Merchandising Mitt
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As E. J. Dionne put it on 14 October 2012, “You can imagine Romney someday saying: “Politicians are products, my friend.” There’s no other way to explain why a candidate would seem to believe he can alter what he stands for at will. His campaign has been an exercise in identifying which piece of the electorate he needs at any given moment and adjusting his views, sometimes radically, to suit this requirement.” To an extent unprecedented in our history, Americans are confronted with a candidate of a major political party who demonstrates no constancy beyond his unrelenting ambition. Mitt Romney will say anything he believes will lure citizens into voting for him even if it contradicts what he said on the same topic the day before to a different group. This has been documented throughout the campaign, but so far, Mr. Romney seems to be getting away with a brazen and audacious confidence game.
Americans are witnessing a candidate for the presidency who has a pervasive conviction deficiency. He is powerfully ambitious and he is genuinely clever, but he has no core principles. It may be that Mitt Romney is a pathological liar, or he may be a hypocrite. Be that as it may, it should be obvious by now that relentless ambition is the enduring characteristic of this man. Consequently, deceitful words and pandering actions come easily in the service of this powerful, pervasive ambition.
This behavior has raised speculation in some quarters about Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASP). A person who is calculating, manipulative, deceitful and superficially charming exhibits characteristics used to diagnose ASP. A skilled, recurrent liar who cons others for personal gain and displays little or no remorse for having harmed others or who invents one rationalization after another for having precipitated harm to others while gaining personally. For much of his professional life, Romney and his partners pillaged the assets of corporations and shareholders they had duped into believing Bain Management would make flourish. Mitt and his cohorts shuttered businesses and raided employee’s pensions all for the personal profit of themselves and their investors. Now in campaigning for the presidency, Mitt alludes to his record of job creation. Not only is he unremorseful; he is blatantly dishonest.
Mitt Romney claims his experience as the head of Bain Capital is his main credential for the presidency. Unfortunately for Mitt Romney, this argument is bogus. As former Reagan Budget Director, specifies, “Except Mitt Romney was not a businessman; he was a master financial speculator who bought, sold, flipped, and stripped businesses. He did not build enterprises the old-fashioned way—out of inspiration, perspiration, and a long slog in the free market fostering a new product, service, or process of production.” Essentially Romney was a financial predator who used favorable regulatory conditions “to strip mine cash from healthy businesses and recycle it” mainly to himself and other members of the 1%. As Stockman explains, “The whole business [private equity] was about maximizing debt, extracting cash, cutting head counts, skimping on capital spending, outsourcing production, and dressing up the deal for the earliest, highest-profit exit possible. Occasionally, we did invest in genuine growth companies, but without cheap debt and deep tax subsidies, most deals would not make economic sense.” In truth, LBOs are vulture investors who feed on failing businesses, but in a bad policy environment, they become monsters who actively kill enterprises as well as feed upon the dead and dying. This vulture capitalism is the true nature of Mitt Romney’s professional experience and the real source of most of his significant wealth. For campaign purposes, however, Romney tries to market his successful career as a financial speculator as that of a businessman who created or sustained enterprises and thereby employed people and resources in ways that were economically productive rather than merely financially lucrative.
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Tags: Barack Obama, citizens, Debates, election, Larry Conley, Merchandising, Mitt Romney, Myths, Republic, sojourner truth, Votes