47%... Who's Romney Going To Fire Over This Class war Plotting Against America?

My grandparents came to this country from Europe when they were children, escaping religious persecution. Their parents arrived in New York virtually penniless. My grandfather worked hard and started a business and when I recall our earliest times together he was showing me how a socialist like himself could be a good employer. He had a garment factory and his workers were his team. He was a great boss and his employees were devoted to him. I hope think if you ask people who worked for me at Warner Bros they'll say the same thing about how I was as a boss. My grandparents raised two children and helped them get started in life but he never lived a remotely luxurious life, nor did aspire to. When he passed away, my grandmother didn't have to change her modest lifestyle. I was lucky to have had them as my grandparents; what I got from them is far more than any inheritance of riches could ever buy.

My dad worked hard but never did really well financially and if it wasn't for student loans and a then-inexpensive state university I would never have been able to go to college. I guess I would have qualified as part of the 47% of Americans who are, in Mitt Romney's sick, twisted mind, moochers. I lived overseas for nearly 7 years after college and when I returned home I started a small, independent record label. My salary was $5,000 annually and food stamps tided me over for a couple of years, some of the happiest and most fulfilling years of my life, I might add. I doubt someone like Romney could conceive anyone could have a happy, fulfilling life on $5,000 a year-- or $5,000 a week for that matter. That he thinks we're "victims" is very telling-- for a financial predator who's risen to the "top" by cheating and chasing Mammon as though it's all that exists.

When I was president of Reprise, there were years when I paid a million dollars in taxes. I never begrudged those checks and I know I would never have been in the position if the government hadn't built a state university system and hadn't loaned me the money for my college education. If I didn't have food stamps in the late '70s I wouldn't have been able to build and develop my company and sell it to SONY.

Romney is a horrible sociopath without an ability for empathy. As the video above shows so clearly, he's the last kind of person we should let anywhere near public office. He doesn't see non-Mormons as fellow human beings and he doesn't have the sense to understand the difference between investing and pillaging. His career was always that of a pillager and he never purposely added a bit of value to anything he touched. He moved money around and was rewarded beyond reason.

You already know how the scions of the John Birch Society, David and Charles Koch and Organized Crime boss (and Communist China agent) Sheldon Adelson have dumped tens of millions of dollars into electing Romney and other Republicans. Now we find out another crooked financial predator, Ameritrade's Joe Ricketts, has pledged $12 million towards replacing democracy with an oligarchy. Romney met with a bunch of these self-entitled billionaires a few months ago and gave them his underlying philosophy about America-- namely that "there are 47% of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47% who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…These are people who pay no income tax... my job is is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives."

Its so ironic because it's Romney himself-- and so many of his friends-- who hire armies of tax lawyers so they can cheat on their taxes. It's why Republican Congressman Ron Paul said he won't endorse Romney until he releases his tax returns like every other presidential candidate. But if there is a class of people in America who are moochers and parasites and who believe they are entitled to own everything, it's Mitt Romney and his sick, virulently anti-democracy friends.

I've said it many times before-- there is no place for billionaires in a democracy. The way to exterminate them isn't with ropes and bullets; it's with a sensible tax code, the tax code we had when the middle class rose out of dusty, during the Eisenhower years. Is it any wonder why the Koch brothers fascist and racist father called Eisenhower a communist spy?

The full story about this video-ed catastrophe for Romney is at Mother Jones and David Corn is the man behind what could turn out to be the most important story of the campaign. Obama campaign manager, Jim Messina commented on it, on the record, this afternoon: “It's shocking that a candidate for President of the United States would go behind closed doors and declare to a group of wealthy donors that half the American people view themselves as ‘victims,’ entitled to handouts, and are unwilling to take ‘personal responsibility’ for their lives. It’s hard to serve as president for all Americans when you’ve disdainfully written off half the nation.”

And by the way, tonight's David Brooks column in the NY Times is titled Thurston Howell Romney. David Brooks, the right-wing guy.

The people who receive the disproportionate share of government spending are not big-government lovers. They are Republicans. They are senior citizens. They are white men with high school degrees. As Bill Galston of the Brookings Institution has noted, the people who have benefited from the entitlements explosion are middle-class workers, more so than the dependent poor.

Romney’s comments also reveal that he has lost any sense of the social compact. In 1987, during Ronald Reagan’s second term, 62 percent of Republicans believed that the government has a responsibility to help those who can’t help themselves. Now, according to the Pew Research Center, only 40 percent of Republicans believe that.

The Republican Party, and apparently Mitt Romney, too, has shifted over toward a much more hyperindividualistic and atomistic social view-- from the Reaganesque language of common citizenship to the libertarian language of makers and takers. There’s no way the country will trust the Republican Party to reform the welfare state if that party doesn’t have a basic commitment to provide a safety net for those who suffer for no fault of their own.

The final thing the comment suggests is that Romney knows nothing about ambition and motivation. The formula he sketches is this: People who are forced to make it on their own have drive. People who receive benefits have dependency.

But, of course, no middle-class parent acts as if this is true. Middle-class parents don’t deprive their children of benefits so they can learn to struggle on their own. They shower benefits on their children to give them more opportunities-- so they can play travel sports, go on foreign trips and develop more skills.

People are motivated when they feel competent. They are motivated when they have more opportunities. Ambition is fired by possibility, not by deprivation, as a tour through the world’s poorest regions makes clear.

I suppose Romney would fire someone over this... but he can't fire David Corn and he's probably never fired himself. Did the GOP nominate him because Scrooge McDuck wasn't available? After all, how many people would disdainfully decry the notion of their fellow (non-Mormon) human beings daring to think they're "entitled" to food! I'm sure Ayn Romney is wondering why these people don't just sell some of the stock their parents left them like she and Mitt did when they were so poor they had to have carpet tiles in their flat and tuna casseroles for dinner.




UPDATE: Wonder How This Looks To Observers Abroad?

Iain Martin is one of the U.K. top political pundits on the right. He endorsed Romney a few months ago in the Telegraph but, as he quipped this morning, since then "a video and certain statements by Mr Romney have come to light which suggest that my original argument suffered from severe design flaws. I am now issuing a product recall."

In the secret recording that has just emerged Romney was caught telling Republican donors he has no interest in 47 per cent of the US electorate, as they are all dependent on the state, expect the government to provide and see themselves as victims. This is one of the all time great election screw ups. A candidate stupid enough to say such a thing in an election year, or in any year, should be asking himself if politics is really the game for him. It will be astonishing if the release of this tape doesn't signal the implosion of his campaign, sealing victory for Obama.

There will be those who say: Romney is right, 46 per cent of Americans pay no income tax. But it isn't that simple. Some of those who pay no income tax, as the Democrats are eagerly pointing out, will be elderly Republicans. Or there are people who now pay no income tax now, but who did in the past or who aspire to in the future when they can get a job. Is Romney calling all such voters subsidy junkies? Also, most Americans pay sales taxes, so many contribute in other ways.

But what is worst about this episode is that Romney chooses to take such a mean, cynical, reductive, depressing view of so many of his countrymen. It is impossible to imagine Ronald Reagan saying, or thinking, that 47 per cent of  Americans should be written off. He would have wanted to try and persuade those overly reliant on the state that they could be liberated, and the lives of their families improved, if they voted for him. His creed was essentially positive and aspirational. ... [U]nfortunately [Teddy Roosevelt] died in 1919. Leaving the Republicans with Mitt Romney.

And, closer to home, Blue America-backed congressional candidate Nate Shinagawa (NY-23) created this infographic to help explain to voters in New York's Southern Tier and Finger Lakes region just how wrong Romney was in his nasty remarks: