Mitt Romney-- A Model Of Economic Recovery For America? Not A Chance

All my friends keep saying Obama has his reelection in the bag. At dinner the other night someone authoritatively declared it would be a landslide and derided me when I said if Obama manages to win, it will be a squeaker. If it comes down to a contest between which evil is the lesser, then maybe Obama has a chance-- and it's been what they've counted on since they took office: that the GOP is an off the rails mess and that whatever candidate they'd offer would be mired in dreck. But Obama has been-- at best-- a tepid, mediocre president, surprising for some, predicted by others. In the aftermath of the crisis precipitated by the criminal Bush Regime, we needed something different from the conservative, corporate-friendly Obama that was such a departure from the Obama so many people thought they were getting during the 2008 campaign. And polling consistently shows that on the economy-- on which elections are won and lost-- the American people are not satisfied with his leadership, or his results:


The first president I remember was Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican. And basically it's been all downhill since then. The Military Industrial Complex and corporate agendas of Clinton and Obama have, essentially, been no better than those of the Bushes, and Reagan. But the idea that anyone could possibly see Mitt Romney as someone who could improve on Obama economically is absurd. Mitt Romney is George W. Bush. Romney is the quintessential one-percent candidate-- of, for and by. This week EclectaBlog in Michigan put it bluntly: Mitt Romney is exactly what's wrong with the American economy.

I like to say that Mitt Romney made his millions betting against American workers. It isn’t the greatest Romney-attack line ever. (That belongs to Ted Kennedy who said, “He isn’t pro-choice or anti-choice. He’s multiple choice.”) But it makes a point you can’t hear enough.

Romney had a record of devaluing American workers and work. He offshored and outsourced jobs. Even as he was running for President of the United States, he did not instruct his blind trust to only invest in the United States. He still opposes saving the auto industry because it didn’t punish workers enough. Worst of all, Mitt wants to make all of the Bush tax breaks for the richest permanent.

All of the Bush tax breaks were reckless given the debt and the trillions we need to spend on infrastructure, but it was the second round, passed in the wake of 9/11 as this nation stormed into war, that most harmed the middle class.

By taxing investments and the people who sell investments at a far lower rate than people who work for a living, we insanely incentivized gambling with the American economy. This combined the legacy Democratic president repealing Glass-Steagall and an administration with no desire to regulate Wall Street led the greatest financial crisis in a half century.

Robert Reich explains-- in 8 simple steps-- how Mitt Romney got so rich. It's pretty sociopathic behavior, good for Romney and his fellow investors, terrible for workers, taxpayers, and society in general: