Mad dash! The annual running of the bulls begins in Pamplona
A general view of Estafeta street crowded with runners or ‘mozos’, prior to the first bull run of the Sanfermines 2012 in Pamplona, northern Spain, July 7. Sanfermines is a week-long festival celebrated to honor San Fermin, the town’s patron saint. via newsflick
Paul Krugman sums up the reasons (the right reasons!) that the Obama campaign has decided to go after Mitt Romney’s record at Bain Capital:
“Romney wasn’t that kind of businessman. He didn’t build businesses, he bought and sold them.”
“…why does [Romney] want us to think he should be president? It’s not about ideology: Romney offers nothing but warmed-over right-wing platitudes, with an extra helping of fraudulent arithmetic, and it’s fairly obvious that even he himself doesn’t believe anything he’s saying.
“Instead, his thing is competence: supposedly, his record as a successful businessman should tell us that he knows how to create jobs. And this in turn means that we have every right to ask exactly what kind of a businessman he was.
“Bain invested in companies that specialized in helping other companies get rid of employees, either in the United States or overall, by outsourcing work to outside suppliers and offshoring work to other countries.”
“Now, the truth is even under the best of circumstances, the case for electing a businessman as president would be very weak. A country is not a company – does any company sell more than 80 percent of what it makes to its own workers, the way America does? — and competitive success in business bears no particular relationship to the principles of macroeconomic policy. So even if Romney were a true captain of industry, a latter-day Andrew Carnegie, this wouldn’t be a strong qualification.
“In any case, however, Romney wasn’t that kind of businessman. He didn’t build businesses, he bought and sold them – sometimes restructuring them in ways that added jobs, often in ways that preserved profits but destroyed jobs, and fairly often in ways that extracted money for Bain but killed the business in the process.
“And recently the Washington Post added a further piece of information: Bain invested in companies that specialized in helping other companies get rid of employees, either in the United States or overall, by outsourcing work to outside suppliers and offshoring work to other countries.
“[Romney was] a captain of deindustrialization, making big profits…by helping to dismantle the implicit social contract that used to make America a middle-class society”
“The Romney camp went ballistic, accusing the Post of confusing outsourcing and offshoring, but this is a pretty pathetic defense. For one thing, there weren’t any actual errors in the article. For another, it’s simply not true, as the Romney people would have you believe, that domestic outsourcing is entirely innocuous. On the contrary, it’s often a way to replace well-paid employees who receive decent health and retirement benefits with low-wage, low-benefit employees at subcontracting firms. That is, it’s still about redistribution from middle-class Americans to a small minority at the top.
“Arguably, that’s just business – but it’s not the kind of business that makes you especially want to see Romney as president.
“Or put it a different way: Romney wasn’t so much a captain of industry as a captain of deindustrialization, making big profits for his firm (and himself) by helping to dismantle the implicit social contract that used to make America a middle-class society.”
Summer of Fire and Brimstone Ahead | Mother Jones
“Part of what’s fueling the insane heat are the same extreme drought conditions feeding the wildfires out west. (Tim McDonnell’s MoJo wildfire explainer here.)
As you can see in the map above, 72 percent of the lower 48 is now classified as experiencing dry or drought conditions. And don’t expect things to get better soon.”
…
“The Problem”
Mitt Romney, 10/11/2012: ”The Chinese are smiling all the way to the bank … taking our jobs and taking a lot of our future. And I am not willing to let that happen.”
He made a fortune letting it happen.
Newly published documents show Mitt Romney’s firms were ‘pioneers’ at ‘helping companies outsource their manufacturing’ to countries including China.
Bragging they were ‘A one-stop shop for their outsource requirements.’
Mitt Romney’s not the solution.
He’s the problem.
demnewswire: President Barack Obama speaks at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pa. , Friday, July 6, 2012.
“…on Friday, I signed into law a bill that will do two things for the American people. First, it will keep thousands of construction workers on the job rebuilding our nation’s infrastructure. Second, it will keep interest rates on federal student loans from doubling this year – which would have hit more than seven million students with about a thousand dollars more on their loan payments. Those steps will make a real difference in the lives of millions of Americans. But make no mistake: we’ve got more to do. The construction industry was hit brutally hard when the housing bubble burst. So it’s not enough to just keep construction workers on the job doing projects that were already underway. For months, I’ve been calling on Congress to take half the money we’re no longer spending on war and use it to do some nation-building here at home. There’s work to be done building roads and bridges and wireless networks. And there are hundreds of thousands of construction workers ready to do it…” — The President’s weekly address
…
“Conservatives would have you believe that our disappointing economic performance has somehow been caused by excessive government spending, which crowds out private job creation. But the reality is that private-sector job growth has more or less matched the recoveries from the last two recessions; the big difference this time is an unprecedented fall in public employment, which is now about 1.4 million jobs less than it would be if it had grown as fast as it did under President George W. Bush. And, if we had those extra jobs, the unemployment rate would be much lower than it is — something like 7.3 percent instead of 8.2 percent. It sure looks as if cutting government when the economy is deeply depressed hurts rather than helps the American people.” – Paul Krugman
…
And, of course, to criticize the President.
Just a few hours after telling reporters the jobs report today was a “kick in the gut” for Americans, Mitt Romney returned to his vacation, driving his high-power speedboat, filled to the brim with his kids and grandkids, to a nearby home for a dip in Lake Winnipesaukee. ABC News
In a press conference scheduled less than a hour before he spoke, and timed as a response to Friday’s jobs report, Mitt Romney continued to criticize President Obama’s economic policies in general and also defended his decision to leave the campaign trail for a family vacation — a move that has been widely criticized within the GOP, Politico reports:
““I’m delighted to be able to take a vacation with my family. I think all Americans appreciate the memories they have with their children and their grandchildren. I hope that more Americans are able to take vacation… Part of a good job is the capacity to take a vacation.” [...] This was the second month in a row where Romney had no public schedule on the day jobs figures were released. Last month, he gave a quickly arranged interview on CNBC and then had no public events for several days after.”
Far be it for Mitt Romney to deny himself a vacation when he’s worked so hard over the years at leveraging and cannibalizing healthy companies, brutalizing American employees, and walking away with all the money. Not to mention the energy it takes to campaign for almost five years straight, lie constantly, reverse your opinions (and then reverse them back!) on anything and everything on an almost daily basis, while trying to convince voters to trust you as you’re fighting to hide your true wealth, tax returns, and offshore accounts from them.
Mitt and Ann Romney: hardest working people in America!
Related: “Lemon. Wet. Good.”
via: thefrogman
