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Repackaging Mitt? Too Late |
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Thursday, 27 September 2012 08:44 |
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Excerpt: "What we're seeing in Ohio isn't a new Mitt Romney. It's a newly-packaged Mitt Romney. The real Mitt Romney is the one we saw on the videotape last week. And no amount of re-taping can disguise the package's true contents."
Portrait, Robert Reich, 08/16/09. (photo: Perian Flaherty)
Repackaging Mitt? Too Late
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog
27 September 12
  y heart aches for the people I've seen," Mitt Romney said, on the second day of his Ohio bus tour. He's now telling stories of economic hardship among the people he's met.
Up until now, Romney's stories on the campaign trail have been about business successes - people who started businesses in garages and grew their companies into global giants, entrepreneurs who succeeded because of grit and determination, millionaires who began poor. Horatio Alger updated.
Curiously absent from these narratives have been the stories of ordinary Americans caught in an economy over which they have no control. That is, most of us.
At least until now.
"I was yesterday with a woman who was emotional," Romney recounts, "and she said, 'Look, I've been out of work since May.' She was in her 50s. She said, 'I don't see any prospects. Can you help me?'"
Could it be Romney is finally getting the message that many Americans need help through no fault of their own?
"There are so many people in our country that are hurting right now," Romney says. "I want to help them."
Later in the day, Romney told NBC that because of his efforts as governor of Massachusetts, "one hundred percent of the kids in our state had health insurance. I don't think there's anything that shows more empathy and care about the people of this country than that kind of record."
But the repackaging of Mitt as a compassionate conservative won't work. The good citizens of Ohio - as elsewhere - have reason to be skeptical.
This is, after all, the same Mitt Romney who told his backers in Boca Raton that 47 percent of Americans are dependent on government and unwilling to take care of themselves.
It's the same Romney who was against bailing out GM and Chrysler. One in eight jobs in Ohio is dependent on the automobile industry. Had GM and Chrysler gone under, unemployment in Ohio would be closer to the national average of 8.1 percent than the 7.2 percent it is today.
This is the same Romney who has been against extending unemployment benefits. Or providing food stamps or housing benefits for families that have fallen into poverty. Or medical benefits. To the contrary, Romney wants to repeal Obamacare, turn Medicare into vouchers, and turn Medicaid over to cash-starved states.
This is the same Mitt Romney who doesn't worry that Wall Street financiers - including his own Bain Capital - have put so much pressure on companies for short-term profits that they're still laying off workers and reluctant to take on any more.
And the same Mitt who doesn't want government to spend money repairing our crumbling infrastructure, rebuilding our schools, or rehiring police and firefighters and teachers.
Romney says he feels their pain but his policy prescriptions would create more pain.
Mitt Romney's real compassion is for people like himself, whom he believes are America's "job creators." He aims to cut taxes on the rich, in the belief that the rich create jobs - and the benefits of such a tax cut trickle down to everyone else.
Trickle-down economics is the core of Romney's economics, and it's bunk. George W. Bush cut taxes - mostly for the wealthy - and we ended up with fewer jobs, lower wages, and an economy that fell off a cliff in 2008.
In Ohio Romney is repeating his claim that, under his tax proposal, the rich would end up paying as much as before even at a lower tax rate because he'd limit their ability to manipulate the tax code. "Don't be expecting a huge cut in taxes because I'm also going to be closing loopholes and deductions," he promises.
But Romney still refuses to say which loopholes and deductions he'll close. He doesn't even mention the "carried interest" loophole that has allowed him and other private-equity managers to treat their incomes as capital gains, taxed at 15 percent.
What we're seeing in Ohio isn't a new Mitt Romney. It's a newly-packaged Mitt Romney. The real Mitt Romney is the one we saw on the videotape last week. And no amount of re-taping can disguise the package's true contents.
Robert B. Reich, Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley, was Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration. Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the last century. He has written thirteen books, including the best sellers "Aftershock" and "The Work of Nations." His latest is an e-book, "Beyond Outrage." He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine and chairman of Common Cause.
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California's Prop 37: Monsanto Versus the Public Interest |
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Wednesday, 26 September 2012 14:55 |
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Silver writes: "While the initiative merely seeks to add a few words to nutrition labels, it has incurred the wrath and moneyed opposition of biotech and food giants."
Protestors pour GMO corn into a giant toilet. (photo: EPA)
California's Prop 37: Monsanto Versus the Public Interest
By Charlotte Silver, Al Jazeera English
26 September 12
Over half of the staggering sum spent on defeating the measure of labelling comes from pesticide and biotech firms.
 n this November's election, California voters will decide if they have a right to know what is in the food they are eating. Proposition 37, dubbed, "The California Right to Know Genetically Engineered Food Act", would require manufacturers to label all food items that contain genetically engineered ingredients as such.
While the initiative merely seeks to add a few words to nutrition labels, it has incurred the wrath and moneyed opposition of biotech and food giants - no doubt because they fear the initiative might herald actual regulations on an industry that has long been allowed to experiment willy-nilly with the food people consume in the United States.
Nationwide polls have indicated a bipartisan, nearly unanimous support for labelling GMOs (genetically modified organisms). At the end of August, Pepperdine University School of Public Policy and the California Business Roundtable released the most recent survey assessing the viability of California’s ballot initiatives. The poll showed 65 per cent in favour of Proposition 37 compared to 24 per cent in opposition.
Faced with those bleak odds, Monsanto, the biotech Goliath, threw in another $2.89 million on September 14 in an effort to defeat the measure - nearly doubling its total contributions heading into the homestretch of the election.
Monsanto, the single largest contributor to the effort to defeat the measure, was one of the first producers of the toxic pest control substances, DDT and PCB, both now banned in the US.
However, over the past two decades, Monsanto has attempted to transform its image from a purveyor of poisons to that of a food producer and bioengineering champion -being required to label their products threatens to undo the corporation’s careful PR work.
Monsanto seems determined to quash the Right to Know campaign, already successfully intimidating the very progressive state of Vermont from even proposing similar legislation to Prop 37.
Proposition 37 is one of 11 sundry measures that will appear on California’s November 6 ballot, but it leads the pack in attracting financial heavyweights determined to defeat it. As of mid-September, opponents to the proposition had contributed a total of $32 million.
Currently unregulated by the Food and Drug Administration, genetically modified ingredients are found in up to 70 per cent of food on the shelves of supermarkets across the US, including the omnipresent foods and beverages that contain high fructose corn syrup (85 per cent of US corn is genetically engineered) or traces of soybean (91 per cent of soy is GE).
Genetically Engineered Food
On September 19, French researcher Professor Gilles-Eric Séralini, a molecular biologist at Caen University in France, published a groundbreaking study that, for the first time, demonstrates the long-term health effects on rats of eating genetically engineered corn and being exposed to Roundup.
Roundup is a ubiquitous pesticide that is used in conjunction with "roundup ready" seeds - seeds that produce crops designed to survive being sprayed by Roundup.
"The results were alarming," Professor Séralini told reporters during a telephone press conference held on the day the findings were announced.
According to Professor Séralini, the new study, which was conducted over the course of two years, examined the effects of feeding rats an amount of GE corn that is "comparable to what the American public eats every day".
After four months, female rats developed mammary and kidney tumours; male rats developed liver and kidney damage. Rats exposed to the chemicals were also more likely to die prematurely.
"We think it's criminal that there is this much laxness in reviewing these products," said Professor Séralini.
Michael R Taylor is the current Deputy Commissioner of the US FDA and was appointed by President Obama. Taylor's career has seesawed between Monsanto and the FDA - the agency that ought to be tasked with regulating Monsanto. But in 1991, when Taylor returned to work for the government after a decade with the biochemical corporation, he oversaw the agency’s relinquishing any responsibility for regulation of chemically altered foods, i.e., GMOs.
If Prop 37 passes, California will be the first state to require GMO labelling. The US’ current lackadaisical approach to regulating GMOs contrasts sharply with its counterparts in Europe, where labelling of all foods with genetically engineered ingredients is required and there is a relatively low yield of GE crops.
Spokesperson for the No on 37 Coalition, Kathy Fairbanks, told me that the Coalition represents, "the entire agricultural industry of California".
However, an examination of the campaign contributions made public on the website of the California Secretary of State reveals that over half of the staggering sum spent on defeating the measure comes from pesticide, chemical and biotechnology firms, including Monsanto, Dow Chemical and Syngenta.
"It is completely inaccurate to say the No on 37 Coalition is being funded by the California agricultural industry. Most of their funders are out-of-state corporations and the largest pesticide corporations," said Stacy Malkan, spokesperson for the Yes on 37 campaign, based in Oakland, California.
In fact, fewer than 50 discreet donors have contributed to the no-camp. Not surprising, opponents are trying to redefine the debate from one about consumers' fundamental right to know what is in their food to a manipulative attack on the wording of the measure and the man who wrote it.
"We're not opposed to providing fact-based information to consumers. The problem we have is with the measure. The problem is the particular lawyer who wrote the law itself," Fairbanks says.
Fairbanks asserts that "small and large businesses and ethnic convenience stores will be hit the hardest" by lawsuits enabled by the proposition. "We oppose the proposition because it will cause higher grocery bills and lead to meritless, shakedown lawsuits," Fairbanks says.
The lawyer who wrote the bill is James Wheaton, a public interest lawyer who teaches journalism law at Stanford University and the University of California Berkeley. Wheaton founded the First Amendment Project and serves as president of the Environmental Law Foundation.
Wheaton dismisses Fairbanks' concerns: "First, we expect companies will simply comply - how much does it cost to add a few words to labels several years after this passes? Nothing."
And perhaps more important, as Wheaton point out: "There's no money in meritless lawsuits."
Wheaton drafted the measure because, as he says, "Since 50 countries around the world already require labelling of genetically engineered foods, it seemed time Americans get the same right. But we know big agribusiness will work tirelessly with government bureaucrats to deny that to Americans." (emphasis mine)
Grassroots Support for Prop 37
Malkan explains that Proposition 37 represents California farm owners and workers, small businesses and organic companies, including Strauss Family Creamery and Amy’s Kitchen. Proponents have raised just under $3 million from over 1,000 donors.
Support for Proposition 37 has galvanised a long-standing opposition to Monsanto. On September 17, the one-year anniversary of the Occupy movement, activists protested outside Monsanto’s office in Davis, California, a place where vast expanses of farmland and food production exist next to biotechnology research. Around the state, supporters of the labelling initiative staged similar rallies.
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FOCUS | Top Ten Mitt Romney Solutions to Our Problems |
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Wednesday, 26 September 2012 11:36 |
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Excerpt: "Expensive emergency room care for those who have no health insurance."
Juan Cole; blogger, essayist and professor of history. (photo: Informed Comment)
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This Presidential Race Should Never Have Been This Close |
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Wednesday, 26 September 2012 08:25 |
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Excerpt: "Romney is an almost perfect amalgam of all the great out-of-touch douchebags of our national cinema. ... He's everything we've been trained to despise, the guy who had everything handed to him, doesn't fight his own battles and insists there's only room in the lifeboat for himself – and yet the Democrats, for some reason, have had terrible trouble beating him in a popularity contest."
Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone. (photo: Griffin Lotz/Rolling Stone Magazine)
This Presidential Race Should Never Have Been This Close
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone Magazine
26 September 12
 he press everywhere is buzzing this week with premature obituaries of the Romney campaign. New polls are out suggesting that Mitt Romney's electoral path to the presidency is all but blocked. Unless someone snags an iPhone video of Obama taking a leak on Ohio State mascot Brutus Buckeye, or stealing pain meds from a Tampa retiree and sharing them with a bunch of Japanese carmakers, the game looks pretty much up – Obama's widening leads in three battleground states, Virginia, Ohio and Florida, seem to have sealed the deal.
That's left the media to speculate, with a palpable air of sadness, over where the system went wrong. Whatever you believe, many of these articles say, wherever you rest on the ideological spectrum, you should be disappointed that Obama ultimately had to run against such an incompetent challenger. Weirdly, there seems to be an expectation that presidential races should be closer, and that if one doesn't come down to the wire in an exciting photo finish, we've all missed out somehow.
Frank Bruni of The New York Times wrote a thoughtful, insightful editorial today that blames the painful, repetitive and vacuous campaign process for thinning the electoral herd and leaving us with only automatons and demented narcissists willing to climb the mountain:
Romney's bleeding has plenty to do with his intrinsic shortcomings and his shortsightedness: how does a man who has harbored presidential ambitions almost since he was a zygote create a paper trail of offshore accounts and tax returns like his?
But I wonder if we're not seeing the worst possible version of him, and if it isn't the ugly flower of the process itself. I wonder, too, what the politicians mulling 2016 make of it, and whether, God help us, we'll be looking at an even worse crop of candidates then.
The Times, meanwhile, ran a house editorial blaming Romney's general obliqueness, his willingness to stretch the truth and his inability to connect with ordinary people for his fall. David Brooks ran a column suggesting that Romney's overreliance on a message of strict market conservatism, ignoring the values message of "traditional" conservatism, was what killed him in the end.
All of these points of view have merit, I guess, but to me they're mostly irrelevant. The mere fact that Mitt Romney is even within striking distance of winning this election is an incredible testament to two things: a) the rank incompetence of the Democratic Party, which would have this and every other election for the next half century sewn up if they were a little less money-hungry and tried just a little harder to represent their ostensible constituents, and b) the power of our propaganda machine, which has conditioned all of us to accept the idea that the American population, ideologically speaking, is naturally split down the middle, whereas the real fault lines are a lot closer to the 99-1 ratio the Occupy movement has been talking about since last year.
Think about it. Four years ago, we had an economic crash that wiped out somewhere between a quarter to 40% of the world's wealth, depending on whom you believe. The crash was caused by an utterly disgusting and irresponsible class of Wall Street paper-pushers who loaded the world up with deadly leverage in pursuit of their own bonuses, then ran screaming to the government for a handout (and got it) the instant it all went south.
These people represent everything that ordinarily repels the American voter. They mostly come from privileged backgrounds. Few of them have ever worked with their hands, or done anything like hard work. They not only don't oppose the offshoring of American manufacturing jobs, they enthusiastically support it, financing the construction of new factories in places like China and India.
They've relentlessly lobbied the government to give themselves tax holidays and shelters, and have succeeded at turning the graduated income tax idea on its head by getting the IRS to accept a sprawling buffet of absurd semantic precepts, like the notions that "capital gains" and "carried interest" are somehow not the same as "income."
The people in this group inevitably support every war that America has even the slimmest chance of involving itself in, but neither they nor their children ever fight in these conflicts. They are largely irreligious and incidentally they do massive amounts of drugs, from cocaine on down, but almost never suffer any kind of criminal penalty for their behavior.
That last thing I would say is probably appropriate, except for the fact that hundreds of thousands of poor (and mostly black and Hispanic) kids get tossed by cops every year (would you believe 684,000 street stops in New York alone in 2011?) in the same city where Wall Street's finest work, and those kids do real time for possession of anything from a marijuana stem to an empty vial. How many Wall Street guys would you think would fill the jails if the police spent even one day doing aggressive, no-leniency stop-and-frisk checks outside the bars in lower Manhattan? How many Lortabs and Adderalls and little foil-wraps of coke or E would pop out of those briefcases?
For all this, when it came time to nominate a candidate for the presidency four years after the crash, the Republicans chose a man who in almost every respect perfectly represents this class of people. Mitt Romney is a rich-from-birth Ivy League product who not only has never done a hard day of work in his life – he never even saw a bad neighborhood in America until 1996, when he was 49 years old, when he went into some seedy sections of New York in search of a colleague's missing daughter ("It was a shocker," Mitt said. "The number of lost souls was astounding").
He has a $250 million fortune, but he appears to pay well under half the maximum tax rate, thanks to those absurd semantic distinctions that even Ronald Reagan dismissed as meaningless and counterproductive. He has used offshore tax havens for himself and his wife, and his company, Bain Capital, has both eliminated jobs in the name of efficiency (often using these cuts to pay for payments to his own company) and moved American jobs overseas.
The point is, Mitt Romney's natural constituency should be about 1% of the population. If you restrict that pool to "likely voters," he might naturally appeal to 2%. Maybe 3%.
If the clichés are true and the presidential race always comes down to which candidate the American people "wants to have a beer with," how many Americans will choose to sit at the bar with the coiffed Wall Street multimillionaire who fires your sister, unapologetically pays half your tax rate, keeps his money stashed in Cayman Islands partnerships or Swiss accounts in his wife's name, cheerfully encourages finance-industry bailouts while bashing "entitlements" like Medicare, waves a pom-pom while your kids go fight and die in hell-holes like Afghanistan and Iraq and generally speaking has never even visited the country that most of the rest of us call the United States, except to make sure that it's paying its bills to him on time?
Romney is an almost perfect amalgam of all the great out-of-touch douchebags of our national cinema: he's Gregg Marmalaard from Animal House mixed with Billy Zane's sneering, tux-wearing Cal character in Titanic to pussy-ass Prince Humperdinck to Roy Stalin to Gordon Gekko (he's literally Gordon Gekko). He's everything we've been trained to despise, the guy who had everything handed to him, doesn't fight his own battles and insists there's only room in the lifeboat for himself – and yet the Democrats, for some reason, have had terrible trouble beating him in a popularity contest.
The fact that Barack Obama needed a Himalayan mountain range of cash and some rather extreme last-minute incompetence on Romney's part to pull safely ahead in this race is what really speaks to the brokenness of this system. Bruni of the Times is right that the process scares away qualified candidates who could have given Obama a better run for all that money. But what he misses is that the brutal campaign process, with its two years of nearly constant media abuse and "gotcha" watch-dogging, serves mainly to select out any candidate who is considered anything like a threat to the corrupt political establishment – and that selection process is the only thing that has kept this race close.
Barack Obama is hardly a complete Wall Street stooge. The country's most powerful bankers seem genuinely to hate his guts, mainly because they're delusional and are sincerely offended by anyone who dares to even generally criticize them for being greedy or ethically suspect, as Obama has with his occasional broadsides against "fat cat bankers" and so on.
On the other hand, Obama's policy choices in the last four years have made it impossible for him to run aggressively against the corruption and greed and generally self-obsessed, almost cinematic douchiness that Romney represents.
With 300 million possible entrants in the race, how did we end up with two guys who would both refuse to bring a single case against a Wall Street bank during a period of epic corruption? How did we end up with two guys who refuse to repeal the carried-interest tax break? How did we end with two guys who supported a vast program of bailouts with virtually no conditions attached to them? Citigroup has had so many people running policy in the Obama White House, they should open a branch in the Roosevelt Room. It's not as bad as it would be in a Romney presidency, but it comes close.
If this race had even one guy running in it who didn't take money from all the usual quarters and actually represented the economic interests of ordinary people, it wouldn't be close. It shouldn't be close. If one percent of the country controls forty percent of the country's wealth – and that trend is moving rapidly in the direction of more inequality with each successive year – what kind of split should we have, given that at least one of the candidates enthusiastically and unapologetically represents the interests of that one percent?
To me the biggest reason the split isn't bigger is the news media, which wants a close race mainly for selfish commercial reasons – it's better theater and sells more ads. Most people in the news business have been conditioned to believe that national elections should be close.
This conditioning leads to all sorts of problems and journalistic mischief, like a tendency of pundits to give equal weight to opposing views in situations where one of those views is actually completely moronic and illegitimate, a similar tendency to overlook or downplay glaring flaws in a candidate just because one of the two major parties has blessed him or her with its support (Sarah Palin is a classic example), and the more subtly dangerous tendency to describe races as "hotly contested" or "neck and neck" in nearly all situations regardless of reality, which not only has the effect of legitimizing both candidates but leaves people with the mistaken impression that the candidates are fierce ideological opposites, when in fact they aren't, or at least aren't always. This last media habit is the biggest reason that we don't hear about the areas where candidates like Romney and Obama agree, which come mostly in the hardcore economic issues.
It's obviously simplistic to say that in a country where the wealth divide is as big as it is in America, elections should always be landslide victories for the candidate who represents the broke-and-struggling sector of the population. All sorts of non-economic factors, from social issues to the personal magnetism of the candidates, can tighten the races. And just because someone happens to represent the very rich, well, that doesn't automatically disqualify him or her from higher office; he or she might have a vision for the whole country that is captivating (such a candidacy, however, would be more feasible during a time when the very rich were less completely besotted with corruption).
But when one of the candidates is Mitt Romney, the race shouldn't be close. You'll hear differently in the coming weeks from the news media, which will spend a lot of time scratching its figurative beard while it argues that a 54-46 split, or however this thing ends up (and they'll call anything above 53% for Obama a rout, I would guess), is evidence that the system is broken. But what we probably should be wondering is why it was ever close at all.
Matt Taibbi is a contributing editor for Rolling Stone. He’s the author of five books, most recently The Great Derangement and Griftopia, and a winner of the National Magazine Award for commentary.
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n Monday, September 24, we saw what happens when under-qualified, bottom-dollar replacements are in charge of an NFL football game. And every day in Washington, we see what happens when they're in charge of providing education for our children, protection for our neighborhoods, and health care for the sick and elderly. Americans should be just as eager to see real congressmen and congress women in Washington serving the people as they are eager to see the real referees 
