Every once in a while politicians slip up and the truth comes out of their mouths. Recently Mitt Romney had one of those rare moments and while his campaign has been detail free on the specifics of what they would actually do if elected this one shows his intent.
Romeny Slips up and Calls America a company:
Romney's 5 Point Business Plan for America.
It is a page that millions of Americans will recognize... because it comes right out of the "corporate leverage buyout" playbook that has put millions out of work.
1. Harvest profit centers and sell them off = Privatize the postal service, privatize education, privatize all healthcare, privatize the military supply chain… already sold to Halliburton and companies like the renamed Blackwater by Bush.
2. Liquidate Assets = Sell off federal lands and their oil and mineral rights.
3. Reduce payroll by laying off personnel and off-shoring manufacturing jobs to cheap overseas labor markets = shrink government by getting rid of public employees (teachers,firemen, policemen, postal workers,FDA inspectors and the list goes on!)
4. Get rid of pension plans to reduce overhead = Get rid of medicare, medicaid and social security
5. Provide dividends to key investors for continued support = massive tax cuts to the .0001%ers funding his campaign and buying congress through lobbyist.
Does any of this sound familiar to you... it does to me when I take the 10,000 foot up vantage point on what the Romney campaign is selling... his business experience.
Like the “good” vulture capitalist pitch men they are, Romney and Ryan are saying anything, promising anything no matter how inflated or untrue, to win the election and get control of congress and USA Inc.
Politics these days have left Americans yearning for the return of the respected "Elder Statesman", men with stature and integrity like Lincoln, Adams, and Jefferson. Sadly though what we get, more often than not, are politicians with all the veracity of a used care salesman. The recent radical makeover of "Moderate Mitt" is a perfect case in point and really has raised the bar for Machiavellian machinations.
Mitt Romney debates himself
Mitt Romney debates himself, round 2
The kind of brazen duplicity that we saw in the first Presidential debate on Romney's part was unbelievable. I do not excuse President Obama's poor performance but the outright audacity for Romney to look into the camera and tell outright lies about his own positions that he has campaigned on for the last two years was shocking.
I personally do not know what I would have done if I had been in President Obama's place that night witnessing Romney's "etch-a-sketch" moment. Vice President Biden was prepared for it, but he knew it was coming.
What disturbs me most of all though is the effect it has had on the polls. Are the American people so gullible as to have believed Romney's outright lies? American's have been warned of this before...
FDR Let Me Warn You (1936)
So the question that recent events raises, or should raise in the minds of Americans is who is the real Mitt Romney? Where does this man really live and what are his core beliefs? Character does matter, at least I think it should. Salesmanship is not leadership!
Romney is first and foremost a "businessman." It is a fact the Romney won't deny and he is certainly taken great pains to remind us of it. Romney is a member of the CEO Class and true to form, isn't using his own money in this campaign but his "Investors" (donors) and seeking to minimizing risk with his deregulation and "Free-market" themes that are central to his pitch.
We’re all familiar now with Gordon Gekko’s “Greed is good” speech, but what I found more interesting than that scene from the movie was this private confrontation between Bud and Gekko:
The truth in that scene haunts me because I have heard it in IPO’s I worked on. They call retail investors “easy money” for good reason… they believe the lies they peddle. Psychologist at MIT came up with a cute term for it, “Motivational Cognition” to explain why even when lies are exposed people believe them because they hear what they want to hear.
The MIT researchers also pointed out that in politics cable news outlets like Fox News make it possible for candidates to tell blatant lies and have large groups of "true believers" who will deny any facts to the contrary. The age of fact free politics is upon us.
You would have thought that after all of the Lies that Romney and Ryan have been telling and have been exposed, that it would have ruined their chances in the election, yet as of this morning Obama has only a 1% lead over Romney in the poll averages.
In twenty-five years in international business I've watched LBO experts like Romney ruin one company after another doing this. They don't build anything... just pick the bones clean and take the money and run.
Talk me down from this if you can... but this is what I see happening to America if the GOP gets their way and a whole lot worse will follow.
I almost forgot... Happy Labor Day!
There are a few one other things that I would like to address...
"Government doesn't create jobs" and "We Built It"
I work in the tech sector and for most of my years in business I lived and worked in Silicon Valley and the thing that irritates me the most are those two memes being parroted. For those of us who worked in the valley for any length of time, we know that Silicon Valley itself is proof that entrepreneurial individual achievement coupled with government support is what made it possible.
The computer industry only had one customer for the first ten years of its existence and it was the US government and NASA. The federal government also funneled huge amounts of research dollars to universities,research institutes, and companies through their ARPA grants which later became DARPA.
The reason you have a personal computer on your desk is only because NASA needed to get computers to be small enough to get inside of a space capsule.
I don't underestimate the value of a Steve Jobs or other entrepreneurs who contributed greatly to technological advancement, but the environment for their achievements was created by government and in their success they stand on the shoulders of many unsung heroes... real giants in the industry.
Look up Admiral Grace Hopper sometime, one of the true heroes of the computer industry, who championed the personal computer projects funding in congress for years and without whom computers would be running on punch cards. If you do look her up you will find out how the phrase, "there is a bug in the system" came in to being along with, "It is easier to get forgiveness than it is permission."
NASA not only put a man on the moon but created whole new sciences and industries that had never existed before.
Silicon Valley would not have come into existence were it not for the US government and the space program.
The space program was responsible for over 500,000 new medical devices and the probabilities are high that you or a family member are alive to day because of one of them.
All the development of these technologies were funded by the US government and turned over to corporations for commercialization and manufacturing. Companies have made trillions of dollars off of their sales of products that were the direct result of the government funded research.
Putting a man on the moon was the 20th century equivalent of building a cathedral in medieval times... it drew the best engineers and scientists of the day and advanced the whole society.
Behind Neil Armstrong's step on the moon was a team of over 400,000 engineers and their individual achievements as they solved problem after problem after problem, all these individuals were working together towards a common goal.
GM built the lunar rovers. Northrop Grumman built the lunar modules engines for the return flight from the surface. Boeing, North American Aviation, Douglas Aircraft, and IBM were the lead contractors who built the Saturn 5 booster that took them to the moon.
The illustrations most frequently pointed to as examples of government's achievements are the transcontinental rail system, our highway system, our hydroelectric dams, and they are excellent.
The space program, however, did something unique by creating whole new industries, it created untold millions of jobs, and has saved countless numbers of lives right here on earth. It exemplifies most of all what is truly possible when individual achievement is harnessed towards a common aspirational visionary purpose.
President Clinton explains this relationship on the Daily show:
Romney has served up a lot of platitudes about restoring the past. He has made countless grand promises about our future but no specifics on how he would accomplish them, and worst of all he has told outright lies about the Obama record and played to some of the basest of human emotions to muster his support.
Let's look at another fundamental fallacy being pushed by Republicans:
"Taxing the rich hurts the "job creators" and it will cost jobs!"
Romney's prescription for the economy so far is a replay of Bush's deregulation and even greater tax cuts for the top .0001%ers. After 8 years of Bush and the failure of these policies to stimulate job growth it is not a past we should return to. The Wall Street Journal did an article comparing the job creation records of all the the Presidents and determined:
Bush On Jobs: The Worst Track Record On Record
Excerpt:
President George W. Bush entered office in 2001 just as a recession was starting, and is preparing to leave in the middle of a long one. That’s almost 22 months of recession during his 96 months in office.
His job-creation record won’t look much better. The Bush administration created about three million jobs (net) over its eight years, a fraction of the 23 million jobs created under President Bill Clinton‘s administration and only slightly better than President George H.W. Bush did in his four years in office.
More...
http://blogs.wsj.com/...
The article in the Wall Street Journal was published before the worst of the job losses numbers were reported for the last three months of his presidency. This when job losses began to peak at 800,000 a month and wiped out the job gains that the article reported.
Americans are known to have a short memory when it comes to politicians and history. Perhaps this will help remind them of how we got into our current economic mess!
President Bush: Bush Tax Cuts Destroyed US Economy
Who are the JOB Creators?
Who are the job creators you might ask? Well the best answer I've heard so far came at a TED talk given by multimillionaire venture capitalist Nick Hanauer:
Any one who has ever run a business knows that businesses only hire employees when the customer demand exceeds the ability of the company to produce enough product to satisfy that demand.
Nick Hanauer's talk set off a firestorm in the financial journals as it challenged the basic heterodoxy that started with Reagan in 1980 and his "voodoo economics" which became relabeled "supply side" economics. It was garbage then and it is garbage now. It led to the steady decline of the middle class and the biggest income disparity this country has ever known.
If you check the facts on the "Reagan Miracle" as they call it, you will find that Reagan actually raised taxes eleven times during his administration and raised the national debt by 189%! He sent aid to the states to put police, firefighters, and teachers back to work and the number of public employees during his administration soared.
President Obama created more jobs in his first year of office than the Bush administration did during his full 8 years in office! The unemployment rate peaked at 10.5% and has dropped to 8.3% currently. There have been 4.5 million private sector jobs created since Obama took office and the economy has added manufacturing jobs for the first time since 1998.
We have seen 29 consecutive months where the economy has added jobs despite the GOP's obstruction in congress. They delayed passage of the infrastructure and transportation bill, which the CBO said would create over 1.5 million jobs, for almost a year.
The Tea party contingent in the House finally passed it on June 29th of this year so that its effects would not be felt until 2013, after the election. It was the first jobs bill that they have passed since they took control of the House in 2010, but they did find the time to pass nine anti-abortion bills during the same time period.
If you want to check on the facts and figures I strongly urge you to read this:
Which party is best for the economy? It's not even close
http://www.dailykos.com/...
President Obama has put forward a plan and a vision of where he wants to take this country. The first term has been rough as opposition from Republican extremest in congress, who have put party over the common good, have blocked his efforts at every turn to get our economy moving forward again.
No, President Obama has not been perfect. He has not been the FDR that many of us hoped for, but he does have a record to be proud of despite the Republican's Machiavellian machinations. He has achieved legislative accomplishments that have eluded Presidents for almost a hundred years. His policies are sound, his vision is one of the common good, it is an aspirational vision of where we need to go and what we can become if we choose to work together to fulfill our potential as a people and as a nation.