Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor reportedly made a joke recently about the two front runners in the Repug primary… One of the candidates is a polygamist and he’s not the Mormon. Gingrich, the serial philanderer, who was forced out of congress for ethics violations is the darling of the conservatives… they really believe he’s into their small government, family values shit. He swears he’s not a lobbyist, but nonetheless received $25,000 per month from Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac, government mortgage insurers, for his services - not to lobby, mind you, but as a historian.
They also like Santorum, a true conservative who equated being gay to fucking dogs and children, who lost the last contest he fought for US Senate from Pennsylvania by a deluge of eighteen percentage points… real popular guy, that. However, lately he’s on the up and up, winning three contests in a row and shaming Romney, the putative frontrunner.
Then there’s Ron Paul, who, true to his libertarian principles, wants to eliminate Social Security, Medicare and any other part of government that might, incidentally, do anything good for average Americans, who is also noted for putting out a little racist mag.
And what about the turkeys who fell by the wayside (but not before offering a few laughs to the peanut gallery)? Like the pizza guy who regularly pays hush money to keep sexual abuse incidents quiet, who didn’t know that China has had nukes since the early sixties. Or how about the dim bulb from Texas who couldn’t remember which three government departments he wanted to eliminate?
The grand prize will likely go to “Corporations are people” Romney. People own them and work for them, don’t they? Yes, but when’s the last time Texas executed one? That’s how you know what a person is. Dumbocrats will also gleefully take his comment that he doesn’t care about very poor people out of context, though even in context it shows how far out of touch he his. He went on to say that they are taken care of by the country’s safety net… except it’s the worst safety net in the developed world and leaves millions of people in desperate straits. But give him credit, he’s the first major politician who’s uttered the words poor people since Lyndon Johnson… except, that is, to berate them for being poor because they’re lazy. Newt would solve that problem by having them work their way through middle school as janitors. Not only would they learn the value of hard work, schools wouldn’t have to soak downtrodden and long suffering middle class taxpayers (who, in the world of America today, have incomes up to $250,000) for the cost of a low end but livable wage for school janitors.
Let me recount a story about laziness and opportunity amongst poor kids. Some twenty or thirty years ago a wealthy New Yorker found himself teaching a ghetto class of teenagers. I don’t remember what brought him there, whether it was purely voluntary or he was required to be there for some reason. He wound up liking the kids so much he offered, on impulse, to pay all costs of higher education for any kid who did well in school. Almost all the kids in that class went on to college compared to almost none in other classes in the same school. Community colleges used to be free. City College of New York where I got my B.A. used to be free. Otherwise I couldn’t have gone since I was a single parent working for peanuts driving a cab. Society should first provide opportunity then talk about lazy poor people who don’t take advantage of it.
Anyway, forget about Newt, he hasn’t got a chance in a million of being the nominee. Though they may love him in their hearts, even dumb as doorknob Repugs know he can’t win against Obama. Though after Santorum’s recent wins, the Repugs might actually rather go down in flames rather than have a chance at the presidency.
So back to Romney. His other glib great-to-take-out-of-context remark was the one about liking to fire people. In context he added; who provide services to me I don’t like. He was referring to medical insurance and, having hundreds of millions in the bank, he does have a few choices. And no matter how big the co-pays he’s not likely to be forced to declare bankruptcy because of them. Seventy percent of Americans are forced into bankruptcy because of medical bills, sixty percent of those had insurance but couldn’t cover the co-pays, a situation which hasn’t changed a bit with Obamneycare.
In spite of the obvious heartlessness and cluelessness of his statements, his sleaziest attribute by far is the way he made his fortune as a vulture capitalist. Putting it in simplest terms, you look for a healthy going concern to buy. You use a small amount of your own money and borrow the rest using the assets of the company as collateral. Once you’ve got it in your clutches you load it down with debt to pay your creditors or you strip it of its assets to pay those debts, either way the company is toast. You don’t care what happens to the company because you’ve made your money by charging exorbitant fees in the process of destroying it. In that way he bought a Florida company employing 700 people with $30 million of his own money and then earned more than $500 million while bankrupting it and destroying 700 jobs.
Meanwhile he might well be the next president. If the vote is close the Repugs will steal the election and the Dumbos will figure, as they did in the cases of both Gore and Kerry, that if the Repugs are smart enough to steal it they must deserve it so it’s a waste of time trying to fight for an honest vote count.
Anyway, it won’t make much difference to the American people since he’d be governing from almost the same position as Obama minus a few details. The banksters love Romney, but they’re doing really well under Obama, who’s doing his best to burnish his creds with them. Obama’s new chief of staff, Jack Lew, came right out of Citigroup. William Daley, the previous one, came directly from one of the other megabastard banks into the most important position in the white house. Do you think it’s possible that Obama, if he looked really hard, could find one person in the whole US of A to run his staff who wasn’t a sleazoid, scumbag bankster? Evidently not.
Obama’s justice department is pushing hard for the states to accept a settlement with the banks over mortgage fraud. It’s a total sell-out, free pass, get-out-of-jail-free card. The banks get to pay $25 billion where the damage is up around $700 billion. They get to do that without admitting any wrongdoing or anybody going to prison for malfeasance. The $25 billion is nothing especially since the banks can borrow it from the Fed at close to 0% interest.
As it stands now Obama will have the advantage of saying the economy is improving since it’s been growing at about 2% and unemployment is going down. But when you look more closely at the numbers you see a completely different picture since some 90% of the growth in the economy has gone to the top 10% in the form of rising stock values and the new jobs created pay a lot less than the ones that have been lost. New manufacturing jobs pay only half what they paid just a few years ago. Once again income is being transferred from the poor to the rich.
So where are we then? Well, Americans will have a choice this November between a cool guy who’s a center right conservative and a doltish megamillionare who’s a center right conservative. And the banksters will be shitting their pants with glee either way.
