Tag Archives: george romney

Growing up Romney

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Grey Villet—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
Caption from March, 1958, issue of LIFE. ”With ‘Mitt,’ 10, youngest of Romney children, [George Romney] inspects house at Bloomfield Hills which he and his wife designed.”


Grey Villet—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
Not originally published in LIFE. George Romney with his son, Mitt, 1958


Francis Miller—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
Caption from February, 1962, issue of LIFE. ”At end of a long day on the new state constitution — and after a quick change to pajamas — Romney falls asleep on fold-back seat of his car as the chauffeur begins the trip back to Bloomfield Hills.”


Francis Miller—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
Caption from February, 1962, issue of LIFE. “After Sunday services the Romneys crowd onto a sofa in living room. Son Mitt and married daughters Jane and Lynn are at the rear. From left, grandchildren are Gregory (held by Lenore), Douglas, Susan, Brett and Jody. Another son, Scott, is in England with a mission group.“

**************My SIDE NOTE: U.S. involvement in Vietnam escalated in the early 1960s, with troop levels tripling in 1961 and tripling again in 1962. U.S. combat units were deployed beginning in 1965. Operations spanned international borders, with Laos and Cambodia heavily bombed. American involvement in the war peaked in 1968, at the time of the Tet Offensive. After this, U.S. ground forces were gradually withdrawn as part of a policy known as Vietnamization. Despite the Paris Peace Accords, signed by all parties in January 1973, fighting continued.***********

Mitt wasn’t the only fortunate son from that family — or the last.


Francis Miller—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
Not originally published in LIFE. Lenore Romney, wife of Michigan governor George Romney, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 1963


Francis Miller—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
Not originally published in LIFE. George Romney officiates during a Mormon service, Michigan, 1962

Growing Up Romney: Mitt’s Early World | LIFE (see all photos) – Nevertheless, it remains clear that President Obama’s and Governor Romney’s backgrounds are part of the larger national conversation this fall. Electing a commander in chief solely on the basis of his experience of childhood would, of course, be absurd; but ignoring the public curiosity about where these men came from would be equally silly. Both candidates, after all, have proudly proclaimed that the people who raised them unquestionably shaped the way they see the world. These photos, ultimately, offer one, small window through which to view the world in which Mitt Romney was raised. His father (“lean, hard George Romney,” as LIFE put characterized the AMC chairman and president in 1958) is here, as are his mom and his siblings. Some of the pictures feel rather stagey; others seem genuinely informal and, as it were, intimate; all of them suggest a close-knit family defined, in large part, by its faith and by the pursuits of its dynamic patriarch. Taken as a whole, they’re one more piece to the puzzle that is the current Republican candidate for president. This is not an exhaustive portrait, but instead a glimpse into what it was sometimes like — at least when reporters and photographers were around — growing up Romney.

Class warfare, Romney-style

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David Corn says this is the most damning line of Romney’s remarks in the hidden camera video:

“I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.” 

“Here was Romney sharing his view that Americans who don’t make enough money to pay income taxes and his fellow citizens who rely on Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, or other government programs are lesser people than he and the millionaires before him. These people, Romney was saying, are not adults; they do not, and will not, fend for themselves or do what they must to feed, clothe, shelter, educate, and care for themselves and their family members. It was an arrogant insult spoken with true detachment. This was 100-percent 1-percent.”

Sorry, Willard. You and your mega-rich friends don’t get to judge anyone.


image: destroythegop 

Mitt Romney’s Oedipal conflicts

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Mitt Romney’s lovely mother, Lenore LaFount Romney, talking about how his father George was on welfare relief as a child, after he came to America as a refugee from Mexico.

[M]y job is is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.

Mitt Romney isn’t just detached from half of America, he’s detached from his own heritage. George and Lenore might have been better served if they’d loaded that silver spoon they placed in li’l Willard’s mouth (as most parents who can, will do) with some grace, empathy, and appreciation.

For their troubles, they received a kid who felt entitled, who spent his childhood bullying others: a blind teacher, an unpopular gay classmate, or pranking friends and strangers while dressed like a police officer.  A son who spent his young adulthood living in a mansion in France, avoiding the Vietnam draft, and then felt that selling some stock to live on while attending Harvard was the true measure of suffering. A man who went on to become the “King of Bain,” the real-life basis of Hollywood’s Gordon Gekko character, leveraging businesses for personal profit, wiping out American jobs that once paid living wages with benefits, shuttering factories and halting manufacturing across the land. A man who took the fortune he made in all that destruction, and put it in bank accounts all over the world — ensuring the United States government would never see a penny of tax. A man who then decided he had so much, he also deserved to be President. A man who refuses to reveal his tax returns to voters — completely contrary to what his own father practiced and believed.

  
  
  
  

source: sandandglass

OR Mitt Romney would consider his own father’s family to be among ‘those people’ who it’s his job not to worry about — those people who are “dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them… people who pay no income tax.” 

It’s like Mitt Romney is begging Latinos not to vote for him

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“My heritage… my dad, as you probably know, was the governor of Michigan and was the head of a car company. But he was born in Mexico … and, uh, had he been born of, uh, Mexican parents, I’d have a better shot at winning this. But he was unfortunately born to Americans living in Mexico…. He lived there for a number of years. I mean, I say that jokingly, but it would be helpful to be Latino.“

Latino vote favors Obama by 68% vs. Mitt Romney’s 26% (via: political-linguaphile)

  • Between Latina women, 74% support Obama vs. Romney’s 21%
  • Between Latino men, 61% support Obama vs. Romney’s  32%

[h/t on video: reader John Roach]

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Sidenote: WHY WAS Romney’s father born in Mexico? George Romney was born in Mexico and was 5 years old when a revolution forced his family members in 1912 to flee their Mormon colony and seek refuge in the United States. The Mormon exiles lost their homes, farms, and most of their belongings, were welcomed by the United States, and benefited from a $100,000 refugee fund established by Congress. But there are other elements to the Romney story that may explain why he doesn’t tell the full tale on the campaign trail. The reason that George was born in Mexico is that his grandfather – Mitt’s great-grandfather – had taken refuge there in order to escape US laws against polygamy. It was this family patriarch, Miles Park Romney, who established the colony and lived there with four wives. Mitt Romney has decried what he has called the “awful’’ practice of polygamy and has never visited the colony, even though several dozen of his cousins continue to live there.

The ethos of Mitt Romney: “make-nothing, take-everything, screw-everyone”

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“…Instead of cars and airplanes, we built swaps, CDOs and other toxic financial products. Instead of building new companies from the ground up, we took out massive bank loans and used them to acquire existing firms, liquidating every asset in sight and leaving the target companies holding the note. The new borrow-and-conquer economy was morally sanctified by an almost religious faith in the grossly euphemistic concept of “creative destruction,” and amounted to a total abdication of collective responsibility by America’s rich, whose new thing was making assloads of money in ever-shorter campaigns of economic conquest, sending the proceeds offshore, and shrugging as the great towns and factories their parents and grandparents built were shuttered and boarded up, crushed by a true prairie fire of debt.

“Mitt Romney – a man whose own father built cars and nurtured communities, and was one of the old-school industrial anachronisms pushed aside by the new generation’s wealth grab – has emerged now to sell this make-nothing, take-everything, screw-everyone ethos to the world. He’s Gordon Gekko, but a new and improved version, with better PR – and a bigger goal. A takeover artist all his life, Romney is now trying to take over America itself. And if his own history is any guide, we’ll all end up paying for the acquisition.”

— Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital | Matt Taibbi | Rolling Stone

George Romney vs. his own son: “One year could be a fluke, perhaps done for show.”

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image: romney2012

“One year could be a fluke, perhaps done for show.” — George Romney in 1967 when he released 12 years worth of tax returns.

Thursday morning’s 4 slightly interesting things

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1) FOOT IN MOUTH ROMNEY

Romney Laughingly Recalls Father’s Layoffs — From the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel: At the outset of the call, Romney said he has some connections to Wisconsin. “One of most humorous I think relates to my father. You may remember my father, George Romney, was president of an automobile company called American Motors … They had a factory in Michigan, and they had a factory in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and another one in Milwaukee, Wisconsin,” said Romney. “And as the president of the company he decided to close the factory in Michigan and move all the production to Wisconsin. Now later he decided to run for governor of Michigan and so you can imagine that having closed the factory and moved all the production to Wisconsin was a very sensitive issue to him, for his campaign.” Romney said he recalled a parade in which the school band marching with his father’s campaign only knew the Wisconsin fight song, not the Michigan song. “So every time they would start playing ‘On Wisconsin, on Wisconsin,’ my dad’s political people would jump up and down and try to get them to stop, because they didn’t want people in Michigan to be reminded that my dad had moved production to Wisconsin,” said Romney, laughing.

White House to Romney: Cold War over — White House spokesman Josh Earnest rejected accusations by Romney, the Republican Party frontrunnner to challenge the Democratic president, that Obama had nothing to show for his overtures to repair relations with Russia. “You don’t have to be a foreign policy expert to know that the Cold War ended 20 years ago and that the greatest threat that the president has been fighting on behalf of the American people is the threat posed by al-Qaeda. The irony is that Russia, particularly in the cases of North Korea and Iran, (has) worked very well with the international community to isolate those two regimes and to seek a diplomatic solution to hold those two regimes accountable for living up to their international obligations,” Earnest said.

2) HEAD UP ASS SANTORUM

Santorum tells young man not to use pink bowling ball ‘on camera’ – Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum on Wednesday told a young man not to use a pink ball at a bowling alley in Wisconsin. “You’re not gonna use the pink ball. We’re not gonna let you do that. Not on camera,” he said, according to Reuters reporter Sam Youngman. “Friends don’t let friends use pink balls,” he added. Santorum was bowling with the University of Wisconsin at La Crosse College Republicans. Wisconsin holds its presidential primary next Tuesday.

3) THE GOP’S NEW CLASS WARFARE SCHEME (SAME AS THE OLD SCHEME)

Cantor Proposal for 20 Percent Business Tax Deduction Would Provide Windfall for Wealthy, Not Create Jobs — Though billed as a measure to create jobs by aiding small businesses, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s (R-VA) proposal for a 20 percent tax deduction in 2012 for businesses with fewer than 500 employees would benefit many high-income taxpayers — including many affluent doctors, lawyers, and stockbrokers — while failing to generate the promised economic benefits. The Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center estimates that nearly half — 49 percent — of the $46 billion tax cut that the measure would provide would go to people with incomes over $1 million a year. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) rated this general approach as one of the least cost-effective ways that policymakers were considering to encourage growth or create jobs in a weak economy. For one thing, the tax benefits would flow disproportionately to high-income people who would spend a relatively small share of their additional income; thus, CBO estimated that the deduction would generate just 0 to 20 cents in economic growth for every dollar in budgetary cost. For another, firms would receive this tax break whether they hired new workers or not; thus, CBO estimated that in 2012 it would create one job or fewer per $1 million of budgetary cost.

The House Republican Budget Would Eliminate Pell Grants For More Than One Million Students — More than 1 million students would lose Pell grants entirely over the next 10 years under Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget, according to an analysis that the national reform organization Education Trust provided to The Huffington Post. And by the looks of it, the Ryan budget, which is slated to hit the House floor this week, would hit the poorest kids hardest. [...] The budget would cut Pell grant eligibility for students who attend classes on a less-than-halftime schedule — which usually means low-income students who need to work their way through college. And it gets worse. Sixty percent of students who receive Pell grants also take out loans — twice the rate for college students overall — so they might be doubly hit by the Ryan cuts: In addition to receiving less Pell money, they would have to start paying interest on their loans while still in school.

4) TRAYVON MARTIN MURDER

Funeral director saw no signs of fight on Trayvon’s hands – “As for his hands and knuckles, I didn’t see any evidence he had been fighting anybody,” Kurtz said. Citing police sources, the Orlando Sentinel reported that Zimmerman told investigators Martin punched him and slammed his head into the ground repeatedly before he fired the shot that killed the unarmed 17-year-old. He claimed he shot Martin in self-defense, and he has not been charged in the case at this point. While Kurtz is not a forensics expert, the funeral director said he has handled the bodies of many homicide victims in his career. This case in particular affected him as he learned more about what happened to Trayvon Martin and how the case was handled. “I think the police investigation was the most unprofessional one I’ve ever seen in my lifetime,” Kurtz said.

Surveillance video shows no blood or bruises on George Zimmerman  – The video shows Zimmerman arriving at the Sanford Police Department in a police cruiser. […] The initial police report noted that Zimmerman was covered in grass, and was bleeding from the back of the head and nose. Zimmerman’s lawyer has also said that his nose was broken in the incident. But the surveillance video shows no blood or bruises on him. It is unclear whether the medical attention Zimmerman reportedly received would have stopped him from bleeding. The lead homicide investigator on the Trayvon Martin case recommended George Zimmerman be charged with manslaughter, but was denied. Chris Serino, the Sanford investigator, filed an affidavit on the night of crime saying he was unconvinced of Zimmerman’s account. However, the state attorney’s office told Serino not to press charges against Zimmerman because there wasn’t enough evidence against him. WATCH VIDEO:

Trayvon Martin: The 5 Key Unanswered Questions — While media coverage of the case has been intense, there are several key questions that have yet to be answered about the case. Here are five of the most important: 1. What was the purported “conflict” that required the initial prosecutor to step down? 2. Why did the prosecutor ignore the recommendations of the lead homicide investigator? 3. Why did then-Police Chief Bill Lee make public statements directly contradicting the official recommendations of the police department? 4. Who leaked Trayvon Martin’s school records? 5. Why was Trayvon Martin’s body tagged as a John Doe? Special prosecutor Angela Corey has promised to release additional information about the case once she makes a decision about whether to charge Zimmerman, something that could happen at any time.

Trayvon Martin Case: Department of Justice to investigate entire Sanford police – He said that so many people complained at Monday night’s city commission meeting about Sanford officers, the city asked the Department of Justice to step in. “I am now in the process of talking with the Department of Justice and instituting a mechanism whereby citizens that have concerns or complaints about the Sanford Police Department can have their concerns heard and investigated by an independent agency,” Bonaparte said. WFTV found the investigations could pave the way for a long relationship with federal officials. After complaints surfaced in Los Angeles and Pittsburgh, the Department of Justice found a pattern of civil rights abuse. Then, it completely took over the departments and entered into “consent decrees” to improve them. The Department of Justice took over the department in LA for eight years and in Pittsburgh for four.

Mitt Romney’s Oedipus complex

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It must suck to know that you’ll never be more than a pale shell of your own father, even if you’re worth a quarter billion with foreign accounts around the world. An Oedipus complex is best worked out on a couch, not in a seemingly never-ending presidential campaign.

Goldwater, Romney and the 27%

So I was reading a 11-29-1966 New York Times article about the Romney/Goldwater feud (ROMNEY ATTACKED GOLDWATER RACE AS KEYED TO SOUTH; Letter to Defeated Nominee Gave Governor’s Reason…) and how Romney broke with Goldwater over the issues of Civil Rights, extremism and Republican values (according to some reports George Romney, with young Mitt in tow, walked out of the ‘64 GOP Convention—during Goldwater’s speech—to protest the removal of a strong Civil Rights plank to the Party Platform).

In the article, I came across the two paragraphs cited above. Of course 27% would the number of Republicans who would not support any candidate who did not endorse Goldwater’s platform of crazy.

Mitt Romney has bent himself over so completely with what he stands for, from one day to the next, in his quest to appeal to the worst elements in the Grand Old Teaparty, that his head is now permanently inserted in his own ass. Yet apparently Mitt’s own father actually stood for something, he had his own value system and stuck to it — politics be damned. Mitt’s a RINO (Romney in name only).