The USA Voted For Real Values and Re-elected President Obama

The USA Voted For Real Values and Re-elected President Obama

President Obama's re-election was never much in doubt, except perhaps briefly when he took a plunge after the first debate and we didn't know where the bottom was. But by the end of the campaign, Sam Wang of the Princeton Election Consortium was giving Obama a better-than-99% chance of winning. Nate Silver of the New York Times, more cautious, put the odds Tuesday at about 90-10 in favor of Obama.

Those who point to the popular vote as evidence of a very tight contest, as much of the media did before the election, should consider two things: first, that is not the way the game is played here (unfortunately). If the popular vote determined the presidency, the Obama team would have put more resources into big states like California and New York to ensure that Obama would win the popular vote by a wider margin. Instead, the resources went into swing states, in order to ensure a victory in the electoral college vote. ( this was written before some votes were counted: President Obama won the popular vote and the electoral college)

Second, the country is nowhere near as closely divided as the popular vote indicates. That's because non-voters, who were about 43% of the electorate in 2008, favor Obama by a margin of about 2.5 to one.

Indeed, the resources and political power that Republicans mobilized in an effort to deny millions of Americans their right to vote, and to suppress voter turnout, raise serious questions about their legitimacy as a political party. A legitimate political party does not rely on preventing citizens from voting, in order to prevail at the polls, any more than a legitimate government relies on repressing freedom of speech or assembly in order to remain in power.

How did Obama win?

In this election, as in almost every presidential election for decades, the biggest block of swing voters has been white working-class voters (however defined: for example, without college education). No Democratic candidate has won a majority of white voters for decades, since the Republicans adopted their "southern strategy" in the wake of historic civil rights legislation, and became the "white people's party". (In fact, Obama did better among white voters in 2008 than John Kerry did in 2004 – his racial identity was not a handicap because most voters who wouldn't vote for an African American don't vote for Democrats.) But in this contest, Obama had to win enough of the white working-class voters in battleground states to win the election, while winning about 95% of African-American voters and a large majority of Latino voters.

This he did primarily by making a populist appeal to working-class voters, more populist than any major party presidential nominee in decades. In the last debate, which was supposedly about foreign policy, Obama repeatedly referred to Romney as someone who wants to make sure that rich people "don't play by the same set of rules" as everyone else. Throughout the campaign, his team attacked Romney for being a rich, unscrupulous politician who didn't care about working people.

Of course, it helped that Romney fit the stereotype – a rich corporate raider, a private equity fund CEO, who said he "like[s] being able to fire people", and paid less of his income in taxes than millions of working Americans. His infamous secretly-recorded remark dismissing 47% of Americans as moochers – "my job is not to worry about those people" – was a gift from God, and became one of the Obama campaign's most effective TV ads.

But for those who have followed Obama's political career, his re-election was always extremely likely – and indeed, it would hardly have been in jeopardy if he had actually debated in the first debate. We knew that he would be as populist as he needed to be in order to win. Even with 23 million people still unemployed or underemployed (as Romney repeated endlessly), it's not that hard to convince a lot of working-class voters that Romney and his party don't have their interests at heart – if you are willing to make the kind of economic populist appeal that Obama ultimately made.

The downside risk, for a candidate, is the potential loss of rich campaign contributors and media; but Obama was willing to take these risks in order to win. This was a historic difference from previous presidential campaigns: Democratic candidates such as Michael Dukakis and Al Gore flirted briefly with economic populist appeals, but backed off in the face of media pressure.

The media are a huge factor in most elections in the US, and outside of Fox News and the rightwing press, most of the major news outlets were more sympathetic to Obama than to Romney. They still helped Romney quite a bit, however, especially with swing voters, with poor reporting on key economic issues. Most Americans didn't know that the federal stimulus had created an estimated 3m jobs; in fact, they didn't even distinguish the stimulus from the unpopular federal bank bailout. They didn't understand the benefits that people would derive from Obama's healthcare legislation. They didn't know that they'd had their taxes cut under Obama. And millions believed the hype that federal deficit spending and the US public debt were major problems. (For the record, the US currently pays less than 1% of GDP in net interest annually on the federal debt – less than it has paid during the past 60 years.)

The confusion on economic issues was probably the most important influence on swing voters, who supported Romney against their own economic interests, thinking that the economy might improve if he were elected. For this, and other misunderstandings, we can thank the major media, although we should also include the public relations blunders made by the Obama team. Perhaps the biggest strategic error was President Obama's refusal to go after Romney's proposal to cut social security, thereby losing the majority of senior citizens' votes (a big vote in swing states like Virginia and Florida), which he could potentially have won by defending America's most popular anti-poverty program.

Obama's silence on social security is a bad omen for the future of his second administration, when – facing almost immediately the "fiscal cliff" – political, media, and business leaders will be pressing for a "grand bargain" on budget issues that will screw the vast majority of Americans. It will take a lot of grassroots pressure to prevent the worst outcomes: likewise, to get us out of Afghanistan and to prevent another disastrous war, this time with Iran. Obama's foreign policy has been mostly atrocious and the never-ending "war on terror" continues to expand, while most Americans' living standards have been declining.

It's going to be an uphill fight for progress, but it could have been a lot worse.

Like an increasing number of Americans I'm not sure what conservatives like Romney stand for. They chant 'small government" like a mantra, but when you look at the details what they mean is gutting social safety net programs like Medicare and Social Security, doing away with food inspections, gutting safety standards for water so industry can dumb as much toxins as they like ( that is also how conservative Republicans define freedom - just let business give America the shaft in the name of increasing the wealth of people who are already wealthier than 90% of the population). Conservatives deserve to lose every office they were running for. They wave the flag a lot, but have seized to stand for patriotism, and instead stand for hateful unhinged nationalism.

A Letter to Conservatives

Why Should You Vote? Visualize The Nightmare of Romney World

Why Should You Vote? Visualize The Nightmare of Romney World

My wife, Jan Schakowsky, and I are friends with a wonderful woman named Bea. Bea is now 95 years old. Bea was born in 1917.

She was born in a country where women couldn't vote. In some areas of the country, just fifty years before, slavery had been legal. Collective bargaining was not recognized under the law. Poverty was rampant -- especially among the country's oldest citizens.

Bea was born in a country where there was an unimaginable gulf between a few fabulously wealthy oligarchs, and the masses of ordinary people. It was a country where only a tiny fraction of the population ever went to college -- or even graduated from high school -- a country were hardly anyone was considered "middle class." It was a country where there were few regulations to protect health and safety on the job, no national child labor laws, no federal minimum wage, and very little to prevent corporations from recklessly destroying the environment.

Bea was born in a country where people of color were considered second-class citizens and discrimination against them was enshrined into law -- a country where gays and homosexuals could be prosecuted for their sexual orientation.

Bea was born in the United States of America.

Over her lifetime, Bea has been involved in many of the great social movements of our time -- movements that helped transform our country into the envy of the world.

She was active building the labor unions that build the middle class. won a living wage, weekends and a 40-hour work week, pensions for retirement, and the passage of Social Security and Medicare that ensured a retirement free of poverty.

She marched with the civil rights movement that gave people of color an equal status in American society.

Bea became a public school teacher and helped educate an ever-expanding number of ordinary Americans -- watching more and more of them go on to college to fulfill their dreams.

She was part of the women's movement that demanded equal status and equal pay for women -- as well as the right for women to control their own decisions about contraception and abortion.

This year, Bea -- at 95 years old -- is working on a phone bank to turn out voters for Barack Obama. She says that if Mitt Romney and the Republican Right win the election on Tuesday, they have made clear that they absolutely intend to destroy all of the things for which she has struggled her entire life. She's right.

Mitt Romney has demonstrated over the years that he has only one real core value: his own success.

Throughout his career, Mitt has demonstrated that he will do whatever is necessary to benefit himself -- and his investors. At Bain Capital he didn't flinch when it came to destroying other people's jobs and lives if it would make him and his investors money.

Now his "investors" are the oligarchs of the Republican Right -- people like the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson -- who, between them, have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to get him elected. Many are the same people who funded the Tea Party movement. Others are the Wall Street hedge fund barons whose recklessness collapsed the economy and came very close to recreating a Great Depression.

These people -- and their Tea Party allies in Congress -- have shown the country that they have no intention of compromise. They are intent upon rolling back all of the things Bea has fought for -- on sending us back to the Gilded Age. They truly believe that America would be a better place without labor unions. They want to eliminate Medicare and replace it with vouchers of ever-shrinking value that pay private insurance companies.

They want to be free to despoil the environment, do away with public education, eliminate jobs, cut wages, and continue to appropriate every dime of economic growth that is generated by our increasingly productive labor force.

As President Obama said in the second presidential debate, they want send us back to the foreign policy of the 1980's, a social policy of the 1950's and an economic policy of the 1920's. They believe in a society where the law of the jungle reigns supreme -- where you look out for yourself above all else -- where, if you believe you are your brother and sisters' keeper, that we shouldn't leave anyone behind, that we should have each other's back -- you're simply a chump.

If Mitt Romney becomes president, Republicans keep control of the House and win the few seats necessary to control the Senate, there will be nothing to restrain them from making their vision of society a reality in America -- from taking America backward to a time most of us cannot imagine.

What are some of the things a President Romney has promised to do?

    Eliminate Medicare and convert it into a voucher for private insurance -- ending the most popular and successful health care program in American history and raising out of pocket costs for seniors by6,500 a year.

    Privatize and cut Social Security - handing over the Social Security Trust fund to Wall Street and eliminating guaranteed benefits.

    Appoint -- most likely two -- Supreme Court justices who would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, outlawing abortion rights -- and most likely make the Court a firm ally of unrestrained corporate and Wall Street power for generations.

    Repeal Wall Street Reform. Return us to the pre-crash law that would allow Wall Street to once again run wild, gamble with more and more exotic financial instruments, make a fortune for itself -- and once again wreck the economy.

    Repeal ObamaCare. That by itself would end the promise that no one will ever again be bankrupt by a sudden illness. It will return us to a very recent time when someone who has a pre-existing condition can be denied insurance coverage - and that insurance companies can call the shots when it comes to your health care.

    Pass the Ryan Budget. That would mean slashing critical federal expenditures that benefit the middle class and those who aspire to the middle class, like cutting Medicaid that pays for health care for the poor, children and those in need of nursing homes or home care -- and slashing funds for education and college grants.

    Increase military spending by two trillion dollars above the amount requested by the military leadership. That might benefit big defense contractors, but it would make it practically impossible to reduce the giant federal deficit.

    Give the wealthy an additional 5 trillion dollar tax cut and pay for it by increasing the effective tax rate paid by the middle class.
    Stop funding for Planned Parenthood and any other family planning programs that we fund around the world that use their own funds to pay for abortions.

    Try to pass the "Personhood" Amendment that would effectively outlaw all abortions and many forms of hormonal contraception.

    Allow many of the same Neo-Con foreign policy advisers who got us into the Iraq War to once again take control of American foreign policy.

    Veto the Dream Act that would allow young people who were brought to America as children to apply for citizenship.

    Eliminate the Presidential Directive that prevents the deportation of Dream Act-eligible young people.

    Empower people like Kris Kobach, the Kansas Secretary of State who wrote the Arizona "papers please" law and now serves as Romney's chief adviser on immigration.

    Slash environmental regulations and investment in clean energy development.

The list goes on and on.

But worse than the individual initiatives that Romney and Ryan have made clear they would undertake, is the attitude they would bring to decision-making.

Romney's true views were laid bare in the now famous "47 percent video" where he explained how he could not convince 47% of Americans to take responsibility for their lives -- people like retirees who worked all of their lives for their Social Security and Medicare -- people like veterans who risked their lives for the country -- people like the disabled -- in fact, pretty much anyone who doesn't agree with his "we're all in this alone" view of American society.

If Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are elected on Tuesday, they will turn back the clock on progress in America. If they are allowed to do so by a Republican House and Senate, they would return us to a time we could scarcely imagine.

For those who believe in a society where we're all in this together, Tuesday's election is the mother of all battles.

Every conservative Republican president since Nixon has moved further and further to the extreme Right. Many thought George W. Bush would be the last radical right-wing president. Most Americans saw that radical conservatives had lied us into a $3 trillion dollar war and their accumulated economic policies were the cause of the worse economic crash since 1929 - Americans lost between $14 and $17 trillion dollars of their wealth. yet somehow here we are again with a clueless plutocrat that wants to mold the USA into 17th century France, with the overlords at the top and everyone else working hard just to get survive.

Obama Gains Edge in Campaign's Final Days - still every vote is needed.

Romney staff refusing to let frostbitten children leave PA rally

Conservatives Who Think That Women Should Have Fewer Rights Than Men May Cost Republicans Victory, But Save America From A Radical Agenda

Conservatives Who Think That Women Should Have Fewer Rights Than Men May Cost Republicans Victory, But Save America From A Radical Agenda

What if misogyny ends up costing Republicans the Senate? Judging by the polls in the final days before the election, this is not a crazy proposition — especially if “gaffes” on abortion, rape and contraception are equated by the electorate with extremism, repelling even ideologically sympathetic voters.

Just look at Indiana, a state that is choosing between two “pro-life” candidates, one of whom is a Democrat who has voted for House Republicans’ most restrictive legislation on reproductive rights. Still, Joe Donnelly managed to avoid doing what Richard Mourdock did – getting famous for talking insensitively about rape. They’ve been tied or within inches of each other for weeks, but as of today, the first post-rape-comment poll, Mourdock is down 11 points. Meanwhile, Mourdock’s rape-talking fellow traveler in Missouri, Senate candidate Todd Akin, is locked in a race that was never supposed to be competitive, and a cash infusion may come too late to save him. And in Connecticut and Massachusetts, both abortion and contraception have been used to pummel relatively moderate Republicans with the ever-rightward agenda of the national party, and for that reason and more, it’s looking like Democrats will prevail.

This is about more than the so-called gender gap, though women do tend to vote disproportionately to our share in the population and historically favor Democrats. And it’s about more than “pro-life” and “pro-choice,” where, at least as far as those fuzzy words go, the former has a slight edge in polling. When abortion conversations turn to rape, exceptions for which are broadly, if inconsistently, supported by voters, they also suddenly become about a broader callousness and indifference to suffering, one that jibes with messaging about slashing Medicare and Medicaid. Voters drifting away from Mourdock would probably never use the word “misogyny,” but as I’ve said, as the Republican agenda on sex and reproduction gets explained in full, we’re hearing very little about compassion for fetal life and a lot about women having sex.

Pro-choice activists have been saying this for years, but didn’t get much credence until elected Republicans gave a larger platform for marginal and largely discredited views — rape victims can’t get pregnant (Akin); exceptions to save a woman’s life are never needed (Rep. Joe Walsh); consensual sex, and getting pregnant from it, is as shameful as rape (GOP Senate candidate Tom Smith, who hasn’t been able to close the deal in Pennsylvania). The same goes for defunding Planned Parenthood and repealing Obamacare, or at the very least getting rid of the birth control coverage in it — these days, virtually uncontested across Republicans in office or running for it. That may work well in a House race, but it’s proving a tougher sell statewide — and, judging by Romney’s ads soft-pedaling his stances on abortion and contraception, nationally as well.

If you want to know where this all came from or where it’s going, check out Emily Bazelon’s profile of the Americans United for Life president in the New York  Times magazine. AUL has been as influential as any group in crafting the state-level abortion restrictions and rhetoric around them, taking the murky anti-choice rhetoric and mainstreaming it in a palatable and reasonable-sounding way. Yoest “believes that embryos have legal rights and opposes birth control, like the IUD, that she thinks ‘has life-ending properties.’” (She can think that, but it doesn’t make it medically accurate.) She refuses to discuss a study showing that the abortion rate drops dramatically when you make long-acting reversible birth control — like the IUD — free to women who want it, mimicking Obamacare’s full coverage under insurance. And yet she knows that when you talk about birth control and abortion as connected to women’s reproductive and sexual autonomy, the anti-choice side loses. She said as much on PBS, Bazelon notes: ““It’s really a red herring that the abortion lobby likes to bring up by conflating abortion and birth control … Because that would be, frankly, carrying water for the other side to allow them to redefine the issue in that way.”

Instead of outright repealing the 19th Amendment( guaranteeing women the right to vote) and other progressive legislation that have leveled the playing field over the years in one fail swoop, Republicans have been pretty successful in chipping away at the rights of women to be full citizens. And Mittens is no friend to more than have the country. He thinks conservatives and big government should control women,Top 6 Lies Romney Has Told Women in an Election Season Full of Whoppers, Mitt has assembled a binder full of bs on issues that matter to more than half the population

Republicans are resorting to some weird extortion to get the vote, The GOP Will Destroy America If We Reelect Obama, So We Must Let the GOP Win

Conservative Republican Strategist Defends Romney’s Plan To Dismantle FEMA

Conservative Republican Strategist Defends Mitt Romney’s Plan To Dismantle FEMA

Mitt Romney’s past comments about dismantling FEMA and privatizing disaster relief have come back to haunt him as Hurricane Sandy begins to wreak havoc on the East Coast. Still, one Republican strategist, Ron Bonjean, agrees with him. On CNN Monday morning, Bonjean, a private consultant who advises GOP congressional leaders, defended Romney, suggesting that even talking about federal disaster relief is politically toxic:

    Most people don’t have a positive impression of FEMA and I think Mitt Romney was right on the button. But I don’t think anybody cares about that right now. I think people care about whether or not their power’s on, whether or not their basement’s going to be flooded. And I think that if the president gets too far in front of this and something goes wrong, people are going to remember, hey, my power’s not out, and the president’s talking about FEMA. I’m not a real big fan of FEMA. That could sway their vote.


Sandy has already caused severe flooding in the Northeast, hours before the worst of the storm is projected to hit. President Obama has declared a state of emergency in 7 states and DC after several governors’ urgent requests for federal aid to combat the storm. Though Bonjean fails to make the connection between FEMA’s services and people worrying about their power going out, the agency has already dispatched emergency power teams to try to reinforce vulnerable power grids before the storm hits and provided hundreds of generators and other back-up power sources. Americans are unfortunately well-acquainted with the agency, despite Bonjean’s insistence that they “don’t care” about it; a recent study of FEMA data found that, since 2006, 4 out of 5 Americans have been affected by weather-related disasters.

No one wants government that is too big, that is just common sense. Conservative Republicans have take that to the wacko extreme, they just plain do not want government to work. Like Exxon, BP, chemical, mining and insurance companies always do the right thing and are never unethical or inefficient. To be a conservative takes tremendous powers of denial about reality.

Morally Corrupt Romney campaign falsely training Wisc. poll watchers that IDs ‘must include photo’

Never let a tragedy go unexploited: Sleazebag Romney playing campaign videos at ‘storm relief events’

What is a Nightmare? The Day After Morally Bankrupt Mitt Romney is Elected

What is a Nightmare? The Day After Morally Bankrupt Mitt Romney is Elected

Despite the difficulty nailing down a chameleon-like candidate's positions, we've tried to discern some of the economic measures that Romney would likely champion if he wins. We'll follow up with a look at non-economic policies in the coming days.

1. The Romney-Ryan Budget

Let's assume, for the moment, that the Republicans take the Senate.

Mitt Romney has at times embraced Paul Ryan's “roadmap [3],” and he's also distanced himself from it. But there will be quite a bit of pressure from conservative activists and the Republican House to enact something along the lines of the roadmap.

There are two things to understand about Paul Ryan's budget. First, it has been carefully written so that most of its provisions can be passed under a process known as budget reconciliation, which requires only a simple majority of votes in the Senate. Second, it is a right-wing fantasy that, if enacted as written, would trigger a major drop in employment and send the economy into a tailspin. Its cuts are so deep, and would effect so many constituents – including traditionally Republican constituents – that it would have to be modified. It's one thing to campaign on such a plan and another to govern with it.

What does it do? According to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities [4], “by 2050, most of the federal government aside from Social Security, healthcare and defense would cease to exist, according to figures in a Congressional Budget Office analysis.”

    The CBO report, prepared at Chairman Ryan’s request, shows that Ryan’s budget path would shrink federal expenditures for everything other than Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and interest payments to just 3¾ percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) by 2050. Since, as CBO notes, “spending for defense alone has not been lower than 3 percent of GDP in any year [since World War II]” and Ryan seeks a high level of defense spending — he increases defense funding by $228 billion over the next ten years above the pre-sequestration baseline — the rest of government would largely have to disappear. That includes everything from veterans’ programs to medical and scientific research, highways, education, nearly all programs for low-income families and individuals other than Medicaid, national parks, border patrols, protection of food safety and the water supply, law enforcement, and the like.

Ryan has already modified his plan in response to the outcry over a CBO analysis that found future retirees would face $6,400 more in out-of-pocket healthcare costs. We can expect further modifications because no Republican administration is actually going to slash veterans' benefits to the bone, to name just one example. It's untenable, but that doesn't mean President Romney wouldn't push through something moderately less damaging.

2. Tax Cuts or rewarding rich people for being rich, not for work.

Romney promises to slash taxes by 20 percent across the board, maintain deductions enjoyed by the middle class and not decrease the share of taxes paid by the wealthy (or anyone else). We know Romney's math simply doesn't work [5] – it's impossible. http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3708

But while the whole doesn't add up, Romney could get a number of those provisions passed, like eliminating the inheritance tax, the Alternative Minimum Tax (which hits high earners), and certainly keeping the “Bush tax cuts” on income investment in place.

When a candidate presents a plan that literally does not add up, it's not possible to predict what he'd do with any specificity once in office. Based on the recent history of GOP governance, the sharp right turn the party's taken in recent years and Mitt Romney's own background, one can be reasonably confident that Romney would cut taxes on high earners and corporations, but projecting by how much – and whether it would be financed through deficits, additional cuts or higher taxes on the middle class – is an exercise in reading the tea leaves.

3. ObamaCare

Mitt Romney has pledged to repeal ObamaCare and replace it with a plan that, while light on details, would be centered around health savings accounts and insurance deregulation. Employers would throw some cash into the accounts, people would get some tax breaks and then the miracle of the free market will supposedly swoop in and fix our broken healthcare system.

Repealing ObamaCare may not be as cut-and-dried as the Republican base has been led to believe, however. Contrary to the mythology surrounding the program, the Congressional Budget Office projects ObamaCare to reduce the deficit by hundreds of billions of dollars in the coming decade and beyond. According to Senate rules now in effect, the reconciliation process cannot be used to pass anything that increases the budget deficit 10 years from now.

There are ways to get around procedural rules, and failing that, the executive branch has a lot of discretion in terms of implementation. A Romney adviser told Politico [6] that if the Dems hold the Senate, “we would just have to try to grind out changes by starving ObamaCare through regulations.”

If Romney is able to repeal ObamaCare and replace it with his plan, a study by the Commonwealth Fund [7] projects that it will leave 72 million uninsured by 2022 – 45 million more than is projected under ObamaCare.
A tragic irony is that Romney's healthcare plan would likely prove to be a fatal blow [8] to the best thing he's ever accomplished in public service – the “RomneyCare” scheme in Massachussetts.

4. Medicare

There is little doubt that Mitt Romney would pursue a variant of Paul Ryan's plan to voucherize Medicare for those who retire after a given date (in Ryan's plan it's 2023). Seniors would at first get a voucher sufficient to cover the cost of a private insurance plan comparable to Medicare. But the value of that voucher would only increase by the rate of overall economic growth plus 0.5 percent. The problem is that healthcare costs grow a lot faster. The difference would be borne by seniors themselves – it does nothing to contain healthcare costs, it just shifts them from the government to the backs of individuals.

When the CBO scored Ryan's first plan in 2011, it found that seniors would face an additional $6,400 in out-of-pocket expenses by 2022. After Democrats jumped on that figure, Ryan released a new plan, which called for Congress to come up with some unspecified remedy. CBO wasn't able to score it, but said [9] “beneficiaries might face higher costs.”

Ryan would also raise the retirement age to 67, a measure Romney has endorsed.

It's entirely possible that a President Romney would sweeten the deal a bit to make those numbers look better in the medium-term, but any voucher plan that doesn't keep up with the actual increase in healthcare costs achieves the same thing -- eventually shifting part of the burden onto seniors.

5. Medicaid

While Medicare has received the most attention, Ryan's plan for Medicaid, which Mitt Romney has endorsed, would be a more devastating hit to our threadbare social safety net.

Ryan's plan would turn Medicaid into a block-grant program, cap its funding – cutting $800 billion from the program over the next decade -- and then send it to the states to administer. The first problem is that states – presumably red states – would be free to make it harder to qualify, and the second is that the program wouldn't have the funding flexibility to enroll more people during economic downturns.

Medicaid serves 60 million Americans, about 10 million more than Medicare. Most people think Medicaid only serves the poor, but Medicaid is indespensible for the disabled, especially the severely diabled who require a lot of care. It also covers Medicare's out-of-pocket expenses for retirees with limited incomes.

6. Social Security

George W. Bush learned the hard way that privatizing Social Security is a great way to make voters hate you. That's why the Ryan plan is quite vague. It calls for "action on Social Security by requiring both the President and the Congress to put forward specific ideas and legislation to ensure the sustainable solvency of this critical program." The budget does tout "reforms that take into account increases in longevity, to arrest the demographic problems that are undermining Social Security's finances” – which sounds a lot like raising the retirement age.

7. State Children's Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP)

S-CHIP is likely to be hit hard under a Romney administration if he has a Republican Congress. Under the Ryan plan, S-CHIP could only increase by the rate of inflation, which again, is much slower than the projected rate of healthcare cost inflation. The CBO looked at Medicaid and S-CHIP together, and found that spending on the two programs would be about 70 percent less than currently projected by the year 2050 under Ryan's "roadmap."

8. The Rest

If the Republicans run the field in a big win, expect a lot of talk about a constitutional amendment capping federal spending at a given share of our gross domestic product. It will only be talk. It's a right-wing fantasy of a policy that can only be enacted with a constitutional amendment, which isn't going to happen.

That doesn't mean there won't be deep, deep cuts to non-defense discretionary spending under a Romney administration. Under the Ryan plan, non-defense discretionary spending would be on a downward trajectory leading to 39 percent less funding than currently projected by the year 2040. What is “non-defense discretionary spending”? Well, about 40 percent is education, training and research, and the rest is veterans' programs, various programs for low-income families, public safety and disaster response and the like. It's basically government, absent the Pentagon budget, Social Security and Medicare.

9. If Dems Have 40-50 Seats in Senate (With Ryan the Tie-Breaking Vote)

Although he has been vocal in his opposition in the past [10], there's a good chance that as Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, might embrace filibuster reform – dropping the number of votes needed to overcome a filibuster from 60 -- if the Dems hold a minority in the upper chamber.

Either way, one thing not to expect in this scenario is Senate Democrats turning the tables on the GOP and blocking their legislative agenda at every turn. That's a strategy the Republicans can undertake because their overarching narrative is that governent doesn't do anything right – it ultimately works to their benefit when they can “prove” that theory by rendering Congress incapable of action. Democrats still adhere to the idea that good governance can improve our society, so they can't play the same game and get away with it.

10. If Dems Hold Senate

If the Dems hold the Senate they will act as a firewall against the radical restructuring of the public sector promised by the Ryan budget.

That means maintaining the status quo, more or less, at least through 2014, with one painful exception. Cheered on by the Beltway media, the Democrats, having embraced the non-existent recommendations of the Simpson-Bowles commission (the chairmen drafted recommendations but the gang of 18 didn't vote to approve them), would almost certainly be willing to strike a “grand bargain” with President Romney along those lines.

The only question is whether Speaker Boehner (or Cantor?) would have any trouble coming up with the votes for a “balanced” deficit reduction deal – for a deal that raises some new revenues. If history is any guide, even the most ideological House Republicans will support a Republican president in such an effort.

Currently, non-defense discretionary spending is expected to hit its lowest level since 1962, and Simpson-Bowles would cut deeper still – with a 3:1 ratio of spending cuts to tax increases. That means programs that help the poor and middle class will be on the chopping block. Simpson-Bowles also called for a hike in the Social Security retirement age, despite the fact that life expectancies have only increased significantly for the well-to-do who don't rely on the program as heavily as working people and the poor.

The U.S. is still the richest nation in the world ( maybe 2nd, some economists think China passed us) yet Romney-Ryan would have half the population living in their own 3rd world like conditions. Conservatives talk about imgiinary death panels - the reality is that a conservative president and a conservative Congress will literary mean the deaths of millions of senior citizens and disabled. besides their wacky UnAmerican ideology, why are conservatives going to try and pass this kind of cruel legislation/ Because they do not want to rise taxes on billionaires who are complaining they're not making enough money. Seriously. These same billionaires and multimillionaires are also threatening to fire employees if they do not vote for immoral Mitt.

Paul Ryan Takes a Side in the War on Poverty: He's Against What Works

Condi Rice Pours Cold Water On ‘Benghazi-Gate’

The Republican propaganda channel and Anti-American Fox New's John Roberts Whitewashes Romney's Position On Auto Rescue

What Would a Mitt Romney Economy Look Like, Stealing From The Working Class To Give More to The Wealthy

Does Mitt Romney hate The USA. He has created more jobs in other countries than he has in America

What Would a Mitt Romney Economy Look Like, Stealing From The Working Class To Give More to The Wealthy

Mitt Romney’s best argument on the campaign trail has been simple: Under President Obama, the American economy has remained excruciatingly weak, far underperforming the White House’s own projections.

That’s a fair criticism.

But Obama’s best response could be this: If you want to see how Romney’s economic policies would work out, take a look at Europe. And weep.

In the last few years, Germany and Britain, in particular, have implemented precisely the policies that Romney favors, and they have been richly praised by Republicans here as a result. Yet these days those economies seem, to use a German technical term, kaput.

Is Europe a fair comparison? Well, Republicans seem to think so, because they came up with it. In the last few years, they’ve repeatedly cited Republican-style austerity in places like Germany and Britain as a model for America.

Let’s dial back the time machine and listen up:

“Europe is already setting an example for the U.S.,” Representative Kenny Marchant, a Texas Republican, said in 2010. (You know things are bad when a Texas Republican is calling for Americans to study at the feet of those socialist Europeans.)

The same year, Karl Rove praised European austerity as a model for America and approvingly quoted the leader of the European Central Bank as saying: “The idea that austerity measures could trigger stagnation is incorrect.”

Representative Steve King of Iowa, another Republican, praised Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany for preaching austerity and said: “It ought to hit home to our president of the United States. It ought to hit all of us here in this country.”

“The president should learn a lesson from the ‘German Miracle,’ ” Representative Joe Wilson of South Carolina, a Republican, urged on the House floor in July 2011.

Also in 2011, Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the top Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, denounced Obama’s economic management and said: “We need a budget with a bold vision — like those unveiled in Britain and New Jersey.”

O.K. Let’s see how that’s working out.

New Jersey isn’t overseas, but since Sessions and many other Republicans have hailed it as a shining model of austerity, let’s start there. New Jersey ranked 47th in economic growth last year. When Gov. Chris Christie took office in 2010 and began to impose austerity measures, New Jersey ranked 35th in its unemployment rate; now it ranks 48th.

Senator Sessions, do we really aspire for the same in America as a whole?

Something similar has happened internationally. The International Monetary Fund this month downgraded its estimates for global economic growth, with only one major bright spot in the West. That would be the United States, expected to grow a bit more than 2 percent this year and next.

In contrast, Europe’s economy is expected to shrink this year and have negligible growth next year. The I.M.F. projects that Germany will grow less than 1 percent this year and next, while Britain’s economy is contracting this year.

Karl Rove, that sounds a lot like stagnation to me.

All this is exactly what economic textbooks predicted. Since Keynes, it’s been understood that, in a downturn, governments should go into deficit to stimulate demand; that’s how we got out of the Great Depression. And recent European data and I.M.F. analyses underscore that austerity in the middle of a downturn not only doesn’t help but leads to even higher ratios of debt to economic output.

So, yes, Republicans have a legitimate point about the long-term need to curb deficits and entitlement growth. But, no, it isn’t reasonable for Republicans to advocate austerity in the middle of a downturn. On that, they’re empirically wrong.

If there were still doubt about this, we’ve had a lovely natural experiment in the last few years, as the Republicans in previous years were happy to point out. All industrialized countries experienced similar slowdowns, and the United States under Obama chose a massive stimulus while Germany and Britain chose Republican-endorsed austerity.

Neither approach worked brilliantly. Obama’s initial economic stimulus created at least 1.4 million jobs, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. But that wasn’t enough, and it was partly negated by austerity in state and local governments.

Still, America’s economy is now the fastest growing among major countries in the West, and Britain’s is shrinking. Which would you prefer?

I’m not suggesting Obama distribute bumper stickers saying: “It Could Be Worse.” He might want to stick with: “Osama’s Dead and G.M. Is Alive.”

Yes, there are differences between Europe and America. But Republicans were right to call attention to this empirical experiment.

The results are in. And, as Representative King suggested, the lessons “ought to hit all of us here in this country.”

If a modern radical political movement - like modern conservatism that hates freedom, democracy, genuinely competitive markets and most of all hates American workers for having any rights at all - wanted to sell its wacky agenda to the public it would not admit it hates the USA. No, on the contrary it would wrap up its radicalism in the flag, in faux patriotism. Conservative Republicans have cleverly used the tools of democracy to destroy in little pieces at a time. You don't have to be smart to be clever. You just have to tap into some base emotions and superstitions, while cultivating contempt for reality based studies, reality based history and reality based public policy.

 Top Six Lies Romney Has Told Women in This Election Cycle an Election Season Full of Whoppers

Reality TV has-been (and congressman) Rep. Sean Duffy (R-WI)  would totally love Planned Parenthood except ...

The Economist Pounds Romney on the Economy

Mitt Romney Endorsed Senate Candidate Richard Mourdock (R-IN) Who Calls Rape Pregnancies A ‘Gift From God’

Inside Bain's Chinese Sensata Factories (they used to be in Illinois), Where Workers Put in 12-Hour Days for $.99-$1.35 an hr

President Obama handled a tough situation fairly well; Romney offers no credible alternative

Mitt Romney Endorsed Senate Candidate Richard Mourdock (R-IN) Who Calls Calls Rape Pregnancies A ‘Gift From God’

Mitt Romney Endorsed Senate Candidate Richard Mourdock (R-IN) Who Calls Calls Rape Pregnancies A ‘Gift From God’

NEW ALBANY, Indiana — At a debate this evening with his Democratic opponent Rep. Joe Donnelly (D-IN), Indiana GOP Senate candidate Richard Mourdock claimed that raped women should be forced to carry their rapist’s baby to term because their forced pregnancy is a “gift from God”:

    I believe life begins at conception. The only exception I have for to have an abortion is in the case of the life of the mother. I struggled with myself for a long time but I came to realize life is that gift from God, even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape. It is something that God intended to happen.



Throughout his campaign, Mourdock has left no doubt that he believes in a sacred right to life that begins at conception and ends at birth. Earlier this year, Mourdock mocked the very idea that Social Security and Medicare — programs that millions of seniors depend on to save their lives — are even constitutional.

Update

In his post-debate press conference, Mourdock repeatedly asserted that he believes “God creates life” but, seemingly contradicting his own remarks from the debate, said God does not “pre-ordain[] rape.”

“What I said was, in answering the question form my position of faith, I said I believe that God creates life. I believe that as wholly and as fully as I can believe it. That God creates life,” Mourdock said. “Are you trying to suggest that somehow I think that God pre-ordained rape? No, I don’t think that. That’s sick. Twisted. That’s not even close to what I said. What I said is that God creates life.”

Mourdock did, however, re-assert his belief that abortion should be illegal even for victims of rape and incest.

“I’ve said that consistently,” Mourdock said. “I’ve said that for a long, long time.”

Watch his post-debate comments:

Update

Earlier this week, GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney starred in an ad calling upon Indiana voters to “join me in supporting Richard Mourdock for U.S. Senate.” This is the first time this election that Romney cut such an ad for a fellow Republican candidate.

So voting for Mitt Romney or  Richard Mourdock (R-IN) is not too different from voting for Islamic fundamentalists who believe that men and their interpretation of what God wants should be the culture and law that America lives under. Conservatives in Iran and Indiana seems to think that women are only three-fifths a person and thus should not have the same rights as men.

Conservative Media Pundits Help Romney Hide His Opposition To The Successful Auto Rescue. Romney's editorial attacking the rescue of the American auto industry might be too widely known for even the well oiled Republican propaganda machine to cover-up.

The ultra radical conservative Koch brothers and an assortment of wacky right-wing think tanks are determined to destroy Social Security because they believe it is part of a communist plot to take over America.

A Few Good Reasons Not To Vote Romney or For Any Conservative Republican

Where Mittens puts his money

A Few Good Reasons Not To Vote Romney or For Any Conservative Republican

There is no shortage of reasons not to vote Republican. The litany includes tax cuts for the rich, cutbacks in government programs, obstructing needed legislation, disregard for the environment, denial of women's and other human rights, military escalation.

But the following five reasons have to do with money -- specifically, who's paying for the $1 trillion of annual tax savings and tax avoidance for the super-rich? And who's paying for the $1 trillion of national security to protect their growing fortunes? The Republicans want that money to come from the rest of us.

1. Economic Darwinism -- Republicans want the Poor to Pay

Paul Ryan's proposed budget would take about a half-trillion dollars a year from programs that support the poor. This is a continuation of a 15-year shredding of the safety net by Republicans. The GOP-controlled Congress of Bill Clinton created Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), which has experienced a 60% drop in its caseload despite growing poverty, and which, according to the Urban Institute, provides "maximum benefits [that] even in the more generous states were far below the federal poverty level of $1,525 a month for a family of three."

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), another vital program that serves 50 million "food insecure" Americans, would be cut by $16 billion under the House version of the Farm Bill. The average recipient currently gets $4.30 a day for food.

Republicans also voted to end the Child Tax Credit, and favor a tax plan that would eliminate the Earned Income Tax Credit.

2. Payroll Tax -- Republicans want the Middle Class to Pay

Encouraged by the steady Republican demand for lower corporate tax rates, big business has effected a stunning shift in taxpaying responsibility over the years, from corporate income tax to worker payroll tax. For every dollar of payroll tax paid in the 1950s, corporations paid three dollars. Now it's 22 cents.

It's gotten worse in recent years, as corporations decided to drastically cut their tax rates after the start of the recession. After paying an average of 22.5% from 1987 to 2008, they've paid an annual rate of 10% since. This represents a sudden $250 billion annual loss in taxes.

Republicans claim that almost half of Americans don't pay taxes. But when payroll and state and local taxes are considered, middle-income Americans pay at about the same rate as the highest earners. Only about 17% of households paid no federal income tax or payroll tax in 2009. And average workers get little help from people who make most of the money. Because of the $110,000 cutoff for payroll tax deductions, the richest 10% of Americans save $150 billion a year in taxes.

3. Job Shrinkage -- Republicans want Young People to Pay

The jobs that exist for young Americans are paying much less than just a few years ago. During and after the recession, according to the National Employment Law Project, low-wage jobs ($7.69 to $13.83 per hour) dropped by 21 percent, and then grew back at a 58 percent rate. Mid-wage jobs ($13.84 to $21.13 per hour) dropped by 60 percent and grew back at a 22 percent rate. In other words, the median wage is falling fast.

Unemployment for workers under 25 stands at 16.4 percent, twice the national average. Half of recent college graduates are jobless or underemployed.

Yet Republicans killed a jobs bill that was supported by two-thirds of the public.

An academic study of employment data over 64 years found that an average of two million jobs per year were created under Democratic presidents, compared to one million under Republican presidents. Similar results were reported by the Bloomberg Government Barometer.

4. Retirement Planning -- Republicans want the Seniors to Pay

There's a common misconception in our country that most seniors are financially secure. Actually, Census data reveals that elderly people experience greater inequality than any other population group, with the poorest one-fifth receiving just 5.5% of the group's total resources, while the wealthiest one-fifth receives 46%.

The senior wealth gap is further evidenced by data during the great 30-year surge in inequality. The average over-60 wealth was five times greater than the median in 1995, as would be expected with a small percentage of ultra-high-net-worth individuals and a great majority of low-wealth people. Further confirmation comes from 2004 Harvard data that shows rising inequality within all age groups, including the elderly. Indeed, an MIT study found that about 46% of U.S. senior citizens have less than $10,000 in financial assets when they die.

For the vast majority of seniors, Social Security has been life-sustaining, accounting for 55% of their annual income. Because of this successful and popular program, the senior poverty rate has dropped from 50% to 10%, and due to life-long contributions from working Americans the program has a $2.7 trillion surplus while contributing nothing to the deficit. Yet Republicans want to undo it.

5. Public Fire Sale -- Republicans want Society to Pay

The common good is threatened by the Republican disdain for public resources. Drilling and mining and pipeline construction continues on public lands, and the House of Representatives has voted over 100 times since 2011 to subsidize the oil and gas industry while weakening environmental, public health, and safety requirements. The "land grab" is pitting corporate muscle against citizens' rights.

Sadly, most of America envisions a new era of energy independence that increases our world-leading consumption of energy while depending on a proliferation of dirty technologies to extract it. Threats of methane emissions, water pollution, and earthquake activity don't deter the fossil fuel enthusiasts.

It gets worse. Republicans are eager to sell public land. Paul Ryan's "Path to Prosperity" proposes to sell millions of acres of "unneeded federal land" and billions of dollars worth of federal assets. His running mate Mitt Romney admits that he doesn't know "what the purpose is" of public lands.

That brings us to the heart of the reasons not to vote Republican. Their reckless belief in the free market, and their dependency on corporatization and privatization to run the country, means that middle-class Americans keep paying for the fabulously wealthy people at the top who think they deserve everything they've taken from society.

 Fellow bloggers might consider re-posting this article on their blogs and sending it to everyone on their e-mail list. Conservatism has come to mean remaking the USA into very much what old European monarchies looked like. The vast majority of the population relegated to be being wage slaves for their wealthy overlords, with very little chance to move up the economic ladder, no matter how hard you work.

Right-Wing Media Ignores President Obama's Plan For Economic Growth. Sure unemployment figures could be better. Guess which party has pulled very legislative trick to stop three job creation bills. Conservatives say that government does not create jobs, yet Romney claims he is a veritable job wizard that will create jobs if elected. Go figure on how the conservative mind reconciles the hypocrisy of stalling jobs bills, saying government cannot create jobs and the claim they will use government to create jobs.

Mitt Romney Supporters Show Love For China, Hatred For American Workers

Republicans Are Shamelessly Immoral, The Embassy Attacks in Libya Are The Iranian Style Crisis Immoral Mitt Was Hoping For

Is Romney really a job creator? Ronald Reagan’s budget director, David Stockman, takes a scalpel to the claims

Is Romney really a job creator? Ronald Reagan’s budget director, David Stockman, takes a scalpel to the claims

Bain Capital is a product of the Great Deformation. It has garnered fabulous winnings through leveraged speculation in financial markets that have been perverted and deformed by decades of money printing and Wall Street coddling by the Fed. So Bain’s billions of profits were not rewards for capitalist creation; they were mainly windfalls collected from gambling in markets that were rigged to rise.
Romney

Mitt Romney was not a businessman; He was a master financial speculator who bought, sold, flipped, and stripped businesses.

Nevertheless, Mitt Romney claims that his essential qualification to be president is grounded in his 15 years as head of Bain Capital, from 1984 through early 1999. According to the campaign’s narrative, it was then that he became immersed in the toils of business enterprise, learning along the way the true secrets of how to grow the economy and create jobs. The fact that Bain’s returns reputedly averaged more than 50 percent annually during this period is purportedly proof of the case—real-world validation that Romney not only was a striking business success but also has been uniquely trained and seasoned for the task of restarting the nation’s sputtering engines of capitalism.

Except Mitt Romney was not a businessman; he was a master financial speculator who bought, sold, flipped, and stripped businesses. He did not build enterprises the old-fashioned way—out of inspiration, perspiration, and a long slog in the free market fostering a new product, service, or process of production. Instead, he spent his 15 years raising debt in prodigious amounts on Wall Street so that Bain could purchase the pots and pans and castoffs of corporate America, leverage them to the hilt, gussy them up as reborn “roll-ups,” and then deliver them back to Wall Street for resale—the faster the better.

That is the modus operandi of the leveraged-buyout business, and in an honest free-market economy, there wouldn’t be much scope for it because it creates little of economic value. But we have a rigged system—a regime of crony capitalism—where the tax code heavily favors debt and capital gains, and the central bank purposefully enables rampant speculation by propping up the price of financial assets and battering down the cost of leveraged finance.

So the vast outpouring of LBOs in recent decades has been the consequence of bad policy, not the product of capitalist enterprise. I know this from 17 years of experience doing leveraged buyouts at one of the pioneering private-equity houses, Blackstone, and then my own firm. I know the pitfalls of private equity. The whole business was about maximizing debt, extracting cash, cutting head counts, skimping on capital spending, outsourcing production, and dressing up the deal for the earliest, highest-profit exit possible. Occasionally, we did invest in genuine growth companies, but without cheap debt and deep tax subsidies, most deals would not make economic sense.

VICTORY FROM THE JAWS OF DEFEAT

The startling fact is that four of the 10 Bain Capital home runs ended up in bankruptcy, and for an obvious reason: Bain got its money out at the top of the Greenspan boom in the late 1990s and then these companies hit the wall during the 2000-02 downturn, weighed down by the massive load of debt Bain had bequeathed them. In fact, nearly $600 million, or one third of the profits earned by the home-run companies, had been extracted from the hide of these four eventual debt zombies.

The most emblematic among them was a roll-up deal focused on down-in-the-mouth department stores and apparel chains that were falling by the wayside in small-town America due to the arrival of Wal-Mart and the big-box retailers. Bain invested $10 million in 1988 and nine years later took out 18X its money—that is, a $175 million profit.

Fittingly, Stage Stores Inc. was the last deal underwritten by the Drexel-Milken junk-bond machine before its demise. And the $300 million raised for this incipient LBO was exactly the kind of slush fund that Milken’s stable of takeover artists had used to acquire corporate castoffs and other bedraggled pots and pans that got rechristened as “growth” companies.

During the next eight years, Bain slogged it out, accumulating about 300 small Main Street storefronts under such forgettable banners as Royal Palais, Bealls, and Fashion Bar. Yet the company wasn’t making much headway. By 1996, it had paid back none of the Milken debt and was only earning $14 million—exactly what it had generated back in 1992 on half the number of stores.

In the spring of 1997, when Chairman Greenspan decided that “irrational exuberance” was not such a worrisome thing, Bain Capital decided to indulge, too. It caused Stage Stores Inc.—which was already publicly traded—to raise $300 million of new junk bonds and used the proceeds to buy a faltering 250-store chain of family clothing stores called C.R. Anthony.

These 12,000-square-foot cracker-box stores sold mid-market shoes, shirts, and dresses right in Wal-Mart’s wheelhouse. In hot pursuit of “synergies,” Bain promptly rebranded these Anthony stores to the purportedly more compelling Stage and Bealls banners. While the name change did nothing to ward off the grim reaper from Bentonville, it suddenly gave Stage Stores Inc. the “growth” story that Greenspan’s bull market craved. Within five months of this ostensibly “transformative” deal and long before the results of the ritual “synergies” and “rebranding” could be determined, the company’s stock price had doubled. Bain Capital and its partner, Goldman Sachs, quickly unloaded their shares at the aforementioned 18X gain.

As a matter of plain fact, the “transformative” C.R. Anthony deal was a bull-market scam. Almost immediately, results headed south. After growing 4 percent during the year of Bain’s quick 1997 exit, same-store sales turned to a negative 3 percent in 1998 and negative 7 percent in 1999, and were still falling when Stage Stores Inc. filed for bankruptcy shortly thereafter. The company hemorrhaged $150 million of negative cash flow during 1998-99—that is, during the two years after Bain and Goldman got out of Dodge City.

Bain Capital subsequently claimed the company was “a growing, successful and consistently profitable company during the nine years we owned it” but then immediately ran into “operating problems.” That was a doozy by any other name but typical of the standard private-equity narrative that confuses speculators’ timing with real value creation on the free market. The fact is, the bad inventory and vastly overstated assets that took the company down did not suddenly materialize out of the blue during the 24 months after Bain’s exit: they were actually the result of financial-engineering games from the very beginning.

Worse still, the Stage Stores deal embodied all of the hidden leverage that had become par for the course in the era of bubble finance. When the crunch came, the company had no assets to fall back on because Bain had hocked virtually everything; it sold all the company’s credit-card receivables to a third party, and among its 650 stores it owned exactly three! By my calculation, the capitalized debt embedded in its store leases was nearly $750 million and when added to its disclosed balance-sheet debt, the company’s true debt of was $1.3 billion or a devastating 25X its peak-year free cash flow.

The bankruptcy forced the closure of about 250—or 40 percent—of the company’s stores and the loss of about 5,000 jobs. Yet the moral of the Stage Stores saga is not simply that in this instance Bain Capital was a jobs destroyer, not a jobs creator. The larger point is that it is actually a tale of Wall Street speculators toying with Main Street properties in defiance of sound finance—an anti-Schumpeterian project that used state-subsidized debt to milk cash from stores that would not have otherwise survived on the free market.

Bain’s acclaimed success with another retailer—Staples—is also not what it is touted to be. Tom Stemberg was a visionary entrepreneur who got $5 million of seed money from Bain in 1986 when it was still in the venture-capital business; the Milken-style LBO schemes came later. As it happened, Bain exited the Staples deal after only a few years with a $15 million profit, a rounding error in the scheme of things.

Stemberg made Staples a free-market success, a relentless generator of efficiency in the retail distribution of office supplies. Yet this honest capitalist efficiency, which benefited millions of customers, was achieved by a rampage of job destruction among tens of thousands of Main Street stationery and office-supplies stores and other traditional distributors. These now-defunct operations could not compete with Staples due to their high labor costs per dollar of sales—including upstream labor expense in the traditional, inefficient wholesale and distribution layers that stood behind Main Street retailers.

Ironically, the businesses and jobs that Staples eliminated were the office-supply counterparts of the cracker-box stores selling shoes, shirts, and dresses that Bain kept on artificial life-support at Stage Stores Inc. At length, Wal-Mart eliminated these jobs and replaced them with back-of–the-store automation and front-end part-timers, as did Staples, which now has 40,000 part-time employees out of its approximate 90,000 total head count. The pointless exercise of counting jobs won and lost owing to these epochal shifts on the free market is obviously irrelevant to the job of being president, but the fact that Bain made $15 million from the winner and $175 million from the loser is evidence that it did not make a fortune all on its own. It had considerable help from the Easy Button at the Fed.

Romney and his crony pals have simply found a way to to use tax subsidies, leveraged buy outs and assorted financial tricks to pay themselves use fees and sell off the bones of the company they stripped apart in the name of plutocratic plundering, not capitalism. Capitalism is this great system for competing to sell the best products and services to actually create jobs and improve the quality of people's lives. Romney would probably laugh in your face if you told him that in private.

Romney and Paul Ryan are just your garden variety conservative Republican stealth candidates, hiding their real selves and real agenda behind fake patriotism and fake values, Charity president says Paul Ryan 'ramrodded' way into fake dish washing photo-op

Mitt Romney Running Anti-China Trade Ad Against Obama Yet Has Money in China, Cayman Islands and Switzerland

Mitt Romney Running Anti-China Trade Ad Against Obama Yet Has Money in China, Cayman Islands and Switzerland

The tale of Asimco Technologies, an auto parts manufacturer whose plants dot eastern China, would seem to underscore Mitt Romney’s campaign-trail complaint that China’s manufacturing juggernaut is costing America jobs.

Nine years ago, the company bought two camshaft factories that employed about 500 people in Michigan. By 2007 both were shut down. Now Asimco manufactures the same components in China on government-donated land in a coastal region that China has designated an export base, where companies are eligible for the sort of subsidies Mr. Romney says create an unfair trade imbalance.

But there is a twist to the Asimco story that would not fit neatly into a Romney stump speech: Since 2010, it has been owned by Bain Capital, the private equity firm founded by Mr. Romney, who has as much as $2.25 million invested in three Bain funds with large stakes in Asimco and at least seven other Chinese businesses, according to his 2012 candidate financial disclosure and other documents.

That and other China-related holdings by Bain funds in which Mr. Romney has invested are a reminder of how he inhabits two worlds that at times have come into conflict during his campaign for the White House.

As a candidate, Mr. Romney uses China as a punching bag. He accuses Beijing of unfairly subsidizing Chinese exports, artificially holding down the value of its currency to keep exports cheap, stealing American technology and hacking into corporate and government computers.

“How is it China’s been so successful in taking away our jobs?” he asked recently. “Well, let me tell you how: by cheating.”

But his private equity dealings, both while he headed Bain and since, complicate that message.

Mr. Romney’s campaign insists he has no control over his investments since they are held in a blind trust. That said, a confidential prospectus for one of the Bain funds, obtained by The New York Times, promotes China as a good investment for some of the same reasons that Mr. Romney has said concern him: “Strong fundamentals” like manufacturing wages 85 percent lower than what Americans earn, vast foreign exchange reserves and the likelihood that China will surpass the United States as the world’s largest economy.

“Accordingly, Bain Capital expects to see an increasing array of high-growth companies available for investment,” the prospectus says, noting the relative dearth of private equity in China.

Among the companies in which the Bain funds have invested is a global auto parts maker that is in the process of closing a factory in Illinois and moving most of the equipment and jobs to Jiangsu Province, where the Chinese government has built it a new plant; a Chinese electronics retailer accused by Microsoft of selling computers with pirated software; and a Hong Kong-based Chinese appliance maker that was sued for copying another company’s design for a deep-fat fryer.

Asked if Mr. Romney sees any conflict between his Bain investments in China and his policy positions, the campaign said: “Only the president has the power to level the playing field with China. No private citizen can do that alone.”

The campaign said Mr. Romney put his fortune, estimated at $250 million, in a “blind trust” when he became Massachusetts governor in 2003. “The trustee of the blind trust has said publicly that he will endeavor to make the investments in the blind trust conform to Governor Romney’s positions, and whenever it comes to his attention that there is something inconsistent, he ends the investment,” the statement said.

Should Mr. Romney become president, however, the structure of the trust would most likely not meet the federal requirements for independent management. It is managed by a Boston-based law firm, Ropes & Gray, that has a long history of doing legal work for both Mr. Romney and Bain Capital, including representing some of the same Bain funds in which it invested Mr. Romney’s money.

Mr. Romney’s trustee, R. Bradford Malt, who is chairman of Ropes & Gray, declined to comment.

Bain Capital declined to comment on specific investments, but said in a statement that its Chinese holdings “are consistent with the widely accepted principle that the private sector has a critical role to play in the continuing interdependence of the world’s economies.”

For many sophisticated and wealthy investors, as well as for ordinary workers invested in pension funds, China is a part of any diversified investment strategy. President Obama, a former Illinois state senator, has as much as $100,000 in a state retirement plan that contains shares of Sensata Technologies, the same auto parts company controlled by Bain that is closing its Illinois factory.

Last year, Mr. Romney’s trust sold its stake in an array of foreign holdings, including two Chinese state-owned companies: an oil company and a bank that have done business in Iran. But Mr. Romney continues to have money in Bain funds with sizable holdings in China.

He has as much as $250,000 in the Bain Capital Asia Fund and as much as $1 million each in Bain Capital Funds IX and X, all Cayman Islands entities used by Bain to make sizable investments in China, according to the 2012 candidate financial disclosures and confidential Bain prospectuses obtained by The Times through a public records request.

Among those funds’ holdings is $234 million that Bain invested in 2009 in Gome Electrical Appliances, a major Chinese retailer that was accused by Microsoft this year of selling computers with pirated software. In 2007, Bain’s Asia fund also invested $39 million in Feixiang Group, a Chinese producer and exporter of chemicals that is a designated “state high-tech enterprise,” making it eligible for tax breaks and other government incentives. Ropes & Gray represented Bain in the partial sale of Feixiang three years later for a 53 percent return on the fund’s investment.

The Asia fund withdrew from another deal in 2008 that could have proved politically embarrassing to Mr. Romney. After the Bush administration objected, Bain dropped plans to team up with a Chinese technology giant, Huawei, to buy 3Com, a network equipment maker that supplies software and equipment to the Pentagon and other federal agencies.

Republicans like to say that Americans are lazy and there are plenty of jobs out there. There are jobs in Asia where conservatives stash a lot of their money. What ever happened to America first. And how is it that Romney claims to be a person with values, yet has run televison ads that set a new low for lies and hypocrisy.

Koch Sends Pro-Romney Mailing to 45,000 Employees While Stifling Workplace Political Speech

The billionaire Koch brothers have found a new way to influence the 2012 election—preaching to employees.