney. Romney's gymnastic flip-flops on abortion, immigration, climate change, health care, Ronald Reagan ("I was an independent during the time of Reagan-Bush; I'm not trying to return to Reagan-Bush" became "My life experience convinced me that Ronald Reagan was right") and even flip-flopping itself ("I think you'll find that I've been as consistent as human beings can be" after having declared "if you're looking for someone who's never changed any positions on any policies, then I'm not your guy") show that Mitt, like Schrödinger's Cat, can occupy two positions at once. Or looked at another way, perhaps there's another "multiverse" in which Mitt Romney is still pro-choice and claims "my views are progressive." And when he's in doubt about what to say about his personal finances, immigration, the DREAM Act, paycheck fairness, the Lily Ledbetter Act, the Violence Against Women Act, his scrubbed Massachusetts records, details on which tax deductions and loopholes he would cut and so much else, Mitt Romney becomes a black hole, a void into which reporters' inquiries disappear, never to be answered.

He has admitted as much. As Mitt explained to the Weekly Standard, a lesson he learned from his 1994 defeat by Teddy Kennedy was to answer questions about, say, what federal agencies he'd eliminate, by answering, "I'm not going to give you a list right now." In December, the Wall Street Journal concluded that Romney's evasiveness was a feature, not a bug:

Amid such generalities, it's hard not to conclude that the candidate is trying to avoid offering any details that might become a political target. And he all but admits as much. "I happen to also recognize," he says, "that if you go out with a tax proposal which conforms to your philosophy but it hasn't been thoroughly analyzed, vetted, put through models and calculated in detail, that you're gonna get hit by the demagogues in the general election."

In Mitt Romney's world, those beings are called "demagogues." But in the rest of this universe, they are known as "voters." And thanks to the dark force of Mitt's Boson, enough of them may yet be attracted to Romney to put him in the White House.

Technorati Tags: Mitt Romney,Super Liar,Factually Challanged,Republican Party,Affordable Care Act,American Recovery and Reinvestment Act,Dream Act,CBO,GOP,Health Care,Current Events

Another Day, Another Obamacare Repeal Debate In The House

Tue Jul 10, 2012

For the 31st time in 18 months, Republicans in the House of Representatives are spending today debating a repeal of the Affordable Care Act, with the final vote tomorrow. This time is extra special, though, since the Supreme Court ruled last month that the ACA is constitutional. It gives a certain oomph to this iteration of the temper tantrum, the utterly futile "Repeal of Obamacare Act." It will never reach the Senate floor, but if by some miracle it did, it would be vetoed. Like wasting time is going to stop this crop of Republicans.

Demonstrating just how absurd all this is, they actually let Rep. Allen West (R-Crazytown) out in public to act as spokesman.

"I don't think it's symbolic," Rep. Allen West, R-Fla., told ABC Monday evening. "Now that we know that the truth is out there that this is a tax, we need to be able to let the American people know where we stand." [...]

"If you've got orders to take a hill, you're going to keep going until you take the hill," West, R-Fla., explained. "The American people don't want this Patient Protection Affordable Care Act. It's heinous, it's onerous. They want it gone so we as their representatives are going to continue to do what they sent us up here to do which is every way that we possibly can make sure that this bad policy, this bad law is irradiated from our rolls."

Not just repealed. Irradiated. Which is complete gibberish, but it's decisive gibberish. But what's not gibberish is what Republicans are intent upon doing, as Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) explains: "It's more than just whether or not they will do it and its politics. It is about the philosophy that is behind it and who they are willing to hurt and whose side they're on. That's what this vote is about. [...] It's making health care affordable for those who have it and for those who do not have it. That is what Republicans do not want to have happen."

Of course, it could also be about Republican members of Congress not wanting to lose the very sweet deal that they have for health care. During the negotiations, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) offered what he thought would be a cute poison pill amendment, requiring that all members of Congress give up their federal employees health benefits, and shop for their insurance on the new exchanges. Democrats loved the idea, and it was adopted. And now, Republicans want to get rid of it, and keep their very generous health insurance, which they get to keep for their whole lives, if they want to.

So it's lifetime government health care coverage for them, but not for you. That's the Republican vision of freedom.

Originally posted to Joan McCarter

Technorati Tags: ACA,Affordable Care Act,ObamaCare,RomneyCare,House Republicans,Health Care Reform,Current Events,Politics

Obama's Tax Plan Puts Middle Class In Spotlight Again

Georgia Logothetis on Tue Jul 10, 2012

Source

A lot of ink was used these last couple of days writing about the wealthy at Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's mega-donor retreat last weekend. Now it's time to talk about the middle class again.

Yesterday, President Obama urged an extension of the Bush tax cuts for the middle class while arguing that the tax cuts for wealthy Americans should expire. Here's the pundit reaction to his proposal.

The New York Times Editorial Board looks at President Obama's plan to extend tax cuts for middle class families:

In calling for cooperation from Congress, Mr. Obama said that the point is to “agree to do what we agree on”: extend the middle-class tax cuts. As a matter of fairness and responsible policy making, he said, the majority of Americans, and the broader economy, should not be held hostage again to another debate over the merits of tax cuts for the wealthy.

Unfortunately, it is not a message Congressional Republicans want to hear, committed as they are to preserving tax cuts for the rich at all costs. It is not even what some Democratic leaders want to hear, including Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader and Senator Charles Schumer of New York, both of whom voiced support on Monday for Mr. Obama’s approach but have advocated in the past for extending the tax cuts for households that earn up to $1 million a year, a level that would please wealthy campaign donors.

But it’s a message that needs to be sent, loud and clear, over and over.

The Chicago Sun-Times:

[Obama's plan] would keep more money in the pockets of middle-class Americans, whose spending provides a direct boost to the economy, while generating $850 billion in revenues over 10 years. That’s money desperately needed to fund a host of worthy programs, from student loans to the military, without adding to the federal deficit.

Republicans say it would be a mistake to raise taxes on anyone, even on multimillionaires, at a time when the economy is so weak, and we might agree if the alternative were not worse. But we can’t imagine an America where money for education, for example, is slashed to nothing while Warren Buffett’s billions go untouched.

We also find it curious that this general GOP worry — the danger of slowing spending during hard times — fails to discourage them from chopping mightily at government spending. Too many Republicans on Capitol Hill, we fear, are doing the bidding of their billionaire benefactors or are captive to Grover Norquist’s mindless no-tax pledge.

Dana Milbank at The Washington Post:

President Obama is a reluctant populist.  [...] His reelection campaign has doubled its effort to allow the George W. Bush-era tax cuts to expire for the wealthiest Americans — a policy that should be an easy sell to the remaining 98 percent of Americans. But where he needs to be fiery and passionate, he stood in a business suit behind a lectern in the executive mansion, making a presentation that was almost apologetic.

He presented an argument that would appeal to political strategists: “The American people are with me on this. Poll after poll shows that’s the case.” [...] Obama launched his new offensive in a defensive posture, anticipating the Republican criticism and trying to defend against it.

“They’ll say that we can’t tax ‘job creators,’ and they’ll try to explain how this would be bad for small businesses,” he said. He made sure everybody knew that he “cut taxes for small-business owners 18 times” and that he wouldn’t raise taxes on “97 percent of all small-business owners in America.” [...]

So if the wealthy are going to accuse Obama of class warfare, he might as well do something to merit the charge. “Always take the offensive,” the legendary populist Huey Long said. “The defensive ain’t worth a damn.”

Ezra Klein, also at The Washington Post:

If Obama signed his name onto the upper-income tax cuts in the months before the election, it would effectively take tax rates on the rich off the table in the election, as both parties will agree on the issue, at least through 2013. But with its announcement today, the Obama campaign signaled that that’s not going to happen. And that means no clarity for the market on how — or whether — the fiscal cliff will be resolved until after November.

Some economists think the economy can weather the uncertainty — at least through to the election. ”It’s July now, and early November is soon,” says Wolfers, a visiting professor at Princeton. “While I can see the fiscal cliff having an effect on financial markets and on confidence fairly quickly, it’s hard to see that effect having much of an effect on the real economy prior to the election. Given that, if all you cared about were electoral math, it would make sense to go for the populist policy choice now.”

Konrad Yakabuski at the Globe & Mail:

Mr. Obama moved on Monday to revive his push for higher tax rates on the wealthiest Americans, making the proposal a key plank of his re-election strategy. It marked a new offensive in his attempt to cast Republican nominee Mitt Romney as a ruthless corporate raider whose policies would protect the rich. Mr. Romney is against all tax increases.

While Mr. Obama’s position is not new, he had not pushed it much in recent months. By suddenly making income inequality a key part of his re-election strategy, Mr. Obama may be hoping to take the focus off a stubbornly high unemployment rate and discontent over his health-care overhaul, both of which have dominated the news in recent weeks.

The tax plan also provides a unifying theme for his campaign. Some Democrats had complained that it had been lacking as the President centred most of his efforts on wooing selected segments of the electorate, such Latinos, gays and single women.

Tamara Keith at NPR:

Much of the political focus when discussing the Bush-era tax cuts is on the wealthy, but they're not the only ones who would be affected if the tax cuts are allowed to expire at the end of this year.

The vast majority of American taxpayers would take a hit, including Randi Cartmill and her husband Josh Walling who live in Madison, Wis., with their three children.

The family's household income hovers a little below the national median, in the $40,000 to $50,000 range. Cartmill says the tax cuts have helped the family's bottom line.

Reuters:

"Small businesses who are struggling to make payroll and working families who have tightened their belts to meet their budgets cannot afford to be hit with a massive tax increase come January," Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor said.

Democrats say that line of attack is misleading, pointing out that 97 percent of small businesses would not be hit, according to nonpartisan congressional estimates.

Also, mega law firms and hedge funds are part of that category - not exactly sympathetic figures for Republicans looking to portray Obama as a job killer ahead of the November 6 election.

Joshua Green at Bloomberg Businessweek:

As the GOP primaries revealed, Romney has a strange compulsion to talk about his wealth in unbecoming ways: joking to a group of unemployed people, for instance, that he, too, is unemployed. James Fallows dubbed this Romney’s “gaffe Tourettes.”

More often, though, Romney invokes his wealth as a political defense in a way that’s clearly intentional and no less unattractive. Questions about everything from his business practices at Bain Capital to the problem of growing income inequality are routinely met with the claim that people are just jealous of all his money. A good example is this Today Show interview with Matt Lauer wherein Romney dismisses Lauer’s questions about income inequality as “very envy-oriented” and a matter best discussed in “private rooms.”

Wealthy presidents from John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush were far more gracious and thoughtful about the subject of their wealth, and, not coincidentally, more successful politically than Romney has been when speaking about his own.

Technorati Tags: 2012 Elections,Bush Tax Cuts,Barack Obama,Republican Party,The Economy,The Middle Class,The 1%,Taxes,Current Events,Mitt Romney

 

If Not For Republicans, Unemployment Would Be Less Than 6%

Blue Mark  on Sun Jul 08, 2012      

The GOP has been on an economic wrecking mission ever since the election of Barack Obama - indeed we now know that leading Republican strategists and legislators met and planned a course of economic sabotage and complete obstruction on Obama's very first day in office.

This obstruction has had a huge price - a deliberate price that the GOP is betting the American people will blame on President Obama. GOP obstruction did not prevent the passage of ARRA - the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act - popularly know as "The Stimulus" bill of 2009 during the height of the economic disaster as the economy was falling off a cliff - the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that ARRA has saved up to 3 million jobs. But nearly every economic measure since then has been blocked by GOP obstruction, filibusters and brinksmanship.

What has been the result of GOP obstruction?

It is hard to quantify what constant obstruction has cost - you could tally up estimates of every measure that came along, but not all would have passed - nor even been introduced if previous measures had been adopted that obviated their need. But we can look at just two big examples and get a minimal measure of the human cost to American citizens of a deliberate policy to destroy the economy in order to bring down the president; 1) austerity, and 2) obstruction of the 2011 American Jobs Act. Taking just those into account, the unemployment rate would be under 6% were it not for deliberate GOP wrecking.

Austerity is madness - many in the GOP actually believe that austerity during an economic downturn is the right thing to do - even 'socialist' Europe was convinced of this - although most realize it is not true, and has no history of success - even Mitt Romney unwittingly admitted as much in an unguarded moment. But that hasn't stopped savage austerity on the state and local level - which has cost over 600,000 public sector jobs so far.

Normally in a recession and recovery government at all levels increase public employment - this has happened in every GOP administration - and much of that increase is funded by federal government grants to the state and local governments. But since the Stimulus, the GOP has blocked any substantial help for the states, and in GOP led states severe austerity cuts have been the rule - even including GOP governors rejecting projects fully funded by the federal government. The economic cost of this is far more than just those 600 thousand jobs - the spillover effect on private business and local economies has been devastating - when you factor in all these effects the total job cost of austerity has been estimated at 2.3 million jobs.

President Obama proposed the American Jobs Act in his 2011 State of the Union address, and spent the next year promoting it at every opportunity. Although expensive - it contained a combination of targeted tax cuts and some tax increases, along with direct spending designed to increase consumer spending and lower the cost to business of hiring new workers, all while paying for the bill. The CBO said the bill would not only have paid for itself within 10 years, but would have reduced the deficit by at least 6 billion dollars. According to an analysis by Moody's it would have created about 1.9 million jobs.

The result of GOP obstruction with those two things cost us 2.3 million jobs and 1.9 million jobs respectively. US employment as of May 2011 is about 155 million jobs, which means those 4.2 million jobs that the GOP has prevented account for 2.7% of the unemployment rate. But let's be fair, there is a small amount of overlap in those jobs - a small portion (about 8%) of the American Jobs Act would have gone to State and Local governments to pay for teachers, first responders and the like - although for the most part it would have just prevented further layoffs rather than resulted in new hires. It is also very likely that without the economic wrecking of GOP obstructionism the labor participation rate would be higher - so instead of a reduction of unemployment to 5.5% it would be slightly higher, but still well under 6%.

Now just for fun, consider if we had done during this recovery what every GOP administration has done, and substantially increased public sector employment.

Without knowing how much we would have increased public sector employment we can't make a firm estimate of how much better employment levels would be, but if we make the assumption that we increased the public sector by just half of the amount we actually reduced it - the total effect on the economy in both public and private sector jobs would be around 1.15 million - which would push the unemployment  rate below 5%.

That is the human cost of GOP economic obstruction.                                     Original

Technorati Tags: The Republican Party,Unemployment,Barack Obama,Mitch McConnell,2012 Elections,The Economy,Congress,Austerity,Politics,Current Events

Romney Economics….Cheat Main Street

By Leo W Gerard  on Wed May 30, 2012

Mitt Romney contends his money making as CEO of Bain Capital qualifies him to be President of the United States. That’s true if Americans believe money should flow out of their pockets, out of the cash registers of Main Street shops and into the Swiss bank accounts of Romney and his 1 percenter cronies.

Mitt Romney made a boatload of money for himself and his fellow fat cats. No doubt about it. Billions. But he made it the way Americans hate most – Wall Street style wheeling and dealing.

Americans hate it because when all that scheming went bad, when the market collapsed, it was the 99 percent who footed the bill to bailout Wall Street. The same is true of Romney and Bain. When Bain bankrupted the companies it bought – and Bain did that shockingly often – workers and Main Street businesses paid the price.

Romney contends his money making as CEO of Bain qualifies him to be President of the United States. That’s true if Americans believe money should flow out of their pockets, out of the cash registers of Main Street shops and into the Swiss bank accounts of Romney and his 1 percenter cronies.

Here are some of Romney’s victims, Main Street businesses owed money by just one bankrupted Bain company, American Pad and Paper Co. (Ampad): Technical Coatings Laboratory, owed $125,191.20 and paid in bankruptcy $237.03; Services Plus Inc., owed $12,064.71, paid $22.84; Crown Vantage, owed $32,155.26, paid $60.89.

In the 15 years Romney ran Bain from 1984 to 1999, 22 percent of the companies it invested in went bankrupt or closed within eight years, according to a study by the Wall Street Journal.

In fact, according to the Wall Street Journal, the bulk – 70 percent – of the $2.5 billion Bain made for investors during that time came from just 10 deals. Four of those ended up in bankruptcy as well – killing jobs and jilting Main Street businesses. Despite that, Romney and the Bain investors fattened their Swiss bank accounts.

More Main Street victims: Lakeway Container Inc., owed $47,143.56 by Ampad, paid $89.26 in bankruptcy; Olympic Adhesives, owed $6,566, paid $12.43; American Chain and Gear, owed $505.54, paid 96 cents.

Bain’s handling of Ampad illustrates how the rich extract money from these deals and leave behind wounded workers and Main Street shops. Bain bought Ampad from Mead Corp. in 1992 and added SCM Office Supplies to the holdings two years later. Like many leveraged buyout deals, these were financed with loans secured by the purchased companies’ assets.

Within hours after buying SCM, Bain fired every one of its 350 workers in Marion, Ind. Bain, through Ampad, told the shocked and terrified workers they could apply for their former positions if they wanted them back – at less pay, fewer benefits and worse working conditions.

One way leveraged buyout firms like Bain make money is by taking it from workers – slashing their pay, benefits and pensions. This also makes companies look more productive, enabling buyout firms like Bain to make money on taking them public.

Bain bought SCM early in July, 1994. Within two months, the workers went out on strike, seeking restoration of some of their pay and benefits. Workers sought help from Romney, who rebuffed them as he was running for Ted Kennedy’s U.S. Senate seat. After losing that race, Romney returned to Bain, permanently closed the Marion plant and moved its equipment to other Ampad facilities.

More Main Street victims of Ampad bankruptcy:  Green Bay Packaging Inc., owed $75,551.92, paid $137.37; Springfield Electric, owed $3,919.88, paid $7.23; American Coffee Break Service, owed $1,349.73, paid $2.56.

Through 1999, Bain continued to be the single largest shareholder in Ampad, and three Bain executives sat on its board of directors. Ampad struggled to meet the low price demands of big box retailers – like Staples, in which Bain had also invested and where Romney sat on the board of directors.

Ampad fell into bankruptcy in 2000. Companies besieged with debt -- as Ampad was -- because of leveraged buyouts often fail because they are too weakened to deal with normal business adversity.

More Main Street victims of Ampad bankruptcy: Economy Plumbing Co., owed $1,505.69, paid $2.85; Hohner Stitching Products, owed $2,095.76, paid $3.97; Mount Tom Box Co. Inc., owed $34,351.96, paid $65.04.

When Ampad went under, it owed $182.6 million to its suppliers across America. The bankruptcy left only $328,633 to pay nearly 1,300 unsecured creditors – that worked out to 10 cents for every $10 Ampad owed. That’s how a company liked Hometown Café & Catering, owed $600.60 by Ampad, got all of $1.14. And Hometown Café received that big fat check 11 years after Ampad filed for bankruptcy.

These Main Street shops and businesses are the heart of American communities, supporting the local United Way, Little League teams and Memorial Day parades. Debts never paid mean less money for them to hire their own workers, fewer dollars for them to contribute to their communities and a higher probability they’ll be forced into bankruptcy.

Bain invested $5 million in Ampad and took more than $100 million out, through numerous methods, including fees. That $100 million would have gone a long way toward paying the debts Ampad owed to Main Street businesses across the country.  It wouldn’t be surprising if they felt a little like Romney and Bain robbed them at gunpoint.

But everything Bain did was legal. It’s Romney economics, working for the wealthy while double crossing Main Street.

Technorati Tags: Mitt Romney,Bain Capitol,Ampad,Mead Corp,Wall Street,Vulture Capitolist,Current Events,Politics

What's in Romney's Offshore Accounts?

by Ben Adler on Wednesday, July 4, 2012 by The Nation

Mitt Romney has been very reluctant to release his tax returns. In all his previous campaigns he refused to release any of them. This time, under pressure, he has given us only the last two years.

    But he must disclose more. If you want to know why, read Nicholas Shaxson’s piece in the new issue of Vanity Fair. In it, Shaxson raises important questions about some strange aspects of Romney’s financial history:

§ What is in Romney’s offshore accounts? He has sheltered much of his wealth in tax havens such as Bermuda, but he has not disclosed anything about those investments. For instance, Shaxson writes, “There is a Bermuda-based entity called Sankaty High Yield Asset Investors Ltd., which has been described in securities filings as ‘a Bermuda corporation wholly owned by W. Mitt Romney.’ He set it up in 1997, then transferred it to his wife’s newly created blind trust on January 1, 2003, the day before he was inaugurated as Massachusetts’s governor…. Romney failed to list this entity on several financial disclosures, even though such a closely held entity would not qualify as an ‘excepted investment fund’ that would not need to be on his disclosure forms. He finally included it on his 2010 tax return. Even after examining that return, we have no idea what is in this company, but it could be valuable, meaning that it is possible Romney’s wealth is even greater than previous estimates.”

§ Why is Romney still being paid by Bain Capital? He left the firm more than ten years ago. Given its varied investments, could the fact that he is still being paid by them create a conflict of interest in office? Shaxson writes, “Though he left the firm in 1999, Romney has continued to receive large payments from it—in early June he revealed more than $2 million in new Bain income. The firm today has at least 138 funds organized in the Cayman Islands, and Romney himself has personal interests in at least 12, worth as much as $30 million, hidden behind controversial confidentiality disclaimers.”

§ Why has Romney opened foreign bank accounts, such as a Swiss account with $3 million that appeared on his 2010 returns but not his 2011 returns? How much has kept in offshore accounts in the past? Was he betting against the strength of the US dollar? How might such financial interests affect his policies as president?

§ Are Romney’s blind trusts really blind? Their trustee is Bradford Malt, his personal lawyer. Malt invested $10 million of Romney’s money in the Solamere Founders Fund, co-founded by his son Tagg and Spencer Zwick, a Romney campaign fundraiser. Malt’s and Romney’s claims that this is coincidental and Romney knew nothing of it strains credulity. If Romney knows what his blind trusts invest in, how might his investments influence his political decisions?

§ How much has Romney invested with Elliot Associates? Shaxson reports, “Elliott buys up cheap debt, often at cents on the dollar, from lenders to deeply troubled nations such as Congo-Brazzaville, then attacks the debtor states with lawsuits to squeeze maximum repayment. Elliott is run by the secretive hedge-fund billionaire and G.O.P. super-donor Paul Singer, whom Fortune recently dubbed Mitt Romney’s ‘Hedge Fund Kingmaker.’ (Singer has given $1 million to Romney’s super-pac Restore Our Future.) It is hard to know the size of these investments. Romney’s financial disclosure form lists 25 of them in an open-ended category, ‘Over $1 million,’ including So­lamere and Elliott, and they are not broken down further.”

§ How did Romney build a $102 million Individual Retirement Account (IRA)? Did he avoid paying taxes in doing so? During Romney’s fifteen years at Bain Capital taxpayers were allowed to put only $2,000 annually into IRAs and $30,000 into another fund. Romney won’t say how his account generated such astronomical returns. The only explanation anyone has come up with, offered by Wall Street Journal reporter Mark Maremont, is that Romney stuffed his account with deliberately undervalued shares of Bain stock. Incidentally, Bain is still contributing to Romney’s and his wife’s IRAs.

§ Did Bain serve as a tax haven for foreign criminals? As Shaxson explains, “Private equity is one channel for this secrecy-shrouded foreign money to enter the United States, and a filing for Mitt Romney’s first $37 million Bain Capital Fund, of 1984, provides a rare window into this. One foreign investor, of $2 million, was the newspaper tycoon, tax evader, and fraudster Robert Maxwell, who fell from his yacht, and drowned, off of the Canary Islands in 1991 in strange circumstances, after looting his company’s pension fund. The Bain filing also names Eduardo Poma, a member of one of the ‘14 families’ oligarchy that has controlled most of El Salvador’s wealth for decades; oddly, Poma is listed as sharing a Miami address with two anonymous companies that invested $1.5 million between them. The filings also show a Geneva-based trustee overseeing a trust that invested $2.5 million, a Bahamas corporation that put in $3 million, and three corporations in the tax haven of Panama, historically a favored destination for Latin-American dirty money—’one of the filthiest money-laundering sinks in the world,’ as a US Customs official once put it.”

Shaxson does not allege that Romney or Bain has ever broken the law. But the public has a right to know about the ethics and probity, not mere legality, of Romney’s personal and professional financial history. Romney has made business experience the central pitch of his candidacy, so how can he claim that how he manages his money is irrelevant?

                                     © 2012 The Nation

Technorati Tags: Mitt Romney,Offshore Accounts,Sankaty High Yield Asset Investors Ltd,2012 Elections,Current Events,Bain Capital,Solamere Founders Fund

Friday Funnies: Supreme Court & ObamaCare Edition

   There were no new late-night shows this week that were not in reruns. So, I am bringing you some political crap from one of my favorites, Bill Maher.

Bill Maher:  "I could not wait to start using my Obamacare. Today, I swallowed a fist full of birth control pills and then washed it down with poison. What do I care, it’s free?"

"The Tea Party is furious. They say this is a slippery slope to dental care."

"Down in Louisiana, Republican Governor Bobby Jindal said he's just going to refuse to implement Obamacare. That's it, 'F**k you all. I'm just not doing it.' So if you need an operation in Louisiana, you're going to have to pay for it the old-fashioned way: Stand on a balcony, flash your tits, and hope someone throws you money."

"What was really so hard for the conservatives to swallow was that Justice John Roberts was the one that did this. Gotta give it up to Justice John Roberts, that was a very studly move he made. But boy, for the conservatives, he was their hero. This is like they threw a big surprise party for their dad and they found him in bed with a black guy."

"They shouldn’t be so sad, the Supreme Court also had a ruling this week that was somewhat in their favor. In the Arizona immigration case they did rule that the police can consider you suspicious down there if you have significant difficulty communicating in English. Who knew George Bush was an alien."

"I secretly want Romney to win because, look, I'm a comedian. Mitt Romney is an ultra-Caucasian Mormon zillionaire who uses his dog as a hood ornament. For me not to secretly want him as President, it's like Halliburton secretly not wanting a war."

"So Mitt, if you are serious about winning, you have to think outside the box. what about, hear me out, Romney-Zimmerman 2012? It's unorthodox, but who better than George Zimmerman to personify your campaign theme of, 'I think the black guy's up to no good.'

"But you know who might be the perfect Mitt Romney Vice President? Mitt Romney. That's right, Mitt. Yourself! Now, of course, this is a controversial pick, because frankly, there are not many issues where you have seen eye to eye with you. (audience applause) I mean, you like you as a person, but on policy, it's gonna be kinda hard to bridge the gap between you and your stance on health care, immigration, gun control, abortion, climate change, campaign finance, Afghanistan, gay rights, space exploration, treaty of the sea, Megan's Law, the infield fly rule. OK, forget that one."

Jay Leno: "Last night was the big annual congressional baseball game between the Democrats and Republicans, and the Democrats won 18-5. Of course the Democrats won. Did you see who the umpire was? Chief Justice John Roberts."

"The Obamacare ruling makes Roberts the first Republican to favor an insurance law with an individual mandate since, well, Mitt Romney."

Technorati Tags: ObamaCare,RomneyCare,Mitt Romney,Barack Obama,John Roberts,The Supreme Court,Late Night Talk,Bill Maher,Political Humor,Current Events

New Report on the Dangers of Genetically Modified Foods

by Richard Schiffman

“Aren’t critics of genetically engineered food anti-science? Isn’t the debate over GMOs (genetically modified organisms) a spat between emotional but ignorant activists on one hand and rational GM-supporting scientists on the other?”

These questions are posed by Earth Open Source, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to assuring the sustainability, security, and safety of the global food system. They answer their own questions in a new study “GMO Myths and Truths.” The myth, they say, is that GM foods have been proven safe. The truth is that there are hidden dangers which corporate-funded research has not yet adequately investigated.

What makes this report unusual is that it was authored not by the usual food activists and environmentalists, but by two well known genetic engineers with help from an investigative reporter. The team conducted an exhaustive survey of hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific studies and concluded not only that GM food crops pose significant, if largely under-evaluated, health risks, but that they have so far failed to deliver on their promise to increase crop yields and lower herbicide and pesticide use.

The authors argue, moreover, that there are already safer environmentally friendly ways to grow more food for the planet’s exploding population. By focusing on the false panacea of genetic modification as a way to feed the world’s hungry, vital research dollars have been siphoned away from more promising lower-tech approaches to increasing the efficiency of the global food system.

The report’s authors include Dr Michael Antoniou of King's College London School of Medicine in the UK, who helped to develop genetic engineering for medical applications, and John Fagan, a biomedical researcher and expert in food system sustainability and GMO testing, who returned $614,000 in grant money to the National Institutes of Health in 1994 because of his concerns about the safety and ethics of genetic modification.

The paper, produced together with Claire Robinson, research director of Earth Open Source, comes out at a critical moment as California voters are considering a referendum which will appear on their ballot in November calling for the labeling of genetically modified foods in the state. Such labeling is already mandatory in Europe, China, India and many other nations.

Seventy percent of the foods that Americans purchase in the supermarket contain ingredients (mostly corn, soy and canola oil) that are genetically modified. The food industry, and often the media, assure us that there is a scientific consensus that GM foods are equivalent nutritionally to foods that have not been modified and not a danger to those who consume them. But it is just not true that all scientists agree. Given the uncertainties in the field and the lack of long-term health studies, some groups like the American Academy of Environmental Medicine and the Union of Concerned Scientists have called for labeling of GM foods.

If Californians agrees, it could have a big impact on the rest of us. Some believe that if the labeling referendum there passes, other states may follow suit. Furthermore, as I reported in the Guardian last month, if food companies are made to label GM foods in California, the nation’s most populous state, they may well do so all over the country, rather than maintain a costly two-tier packaging and distribution system.

The food and biotech industries are expected to fight the labeling initiative with a multi-million dollar statewide PR blitz, like the one which helped to defeat a similar measure in Oregon in 2002. But nearly 90% of Americans-- Republicans and Democrats equally according to a recent survey-- want to see GMOs labeled. This latest report on the dangers of genetically engineered foods will give the referendum’s advocates valuable ammunition in the upcoming California debate.

Here are some of the conclusions of the report:

*Genetically modifying crops, which involves the transfer of genes between biologically unrelated species, is not an extension of traditional plant hybridization, but a radical departure which can produce new toxins or allergens in food that are unlikely to be spotted in current regulatory checks.

*GM foods have not been adequately safety tested. There has been no long term research, and the few short term studies have been inadequate. In many cases proprietary restrictions put in place by biotech companies like Monsanto have prevented independent research by scientists not connected to the corporations which are making claims about their safety.

*Animal studies of the effects of GM foods have disclosed clear signs of toxicity– notably disturbances in liver and kidney function and immune responses.

*Over 75% of genetical modification are to to increase crop tolerance of herbicides. Where these crops are grown there has been a massive increases in herbicide use.

*Over half of GM crops are engineered to withstand application of Monsanto’s best selling Roundup. Contrary to the company’s claims Roundup is not safe at the levels it is being use, but has been found to be associated with miscarriage, birth defects, neurological development problems, DNA damage, and certain types of cancer. A public health crisis has occurred in GM soy-producing regions of South America, where people exposed to spraying with Roundup and other agrochemicals report escalating rates of birth defects and cancer.

*There is insufficient evidence that the BT toxin engineered into the plant structure of corn and cotton (whose seeds are used in food oil production) is safe for human consumption. Bt crops have been found to have toxic effects on laboratory animals in feeding trials. These toxins have also been found circulating in the blood of pregnant women in Canada and in the blood supply to their foetuses.

*GM crops have not been shown to offer higher crop yields, enhanced nutritional value or greater drought tolerance, as they have been hyped to do. The products of conventional breeding continue to outstrip GM in all of these arenas.

*Conventionally bred, locally adapted crops, used in combination with environmentally sustainable farming practices, offer a safer, cheaper and more efficient way to ensure global food security than genetic modification.

“Crop genetic engineering as practiced today is a crude, imprecise, and outmoded technology,” says the report's coauthor John Fagan. “Recent advances point to better ways of using our knowledge of genomics to improve food crops, that do not involve GM."

Selling patented genetically modified seeds, and the agro-chemicals designed to be used with them, has earned biotech giants like Monsanto, Dupont, Bayer and Syngenta untold billions of dollars in the past two decades. But what is good for these corporate bottom lines may not be good for human health, or the integrity of the environment.

Published on Thursday, July 5, 2012 by Common Dreams

                       www.commondreams.org

 

Technorati Tags: GMO,Genetically Modified Organisms.Earth Open Source,Dr Michael Antoniou,John Fagan,Genetically Modified Foods,Current Events,Monsanto,Dupont,Bayer,Syngenta,Roundup

Robert Reich: Mitt Romney IS the Economic Crisis

Wed Jul 04, 2012     by Dartagnan

Robert Reich says the attacks on Romney's tenure at Bain Capital miss the larger point, one which even the White House is not prepared to acknowledge: Mitt Romney is not simply a callous vulture capitalist, he is the living embodiment of the financial catastrophe that brought this country to the edge of ruin.

[T]he real issue here isn’t Bain’s betting record. It’s that Romney’s Bain is part of the same system as Jamie Dimon’s JPMorgan Chase, Jon Corzine’s MF Global and Lloyd Blankfein’s Goldman Sachs—a system that has turned much of the economy into a betting parlor that nearly imploded in 2008, destroying millions of jobs and devastating household incomes. The winners in this system are top Wall Street executives and traders, private-equity managers and hedge-fund moguls, and the losers are most of the rest of us.

The thousands of job losses caused by Bain's "bad bets," while providing rich fodder for the Administration's campaign ads, are really just a microcosm of a self-perpetuating, labyrinthine tax system geared to rewarding the wealthiest with the privilege of betting their fortunes on money they've neither earned nor done anything to deserve, with little or no personal risk. Reich calls it "casino capitalism:"

The biggest players in this system have, like Romney, made their profits placing big bets with other people’s money. If the bets go well, the players make out like bandits. If they go badly, the burden lands on average workers and taxpayers.

The fortunes raked in by financial dealmakers depend on special goodies baked into the tax code such as “carried interest,” which allows Romney and other partners in private-equity firms (as well as in many venture-capital and hedge funds) to treat their incomes as capital gains taxed at a maximum of 15 percent. This is how Romney managed to pay an average of 14 percent on more than $42 million of combined income in 2010 and 2011. But the carried-interest loophole makes no economic sense. Conservatives try to justify the tax code’s generous preference for capital gains as a reward to risk-takers—but Romney and other private-equity partners risk little, if any, of their personal wealth. They mostly bet with other investors’ money, including the pension savings of average working people.

    So when Romney touts his business acumen, he's really bragging about his ability to take advantage of a tax code rigged by himself and others like him to skew the playing field in such a way that in reality poses very little personal risk to himself.  For example, another "loophole" in the Tax Code permitted Romney, as a private equity partner, to place virtually unlimited amounts into a tax-deferred IRA by allowing Romney and his partners to grossly underestimate the "value" of their contributions, because the Code only considers a partnership interest in terms of its "future value."   You and I (and ninety-nine percent of Americans who did not have the good fortune and connections to work for a private equity firm) are limited to deferring a few thousand dollars per year from taxes. Mitt Romney's IRA, according to Reich, approaches 100 million dollars.

The Tax Code also makes interest on debt tax-deductible, fostering a huge incentive to substitute debt for equity, leading to debt-fueled bets made by banks and financial institutions intent on "leveraging America to the hilt," and culminating in the economic catastrophe that the Bush Administration was forced to finally confront in 2008, and that we still find ourselves mired in today.

But for the banks, private equity firms, hedge funds and other financial institutions who brought on the crisis--and for Mitt Romney-- there was no catastrophe.  Two-thirds of all income gains realized between the mid-1980's and 2007 were in the financial sector, showered on the people who made their livelihood playing with other people's money.  People like the folks at Bain Capital, who structured their deals so they would always profit, even though some of the companies they funded ultimately collapsed under the weight of excessive debt.  And when the collapse ultimately occurred, the same people who had profited mightily from leveraging the rest of the country were given a massive bailout. The fact is that the economic crisis directly felt by nearly all "ordinary" Americans was never really felt by the people who caused it. That's the benefit of playing with other people's money.

The Tax code is an opague behemoth, unfathomable to most Americans. When Americans think of tax issues, they think of income tax rates, they think of how their tax money is spent.  They generally don't think in terms of whether interest on debt obligations may be deductible, because your average American doesn't have the wherewithal to get his hands other people's mortgages.  But the folks who are attempting to buy the election for Mitt Romney think of nothing else.  While people like Sheldon Adelson and the Koch Brothers have their pet social issues to amuse themselves, the real issue here is and has always been taxes, or, more correctly, ways to avoid paying taxes.

We’ve entered a new Gilded Age, of which Mitt Romney is the perfect reflection. The original Gilded Age was a time of buoyant rich men with flashy white teeth, raging wealth and a measured disdain for anyone lacking those attributes, which was just about everyone else. Romney looks and acts the part perfectly, offhandedly challenging a GOP primary opponent to a $10,000 bet and referring to his wife’s several Cadillacs. Four years ago he paid $12 million for his fourth home, a 3,000-square-foot villa in La Jolla, California, with vaulted ceilings, five bathrooms, a pool, a Jacuzzi and unobstructed views of the Pacific. Romney has filed plans to tear it down and replace it with a home four times bigger.

We’ve had wealthy presidents before, but they have been traitors to their class—Teddy Roosevelt storming against the “malefactors of great wealth” and busting up the trusts, Franklin Roosevelt railing against the “economic royalists” and raising their taxes, John F. Kennedy appealing to the conscience of the nation to conquer poverty. Romney is the opposite: he wants to do everything he can to make the superwealthy even wealthier and the poor even poorer, and he justifies it all with a thinly veiled social Darwinism.

So in response to the greatest Economic crisis since the Depression, the Republican Party has coalesced behind the crisis' own walking, talking, living embodiment. The mantra that such a person represents the class of "job creators" is just a newly packaged form of Social Darwinism: survival of the "fittest" at the expense of economic "inferiors." This philosophy was embraced and expanded by 19th Century "thinkers" such as William Graham Summer (cited by Reich), and now channeled by the Republican Party in foisting upon us its nominee for the Presidency:

In 1883, Sumner published a highly influential pamphlet entitled "What Social Classes Owe to Each Other", in which he insisted that the social classes owe each other nothing, synthesizing Darwin's findings with free enterprise Capitalism for his justification.[citation needed] According to Sumner, those who feel an obligation to provide assistance to those unequipped or under-equipped to compete for resources, will lead to a country in which the weak and inferior are encouraged to breed more like them, eventually dragging the country down. Sumner also believed that the best equipped to win the struggle for existence was the American businessman, and concluded that taxes and regulations serve as dangers to his survival.

It's hard to find a better description of the Republican Party platform or Mitt Romney's campaign, wouldn't you say?

When Romney simultaneously proposes to cut the taxes of households earning over $1 million by an average of $295,874 a year (according to an analysis of his proposals by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center) because the rich are, allegedly, “job creators,” he mimics Sumner’s view that “millionaires are a product of natural selection, acting on the whole body of men to pick out those who can meet the requirement of certain work to be done.”

Reich believes too few in the Democratic Party are willing to acknowledge the obvious, either because they are similarly tethered to Wall Street's millions, or because to acknowledge that Romney is in fact the perfect face of the economic crisis would be to acknowledge the overwhelming pervasiveness of the problem.  And to acknowledge the scope of the problem would require them to come up with solutions.  Circling above all of this discussion, of course, is the haunting shadow of Citizen's United.   But for Reich, the "clear and present danger" facing this country is the plutocrat about to accept the Republican nomination for the Presidency--

at the very time in our nation’s history when these views and practices are a clear and present danger to the well-being of the rest of us—just as they were more than a century ago. Romney says he’s a job-creating businessman, but in truth he’s just another financial dealmaker in the age of the financial deal, a fat cat in an era of excessively corpulent felines, a plutocrat in this new epoch of plutocrats. That the GOP has made him its standard-bearer at this point in American history is astonishing.

The face of every foreclosure, of every job loss, of every dream of retirement or a secure future wiped out by what we euphemistically call the "financial crisis" will mount the stage at his Party's convention in Tampa Bay this August.

You can donate to President Obama's re-election campaign here.

Originally posted to Dartagnan on Wed Jul 04, 2012

Technorati Tags: Mitt Romney,Bain Capitol,Barack Obama,2012 Elections,Wall Street,Current Events,Politics,Vulture Capitalist

Conservatives want to campaign on health care, but look at who they nominated

By  kos   Tue Jul 03, 2012

This seriously cracks me up!

In the aftermath of the Supreme Court health care ruling, the early conventional wisdom was that an unfavorable health care ruling at the court would be good for Republicans politically, even as it was a serious policy setback for conservatives. But that's not shaping up to be the case. Mitt Romney, after giving a brief statement decrying the decision, has been virtually silent on criticizing the health care law. He's been on vacation and his campaign has been giving off clear signals that it doesn't want to make health care a major part of the election.

Conservatives are furious! The Breitbarts ran a piece headlined:

CONSERVATIVES TO MITT: QUIT NOW IF YOU WON'T FIGHT OBAMATAX!

Too bad Romney can't fight this shit. The "tax" was created by the conservative Heritage Foundation, enthusiastically adopted by Romney in Massachusetts, and upheld by the Supreme Court's foremost corporatist justice. And there would be even more Roberts on the court if Romney wins in November. He's promised it.

If conservatives have a problem with any of this, then maybe they shouldn't have nominated him in the first place. It's not as if they didn't have a choice. They just made a crappy one.

Their big idea, their candidate.

Why are they angry again?

On the other hand, it WOULD be awesome for Romney to quit now. Maybe we'd get Herman Cain redux!

Technorati Tags: 2012 Elections,Affordable Health Care Ac,Mitt Romney,ObamaCare,Current Events,Politics

FloriDUH’s Rick Scott Doesn’t Care About His Struggling/Poorer Residents…

… or the average one, for that matter. If you are not a corporation you do not exist in Scott’s eyes.   

     Not that this comes as a surprise to anyone, Governor Snott  Scott has told Fox Noise Channel that he will not expand Medicaid nor will he set up insurance exchanges in FloriDUH because it is bad policy and that it would be to costly to Floridians.

    Scott also told Fox News that he is hopeful that the law will be repealed by a new president in November, that being Mitt Romney, the original implementer  of the bill ( RomneyCare ) in the state of Massachusetts while he was the Governor.

   “ We’re not going to implement Obamacare in Florida. We’re not going to expand Medicaid because we’re going to do the right thing. We’re not going to do the exchange.” tampabaytimes.com

   Of course, this had been expected by the FloriDUH Democrats all along.

    In another observation, it would appear that Mr. Scott has been reading the Romney “ flip-flop “ manual in order to pick up a few pointers as Scott has stated to many news outlets that in the unlikely event that the ACA was upheld by the Supreme Court, that the state would be ready to implement the law in Florida.

  “ It’s my job, if it’s the law of the country, to be ready when it’s the law…when it’s the law of the land, we’ll implement the law.” Palm Beach Post- Nov 2011

   “ We will follow the law, but we’re not going to make any movements until that unlikely day comes.” Florida Today Scott’s spokesperson in June 2012

   “ If it’s the law of the land, then we will comply…” Gov. Scott in conference call 11 days ago.

  Dick Rick Scott and his hoods in Tallahassee have had 2 years to come up with their own plans for healthcare in the state, and, just as is with the rest of the Republicans sitting on their asses in Washington, D.C., they have nothing on the table. Zero, nada, zilch. The Republican’s in government do not give a shit about the middle class or the poor in America. They cannot create a jobs program. They cannot create a healthcare program. They can create massive unemployment, a very shitty economy, and tax cuts for corporations who pay next to nothing already!

   The racist Republican Party are still seething because they had their asses handed to them by a black man back in 2008. They’ve spent the past 4 years trashing America and, thanks to Citizens United, they and their corporate masters are now trying to buy the next election because they have nothing to run on. Republicans cannot win an election on policy ( they have none ) and they cannot win a fair election. They have to steal everything to get anything.

   If you, my friends, are stupid enough to put Romney in the White House, then you deserve the royal fucking that you will be getting. Unfortunately, the rest of us have to pay for it also.

   To the state of FloriDUH. You are getting what you voted for, so deal with it. Maybe you’ll learn what many of us already know.

     Republican SUCK

 

Technorati Tags: Rick Scott,Florida,Health Care Reform,Medicaid,ObamaCare,Republicans,Current Events,Politics,The Uninsured