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.

Republicans are anti-business

The right wing is still pushing the message, "government is bad, people are good." Less government, lower taxes, more freedom, let free markets work.

The message "government is bad" resonates because, since WWII, our government and wealth have often been directed toward doing things government does not do well. There has also been a successful effort on the part of unions to protect government jobs and paychecks while reducing accountability, which has not been good PR.

But the pointed message "government is bad" has been co-opted as propaganda by radical right wing think tanks that have an entirely different agenda which is being fed to the American people by political puppets. Simply stated, their goal is to reintroduce hardship as a means to improve productivity, and encourage corporate culture to become America's culture.

Which is not bad in and of itself, as long as we are able to have a discussion about what is involved. But we are lazy and we are easily misled and the issues take work and they are hard.

Before we throw out rules and regulations and limit government, we need a real conversation about what will take its place. What will limit the power of those who can and will take advantage of other people's weakness?

"Free markets" without rules that keep as many players as possible in the game aren't free at all. Markets are not "moral." They can't be nor should they be. At best, we hope they are efficient at providing the products and services we want at the lowest possible cost through the mechanism of competition.

Without enough players, and that number varies by industry, markets become captive to the most powerful. Then the powerful take advantage of the rest of us.

In some "markets," such as health care, even the lowest possible cost is probably still more than we can afford when we attempt to postpone death as long as possible. Everyone is being false when we debate only cost and affordability without acknowledging the spiritual issue that Death is inevitable and hard. Horrific manipulation from the right (death panels!) only served to hide the fact that the Republican agenda is a fast track to the same destination. Again, not to disagree with the direction, but the dishonestly is breathtaking.

Or the "markets" in communication. There has been more than one revolution in the telecommunications industry since AT&T, then called "Ma Bell," was broken up (by government regulation). These revolutions would have been far different, and less likely, had Ma Bell's monopoly continued.

Now we have different technologies, and different requirements. But monopolies, or duopolies, or oligopolies still seek power and profit and the power that profit provides. As they should. The corporation has a duty only to itself.

The entity that stands between abuse of corporate power is government. Our system of laws is the "playing field" on which we play the economic game. It doesn't work if one player is able to walk up to any other player at any time and say, "give me all your money."

Which is what AT&T and Exxon and UnitedHealth Group Inc. and Goldman Sachs and Pfeizer and Monsanto are trying to achieve.

They don't want "free" markets, they want your money. Truly efficient markets would mean competition, which would keep costs down and limit how much they could take. So they attempt to reduce the government that could keep markets healthy.

So the Republicans who do their bidding (Bohner, Bachmann, etc.) don't like "free markets" either. They undermine government's role, or work to prohibit government from regulating industries that seek to monopolize our life blood services such as fuel, communication, health care, money and food.

Yes, price controls and direct government interference can do more harm than good. And government screws it up often enough. But let's not forget that government is not the only power, and that many laws are designed first and foremost to protect the public from robbery, either by a thug in a hoody or a Harvard grad in an expensive suit.

Successful efforts (by conservatives and liberals) to repeal banking laws that were enacted after the Great Depression, along with a failure to regulate new financial instruments, and a cultural change ("Borrow money against your house to buy ... toys! You deserve it!") promoted by banks led to the deep recession we have not yet survived.

Look at how much is spent on lobbying, by whom, and how the supreme court (why hasn't Clarence Thomas been impeached?) allowed corporations to hide their influence and spend as much as they like to upend "democracy."

There is an incoherence among a population that wants less government but more services. That incoherence is being manipulated by some very smart and greedy people who know that government is the last warden protecting the average American from a corporatist culture that views our nest egg as food.

And they are being aided unintentionally by a Left Wing that hates other people's money and thinks that good intentions are more powerful than the laws of economics.

Boehner's calculating ignorance

If one needs more proof that the Republican Party capitalizes on the venality of its more vulnerable members (yeah, I know, given Sarah Palin that's hard to believe), Republican leader John Boehner provided it this week.

This Sunday on "Meet the Press," host David Gregory asked Boehner if he thought Obama was a Christian and a citizen. Boehner said he did. But about the conspiracy nut jobs who think Obama is a Muslim and was born in Kenya, Boehner said "... it's not my job to tell the American people what to think ... The American people have the right to think what they want to think."

What a facile, manipulative thing to say. Of course people have the right to think stupid things, and not just Americans. The question was whether Boehner has a responsibility to "inform their ignorance," in the words of Thomas Jefferson.

Of course he does. He is not a national leader if he does not. Facts are not matters of opinion or preference. If we can not agree on simple facts, we do not have "One Nation indivisible, With Liberty and Justice for all" (the original wording of the pledge).

But Boehner is not a national leader, he is a right wing flack who would rather use ignorance to further a shallow political agenda. "Informing their ignorance" is politically inconvenient; correcting that ignorance might allow people to think more calmly about more important issues.

"... he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong," said Jefferson. In saying it is not his job to speak truth to his troops, by hiding behind a shallow rhetorical gimmick, Boehner shows the world what he is, and what the Republican Party has become.

In this, Boehner has more in common with those who spread lies and hate about America than he does with the founding fathers of this great nation.

Christians with no faith

It was hard to figure out why the far right mob was engorging themselves on the fiction of "death panels" dispensing medical care. It took a while, then there was the flash: Despite calling themselves Christian, they have no faith.

Well, not exactly right. They are actually "totemic" Christians. They have faith in their totems. "The Bible" is one of their totems. "Free markets" are another. "Family" is another.

When there needs to be a rational dialogue, they reach into their bag of superstitions and wave around a totem, as if to ward off the evil spirits of "socialism" or "homosexuality" or "lack of values."

Their shamans, Rush, Palin, O'Reilly, and the others, actually know this is a game. They just want to win, and capture the fame, power and money that comes from selling fear, like their forebears, Jimmy Swagggert, Jim Baker, and the others. These use the totems to communicate in code, to prod their flock into panic, to create the frenzy we see building around us.

But others with more character are faced with the knowledge that the issues we face will not bow to superstitions. That the shoddy system of health care we have eats 16% of our budget and will not run from a totem. That it needs to be fixed by rational effort.

Bank reform, credit card reform, education reform, political reform will not be solved with magical potions. These are issues that need to be looked at squarely, and hard decisions need to be made. Imbalances corrected. Power may shift.

Oh yes, the left has its totems as well. In many ways they mirror that of the right, and usually start with a hatred of other people's money. The difference is that the left doesn't hide behind Christianity, though interestingly, probably has more claim to it.

But why are those on the right so eager to believe the false prophets? Is it they don't really believe that their Reward is Coming? Is that why they are so focused on the lies and politics of the material world?

Or it may be that there is need, now, to stretch our idea of community to include others not like us. They want to exclude more than embrace, and hypocrisy always hides behind anger and fear.

It doesn't matter. There is work to be done. We need to get to it.