Tag Archives: jealousy

Newt’s new ad: Mitt’s dog

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Kudos, Newt. This is a good ad:


…

I’m guessing that the GOP political machine is just very thankful that dogs can’t vote in South Carolina.

Here’s what Andrew Sullivan has to say about Newt’s other ad, “The King of Bain,”

Other Republicans can speak about the need for free markets in a sluggish economy. But with Romney, we have a singular example of someone who made a quarter of a billion dollars by firing the white middle and working class in droves in ways that do not seem designed to promote growth or efficiency, but merely to enrich Bain.

Here’s the New York Post, for Pete’s sake, making the case last year against the shifty Wall Street games of Bain:

Romney’s private equity firm, Bain Capital, bought companies and often increased short-term earnings so those businesses could then borrow enormous amounts of money. That borrowed money was used to pay Bain dividends. Then those businesses needed to maintain that high level of earnings to pay their debts…

* Bain in 1988 put $5 million down to buy Stage Stores, and in the mid-’90s took it public, collecting $100 million from stock offerings. Stage filed for bankruptcy in 2000.

* Bain in 1992 bought American Pad & Paper (AMPAD), investing $5 million, and collected $100 million from dividends. The business filed for bankruptcy in 2000.

* Bain in 1993 invested $60 million when buying GS Industries, and received $65 million from dividends. GS filed for bankruptcy in 2001.

* Bain in 1997 invested $46 million when buying Details, and made $93 million from stock offerings. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2003.

Romney’s Bain invested 22 percent of the money it raised from 1987-95 in these five businesses, making a $578 million profit.

[...] Of all the jobs he liquidated, moreover, many are in the American heartland. And his response to the people in this documentary – white working class heartland Americans, the GOP base – is that they are merely envious of his achievements. They don’t come off that way in the ad. They come off as bewildered, betrayed and sure that Romney’s goal in all this was merely, solely to make money for himself – the kind of money that most Americans cannot even compute.

Ed Kilgore noted the video is

“a heat-seeking missile aimed directly at the white working class id.” This is incredibly important in a 2012 context — if Romney is going to win the presidency, he’s going to need to crush President Obama with white working-class voters who tend to support the GOP anyway. This short film, with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, tells this constituency that Romney is not only indifferent to their struggles, but he and people like him caused their economic plight.

But when Romney’s nominated (the Republican Party will have it no other way), will the rightwing base voters decide they hate Obama more than they loved getting a paycheck and buying things (like food and medicine and mortgage payments)? I’m going to go with yes because Obama Derangement Syndrome is a chronic condition.

Mittens: my critics are jealous

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“Somebody who’s fallen from the middle class to poverty, in my opinion, is still middle class.” — Mitt Romney

~~~

This morning on NBC, this happened:

MATT LAUER: When you said that we already have a leader who divides us with the bitter politics of envy, I’m curious about the word envy. Did you suggest that anyone who questions the policies and practices of Wall Street and financial institutions, anyone who has questions about the distribution of wealth and power in this country, is envious? Is it about jealousy, or fairness?

MITT ROMNEY: You know, I think it’s about envy. I think it’s about class warfare. When you have a president encouraging the idea of dividing America based on 99 percent versus one percent, and those people who have been most successful will be in the one percent, you have opened up a wave of approach in this country which is entirely inconsistent with the concept of one nation under God. The American people, I believe in the final analysis, will reject it.

MATT LAUER: Are there no fair questions about the distribution of wealth without it being seen as envy, though?

MITT ROMNEY: I think it’s fine to talk about those things in quiet rooms and discussions about tax policy and the like. But the president has made it part of his campaign rally. Everywhere he goes we hear him talking about millionaires and billionaires and executives and Wall Street. It’s a very envy-oriented, attack-oriented approach and I think it will fail.

STEVE BENEN RESPONDS: I see. So, Americans are allowed to ask questions about inequality, so long as we’re not too loud about it. Let’s just stick to quiet rooms — perhaps Romney can loan us one from one of his mansions — where we can be told to stop being envious.

Source: washingtonmonthly.com (via: quickhits)

See video…

Matt Taibbi on Wall Street: they’re not winning, they’re CHEATING

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Matt Taibbi provides a great counter argument to the Republican / Teaparty myth that the OWS protesters and Democrats calling attention to income disparity are jealous or hate success:

Wall Street Isn’t Winning – It’s Cheating

…And we hate the rich? Come on. Success is the national religion, and almost everyone is a believer. Americans love winners.  But that’s just the problem. These guys on Wall Street are not winning – they’re cheating. And as much as we love the self-made success story, we hate the cheater that much more.

HOW THEY CHEAT:

FREE MONEY. Ordinary people have to borrow their money at market rates. Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon get billions of dollars for free, from the Federal Reserve. They borrow at zero and lend the same money back to the government at two or three percent, a valuable public service otherwise known as “standing in the middle and taking a gigantic cut when the government decides to lend money to itself.”

CREDIT AMNESTY. If you or I miss a $7 payment on a Gap card or, heaven forbid, a mortgage payment, you can forget about the great computer in the sky ever overlooking your mistake. But serial financial fuckups like Citigroup and Bank of America overextended themselves by the hundreds of billions and pumped trillions of dollars of deadly leverage into the system — and got rewarded with things like the Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program, an FDIC plan that allowed irresponsible banks to borrow against the government’s credit rating.

STUPIDITY INSURANCE. Defenders of the banks like to talk a lot about how we shouldn’t feel sorry for people who’ve been foreclosed upon, because it’s they’re own fault for borrowing more than they can pay back… [...] Time after time, when big banks screw up and make irresponsible bets that blow up in their faces, they’ve scored bailouts.

UNGRADUATED TAXES. [...] Bank of America last year paid not a single dollar in taxes — in fact, it received a “tax credit” of $1 billion. There are a slew of troubled companies that will not be paying taxes for years, including Citigroup and CIT.

GET OUT OF JAIL FREE. [...] The point being: if you miss a few home payments, you have a very high likelihood of colliding with a police officer in the near future. But if you defraud a pair of European banks out of a billion dollars — that’s a billion, with a b — you will never be arrested, never see a policeman, never see the inside of a jail cell.

Read it all…

Charles P. Pierce says this is what the Republican party and their self-hating base like to call a war between the “Makers” and the “Takers.” Except if you consider how much and how often the wealthy cheat, how the odds are stacked at least 275% in their favor, turns out it’s actually the wealthy who are the Takers.