Please Vote for Romney The Corporate Socialist

Please Vote for Romney The Corporate Socialist

During the presidential campaign, Mitt Romney has lashed out at the Obama administration’s taxpayer subsidized grants to clean energy start-up companies. “The U.S. government shouldn’t be playing venture capitalist,” wrote Romney in October. “The very process invites cronyism and outright corruption.” But public records show that Romney’s private equity firm, Bain Capital, repeatedly persuaded the government to play venture capitalist when it came to its own portfolio of companies.

News outlets have recently focused attention on Romney’s history as a businessman at Bain, which he founded in 1984. What hasn’t been reported, or fully explained by the candidate, is how Romney often got ahead in the private sector by using government help.

The likely GOP nominee made much of his estimated $250 million fortune buying companies, reorganizing them, and selling them for a profit. Though Romney, whose only government experience is his one term as Massachusetts governor, is quick to claim that he turned around investments using sound management and data-driven strategies, he does not mention one aspect of his success. Bain Capital owned companies that padded their profits using millions in public subsidies. In other cases, firms owned by Bain employed K Street lobbying firms to pursue lucrative government programs.

Gosh, are you as shocked as I am. Conservatives say they are all self-made, pulled themselves up by their own boot straps types and always get ahead by hard work. here we have Romney, just one among many conservatives who used big government, de facto tax payer subsidized money, special favors and inside contacts to get ahead - kind of like the Russian mob.

Starting in 2007, Bain Capital began retaining various  lobbying firms to pressure lawmakers to keep open a loophole that allows much of the earnings by private equity managers to be taxed as capital gains rather than the top income bracket of 35 percent. Given Romney’s profit-sharing retirement deal, the campaign to extend the loophole, which still hasn’t been closed, likely boosted the candidate’s fortune. (Romney has refused to release his tax return, leaving questions about his income.)

As Romney pillories Obama for using the government to fix problems in society (health reform, the auto bailout, etc.), he invites a closer examination of his own career. A balanced view of the Romney record shows he has never had any qualms about government help when it came to his own bottom line. Whether through hiring insider lobbyists or funneling taxpayer subsidies to his companies, government assistance has been part and parcel to the rise of Romney.

Is Romney's middle name Marx or Mao or Gov'mint Welfare Baby. He and his comrades are the ones who fed at the trough like pigs and bankrupted the country. Isn't that just the kind of twisted immoral crook America needs as its next president. You know, since G.W. Bush is ineligible to run again.

Vote For Romney The Choice of Conservative 17th Century French Aristocracy

Vote For Romney The Choice of Conservative 17th Century French Aristocracy

If campaign donations are any sign, Mitt Romney is the runaway favorite candidate of billionaires and Wall Street bankers. Indeed, Wall Street has flooded his campaign with donations and a massive 10 percent of all American billionaires donated to his campaign. So it should probably come as no surprise that, in an interview with MSNBC’s Chuck Todd, Romney called for the super wealthy to be able to give unlimited sums of money directly to candidates:

    TODD: Do you think Citizens United was a bad decision? [...]

    ROMNEY:Well,I think the Supreme Court decision was following their interpretation of the campaign finance laws that were written by Congress. My own view is now we tried a lot of efforts to try and restrict what can be given to campaigns, we’d be a lot wiser to say you can give what you’d like to a campaign. They must report it immediately and the creation of these independent expenditure committees that have to be separate from the candidate, that’s just a bad idea.


It’s not entirely clear from this interview that Romney understands what happened in Citizens United. That decision emphatically did not follow any “interpretation of campaign finance laws that were written by Congress.” Rather, Citizens United threw out a 63 year-old federal ban on corporate money in politics. Citizens United was a case of five conservative justices deciding they knew better than America’s democratically elected representatives, and it was not a case of judges following the law.

More importantly, however, Romney’s proposal to allow wealthy donors to give candidates whatever they’d “like to a campaign” is simply an invitation to corruption. Under Romney’s proposed rule, there is nothing preventing a single billionaire from bankrolling a candidate’s entire campaign — and then expecting that candidate to do whatever the wealthy donor wants once the candidate is elected to office. Romney’s unlimited donations proposal would be a bonanza for Romney himself and the army of Wall Street bankers and billionaire donors who support him, but it is very difficult to distinguish it from legalized bribery.

As Romney himself said in 1994, when you allow special interest groups to buy and sell candidates, “that kind of relationship has an influence on the way that [those candidates are] going to vote.” Now that Romney’s running for president on the Wall Street ticket, however, he’s suddenly unconcerned with whether or not his big money donors exert a corrupting influence.

 Romney thus believes that corporations are people. If corporations are people that means Prince Romney believes money and free speech are one in the same. Those with the most money get the most free speech. Romney would have been a great French monarch.

Should Military Families Trust Mitt Romney. His Foreign Policy has Flip-flopped and he Is Not Sure What a Wise Decision Is

Should Military Families Trust Mitt Romney. His Foreign Policy has Flip-flopped and he Is Not Sure What a Wise Decision Is

Appearing on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace, GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney dodged a question about whether or not the U.S. should have invaded Iraq in 2003. Instead of answering the question about knowing what we know now, Romney, who’s flip-flopped between calling the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq “appropriate” and an “astonishing failure,” stood by his support for the war when he knew only what he knew then:

    WALLACE: [L]ooking back, and hindsight is always 20/20, should we have invaded? [...]

    ROMNEY: At that time, we didn’t have the knowledge that we have now. At that time, Saddam Hussein was hiding. He was not letting the inspectors from the United Nations into the various places that they wanted to go. The IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] was blocked from going into the palaces and so forth. And the intelligence in our nation and other nations was that this tyrant had weapons of mass destruction.

    And in the light of that — that belief, we took action which was appropriate at the time.


While running for governor of Massachusetts in 2002 at the height of the run-up to the Iraq war, Romney campaigned alongside President George W. Bush. Then-Romney aide and now-adviser Eric Fehrnstrom told reporters: “Al Gore has been a critic to the president’s policies in regard to the war on terrorism, specifically on the plans with regard to Iraq. Mitt’s position is that he supports the president.”

In his 2007 presidential campaign, Romney answered the same question Wallace posed the same way. “I supported the president’s decision based on what we knew at that time,” he said, noting that Hussein had not allowed inspectors in. But, as Media Matters pointed out at the time, by the fall of 2002, U.N. inspectors had entered Iraq and were making progress taking stock of weapons of mass destruction programs.

Today, Romney repeated the false claim that Hussein never allowed inspectors in, adding that “the IAEA was blocked from going into the palaces.” However, in a March 2003 Wall Street Journal op-ed, the head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog wrote: “In the past three months they have conducted over 200 inspections at more than 140 locations, entering without prior notice into Iraqi… presidential palaces.”

Ignoring altogether what the Iraqi government wanted, Romney said the U.S. “should have left 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 personnel there.”

Many Romney advisers pushed for invading Iraq in the early 2000s, and now they’re doing the same with Iran.

Asked by Wallace if, as president, Romney would send troops back to Iraq, the candidate replied, “I think the decision to send U.S. troops into a combat setting is a — is a very high threshold decision. This is not something you do easily.” Perhaps he should apply that principle to his reflections about the initial invasion.

How hard can it be to remember and have a straight up opinion on something his buddy George W. Bush one of the three worse presidents in U.S. history did? Bush kicked out inspectors. Why? Because they were not finding the WMD Bush and the conservative media said were in Iraq. Should U.S. military families put their lives in the hands of someone who wants it both ways - to pretend he doesn't remember important historical facts and also says he is an expert on foriegn policy. Maybe he can see Russia from the balcony at his mansion.