Liesmycountry's List: 9-22-2012

• who noticed that none in his audience challenged them?
• Barack Obama’s ‘deficit’ commission believes that Mr. Obama’s big-money supporters are of different mindsets than
• Mr. Romney’s?
• very same people in Mr. Romney’s audience
• who Barack Obama had dedicated his first term in office to serving.
• belief system that sustains the true ‘dependent’ class of bankers,
• corporate executives and their servants in government finds unfettered
• government caused the housing crisis by forcing
• voice.
• bankers to make home loans to poor people
• caused the Great Recession by incurring too much debt
• Excessive regulation caused the financial meltdown of 2008
• unemployed are so because
• unemployment benefits provide them with comfortable lives
• The self-satisfied declamations against Mr. Romney’s comments by Democrats and their supporters depend on near complete ignorance of Mr. Obama’s actual policies while in office
• Who among them stand to benefit from Mr. Obama’s top-secret Trans-Pacific Partnership free-trade agreement that seals the power of international capital over labor and environmental regulations
• Mr. Obama’s build-out of the domestic infrastructure of surveillance, policing and the legal framework needed to crush rebellion?
• But between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, who was it that unconditionally revived their fortunes with bank bailouts while leaving twenty-five million people under / unemployed and forty-six million so poor they qualify for
• food stamps?
• Mitt Romney’s public persona is exactly as he is—a deeply clueless aristocrat born to wealth and power who’s political interests lie exclusively with those of his class (and race).
• are based on his experience of the world
• which can better sell th
• the ruling class:
• clueless aristocrat
• skilled technocrat who can speak the
• language of ‘the people’ while serving these same interests?
• a Romney Presidency would sink
• the fortunes of the ruling class for at least a generation
• And while it is unwise to frame reality by one’s political opposition, some in the ruling class are obviously taking the threat of effective rebellion seriously
• his liberal and progressive minions seem to
• orget his actual policies.
• political ‘gotcha’ against Mr. Romney rather than the education in class struggle that it is.
• Democrats and their supporters seem to want to continue their role of recent decades as constructive functionaries in a system designed to facilitate and perpetuate the fortunes of an economic elite, a ruling class
• which has found ever more effective ways of siphoning off the wealth
• created by working people and nature while increasing their domination
• and control over our lives
• oppressive prison system in the world
• greatest concentration of
• largest and most
• largest and most
• deadly military in human history, used to promote the fortunes of the ruling class, and environmental catastrophe.
• And income distribution is an outcome of political ‘negotiation,’ not a fact of nature
• , is that the income it
• receives is all of the evidence of its social product needed.
• who won the political negotiation, not who produced the
• social value
• made the rich
• richer (link) and left liberals and progressives to plea with the rich to
• give a bit of it back out of ‘kindness.
• increasing surveillance, militarization of the police and removal of legal
• restraints, the ruling class is moving ahead with its plans for the next
• round of ‘negotiations.’
• His lack of political skill is very much a function of his class
• privilege—he conspicuously has never had to explain himself, witness
• his actual policies
• his refusal to release his tax returns, or his views.
• would look as much like Barack Obama’s as Barack Obama’s do like George W. Bush’s.
• scheme to force people to buy health insurance from private insurers
• that have no intention of willfully paying claims
• unconditional and ongoing bailouts of corrupt bankers have gone over if
• Wall Street McMoneybags Romney had engineered them?
• the existing political economy and one that at least stands a chance of
• working. And neither party is offering that choice.

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• he says that 47 percent of Americans — including the poor and the elderly — view themselves as "victims" who are incapable of "taking personable responsibility or care for their lives."
• David Brooks
• Peggy Noonan
• William Kristol
• Republican pundits would
• join the pile-on — and in some
• cases, with perhaps more venom
• Peggy N
• she said an "intervention is needed"
• Romney's "incompetent" campaign
• nominee is "too small and pinched
• and narrow," and some voters are "starting to think Romney's a loser."
• she doubled down on her criticisms, saying she had called his campaign incompetent "only because I was being polite. I really meant 'rolling calamity.'" 
• Michael Gerson
• former speechwriter for George W. Bush also isn't happy with Romney.
• Gerson said Romney's comments
• on the 47 percent reflect an empty ideology that is both "simplistic and
• callous.
• "appealing to a common Republican belief that the expansion of government has produced a class of citizens who live off the sweat of others,"
• joined a battle that less mature conservatives
• have wanted "ever since they read Atlas Shrugged as pimply adolescents.
• Gerson's Ayn Rand zinger: Paul Ryan has described Atlas
• Shrugged as his favorite book and intellectual touchstone.
• David Brooks
• reliable gauge of center-right opinion in America has long been full of
• praise for Romney's entitlement reform plans.
• ammer on Romney this week
• candidate is "running a
• "When will
• depressingly inept presidential campaign,"
• the incompetence stop?"
• the type of thing only "self-satisfied millionaires
• say to each other."
• he really doesn't know much about the country he inhabits."
• Mark McKinnon
• reveal him to be a "deeply
• cynical man, who sees the country as completely divided,
• rn in a
•  McKinnon said Romney "would likely gove
• way that would only further divide us.
• "I honestly don't know what Romney can do to win suppor
• from voters he needs to gain a majority
• William Kristol
• didn't
• hold back on Romney, describing his remarks as "arrogant and stupid.
• he'd rather have another candidate:

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• he embraced several of the most popular features of the Affordable Care Act on Meet the Press
• like allow young adults to keep their coverage under their parents’
• health insurance and ensuring that those with pre-existing conditions can get coverage.
• “of course there are a number of things that I
• like in health care reform that I’m going to put in place” set off alarm bells from K Street lobbying firms to mega rich Super PAC donors an
• Republican leadership.
• right wing pundits were all over Romney
• on Obamacare no less
• Rush Limbaugh
• told listeners that Romney may as well be “Elmer
• Fudd”
• With the mounting criticism from the Republican establishment Romney no doubt saw the events in the Middle East as an opportunity to do just as Limbaugh had instructed.
• At a time when events required him to be a leader Romney was to engaged in fulfilling his ambition to recognize the moment.

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• wealthy gentry really thinks about the rest of us — and it’s not pretty.
• “Frankly, what I need you to do is to raise millions of dollars, because the president’s going to have about $800 to $900 million. And that’s – that’s by far the most important thing you could do.”
• He’s being truthful there because money rules these campaigns.
• And if there were more secret videos from other candidates, we would see them in equally compromised positions, bowing and scraping in their infernal pursuit of campaign cash, bending over backwards to suffer the advice that the privileged think their money entitles them to give
• President Obama joked, “If somebody here has a $10 million check — I can’t solicit it from you, but feel free to use it wisely.”
• Obama and Romney alike now shape their schedules as much around moneymaking events as around rallies and town halls.
• if there’s money to be made, they’ll change the campaign jet’s flight plan and make a special landing, just for the cold, hard cash.
• A new report from Moody’s Investor Service says that all the spending by the parties,
• corporations, super PACs and other outside groups will push political ad spending up this year by half a billion dollars
• “There’s going to be a lot of money spent. I’m not saying that’s the best thing for
• America, but it’s not a bad thing for the CBS Corporation.”
• . One Democratic consultant has called
• it “the greatest windfall that ever happened for political
• operatives in American history.”
• the top 150 political and media
• consultants already had raked in an estimated $465 million
• There’s a groundswell for rooting the money out of
• politics as Americans come to see that this is the one reform that
• enables all other reforms.
• eight in ten – are in favor of clamping down on the amount of money that corporations, the super-rich, and those shadowy outside groups can pour into the campaigns
• “Democracy is not for sale.”

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