Mitt Romney: Greed-Run-Wild Apostle
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.
