At first I thought, Why not a Mormon for President? I know it’s a weird religion, what with those kinky undergarments they wear and the bizarre mumbo jumbo about some guy who claimed he found divine wisdom on some tablets given to him by an angel and then came on like he was the next Moses.

But what’s the big deal? If you’ve ever looked closely at those other, more mainstream religions our past Presidents claimed to believe in, they’re equally absurd. That’s the whole point of religion: invoking some higher power to answer the unanswerable about the purpose of existence when we humans have reached the limits of fact and logic. So claims to divine explanation are, of course, inevitably kooky.

If it were just a matter of crashing the glass ceiling to make the point that a devout Mormon is no less qualified, by virtue of his irrational faith, to be President than is a born-again Christian or a flaming papist, I could see voting for Mitt Romney. But then, as the Republican primaries unfolded, I realized all of this religion stuff is beside the point. Romney, in his pursuit of the ill-gotten gains of enormous wealth accompanied by his unbridled lust for political power, is clearly no more concerned with the moral obligations of his religion than John F.

Kennedy was when he balled those molls supplied by his Mafia buddies. And just like Kennedy, Romney parlayed his old man’s wealth into a successful political career, all the while claiming to be just your ordinary guy working his way up the ladder of life.

The man is a fraud, a Ken doll with a recorded-message greeting instead of a brain. Nothing he says actually reflects thought but rather a sales pitch for the convenience of the moment. Here’s a guy campaigning against Obamacare, which is nothing but a copycat program of the one Romney implemented in Massachusetts when he was the state’s governor.

Not only would Romney gut the improvement in healthcare that Obama brought about, but he also wants to compound that error by undermining Medicare and Medicaid, two programs that offer at least a modicum of cost control. Instead, the candidate and his fellow Republicans would steer consumers completely to the tender mercies of for-profit insurers.

What is most outrageously hypocritical about Romney is that while he babbles on about wasteful spending, he will not close the spending spigot that started spewing red ink after budget-balancing President Bill Clinton left office. That red ink is the direct result of the wild increase in military spending after 9/11 which George W. Bush refused to pay for by increasing taxes on the rich and instead cut them sharply. That and bailing out the banks—which caused the financial crisis—are the main sources of the run-up of the national debt.

Romney wants to do more of the same. He says we need to spend even more money on the military because the Communist government in China is a threat. What a joke! Bain Capital, the company that Romney cofounded, has been supplying those red tyrants with surveillance equipment to better monitor their citizenry.

The dire state of the U.S. economy is the result of two basic scams pulled off by the top multinational corporations, and Romney is complicit in both. The shortterm crisis was kicked off by the radical deregulation of the financial industry that allowed the formerly privately held investment banking partnerships screwing around with their own money to merge with the commercial banks that were holding the deposits of ordinary folks. It was a prescription for greed run wild until the phony securities packages exploded and the taxpayers were left holding the bag, while lots of those ordinary folks lost everything. Not only did Romney enthusiastically support that deregulation scam, but now—even after it hit the fan—he still prattles on about how we have too many regulations.

The other issue concerns the shipping of those once good-paying American jobs abroad. Not only has Romney invested in companies that do just that, but his Presidential campaign platform calls for rewarding those companies for abandoning America by ending all taxes on foreign profits.

Face it, Mitt Romney is about nothing but power and money, and the vulture-capital hedge fund named Bain Capital that enriched him is a classic tale of ripping apart vulnerable businesses and their loyal employees to make a big buck on the margin of the ensuing grief. You don’t want this guy to be the CEO of your entire country.

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Before serving almost 30 years as a Los Angeles Times columnist and editor, Robert Scheer spent the late 1960s as Vietnam correspondent, managing editor and editor in chief of Ramparts magazine. Now editor of TruthDig.com, Scheer has written such hardhitting books as The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America and his latest, The Great American Stick-Up: Greedy Bankers and the Politicians Who Love Them.

When we at HUSTLER think of Willard Mitt Romney—the former governor of Massachusetts and current Republican Presidential aspirant—T.S. Eliot’s poem The Hollow Men comes to mind. How else would you describe someone who has no discernible identity? Oh sure, flip-flopper kinda works, but does it really convey the truly empty and vacuous entity that is Mitt Romney? Of course not.

So just how hollow is Mitt Romney exactly?

That’s not an easy question to answer, given that it’s impossible to know what Mitt really believes in—if indeed he believes in anything at all. In less than ten years, the former CEO of Bain Capital has totally reversed himself on such issues as abortion, same-sex marriage, gun ownership, tax reform, climate change, healthcare and probably a few other issues we’ve forgotten about.

How is such a thing possible? Well, of course, Romney is lying about at least half and maybe even all of the positions he’s taken. It’s possible he doesn’t believe in anything except, perhaps, lying to get what he wants. But even with that, wouldn’t a person feel shame about being such a transparent liar? Or is it possible that the supposedly committed Mormon not only doesn’t believe in anything but also doesn’t feel anything? That would truly make him a hollow man.

Hollow men don’t care about other people. From his early adult years, when Romney served as a bishop in the Mormon church, we have this story reported in the New York Times : Carrel Hilton Sheldon, a married mother of four, was advised by her doctor to terminate her pregnancy because he feared a potentially dangerous blood clot. But Romney, she alleges, insisted—as a representative of his church— that she not go forward with the procedure. According to Mrs. Sheldon, “He was blind to me as a human being.”

That lack of concern for people followed Romney into the job market. As CEO of Bain Capital— a private equity investment firm specializing in leveraged buyouts—he bought companies, sold the assets and shipped the jobs overseas. In many cases, although the acquisition was eventually forced into bankruptcy, Bain Capital still made a huge profit. Romney later said if he had the opportunity to do it over again, he would “be more sensitive” to that issue. Notice he didn’t say he’d do things differently.
We all know about Romney’s “I like being able to fire people” quote. Those who defend the Presidential wannabe for that remark point out he was talking about healthcare companies that weren’t providing “good service.” But we’d like to note that most people would say they “changed companies” or they “like changing companies” when they don’t get good service.

Of course, in Romney’s case, he has had a lot of experience canning employees of the companies he took over at Bain Capital, so the words “I like being able to fire people” would seem to flow naturally from his lips. We wonder how many insurance companies he’s “fired,” if any. Additionally, most people are just stuck with their healthcare provider. Only the superrich like Romney can afford to shop around.

Continuing our analysis of Romney’s attitude toward people, let us not forget that this is the man who said “Corporations are people.” Again we have to ask, can he really believe that?

Because, right on the face of it, that’s nonsense.Yet he said it with no shame.You can see him saying it on YouTube. It’s clear he’s talking down to the people who have just challenged him. He is, in our view, once again a Mormon bishop telling people not what’s real but what to think. Mitt’s talking doctrine instead of facts.

We all know what Republican doctrine is. It’s for ending Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and it’s stringently against legalized abortion, same-sex marriage, tax increases for the superrich, banking regulation, the closing of corporate loopholes and, most notably, against Obamacare, which is based on Romneycare, the heathcare program implemented in Massachusetts when Mitt was governor. These Republican positions are all anti-people or at least antipeople who are not part of the 1%. And, of course, the 1% includes Romney with his $250-million nest egg.

It is worth noting that Romney’s 2010 tax return reveals he paid 13.9% in taxes. That is significantly lower than what the average working person pays. Additionally, Romney is hiding millions in the Cayman Islands, an offshore tax haven. The only question is, how many millions?

This is a man who, even though he wants to be President of the United States, doesn’t want to contribute to the well-being of his country by paying his fair share in taxes.

In essence, he’s screwing all of us. So for Willard Mitt Romney, we offer this T.S. Eliot-inspired poem:
You are of the hollow men
You are of the stuffed men
Looting together
Headpiece filled with greed. Alas!
Your dried avarices, when
You whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or vulture capitalists crawling over broken glass
To get to do their leveraged buyouts
This is the way your candidacy ends
This is the way your candidacy ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.