Mitt Romney and the Temple of Doom!

It has been less than four years ago that the voters of the United States rejected the Republic mantra of lower taxes and less regulation that comes with small government in favor of something else. It has been almost twelve years ago that the popular majority was thwarted by the United States Supreme Court in Bush V. Gore and we began the long, eight year road away from a compromise that had led from budget deficits to a balanced budget and a pay down of the then seemingly burdensome national debt of around four trillion dollars to where we are now. We tell you this because the seeming moderate from Massachusetts--Mitt Romney--has had a forced conversion away from middle of the road policies to where he now speaks to us with his latest proposals that we cut an additional twenty percent from everyone’s income tax bills and cut off the dollars necessary to regulate the nation and its economy. It is interesting to note that it has been estimated that it will take 5.5 percent economic growth in the United States to pay for the decrease in income tax revenue that Romney is proposing, much less paying down any of the national debt. Ronald Reagan’s entire presidency only generated 5.8 percent with much of that coming in the early years during his first term.

One would think that the nation would have learned by now that it is going to take some tax revenue to run this nation and to begin to pay off the massive national debt that is beginning to overburden this nation, and, in turn, the rest of the worlds economic structures that are dependent on the United States as a key lynchpin for the future. The problem is not so much Mitt Romney as it is the Republican party that he must function within to receive the nomination for the presidency. Republicans have been drifting further and further to the right over the decades since Ronald Wilson Reagan began the destruction of the vital center of the party in his quest for those now cult like ideas of small government, low taxes, and freeing up the people and their corporations from overburden some regulation. It has gone so far that people like Grover Norquist now seem to control the party with their hand signed pledges that none of those who sign them will ever vote for another tax increase in their lifetimes in public office. Over two hundred conservative republicans have signed these pledges and those who have gone back on their pledge have been soundly trounced at the polls in the next election. The grand sum of all of it is that there is little or no middle ground left in the Republican party and very little of it left in the Democratic party either. It was these precious moderates who helped to form the coalitions that got things done in Washington D.C. over the years. Now, very little gets done which falls right into the wheelhouse of the extreme conservatives who really want no government at all beyond providing for a very robust national defense so that they can continue the Bush tradition of invading any nation that they don’t like or agree with their policies. Current on those lists are Syria and Iran with probable’s that include North Korea. North Korea would be higher on the list except that they have nuclear weapons and the neoconservatives who control the Republican party are, like most bullies and cowards at heart, afraid of anyone who has that kind of power.

There is another problem with Mitt Romney that, really, overshadows his capitulation to the conservative right of his party. And, that problem is his business background. This nation has never had anyone like Mitt Romney and his business background run for president with the possibility of winning before. Chief Executive Officers (CEO’s) of corporations galore have long dreamed of having one of their own sit in the oval office with their hand on the economy and, especially, on the regulatory trigger. Even CEO’s who back Obama, and there aren’t all that many, such as Warren Buffet, decry the amount of supposed regulation that seems to be hampering their efforts to make more and more money. It has been just about four years since this nation was brought to the brink of disaster in the form of a very great depression by the lack of regulatory control that a steady diet of deregulatory presidents and congresses has foisted off on the nation and its populous. Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich go around the country stating that among the first things that they will do if elected is to repeal the Dodd-Frank legislation that has done a less than perfect job of trying to reign in some of the excesses that brought us to where we had arrived on the date that Barack Obama took office back on January twentieth, 2009.

These Republicans believe in what must be described as the law of the modern jungle where only the economically strong survive and the rest are left to do as my father used to like to say: pick shit with the chickens!!!

Since Barack Obama reached office three plus years ago, we have been able to pull back from that depression that most assuredly confronted us. However, Obama has had to fight the Republican right every step of the way along with members of his own party who seem to be held under the sway of the army of lobbyists who spread the manna from Wall Street all over the capital in a seemingly unending stream. If the Republican presidential candidates and their CEO allies don’t like the regulation that they face today, it would have been much more so if it had not been mostly thwarted by the obscene amounts of money spent to expressly stop it from coming into being.

Mitt Romney was a CEO--of Bain Capital--before he ever took on the governorship for a single term in Massachusetts and, he is still a CEO at heart. He brags now not to be a part of the Washington elite even though he struggled manfully to try to become a part of it before he lost his senate bid to Ted Kennedy back in 1994. And, now, we must, if we dare, confront the idea of a former successful CEO taking the highest office in the land. As we previously stated, the business community literally salivates over the idea of one of their own finally taking the presidency. Jack Welch, the now retired CEO of General Electric, stated on Piers Morgan’s show recently on CNN that Mitt Romney would be the perfect president, at least, for the business community that he has, himself, always been considered to be the perfect CEO of the close to perfect corporation---General Electric.

Weare reminded when we think of this perfect business president of what John F. Kennedy stated a few weeks before he was assassinated, when he said that the business community considered he and his presidency to be sons of bitches. We, in turn, recall what he had to say about steel men, as he called them, during the earlier days of his administration when he had to face them down. How could we ever expect Mitt Romney to do something like that to his good buddies in the CEO community? And, so it goes with business and those who have occupied the presidency of the Unite States. There has always been a somewhat natural antagonism between the two and it is our opinion that the last thing we need is a member of that community holding the presidency, particularly at this critical juncture of our history. There is a difference between government and business and one cannot run a government the way one runs a business. It is interesting to note that the last person who was a CEO to hold public office as president was one George W. Bush who was the CEO of the Texas Rangers baseball team and we remember, we hope, just how that worked out. The last business back grounded person before Bush to hold the office was one Herbert Hoover and we surely remember where that took us.

We do business with business people but we do not necessarily trust those with whom we are forced to do business. There is the Edelman Trust Barometer which measures how influential people feel about CEO’s and that index went from fifty percent trust in 2010 down to thirty eight percent trust in 2011 around the world. And, the fact that most CEO’s are making over four hundred times as much as the workers whom they employee and are usually extremely isolated from their working populations does not add to that level of trust. We feel that there must be some connection between the occupant of the oval office to the common constituency that they serve and people like Mitt Romney do not have that type of connection. On top of that, Romney represents an aging political party that is ninety eight percent white that stands in opposition to where this nation must go in the ever unfolding twenty first century. To think, with all of the various stands that Mitt Romney has taken in his career, that he could ever be trusted by a plurality, much less a majority of this nation, is simply just a bridge too far to span. As we look at Romney in total, he is, in reality, probably a man without a party. There is a struggle underway for the soul of the Republican party and what might be considered a soulless business type really has no place in any of it.

We are, as one might think by reading this piece, deeply disturbed by the idea of a businessman such as Romney inhabiting the White House. Romney and his ilk are, at the base of it, bottom line thinkers, and, one simply cannot run a government by simply looking at the bottom line. We saw an interview with a CEO of a major international corporation in Davos, Switzerland at the World Economic Forum back in January of this year and he stated quite succinctly that if the business community did not get clear visibility from Washington soon, that they would simply take their manufacturing business somewhere else. This is quite simply code for, if you do not elect a businessman as president, we will go somewhere else. The business community and its CEO’s have been sitting on close to two trillion dollars of uninvested funds for close to a year now and there is a war coming between their arrogance and whether they, or regulation and the decent world community that goes with it, will win out in the end. If business wins out we will enter, sooner rather than later, an extremely dark time marked by battles in the streets and a horrible depression that will precede it because one cannot live in an unregulated world for long without those being the end results. We came close in 2008 and 2009 and Mitt Romney is no Barack Obama!

IOVHO,

Regards,

Joe