Oh, My God

It's official. Mitt Romney does not like you if you:

are Latino (immigrant);
are Black;
like Medicare;
believe in Social Security;
have a government job;
don't have a job;
feel responsible for others;
would like help from others when life is hard;
believe that a woman is in charge of her own body and life;
believe you are "entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it."

The man has no concept of community, no concept of charity beyond his Mormon Church, no concept that life can hit you with a random blow, no compassion for others hit with a random blow.

Sometimes, Mr. Romoney, shit happens to someone that ain't their fault. Americans believe that we are stronger when we pull together, extend a hand, provide opportunity for "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Too bad you believe "he who grabs, gets."

Romoney is so insulated by his wealth, inherited and accumulated  by gaming the system (then shipped to Swiss Bank accounts and hidden– can you spell "tax cheat?"), that he feels anyone who is not rich doesn't have the same guarantee of opportunity that he does.

He scorns 47% of the country, saying they believe themselves to be "victims."

After his buddies at Goldman Sachs crashed the economy with dubious deals by playing "casino" with our mortgage payments, after millions of Americans were thrown out of work  because of economic forces OVER WHICH THEY HAD NO CONTOL and lost their homes and their insurance and their future, Ri¢hie Ri¢h Romoney says they consider themselves "victims" and expect handouts.

And yesterday, he and that tight-assed VP candidate, the cold, calculating narcissistic liar Paul Ryan, said the Federal Reserve shouldn't try to jump start the economy because we hadn't been hit hard enough, hadn't suffered enough over the last five years.

America! Wake up! It IS class warfare and they started it! Working men and women are losing! The 1% have contempt for the 47%! They have all the money and they own our Congressmen (that's you, Rep. Greg Walden of Oregon) and are buying our legal system.

Romney is owned by gamblers (real ones – not just Goldman Sachs) and polluters and New York bankers and drug companies and insurance companies. They want to make economic serfs out of us!

Romney has admitted it. Finally, something comes out the man's mouth we can actually believe.

Romney the debt maker

It would be a very different world if you or I could borrow money, put a big chunk of what we borrowed in an bank account in the Cayman Islands or Switzerland, and then stick someone else with the debt. That's what Mitt Romney did.

You see, Bain Capital was a mechanism for Romney to make himself and his "NASCAR team owning" buddies and the tax dodgers he advised very, very rich. The essence of the Bain Scheme was to borrow a lot of money to buy a company, saddle the company with the debt while paying himself big fees and then walk away.

Here is a wonderful analysis of this "business" plan. Thank god most of his investments missed Oregon, though Bain is investing in hospitals and Romney still gets money from Bain.

Sometimes things worked out, like the company Staples. Sometimes what happened is a lot of American workers lost their jobs and the companies went bankrupt.

While Romney raked in a cool quarter billion dollars. And it is likely he raked in a lot of money from Goldman Sachs and others that were getting bailed out by our tax dollars. A transfer from Main Street to Wall Street to Bain Street!

We don't know. Romney is hiding that information. Why? Because there is something to hide.

Does anyone, anyone, really think this man of piercing ambition, who has and will say anything to anybody to get elected, would not release his tax returns if they validated his argument that he should be president?

Not bloody likely.

The GOP's magical thinking

Karl Rove is the political operative running the largest funnel of anonymous money into the Republican party's battle for the presidency. On August 15, 2012, the once credible Wall Street Journal gave Rove a forum for the fiction he uses to reshape America:

“… While there would be no changes in Medicare for those 55 or older, starting in 10 years younger Americans … could either pick traditional Medicare or use … money the government spends on each Medicare enrollee to buy private insurance. The reasoning is based on a reliable truth: Competition will lower costs by using market forces to spur innovation and improvement.”

First, the statement is incoherent. Competition is the "market force." Rove is saying competition will lower costs by using competition to spur innovation… or market forces will lower costs by using market forces…" By using two words for the same force, Rove creates an illusion. The creation of a fictional entity to make belief plausible is characteristic of "magical thinking.”

Rove could have written more logically that "competition will lower costs, spur innovation and improvement," but that would have exposed the second magical element of his thought: the market forces he refers to do not actually exist in most areas of health care.

For there to be "market forces" there has to be a functioning "market." A market requires good information available to informed buyers who choose between multiple providers competing for their business. That is not how we make most health care decisions.

That's the GOP sleight of hand. The GOP doesn't support the fundamentals of efficient markets. The GOP doesn't advocate for good information. The GOP doesn't encourage multiple players in a market, especially if dominate companies make campaign contributions.

Instead, the GOP says "government is the enemy" even when government is protecting markets. The GOP calls rules that prevent oligopolies from ruining markets "antibusiness" when those rules are actually business positive. Bank deregulation harmed many businesses in America by turning mortgage markets into gambling casinos.

The delusions of Paul Ryan and Karl Rove that the Wizard of Competition will give us cheaper healthcare that is even better – Cheaper! Better! – is equally distructive. What they mean is that huge health care monopolies, some partly owned by Mitt Romeny's Bain Capital, will get even more of our health care dollars. That's not healthy for anyone.