Apparently Patriotism and Common Decency Are Dead in Norwood, Colorado

Apparently Patriotism and Common Decency Are Dead in Norwood, Colorado

A small Colorado town’s response to a 13-year-old’s violent hazing and sexual assault has driven the victim out of his school and his father out of his job, according to a startling Bloomberg News profile of what happened in Norwood, Colorado.

Three high school students held down the 13-year-old boy with duct tape on a school bus and sodomized him with a pencil. When the superintendent and school board did not report the incident for a month, the victim’s father, who was the school principal, reported it to the police himself. Yet another aspect complicated the situation: The attack happened outside a wrestling match, and two of the perpetrators are the wrestling coach’s sons.

The boys eventually received a one-day, in-school suspension and varying sentences of probation and community service. However, the victim’s peers would continue to bully him online, asking him “What’s been stuck up your butt today?” and wearing T-shirts that supported the attackers. And parents in the community were on board with the harassment, as well:

    A dozen students wore the T-shirts to school one Friday, and someone posted a sign with the same wording on the locker of the victim’s brother, according to the police report, which was reviewed by Bloomberg. Students who wore the t-shirts told police they wanted to support their friends. The victim told investigators he didn’t understand why his friends would support people who attacked him.

    When police visited parents of students involved in the T-shirt incident to warn them against intimidating the 13-year-old, who would be testifying against his schoolmates in a criminal case, they found the parents instead focused on attacking the principal.

Eventually, the father was put on paid leave from his position. Today, the family lives 200 miles away from Norwood in a new school district, while the wrestling coach (who was the school board president, too) stayed with the Norwood team after a reprimand for leaving the students alone.

States are responsible for establishing their own anti-bullying policies in public schools, but enforcement across the states is uneven. Colorado has one of the nation’s most comprehensive anti-bullying laws, with protections against anti-LGBT bullying, but only 37 percent of school districts actually follow it. Hazing and harassment has also been a particular problem in the world of sports. At the college level, Alfred University found 80 percent of college athletes experience some form of hazing.

This is the culture of conservatism at work; either they deny a sexual assault has taken place, or blame the victims for doing something that deserved to be punished with sexual assault, and/or finding ways to punish the victim for daring to name those cowardly criminals who perpetrated the attack. Why isn't the town of Norwood  demanding justice for the victim. Why are the parents of the criminals who perpetrated the crime being prosecuted for aiding and abetting criminals - the cowardly criminals they raised. Why aren't the kids doing the harassing being shunned by decent kids who know better. This is what happens when Americans worship at the altar of conservative morality. Standards of basic decency get all twisted around. The town is acting like George Bush and Dick Cheney, deny and deny their responsibility for the lies they told and the gross immorality they are guilty of, while simultaneously attacking those seeking simple justice.

Spying Program Doesn’t Make Us Safer, and Spying Leaks Don’t Harm America

Spying Program Doesn’t Make Us Safer, and Spying Leaks Don’t Harm America

America’s top national security experts say that the NSA’s mass surveillance program doesn’t make us safer … and that whistleblowers revealing the nature and extent of the program don’t harm America.

The top counter-terrorism czar under Presidents Clinton and Bush – Richard Clarke – notes:

    The just-revealed surveillance stretches the law to its breaking point and opens the door to future potential abuses

    ***

    I am troubled by the precedent of stretching a law on domestic surveillance almost to the breaking point. On issues so fundamental to our civil liberties, elected leaders should not be so needlessly secretive.

    The argument that this sweeping search must be kept secret from the terrorists is laughable. Terrorists already assume this sort of thing is being done. Only law-abiding American citizens were blissfully ignorant of what their government was doing.

    ***

    If the government wanted a particular set of records, it could tell the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court why — and then be granted permission to access those records directly from specially maintained company servers. The telephone companies would not have to know what data were being accessed. There are no technical disadvantages to doing it that way, although it might be more expensive.

    Would we, as a nation, be willing to pay a little more for a program designed this way, to avoid a situation in which the government keeps on its own computers a record of every time anyone picks up a telephone? That is a question that should have been openly asked and answered in Congress.

The author of the Patriot Act and chairman on the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, Homeland Security, and Investigations – Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner – says:

    Lawmakers’ and the executive branch’s excuses about recent revelations of NSA activity are “a bunch of bunk”

    The government has gone far beyond what the Patriot Act intended, and that section 215 of the act “was originally drafted to prevent data mining” on the scale that’s occurred

    Whistleblower Edward Snowden is not a traitor, and Sensenbrenner would not have known the extent of abuse by the NSA and the FISA court without Snowden’s disclosures

    The Patriot Act needs to be amended to protect Americans’ privacy

The former head of the NSA’s global digital data gathering program, William Binney:

    Confirms Snowden’s allegations about the mass surveillance program

    Says that revealing the details of the spying program will not harm national security … and that government officials are only mad because it exposes their overreaching

    Says that massive surveillance doesn’t work to make us safer

    Says that he set up the NSA’s system so that all of the information would automatically be encrypted, so that the government had to obtain a search warrant based upon probably cause before a particular suspect’s communications could be decrypted. But the NSA now collects all data in an unencrypted form, so that no probable cause is needed to view any citizen’s information. He says that it is actually cheaper and easier to store the data in an encrypted format: so the government’s current system is being done for political – not practical – purposes.  Binney’s statements have been confirmed by other NSA whistleblowers...

But hey I have nothing to hide so what's the big deal. It has nothing to do with whether individuals do not care if the NSA listens to your phone calls or reads your e-mail. Whether you personally care about your rights and how they relate to the 4th Amendment and democracy, has nothing to do with hiding something. It has to do with a basic right to privacy. Anyone who loves big brother and does not think such programs should be closely monitored and have become excessive, by all means move to the 24 or so authoritarian regimes in the world, they love cooperate sheep like you. Are They Allowed to Do That? A Breakdown of Selected Government Surveillance Programs

Where Are The Patriots in Elwood, Indiana A Town That Has Embraced Rape Culture

Where Are The Patriots in Elwood, Indiana A Town That Has Embraced Rape Culture

Several high-profile cases of sexual assault have shown the consequences of rape culture: From Rehtaeh Parsons’ suicide to the Steubenville rape trial, these girls were re-victimized by the harassment and public shaming that followed the sexual assault.

Now, a 14-year-old in Elwood, Indiana who is eight months pregnant faces ongoing harassment simply because her neighborhood sees her as a very young pregnant girl. But a reporter at the Indianapolis Star writes that her town does not know the full story of the 17-year-old boy who physically overpowered her after she told him “no.” On Tuesday, he faces sentencing for three counts of child molestation.

At the same time the girl has encountered vicious public shaming from her community, she and her mother Kristy Green have spoken out because they worry her assailant will walk free in juvenile court:

    “I can’t walk out the door without someone calling me a whore or slut,” the girl said. “I used to have a lot of friends, or people I thought were my friends, but as soon as this happened I just isolated myself.”

    The repeated vandalism incidents at the family’s home — including the words “whore” and “slut” scrawled on the garage doors — were reported to police. But Green said no charges were filed because there were no witnesses to the acts.

    Her daughter also has been the target of mean-spirited rumors and speculation that her pregnancy is the result of promiscuous behavior.


This ordeal is all too common for victims of sexual assault — a reality that affects not just U.S. teens in school, but also pervades military and sports culture. The Chicago Tribune Editorial Board recently noted that “it’s still news when a rape victim stands in front of the cameras to state what ought to be obvious, which is that she has nothing to be ashamed of.”

But the people in Elwood — lacking the details of the rape due to privacy in the juvenile court system — reverted to alienating the teen for her pregnancy because they assumed she must have been “promiscuous.” That’s true for many teen moms across the country, who are often on the receiving end of this stigma precisely at the time they most need support. Public awareness campaigns attempting to prevent teen pregnancy often put inordinate focus on “slut-shaming” abstinence over comprehensive sexual health resources.

A patriotic American town would not allow this kind of harassment to happen. They would form citizen patrols, they'd be finding ways to help that girl and her family. They'd be shaming the rapist, not the victim. Patriots never defend rape and make victims feel like they have done something wrong. Rape culture is part of conservative culture, one that believes, oh well, men will be men.

New York Post Columnist and Conservative Arthur Herman Hates Women and American Values

NY Post Columnist Calls Increase In Military Sexual Assaults A "Bogus Epidemic"

New York Post columnist Arthur Herman called the reported increase in military sexual assaults a "bogus epidemic" because the survey on sexual assaults included all "unwanted sexual contact." But experts have found that any sexual harassment can degrade military readiness and the survey results are consistent with widely used survey methodology.

The Department of Defense released its "Annual Report on Sexual Assault in the Military" which determined that up to 26,000 service members may have been the victim of some form of sexual assault. In a March 31 column published by The New York Post, columnist Herman claimed the report highlighted a "bogus epidemic." After acknowledging that sexual assault and rape are serious crimes, Herman attacked the parameters of the report, saying "no real solution to any problem can be built around flawed data":

    Yet that's precisely what's really going on here -- starting with that report. First off, it's far from comprehensive or authoritative. It's based entirely on a voluntary survey -- and it's wildly anti-scientific to extrapolate from a self-selected group. And only 22,792 service members opted to respond -- roughly 2.2 percent of a military that's 1 million strong.

    Even more amazing, the survey never actually asked about sexual assault. Its questions centered on "unwanted sexual contact" -- which can include any number of behaviors, including trying to slap someone on the buttocks, which may be vulgar or inappropriate but hardly rape.

But the survey didn't measure rape, it measured sexual assault, a term that is given a broad definition by the military. For example, the Army Sexual Assault Prevention & Response Program answers the question "What is sexual assault" by including, among other things, "unwanted and inappropriate sexual conduct or fondling":

    Sexual Assault is a crime. Sexual assault is defined as intentional sexual contact, characterized by use of force, physical threat or abuse of authority, or when the victim does not or cannot consent. Consent should not be deemed or construed to mean the failure by the victim to offer physical resistance. Additionally, consent is not given when a person uses force, threat of force, coercion or when the victim is asleep, incapacitated, or unconscious.

    Sexual assault includes rape, nonconsensual sodomy (oral or anal sex), indecent assault (e.g., unwanted and inappropriate sexual contact or fondling), or attempts to commits these acts. Sexual assault can occur without regard to gender, spousal relationship, or age of victim.

This kind of sexual assault is having a significant effect not only on the victims, but on the military as a whole. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel called the assaults "a despicable crime" that is "a threat to the safety and the welfare of our people." General Martin Dempsey added that sexual assaults constitute a "crisis" in the military.  In a speech to U.S. Naval Academy graduates President Obama addressed the assaults, commenting that the "misconduct of some can have effects that ripple far and wide:

    "Those who commit sexual assault are not only committing a crime, they threaten the trust and discipline that makes our military strong," Obama said. "That's why we have to be determined to stop these crimes, because they've got no place in the greatest military on Earth."

Herman also criticized the survey methodology, claiming that having 22,792 service members respond was inadequate. However, the survey noted that the findings are consistent with a study prepared for the Air Force by Gallup, which had a significantly higher response rate. In fact, the report's research supervisor, Dr. David Lisak, worked with Gallup and the Air Force on the earlier study.

NOTE: Thomas Bishop is a current military officer who has served as an Equal Opportunity Leader in the Army Reserves.

Conservative Arthur Herman  must have never heard of statistical sampling. During elections pollsters do not ask every single individual who they are going to vote for, yet they are generally close ( within a few percentage points) of picking winners. So even if the survey is off by a little that still means a substantial number of sexual assaults are occurring. frequently with the perpetrator going unpunished. Herman hates women. Technically that is his right, but he is using a very large media platform to use his hate to persuade public opinion in a way that is harmful to women serving their country and a disgrace to patriotic values.

Remembering Sen. Frank Lautenberg's (D-NJ) Progressive Legacy

The Freaky Koch Brothers Have Another Bill on Their Anti-American Agenda

The Freaky Koch Brothers Have Another Bill on Their Anti-American Agenda

Will the "Koch Brothers Bill" Make Industrial Accidents More Likely?
Such accidents are all too common in chemical country. So why are congressmen fighting to keep the EPA from doing anything about it?

Last Wednesday’s explosion at a West, Texas, fertilizer plant, which left at least 15 people dead and more than a hundred injured, was made possible by an ultra-lax [1] state- and federal oversight climate that make inspections of such facilities all but a rubber-stamp process—when they even happen. If the chemical lobby and its allies in Congress get their way, a regulatory process dismissed by environmental activists and labor unions as extremely weak would be watered down even more.

In February, 11 congressmen—10 Republicans and 1 Democrat—joined some two dozen [2] industry groups, including the Fertilizer Institute, the American Chemistry Council, and the International Institute of Ammonia Refrigeration, to back the General Duty Clarification Act [3]. The bill is designed to sap the Environmental Protection Agency of its powers to regulate safety and security at major chemical sites, as prescribed by the Clean Air Act.

"We call that the Koch brothers bill," Greenpeace legislative director Rick Hind says, because the bill's sponsor, GOP Rep. Mike Pompeo, represents the conservative mega-donors' home city of Wichita. (The sponsor of the sister legislation in the senate, GOP Sen. Pat Roberts, represents the Kochs' home state of Kansas.) The brothers have huge investments in fertilizer production, and Hind thinks they'll ultimately get what they want, whether or not the bill becomes law. "It's not necessarily intended to achieve legislative passage—it's more about intimidation of a beleaguered agency."

The fight over fertilizer and the Clean Air Act has its origins in the passage of the law back in 1990. Although the original bill included language that would have permitted the EPA to regulate the emissions of ammonia and hydrogen sulfide—both of which are important ingredients and fertilizer manufacturing—a fierce lobbying push from the fertilizer industry resulted in the compounds being stricken from the formal list.

The radical Kochs, their supporters and the Congressional representatives they buy off in Congress say they stand for freedom. Ever been sick or known someone who was seriously ill. How free were they. How much could they enjoy their family, their friends or just enjoy being alive. The Koch-heads want to make a lot of people sick, including children, so they ( already billionaires) can make even more money. The Koch-heads have only one god and that is money. They respect nothing else. Maybe they have figured out a way to take all the money they made off the labor of average workers, with them when they die.

The gun lobby often claims that firearms are used for self-defense an estimated 2.5 million times a year. But according to the Department of Justice's National Crime Victimization Survey, the actual number is just a fraction of that:

If You Love The USA You Should Demand Millionaires Pay Their Fair Share

If You Love The USA You Should Demand Millionaires Pay Their Fair Share

President Barack Obama’s new budget proposal, released Wednesday, would raise $16 billion in revenue over 10 years by getting rid of one of the ways millionaires and billionaires pay lower taxes than their secretaries. It's called the carried interest tax break, and it allows the wealthy to pay a lower rate on some of their income. But ending the carried interest exception will be tough, and not just because a budget compromise with Republicans is unlikely: Previous proposed legislation to kill the tax break was riddled with loopholes.

The carried interest tax break works by letting private equity and hedge fund managers treat some of the income they earn from managing clients' portfolios as if they had invested it themselves. That allows folks like Mitt Romney to pay a 20 percent investment income tax rate on their money management fees, instead of the normal 39.6 percent tax rate on earned income. This special rich person perk costs the government some $1.3 billion a year. That's one reason why Obama and many Democrats slam the tax break as unfair and have targeted it for repeal.

"There continues to be no rationale whatsoever for people to pay at a vastly lower tax rate when they are managing other people’s money," Rep. Sander Levin (D-Mich.), who has introduced all of the carried interest legislation in past years, said in an email. "This is an issue of fairness that we should address as we seek a balanced approach to deficit reduction that involves both additional revenues and spending cuts."

But getting rid of the tax break may not be such an easy task, given the tortuous history of the movement to deep-six it. The fight against carried interest is Levin's baby. He first introduced a bill to ax the loophole in 2007, and has introduced two more versions since then, all of which have stalled.

"It's rather unusual that this legislation hung out there for so many years," says Steve Rosenthal, a fellow at the Tax Policy Center. That's due to the "pretty effective job" that the trillion-dollar private equity industry has done in "confusing and delaying legislation," he says.

Rosenthal says that so much damage has been done to the legislation over the years that he has no faith in the effectiveness of whatever nominal repeal legislation eventually does get into a compromise budget bill—if there ever is one.

First of all, he notes, it's unclear whether the entirety of an executive's carried interest income would be subject to the higher tax rate. Rosenthal says some versions of the bill have only called for raising taxes on 75 percent of it.

Rosenthal says the most recent legislation also includes a loophole that would allow private equity firms, which are usually organized as limited partnerships, to convert themselves into a special kind of small business entity, which would allow them to avoid the carried interest tax hike.

And if Levin's most recent legislation passes, private equity managers would also be exempt in certain cases from a higher carried interest rate on the profit from selling part of their own interest in the firm.

"The carried interest lobbying effort has been a scandal," Rosenthal says.

This insanity where the American people reward wealth and punish work could end in a week. All it would take, and it is asking a lot apparently, is for a few million patriotic Americans to send a postcard to their Senator and representative. They can't ignore the overwhelming wished of working class Americans who want the filthy rich to start paying back society for providing them with roads, firefighters, the world's best military and other infrastructure - that makes their wealth even possible.

MSNBC's Scarborough, Known For His UnAmerican Conservative Bias, Ignores The Facts In Front Of Him To Attack Government Spending

MSNBC's Scarborough, Known For His UnAmerican Conservative Bias, Ignores The Facts In Front Of Him To Attack Government Spending

MSNBC host Joe Scarborough blamed "a Keynesian spending spree" for the contraction in GDP at the end of 2012, while holding evidence that the opposite is true in his hands. Scarborough's claims fit into his ongoing effort to deny and marginalize demand-side economic policies which continue to enjoy broad support from trained economists.

During a discussion of the 2012 fourth quarter GDP report on MSNBC's Morning Joe, Scarborough implied that the 0.1 percent drop in output was due to government spending since the recession. From Morning Joe:

Scarborough's claim is contradicted by the Wall Street Journal article he held up during the segment, which states that "government spending, which has been a drag on growth for more than two years, declined for the ninth time in 10 quarters." The article's subhead - "GDP Shrinks 0.1% on Government Cuts, but Consumer, Business Spending Offer Hope" - also splashed across the screen moments before Scarborough made his argument.

The Wall Street Journal's reporting is in line with the latest Bureau of Economic Analysis report. The BEA calculates the component parts of the GDP figure for each quarter. This most recent report is notable not because the government spending component of GDP continues to be negative due to shrinking direct spending into the economy, but because, for the first time in the recovery, the government component of GDP was so negative that it overwhelmed the positivity in other components.

Poor Joe Scarborough lives in the lala-land of conservative myths. The report showed two inconvenient truths, Obama has not gone on a wild spending spree and, gosh darn-it, government spending can stimulate the economy.

New Anti-American Radical Senator Tim Scott (R-SC) Is Pro Welfare For Corporate Cronies

New Anti-American Radical Senator Tim Scott (R-SC) Is Pro Welfare For Corporate Cronies

Like most of the Tea Party Republican House Class of 2010, Senator-Designate Tim Scott (R-SC) ran for Congress vowing to eliminate “earmarks” — the system Congressional lawmakers once used to direct federal spending to their districts. But a ThinkProgress examination of public records reveals that in his two years in Congress, he instead used an even less transparent method known as “lettermarking” to attempt to secure funding for his district.

In May 2011, just months after Scott was sworn in as a U.S. Representative and the new Republican House majority opted to ban earmarks, Scott joined four other South Carolina Congressmen in writing to Secretary of Energy Chu on behalf of a South Carolina manufacturer.

They wrote:

    The purpose of this letter is to express our support for Robert Bosch LLC (Bosch) and the company’s recent response to DOE Funding Opportunity Number FOA000023900219 (Recirculated Exahust Gas Intake Sensor – REGIS). In addition, we are aware that Bosch’s partner in this application is Clemson University’s International Center for Automotive Research (ICAR). Bosch has been a committed and active member of the South Carolina manufacturing community since 1974.

View the letter at link:

The Department of Energy approved the application as requested, giving Bosch a $550,000 federal project.

But publicly, Scott backed a ban on earmarks, arguing that they were corrupt and wasteful. “Washington is filled with politicians who promise that they will deliver goodies to the folks back home. What those politicians don’t tell us is that by playing that game, they force the taxpayers of our district to pay for hundreds of billions of dollars in wasteful pork projects all over the country,” he observed in his 2010 campaign. He told his future constituents, “The earmark system leaves us with crumbs while others get the loaves.”

According to Taegan Goddard’s Political Dictionary, “lettermarking” occurs when lawmakers send letters to federal agencies requesting money for projects in their home district. While agencies are not obligated to comply with the requests, Reason’s Jacob Sullum notes, “agencies are loath to antagonize the legislators who approve their budgets, especially when they have added extra money with a specific project in mind.” These letters are only available to the public if someone happens to request them under the Freedom of Information Act.

Like the rest of the conservative movement Scott lies so often and is such a shameless hypocrite because he cannot tell real American values from the freaky conservative idea of values rattling around his head. he'd sell South Carolina to China to tomorrow for enough money and he could some how sell it as the "Christian" thing to do. Scott thinks and talks in a bubble of proto-facist doublespeak. The only he stands for now and tomorrow is what ever fetid thought crosses his mind, what will make him richer, what will get him more power over decent hard working Americans and what will advance the radical wacky agenda of the fake patriots of conservatism.

Anti-American and Anti-worker Republican Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder's standing in the polls collapses

New Math

LIMBAUGH: Comparing spending on entitlements to military spending: "Social Security alone would make three military budgets." (radio, 12/13/95)

REALITY: In 1995, according to the Office for Management and Budget, the U.S. spent $291 billion on the military. Three times $291 billion is $873 billion. Social Security in 1995, according to OMB, cost $362 billion.

When He Was a Boy...

LIMBAUGH: Limbaugh enumerated some of the changes the world has seen since the birth of his 104-year-old grandfather: "When he was born--I mean, we look at things that have happened since he was born. Electricity's been invented, the automobile was invented, the mule as a means of plowing the field vanished." (TV, 12/27/95)

REALITY: Limbaugh was combining two of his worst subjects: science and history. The first commercial use of electricity, the telegraph, began in 1843--almost 50 years before Limbaugh's grandfather was born in 1891. Edison invented his electric light bulb in 1879, and 1881 saw the first practical electric railway (Electrical Construction & Maintenance, 5/91). The first steam- powered automobile was invented in 1769, while gasoline-powered models were introduced in 1885 (Automotive Engineering, 6/90).


5. James Madison

LIMBAUGH: Quotes James Madison: "We have staked the future upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God."

FAIR: "We didn't find anything in our files remotely like the sentiment expressed in the extract you sent to us,' David B. Matter, associate editor of The Madison Papers, told the Kansas City Star (1/16/94). In addition, the idea is entirely inconsistent with everything we know about Madison's views on religion and government.'"

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

How Did Romney Supposedly Win The Debate? By Being Himself, One of the Most Morally Corrupt Liars in Politics

How Did Romney Supposedly Win The Debate? By Being Himself, One of the Most Morally Corrupt Liars in Politics

Political reporters and pundits lean heavily on the horse race method of coverage, which has badly hurt Mitt Romney for most of the campaign. Last night it helped him. Romney was forceful and articulate and dodged his association with almost all the most unpopular aspects of his platform. But his success at doing so was built upon two demonstrable untruths.

The most important was taxes. Romney asserted, “I cannot reduce the burden paid by high-income Americans.” Let me explain how this is untrue even by his own campaign’s accounting.

Obama badly flubbed this topic by allowing Romney to change the baseline of the discussion. Romney is promising to extend all the Bush tax cuts and refuses to accept even slightly higher revenue as part of a deficit deal. On top of that, he is proposing a huge, regressive income tax rate cut that would reduce revenue by an additional $5 trillion, but promises to make up for it by closing tax deductions. Obama directed his fire almost entirely at the additional tax cut, leaving mostly untouched, until the end, Romney’s pledge to never bargain away any of the Bush tax cuts.

Obama’s case was sound. The Tax Policy Center has shown that the stated parameters of Romney’s plan don’t add up — even under favorable assumptions, there are not enough tax deductions for the rich to close to pay for the rate cuts. Romney has disputed this and cited a series of studies that, in various ways, change the parameters of the Tax Policy Center study. Some of these studies find that it could be theoretically possible that Romney could cut rates and, by closing loopholes, do so without losing revenue or raising taxes on the middle class — if you lower the bar on who is middle class from $250,000 to $100,000, or count the repeal of Obamacare to help pay for the tax cuts, or use really wildly optimistic growth assumptions.

None of these studies back up Romney’s claim that he won’t reduce taxes on the rich. They confirm that he will reduce taxes on the rich. They merely suggest that he could make up the revenue some other way than taxing the middle class or increasing the deficit — that the economic growth will help the tax cuts for the rich pay for themselves, or that some of the lost revenue can be made up for by cutting off subsidies for the uninsured. Romney flat-out misstated his position.

The other issue was health care. Romney has promised to protect health insurance for people with preexisting conditions who maintain continuous coverage. That caveat is vital, because that right has existed since 1996. It’s a very minor protection. Phrasing his promise this way has allowed Romney to make a promise that sounds like he would keep Obamacare’s protections for people with preexisting coverage without committing himself to anything at all (except, I suppose, keeping in place a 1996 law that didn’t do much).

At the debate last night, Romney didn’t phrase his promise in this misleading-but-true fashion. He promised, “preexisting conditions are covered under my plan.” That is not true. He dropped the legalistic mumbo-jumbo that renders his promise meaningless and promised something. But his plan doesn’t do that. And his adviser Eric Fehrnstrom, asked after the debate if Romney was really promising to cover people with preexisting conditions, admitted that he isn’t. (“With respect to pre-existing conditions, what Governor Romney has said is for those with continuous coverage, he would continue to make sure that they receive their coverage.”)

Romney won the debate in no small part because he adopted a policy of simply lying about his policies.

More here, Debate fact check

10:20 — Romney left his heart in Zurich: Romney tells Obama, “The place you put your money is a pretty good indication of where your heart is.” The obvious rejoinder, ready-made for a DNC attack, is that Romney’s heart must be in the Cayman Island, Bermuda or Switzerland, where Romney has put his money.

10:10 — “The same f*cking bill”: Romney says his healthcare plan in Massachusetts is very different from Obamacare. The guy who designed both the plans calls them “the same f*cking bill.”

10:00 — Romney sees death panels: Romney comes dangerously close to invoking death panels, saying Obamacare has “a board that will tell people what kind of treatment they’re going to get.” He’s referring to IPAB, a board of doctors, hospital officials and government officials who try to find best practices to reduce the cost of Medicare (and only Medicare — no one else’s healthcare — which is already a government plan). IPAB does not decide on individual cases, is subject to congressional oversight and is legally prohibited from rationing care. In August, Paul Ryan told Florida seniors Obamacare has a “rationing board.”

9:45 — Obamacare still doesn’t cut Medicare: Romney revived one of the most repeated falsehoods of the campaign – that Obamacare cut over $700 billion from Medicare. It’s not true, and Paul Ryan’s budget included the same cuts; Ryan and almost every other Republican in the House voted for them. Obamacare did cut funds from Medicare, but from providers, not beneficiaries. The actuaries in charge of the program say the savings will actually extend the life of the program and experts say the cuts won’t affect benefits.

9:40 — NFIB fib:  Romney uses as a cudgel against Obama’s tax plan a study from the National Federation of Independent Business. The NFIB sounds like an anodyne business group, but like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce it is actually a very partisan Republican group funded mostly by large corporations, not small businesses.

There is more at the link. Conservatives and the conservative movement is based on the Big Lie so of course they are thrilled with Romney's performance. And that is what it was, Mitt the snake oil salesman conning America into believing falsehoods that are easily checked. Republicans learned nothing from the economic collapse their policies caused or the Iraq debacle. Romney plans to increase the too big too fail economic pyramid and his foreign policy team is stacked for former Bush advisers. Some people - conservative Republicans - just get a thrill from abusing America and they'll keep doing so until Americans wise up and call them out on their dangerous agenda. 

Mitt Romney's top economic adviser Greg Mankiw said the "offshoring" of American jobs was a good thing.

Mitt Romney, who lambasts the "failures" of government-backed mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, profits from investments in the firms.

Mitt Romney said that catching bin Laden would be "insignificant" and it's "not worth moving heaven and earth."

Mitt Romney pledged to expand a Bush-Era policy of permitting doctors to deny women access to contraceptives.

Mitt Romney said he supported the Ryan Republican budget plan that would effectively end Medicare.

Paul Ryan embraces the extreme philosophy of sex cultist Ayn Rand.

Paul Ryan wants to raises taxes on the middle class, cut them for millionaires

Paul Ryan thinks Social Security is a “ponzi scheme.”

Paul Ryan supports $40 billion in coporate welfare subsides for big oil.

Mr 47% Mitt Romney Prefers The Company of Sexual Perverts Like His America Hating Buddy Marc Leder

Mr 47% Mitt Romney Prefers The Company of Sexual Perverts Like His America Hating Buddy Marc Leder

When Mitt Romney at a private fundraiser dismissed all Barack Obama voters as moochers and victims [1]—showing disdain for nearly half of the American electorate—he was speaking at the home of controversial private equity manager Marc Leder in Boca Raton on May 17, 2012. (It was Romney's second fundraising event in Boca that day [2].) This is evident from references made by Romney within the full video recording of the event that has been reviewed by Mother Jones.

When Mother Jones first disclosed secret video of Romney's remarks, we were obliged to not reveal details regarding the time and place of the event. That restriction has been lifted, as the story has garnered attention throughout the media.

At the fundraiser, Romney was asked how he could win in November, and he replied:

    There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, 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. And they will vote for this president no matter what…These are people who pay no income tax…[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.

Romney made those remarks before donors who had paid $50,000 a plate to attend the dinner at Leder's swanky house [2].

Leder has long been a fan of Romney. In January, the New York Times reported [10]:

    Years ago, a visit to Mr. Romney's investment firm inspired Mr. Leder to get into private equity in the first place. Mr. Romney was an early investor in some of the deals done by Mr. Leder's investment company, Sun Capital, which today oversees about $8 billion in equity.

The paper noted that Leder is something of a poster boy for private equity—and not in a good way:

    Mr. Leder personifies the debates now swirling around this lucrative corner of finance. To his critics, he represents everything that's wrong with this setup. In recent years, a large number of the companies that Sun Capital has acquired have run into serious trouble, eliminated jobs or both. Since 2008, some 25 of its companies—roughly one of every five it owns—have filed for bankruptcy. Among the losers was Friendly's, the restaurant chain known for its Jim Dandy sundaes and Fribble shakes. (Sun Capital was accused by a federal agency of pushing Friendly's into bankruptcy last year to avoid paying pensions to the chain's employees; Sun disputes that contention.) Another company that sank into bankruptcy was Real Mex, owner of the Chevy's restaurant chain. In that case, Mr. Leder lost money for his investors not once, but twice.

But Leder does differ from Romney in one significant fashion: how he likes to have a certain sort of fun. In August 2011, the New York Post reported [11],

    It was as if the Playboy Mansion met the East EBond at a wild party at private-equity titan Marc Leder's Bridgehampton estate, where guests cavorted nude in the pool and performed sex acts, scantily dressed Russians danced on platforms and men twirled lit torches to a booming techno beat. The divorced Sun Capital Partners honcho rented a sprawling beachfront mansion on Surf Side Road for $500,000 for the month of July. Leder's weekly Friday and Saturday night parties have become the talk of the Hamptons—and he ended them in style last weekend with his wildest bash yet. Russell Simmons and ex-wife Kimora Lee attended a more subdued party thrown by Leder—who's an event chair for Simmons' Art For Life charity—on July 29 together. But the revelry hit a frenzied point the next day before midnight when a male guest described as a "chubby white meathead" and a "tanned" female guest stripped and hopped into the pool naked.

If conservatives want to continue to lay claim to being the most morally perfect people on earth than they can also proudly wear the title of the most self-righteous hypocrites. Leder and Romney have a key goal in common, to make America into 16th century Europe and make sure the moots are deep enough and wide enough that the average hard working Americans they consider irresponsible peasants cannot get into their sex parties.

What Mitt Romney Doesn’t Get About Responsibility

The thing about not having much money is you have to take much more responsibility for your life. You can’t pay people to watch your kids or clean your house or fix your meals. You can’t necessarily afford a car or a washing machine or a home in a good school district. That’s what money buys you: goods and services that make your life easier.

That’s what money has bought Romney, too. He’s a guy who sold his dad’s stock to pay for college, who built an elevator to ensure easier access to his multiple cars and who was able to support his wife’s decision to be a stay-at-home mom. That’s great! That’s the dream.

The problem is that he doesn’t seem to realize how difficult it is to focus on college when you’re also working full time, how much planning it takes to reliably commute to work without a car, or the agonizing choices faced by families in which both parents work and a child falls ill. The working poor haven’t abdicated responsibility for their lives. They’re drowning in it.

And guess what, Mitt Romney would got get his own father's vote, Romney’s Dad Was on Welfare

Four histories of the right’s 47 percent theory - Romney may have put it into words, but the ideas behind it have been swirling for decades

How the Media Enables Paul Ryan's Pants On Fire Lies

How the Media Enables Paul Ryan's Pants On Fire Lies

The myth of “Paul Ryan, serious budget wonk” has a history that dates since the 2010 Tea Party sweep of the elections, at least into the Bush administration. It's been untrue [3] for at least that long.

There were magazine stories [4] of the Young Guns of the GOP—Ryan, Eric Cantor and Kevin McCarthy. They even chose that title [5] to brand themselves [6], comparisons to the 1980s cowboy movies notwithstanding. If they were in a boy band, Ryan would've been the Serious One while Cantor was the Wisecracking One, and McCarthy, well, he was the One Everyone Forgets About. Other Serious Young Men gave Paul Ryan gravitas--even those ostensibly across the aisle, like Ezra Klein [7], who wrote in 2011, “Ryan is the kind of politician I fundamentally like. He’s smart, policy-oriented and willing to take political risks.” In 2010 Klein titled a blog post “The virtues of Ryan's roadmap [7],” calling Ryan's plan (the one that gutted Medicare) “a more honest entry into the debate.”

Klein at least has come around to become one of the stronger voices arguing that Ryan isn't a deficit [8] hawk but an ideologue bent on privatization [9]. But plenty of others are still pretending that the vice-presidential nominee is willing to have a serious debate on policy. It's no secret that Fox News is letting Romney and Ryan get away with anything, but it's commentators in the mainstream media that do the most damage. Reporters love a ready-made narrative. Writing on a deadline, it's easy to slot in conventional descriptors and fit politicians into stock roles. We've been told Ryan is a serious budget nerd, and the more it gets echoed, the more it will continue to be echoed. Here we bring you seven media enablers of the Paul Ryan myth.

1. Howard Kurtz, Daily Beast

Howard Kurtz [10] is supposed to be a media critic, which makes it even more grating that he's fallen into the same trap as most of the rest of the mainstream media when it comes to Ryan's bona fides.

“True to his reputation as one of the GOP’s leading intellectuals,” Kurtz wrote of Ryan's RNC appearance, “it was something of a wonky speech sprinkled with folksy references—such as one to his hometown of Janesville, Wisc., where 'a lot of guys I went to high school with' worked at a GM plant that shut down.”

That's not the only time Kurtz alludes to Ryan's wonkiness without actually mentioning any of Ryan's policy points—aside from pointing out that Ryan's misleading everyone by beating up on Obama's Medicare cuts without mentioning his own slash-and-burn plan for healthcare for the elderly. He also mentions the Janesville line without pointing out that it too was one of Ryan's biggest whoppers of the night, trying to blame the president for closing a plant that shut down in 2008 [11].

He wrote that Ryan delivered a policy-based attack on Obama but the example he gives is Ryan's attack on Obamacare, which Ryan said has no place in “a free country.” Serious policy analysis, indeed!

As an aside, the GOP can't seem to decide whether it loves or hates the auto bailout—at once beating up on Obama for bailing out GM and Chrysler and then, as Ryan does here, complaining that Obama didn't save a plant in his own district. Apparently auto plants are like military bases—they should be propped up by the government as “job creators” when it's convenient for members of Congress. Roosevelt Institute fellow Mike Konczal joked on Twitter [12], “Romney should announce a Works Progress Administration/Civilian Conservation Corps tonight, but one where everyone in it works in Janesville.”

In other words, here's the same man lauded as being “serious” for being willing to slice and dice social programs, apparently calling for government to bail out manufacturing. Will that be in his next budget proposal, you think?

2. Dan Balz, Washington Post

According to Balz [13], Romney and Ryan “share an essential geekiness.” He doesn't mean that they're both white men who can't dance—no, he's talking about, you guessed it, policy. “Ryan, like Romney, is a numbers person who likes to break down problems and solve them after digesting reams of data,” he writes.

Funny, I thought the only data Romney liked to digest was how many workers he could lay off [14]. And Ryan's publicly admitted that neither of them have “run the numbers [15]” on Romney's budget plan even while they trumpet their supposed deficit reductions.

As Peter Hart at FAIR [16] notes, Balz actually does source some of the comments about the choice of Paul Ryan—to an anonymous Romney adviser, who spoke anonymously in order to affirm that other people had called the Ryan pick “bold” and that Romney was “confident.” Because one really needs anonymity to assert the feelings of the candidate. Another anonymous source makes the same comment later in the piece that Balz makes on his own--“Romney and Ryan are both data-driven guys, and there’s no question they will win the intellectual argument about whether we need to reform Medicare.”

Why he needs anonymous sources to say things that he seems perfectly comfortable repeating as conventional wisdom, I can't quite figure out.

3. Michael Crowley, Time Magazine

Possibly the most gratuitous fluffing of Paul Ryan's reputation comes from Time, where senior correspondent Crowley [17] opens the piece with the assertion that “Paul Ryan may be America's most famous budget wonk.”

The reasons? Because Ryan likes to quote his many “intellectual idols.” Including, you guessed it, Ayn Rand!

But as Peter Hart points out at FAIR [18], where this article really gets weird is when it starts getting excited about Ryan's religion. Catholicism, you see, is where Ryan gets his ideas on “social issues”--which is, as is usual in the mainstream media, code for “gay marriage, abortion, and those pesky rights women and LGBTQ folks keep going on about.” But wait! It's not just social issues Ryan learned about from the church. No, his budget cuts are all Christlike too. Or at least drawn from the teachings of Pope Benedict XVI.

    But Ryan says Catholic doctrine informs more than his views on social issues. His mission to reduce spending is partly inspired, he said in April, by the Vatican. "The Holy Father, Pope Benedict, has charged that governments, communities and individuals running up high debt levels are 'living at the expense of future generations' and 'living in untruth,'" he said. In which case the Ryan budget could be interpreted as a play for fairness and honesty, at least in the eyes of its maker.

Right. Except that as we've noted, Ryan's budget—to say nothing of Romney's plans for the economy—doesn't actually reduce the deficit, and Ryan's cuts to Pell Grants [19] would explicitly be at the expense of future generations, saddling college students with massive debt even as earnings for college grads are sinking [20].

And what do you think the Pope say about the lies in Ryan's convention speech [21]?

4. Lisa Mascaro, Los Angeles Times

This short LA Times piece [22] is a near-perfect example of a reporter sticking to the narrative she's heard, using the descriptions of the candidate that his party would most like to believe are true without ever questioning whether they hold up. “The vice presidential pick has breathed new vigor into the campaign, as conservatives who had expressed lackluster support for Mitt Romney [23] embraced the budget wonk for the No. 2 spot,” Mascaro writes. And then, “Ryan is among the party's sharpest fiscal thinkers and the architect of the GOP's approach to steep budget cuts and the Medicare overhaul that has been attacked by Democrats as ending the social safety net.”

Balance! Too bad there's no “Republicans say” in front of “budget wonk” or “among the party's sharpest fiscal thinkers.” Those are givens, whereas the cuts that Ryan's Medicare overhaul would make to the beloved program are portrayed as things that Democrats made up rather than actual policy proposals made by the “wonk.”

As Simon Maloy at Media Matters [15] noted: “In the span of two weeks, Paul Ryan the 'wonk' has said he doesn't know when his campaign's budget will balance because they haven't done the math, and he can't give tax details until after the election. So the question for the media now becomes: Why keep hyping Paul Ryan's wonkiness when he keeps giving you reasons not to?”

5. Patrick O'Connor, Wall Street Journal

For O'Connor [24], Ryan's budget wonkery stems from the fact that he once was a policy aide in Congress and that other Tea Party Republicans are attached to his wildly unpopular budget ideas. Admitting that Ryan had only a few pages on the budget in Young Guns, the book he co-wrote with Eric Cantor and Kevin McCarthy, and that Ryan's commitment to deficit-reduction never seems to include a willingness to go after the military yet always targets social programs, O'Connor nevertheless repeats the popular narrative that Ryan is a “wonk.” What he doesn't do is question, in his rather extensive history of Ryan's career, why the budget hawk voted repeatedly to blow holes in the budget with massive tax cuts [25].

He does raise one tantalizing question, after hundreds of words listing Paul Ryan's appeal as a serious intellectual heavyweight on fiscal issues: if Ryan's budget plan is so appealing, why doesn't Mitt Romney want to use it?

While not the first time a conservative got a reputation for being a serious thinker on economics, Ryan might represent the height of that false advertising. he went around preaching the doctrine of Ayn Rand until oops, everyone found out that Rand was an atheist, can little sex cult and died collecting Social Security and medicare - two programs that Ryan would like to put under the knife. More here - Flip side of Sarah PalinThe past two weeks have shown us that Paul Ryan isn't so different from the GOP's last pick for vice president

And yet Ryan’s reputation for true wonkishness seems to be vastly overstated. He’s less a wonk than a policy naif’s idea of a wonk – just enough “baselines” and “percent of GDP” and charts to make it all look nice, but very little under the hood. As Paul Krugman said recently:

    Look, Ryan hasn’t “crunched the numbers”; he has just scribbled some stuff down, without checking at all to see if it makes sense. He asserts that he can cut taxes without net loss of revenue by closing unspecified loopholes; he asserts that he can cut discretionary spending to levels not seen since Calvin Coolidge, without saying how; he asserts that he can convert Medicare to a voucher system, with much lower spending than now projected, without even a hint of how this is supposed to work. This is just a fantasy, not a serious policy proposal.

Krugman is concerned in that post with how Ryan dupes self-proclaimed budget hawks, but Ryan is duping Republicans, too.

Mitt Romney Has More in Common With Old World French Aristocracy Than Patriotic Americans

Mitt Romney Has More in Common With Old World French Aristocracy Than Patriotic Americans

And this is where we get to the hypocrisy at the heart of Mitt Romney. Everyone knows that he is fantastically rich, having scored great success, the legend goes, as a "turnaround specialist," a shrewd financial operator who revived moribund companies as a high-priced consultant for a storied Wall Street private equity firm. But what most voters don't know is the way Mitt Romney actually made his fortune: by borrowing vast sums of money that other people were forced to pay back. This is the plain, stark reality that has somehow eluded America's top political journalists for two consecutive presidential campaigns: Mitt Romney is one of the greatest and most irresponsible debt creators of all time. In the past few decades, in fact, Romney has piled more debt onto more unsuspecting companies, written more gigantic checks that other people have to cover, than perhaps all but a handful of people on planet Earth.

By making debt the centerpiece of his campaign, Romney was making a calculated bluff of historic dimensions – placing a massive all-in bet on the rank incompetence of the American press corps. The result has been a brilliant comedy: A man makes a $250 million fortune loading up companies with debt and then extracting million-dollar fees from those same companies, in exchange for the generous service of telling them who needs to be fired in order to finance the debt payments he saddled them with in the first place. That same man then runs for president riding an image of children roasting on flames of debt, choosing as his running mate perhaps the only politician in America more pompous and self-righteous on the subject of the evils of borrowed money than the candidate himself. If Romney pulls off this whopper, you'll have to tip your hat to him: No one in history has ever successfully run for president riding this big of a lie. It's almost enough to make you think he really is qualified for the White House.

The unlikeliness of Romney's gambit isn't simply a reflection of his own artlessly unapologetic mindset – it stands as an emblem for the resiliency of the entire sociopathic Wall Street set he represents. Four years ago, the Mitt Romneys of the world nearly destroyed the global economy with their greed, shortsightedness and – most notably – wildly irresponsible use of debt in pursuit of personal profit. The sight was so disgusting that people everywhere were ready to drop an H-bomb on Lower Manhattan and bayonet the survivors. But today that same insane greed ethos, that same belief in the lunatic pursuit of instant borrowed millions – it's dusted itself off, it's had a shave and a shoeshine, and it's back out there running for president.

Mitt Romney, it turns out, is the perfect frontman for Wall Street's greed revolution. He's not a two-bit, shifty-eyed huckster like Lloyd Blankfein. He's not a sighing, eye-rolling, arrogant jerkwad like Jamie Dimon. But Mitt believes the same things those guys believe: He's been right with them on the front lines of the financialization revolution, a decades-long campaign in which the old, simple, let's-make-stuff-and-sell-it manufacturing economy was replaced with a new, highly complex, let's-take-stuff-and-trash-it financial economy. 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.

Willard "Mitt" Romney's background in many ways suggests a man who was born to be president – disgustingly rich from birth, raised in prep schools, no early exposure to minorities outside of maids, a powerful daddy to clean up his missteps, and timely exemptions from military service. In Romney's bio there are some eerie early-life similarities to other recent presidential figures. (Is America really ready for another Republican president who was a prep-school cheerleader?) And like other great presidential double-talkers such as Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, Romney has shown particular aptitude in the area of telling multiple factual versions of his own life story.

"I longed in many respects to actually be in Vietnam and be representing our country there," he claimed years after the war. To a different audience, he said, "I was not planning on signing up for the military. It was not my desire to go off and serve in Vietnam."

Like John F. Kennedy and George W. Bush, men whose way into power was smoothed by celebrity fathers but who rebelled against their parental legacy as mature politicians, Mitt Romney's career has been both a tribute to and a repudiation of his famous father. George Romney in the 1950s became CEO of American Motors Corp., made a modest fortune betting on energy efficiency in an age of gas guzzlers and ended up serving as governor of the state of Michigan only two generations removed from the Romney clan's tradition of polygamy. For Mitt, who grew up worshipping his tall, craggily handsome, politically moderate father, life was less rocky: Cranbrook prep school in suburban Detroit, followed by Stanford in the Sixties, a missionary term in which he spent two and a half years trying (as he said) to persuade the French to "give up your wine," and Harvard Business School in the Seventies. Then, faced with making a career choice, Mitt chose an odd one: Already married and a father of two, he left Harvard and eschewed both politics and the law to enter the at-the-time unsexy world of financial consulting.

"When you get out of a place like Harvard, you can do anything – at least in the old days you could," says a prominent corporate lawyer on Wall Street who is familiar with Romney's career. "But he comes out, he not only has a Harvard Business School degree, he's got a national pedigree with his name. He could have done anything – but what does he do? He says, 'I'm going to spend my life loading up distressed companies with debt.'?"

Romney started off at the Boston Consulting Group, where he showed an aptitude for crunching numbers and glad-handing clients. Then, in 1977, he joined a young entrepreneur named Bill Bain at a firm called Bain & Company, where he worked for six years before being handed the reins of a new firm-within-a-firm called Bain Capital.

In Romney's version of the tale, Bain Capital – which evolved into what is today known as a private equity firm – specialized in turning around moribund companies (Romney even wrote a book called Turnaround that complements his other nauseatingly self-complimentary book, No Apology) and helped create the Staples office-supply chain. On the campaign trail, Romney relentlessly trades on his own self-perpetuated reputation as a kind of altruistic rescuer of failing enterprises, never missing an opportunity to use the word "help" or "helped" in his description of what he and Bain did for companies. He might, for instance, describe himself as having been "deeply involved in helping other businesses" or say he "helped create tens of thousands of jobs."

The reality is that toward the middle of his career at Bain, Romney made a fateful strategic decision: He moved away from creating companies like Staples through venture capital schemes, and toward a business model that involved borrowing huge sums of money to take over existing firms, then extracting value from them by force. He decided, as he later put it, that "there's a lot greater risk in a startup than there is in acquiring an existing company." In the Eighties, when Romney made this move, this form of financial piracy became known as a leveraged buyout, and it achieved iconic status thanks to Gordon Gekko in Wall Street. Gekko's business strategy was essentially identical to the Romney–Bain model, only Gekko called himself a "liberator" of companies instead of a "helper."

Here's how Romney would go about "liberating" a company: A private equity firm like Bain typically seeks out floundering businesses with good cash flows. It then puts down a relatively small amount of its own money and runs to a big bank like Goldman Sachs or Citigroup for the rest of the financing. (Most leveraged buyouts are financed with 60 to 90 percent borrowed cash.) The takeover firm then uses that borrowed money to buy a controlling stake in the target company, either with or without its consent. When an LBO is done without the consent of the target, it's called a hostile takeover; such thrilling acts of corporate piracy were made legend in the Eighties, most notably the 1988 attack by notorious corporate raiders Kohlberg Kravis Roberts against RJR Nabisco, a deal memorialized in the book Barbarians at the Gate.

Romney and Bain avoided the hostile approach, preferring to secure the cooperation of their takeover targets by buying off a company's management with lucrative bonuses. Once management is on board, the rest is just math. So if the target company is worth $500 million, Bain might put down $20 million of its own cash, then borrow $350 million from an investment bank to take over a controlling stake.

But here's the catch. When Bain borrows all of that money from the bank, it's the target company that ends up on the hook for all of the debt.

Now your troubled firm – let's say you make tricycles in Alabama – has been taken over by a bunch of slick Wall Street dudes who kicked in as little as five percent as a down payment. So in addition to whatever problems you had before, Tricycle Inc. now owes Goldman or Citigroup $350 million. With all that new debt service to pay, the company's bottom line is suddenly untenable: You almost have to start firing people immediately just to get your costs down to a manageable level.

"That interest," says Lynn Turner, former chief accountant of the Securities and Exchange Commission, "just sucks the profit out of the company."

Fortunately, the geniuses at Bain who now run the place are there to help tell you whom to fire. And for the service it performs cutting your company's costs to help you pay off the massive debt that it, Bain, saddled your company with in the first place, Bain naturally charges a management fee, typically millions of dollars a year. So Tricycle Inc. now has two gigantic new burdens it never had before Bain Capital stepped into the picture: tens of millions in annual debt service, and millions more in "management fees." Since the initial acquisition of Tricycle Inc. was probably greased by promising the company's upper management lucrative bonuses, all that pain inevitably comes out of just one place: the benefits and payroll of the hourly workforce.

Once all that debt is added, one of two things can happen. The company can fire workers and slash benefits to pay off all its new obligations to Goldman Sachs and Bain, leaving it ripe to be resold by Bain at a huge profit. Or it can go bankrupt – this happens after about seven percent of all private equity buyouts – leaving behind one or more shuttered factory towns. Either way, Bain wins. By power-sucking cash value from even the most rapidly dying firms, private equity raiders like Bain almost always get their cash out before a target goes belly up.

This business model wasn't really "helping," of course – and it wasn't new. Fans of mob movies will recognize what's known as the "bust-out," in which a gangster takes over a restaurant or sporting goods store and then monetizes his investment by running up giant debts on the company's credit line. (Think Paulie buying all those cases of Cutty Sark in Goodfellas.) When the note comes due, the mobster simply torches the restaurant and collects the insurance money. Reduced to their most basic level, the leveraged buyouts engineered by Romney followed exactly the same business model. "It's the bust-out," one Wall Street trader says with a laugh. "That's all it is."

Private equity firms aren't necessarily evil by definition. There are many stories of successful turnarounds fueled by private equity, often involving multiple floundering businesses that are rolled into a single entity, eliminating duplicative overhead. Experian, the giant credit-rating tyrant, was acquired by Bain in the Nineties and went on to become an industry leader.

But there's a key difference between private equity firms and the businesses that were America's original industrial cornerstones, like the elder Romney's AMC. Everyone had a stake in the success of those old businesses, which spread prosperity by putting people to work. But even private equity's most enthusiastic adherents have difficulty explaining its benefit to society. Marc Wolpow, a former Bain colleague of Romney's, told reporters during Mitt's first Senate run that Romney erred in trying to sell his business as good for everyone. "I believed he was making a mistake by framing himself as a job creator," said Wolpow. "That was not his or Bain's or the industry's primary objective. The objective of the LBO business is maximizing returns for investors." When it comes to private equity, American workers – not to mention their families and communities – simply don't enter into the equation.

What is the difference between the way Romney and the European aristocracy of the 17th century and earlier. Romney and his followers do not believe in honest rewards for honest goods and services rendered they believe that all the GDP produced by American workers is due them because they are the entitled elite. Sure they'll throw the peasants a a few crumbs, they have to make it look like the system is kind of working and if its not, its your fault. Yet no pain caused to working class Americans is Romney and the elites fault. Funny how that works. 12 Tax-Dodging Corporations Spent $1 Billion To Influence Washington Over The Last Decade

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