Defining Mitt Romney

John Amato has been flooring me with all the research he's been gathering on Romney, especially the stuff from France and Mexico. I can't wait for Romney to get the nomination so Amato starts dropping that stuff publicly! But that isn't the kind of thing I was talking about when I starting thinking about defining Willard today. It wasn't even specifically my own experience with Bain Capital helping drive my old company, Warner Bros Records, onto the trash heap of history. Instead I was thinking about David Korten's brilliant economics book, Agenda For A New Economy.

If you were watching the GOP "presidential" debate Wednesday night you probably recall the crazy answers they all gave about China. On the face-- but only on the face-- Romney's answer sounds slightly less insane and pandering to xenophobic base voters from backward regions of South Carolina and Iowa. He started babbling nonsense about "free trade." It made me go back to Korten's definitions. He called what Romney calls Free Trade, "freedom to commit fraud."

The term free market is a code word for an unregulated market that allows the rich to consume and monopolize resources for personal gain free from accountability for the broader social and environmental consequences. A free market rewards financial rogues and speculators [think Romney and Bain, in fact keep them in mind for the rest of this post] who profit from government, social, and environmental subsidies, speculation, the abuse of monopoly power, and financial fraud, creating an open and often irresistible invitation to externalize costs and increase inequality.

But it was Professor Korten's contrast between Wall Street (the Romney/1% economy) and Main Street (the real/99% economy) that had sent me into a frenzy of margin scribbling about a month ago. His point, that "the production of goods and services becomes incidental to the primary business purpose of making money," actually is a perfect example of the experience Romney is always claiming is the reason we should make him president (of the United States... of America).

Wall Street is a world of pure finance in the business of using money to make money by whatever means for people who have money. Any involvement in the production of real good and services is purely an incidental byproduct. Maximizing financial return is the game. To that end, Wall Street institutions have perfected the arts of financial speculation, corporate-asset stripping, predatory lending, risk shifting, leveraging, and debt-pyramid creation. Successful players are rewarded with celebrity, extravagant perks, and vast financial fortunes.

Wall Street players justify their actions with the claim that they are creating wealth for the benefit of society, a convenient bit of self-delusion...

[M]ost Main Street businesses function within a framework of community values and interests that moderate the drive for profit.