Mitt Romney's Our Kind of Guy, Right?

Robert Reich explains how private equity firms like Mitt Romney's work:



Kind of easy once you look at it that way.

Thanks, MoveOn.org.

My War on Ann Romney!

Actually, I don't have a war on Ann Romney. Just thought I'd title this piece using the mode o' the day.

Still, I know silly when I see it. So, any support for Ann Romney because of how hard she worked as a stay-at-home-mom is nothing short of ridiculous. Sure, anyone who lives a reasonably decent life deserves average respect and courtesy, especially if they haven't shot someone like Trayvon Martin dead for no good reason, but that doesn't mean there isn't a lot of hypocrisy flying around in the heads of the Romney campaign brain trust. So let's examine this issue in words and pictures:

The hard years.

“They were not easy years. You have to understand, I was raised in a lovely neighborhood, as was Mitt, and at BYU, we moved into a $62-a-month basement apartment with a cement floor and lived there two years as students with no income.

“It was tiny. And I didn’t have money to carpet the floor. But you can get remnants, samples, so I glued them together, all different colors. It looked awful, but it was carpeting.

“We were happy, studying hard. Neither one of us had a job, because Mitt had enough of an investment from stock that we could sell off a little at a time.

“The stock came from Mitt’s father. When he took over American Motors, the stock was worth nothing. But he invested Mitt’s birthday money year to year — it wasn’t much, a few thousand, but he put it into American Motors because he believed in himself. Five years later, stock that had been $6 a share was $96 and Mitt cashed it so we could live and pay for education.

“Mitt and I walked to class together, shared housekeeping, had a lot of pasta and tuna fish and learned hard lessons."

--Ann Romney

Not a stay-at-home mom, not in a "lovely neighborhood."

 Want to examine motherhood, especially single motherhood in the U.S.? Read these statistics from a March, 2012 study by Legal Momentum, The Women's Legal Defense and Education Fund:

Prevalence: Single motherhood is very common. Around half of today’s mothers will spend at least some time as the sole custodial parent. At any one time, almost one quarter of mothers are single mothers.

Characteristics: Around 45% of single mothers have never married, around 55% are divorced, separated or widowed. Half have one child, 30% have two. About two fifths are White, one third Black, one quarter Hispanic. One quarter have a college degree, one sixth have not completed high school.

Employment: At any one time, about two thirds of single mothers are also working outside the home, a slightly greater share than the share of married mothers who are also working outside the home. However, only two fifths of single mothers are employed full-time the entire year, and a quarter are jobless the entire year.

Income: Half of single mother families have an annual income less than $25,000. Median income for single mother families is only one third the median for married couple families. Only one third of single mothers receive any child support, and the average amount these mothers receive is only about $300 a month.

Poverty: Two fifths of single mother families are poor, triple the poverty rate for the rest of the population. The majority of poor children are in single mother families. Child poverty is linked to school dropout; to negative adult outcomes including joblessness and ill health; and to reduced economic output estimated to be about 4% of Gross Domestic Product.

Hardship: Two fifths of single mother families are “food insecure,” one seventh use food pantries, one fifth have no health insurance, one third spend more than half their income on housing. Three quarters of homeless families are single mother families.

Welfare & Food Stamp Receipt: Although two fifths of all single mothers are poor, only one tenth of all single mothers receive cash welfare assistance. Two fifths of all single mothers receive Food Stamps.

Compared to Single Mothers in Peer Countries: The single mother poverty rate in the U.S. is far above the average in high income countries even though the single mother employment rate in the U.S. is also above the average. Less generous income support programs in the U.S. help explain the exceptionally high poverty rate for single mother families in the U.S.

 Let's see if we can find a chart that demonstrates how the U.S. compares with other countries like us when it comes to poverty and single mothers:

I'm glad we're so good at poverty. Oh wait...

Now, let's revisit our celebrated mother, Ann Romney:

The young Romney family after the hard times when he had to sell some of his stock to get by.

“Another son came along 18 months later, although we waited four years to have the third, because Mitt was still in school and we had no income except the stock we were chipping away at. We were living on the edge, not entertaining. No, I did not work. Mitt thought it was important for me to stay home with the children, and I was delighted.

“Right after Mitt graduated in 1975, we had our third boy and it was about the time Mitt’s first paycheck came along. So, we were married a long time before we had any income, about five years as struggling students. …

"Now, every once in a while, we say if things get rough, we can go back to a $62-a-month apartment and be happy. All we need is each other and a little corner and we’ll be fine.”

--Ann Romney

A single mother at a jobs fair.

 Currently, what's the fate of single mothers in our society?

In 2010, the first full calendar year after the Great Recession, nearly 41 percent of the nation's single mothers with children under age 18, like Williams, lived on incomes below the federal poverty line. (Federal poverty measures differ according to family size.) New data released by the Census Bureau on Tuesday shows that few Americans fared well in 2010. About 46 million remained in or fell into poverty. The nation's median income dropped to levels unseen since the mid 1990s. But the percentage of single mothers with children under the age of 18 who are poor outstripped that of almost every other group.

"We have a long history of distinguishing between the 'deserving poor' and the 'undeserving poor' in this country,” said Joan Entmacher, vice president for family economic security at the National Women's Law Center, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank and advocacy group. "For a lot of people, single mothers are so far outside their idea of the deserving poor that they can hardly think straight about what might be done to help these mothers or the millions of children that live with them."

 In the meantime, where did Ann Romney raise her boys?

Here in Belmont, Massachusets during the Bain years.

Here in La Jolla, CA (they're tearing this down to more than double it in size.

And here in Park City, Utah. (Kinda small, though. Only 11 acres. Guess that's why they sold it.)

And here on Lake Winnepesauke, New Hampshire

Not here in Boston. Kids were grown.

WASHINGTON -- For a woman with three houses and sixteen grandkids, Ann Romney doesn't have very much help around the house, according to her 2010 tax return.

IRS forms released Tuesday by Mitt Romney's presidential campaign show that despite reporting income of $21.7 million, the couple paid only $20,603 in taxable wages for household help in 2010. This figure was divided among four women: Rosania Costa ($4,808), Kelli Harrison ($8,667), Susan Moore ($2,238) and Valerie Cravens Anae ($4,890).

According to a number of Boston-based domestic staffing agencies, the salary range for a housekeeper is between $20 and $30 an hour, which adds up to an annual salary of $40,000 to $50,000 based on forty-hour weeks and two weeks of paid vacation a year.

But this number is only for one house, and the Romneys have three houses -- a 2,000 sq. ft. townhouse in Belmont, Mass., a 5,400 sq. ft. lake house on 11 acres in Wolfeboro, N.H., and a beach house in La Jolla, Calif., that is undergoing renovations to double its size.

Even if the Romneys avoided spending time in La Jolla in 2010, they spent plenty of time in New Hampshire, with regular visits in the summer from five sons and their families.

Yet the Romneys still paid only half of the lowest range of an average housekeeper's salary, which raises the question of who cleaned the Romney houses the other 50 percent of the time. A Romney campaign adviser declined to respond to questions from The Huffington Post about the housekeeping salaries.

Here's a link to a story about a nanny/maid, Juanita, that took care of young Ann. Apparently, she had a privileged upbringing. This is getting a little funny.

Here's something not funny:

Denise Bowie (L), 21, watches her one-year-old daughter Genelle practice walking at Hope Gardens Family Center, a shelter for homeless women and children, run by Union Rescue Mission on 77 acres (0.31 square km) of countryside away from Skid Row, on the outskirts of Los Angeles, California January 25, 2012. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

We can stop worrying about them now.

Obama's War on Romney, Take 1

There's a reason I smile a lot.

Maybe it isn't Barack Obama who's so smart -- maybe it's his campaign team -- but a day after Mitt Romney finally got some traction with his attempts to mend his women deficit, the president releases his and his wife's 2011 tax return, showing that he paid 20.5% of his income in taxes. That beats the hell out of Mitt Romney's 13.9%.

And who wins the news cycle going into the weekend? Obama/Biden, that's who. There might be a minor residue remaining of the Hilary Rosen kerfuffle, but by the Sunday shows, the tax fairness issue will have been reasserted.

Take that, Mittens!

What's  a candidate supposed to do if he can't sustain faux outrage longer than 10 minutes?

I'm a Better Christian Than Rick Warren, and I'm an Atheist!

Jesus, hear my prayer today, that they don't figure my bullshit out quite yet.

Here's Rick Warren (on fucking Easter!) sharing with ABC his deeply held Christian beliefs:

Well certainly the Bible says we are to care about the poor. There's over 2,000 verses in the Bible about the poor. And God says that those who care about the poor, God will care about them and God will bless them. But there's a fundamental question on the meaning of "fairness." Does fairness mean everybody makes the same amount of money? Or does fairness mean everybody gets the opportunity to make the same amount of money? I do not believe in wealth redistribution, I believe in wealth creation.

Mm-kay. In this week's edition of What Would Jesus Do, let's go to the tape (er, Bible):

And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God. --Matthew 19:24

Jesus looking at him, loved him, and said to him, "One thing you lack. Go, sell whatever you have, and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me, taking up the cross."

But his face fell at that saying, and he went away sorrowful, for he was one who had great possessions. Jesus looked around, and said to his disciples, "How difficult it is for those who have riches to enter into the Kingdom of God!"  --Mark 10:19-20

One of the multitude said to him, "Teacher, bid my brother divide the inheritance with me."

But he said to him, "Man, who made me a judge or divider over you?"

And he said to them, "Take heed, and beware of all covetousness; for a man's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions."

And he told them a parable, saying, "The land of a rich man brought forth plentifully;
and he thought to himself, `What shall I do, for I have nowhere to store my crops?'

And he said, `I will do this: I will pull down my barns, and build larger ones; and there I will store all my grain and my goods.

And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; take your ease, eat, drink, be merry.'

But God said to him, `Fool! This night your soul is required of you; and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?'

So is he who lays up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God."   --Luke 12:13-21

Jesus to the rich young man: Dude, WTF!

Jesus would be saying that to Rick Warren, if, uh, you know, there was a God...and, uh, if Jesus wasn't, uh, stardust by now.

Modern Families

One portrait of a modern American family:

The Romney family at their vacation home

The vacation home at Lake Winnepesaukee, New Hampshire

"Just a couple of weeks ago in Kansas, President Obama lectured us about Teddy Roosevelt’s philosophy of government. But he failed to mention the important difference between Teddy Roosevelt and Barack Obama.  Roosevelt believed that government should level the playing field to create equal opportunities. President Obama believes that government should create equal outcomes.

"In an entitlement society, everyone receives the same or similar rewards, regardless of education, effort, and willingness to take risk. That which is earned by some is redistributed to the others. And the only people who truly enjoy any real rewards are those who do the redistributing—the government.

"The truth is that everyone may get the same rewards, but virtually everyone will be worse off."

--Mitt Romney

 "I stand ready to lead us down a different path, where we are lifted up by our desire to succeed, not dragged down by a resentment of success."

--Mitt Romney

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Another portrait of a modern American family:

An American family not at their vacation home

Not vacation homes in Portland, Oregon

"The success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our gross domestic product, but on the reach of our prosperity, on the ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart -- not out of charity, but because it is the surest route to our common good."

--Barack Obama

"I think that one of the things that we all agree to is that the touchstone for economic policy is, does it allow the average American to find good employment and see their incomes rise; that we can’t just look at things in the aggregate, we do want to grow the pie, but we want to make sure that prosperity is spread across the spectrum of regions and occupations and genders and races; and that economic policy should focus on growing the pie, but it also has to make sure that everybody has got opportunity in that system."  

--Barack Obama

I've Been Soft-Selling My Core Beliefs. Not Anymore.

Over the past few days, I've been trying to sort out a strategy for the U.S., my country, to adopt as we move forward to a more prosperous and peaceful future. What I've watched myself do is sell myself -- and my core beliefs -- short.

Why? What's happening? What am I doing? I’ve been talking myself into being a Democrat, that’s what. I’ve been trying to ramp my own sense of purpose up in a way that lets me support the Democratic Party in the 2012 elections. Okay, I’ve succeeded, I’m going to support the Democratic ticket from here to the voting booth in November.

But it’s simply not enough. It’s not that I don’t trust my party, the party that I’ve supported since 1964, when as a 14-year-old avowed supporter of Lyndon Johnson I went door-to-door campaigning for him. I believed in the Democratic Party then, and I believe in it now. But there is a huge difference in the way I feel now and 50-odd years ago.

The Democratic Party’s platform and performance is a bare-minimum starting point fraught with all kinds of shortcomings. There are a growing number of people that mock the difference between the parties as inconsequential. I know. I’ve posted some diaries at more intensely liberal sites like firedoglake and gotten flamed in comments for being milquetoast (not exactly the word they chose).

Reading Salon.com yesterday – Glenn Greenwald was hosting guest bloggers – I realized the source of my discontent and the reason I got flamed at firedoglake: Supporting the Democratic Party and calling for a bigger tent that includes the 99 percent is not enough, not by a long shot.

I repeat: I’m going to vote the Democratic ticket. Big whoop. That’s like maintaining pressure on a serious wound to hold down the bleeding and then deciding to forgo the trip to the hospital. I’ll likely bleed to death at that rate. We all could. No, to effect real change, we’ve got to stand our ground, we’ve got to stop the bleeding. Then, we’ve got to set the stage for real healing and a real return to health for the whole nation.

And it’s not like ripping off a scab. It’s like staunching a mortal wound. It’s that important. I’m not even sure I know all it will take, but I do know where to start. The first step, like all efforts at rehabilitation, is to be brutally honest. Here goes:

•  Stop being afraid of language. For me, that means admitting, even reveling in, the fact that I'm an avowed socialist. It's not a dirty word. It's an apt description for someone who supports public solutions to public problems. I admit finding a suitable label isn't a substitute for action, but it's a place to come from. And, BTW, liberal, progressive, socialist, it's all about the same thing, and that's pressing for the advancement of public goods. Such belief is not, regardless of conservative talking points, antithetical to private enterprise. One thrives because of the other.
• I speak of healthcare as a human right, and it is. Therefore, my only acceptable solution, given that I'm a socialist and a humanist, is a single-payer system. What's more, we already have an effective example of single-payer, and that's Medicare, an apt name for the cradle-to-grave system we should already have.
• Equality, equality, equality, in every way imaginable. I don't need to spell it out.
• Due process, rule of law, no exceptions just because you're rich and white. Just no exceptions. Armed robbers and too-big-to-fail bank CEOs should share the same cell, if they're caught with their hands in the cookie jar. (Why does that sound weird? Because it doesn't.)
• War crimes and crimes against humanity should be tried in the International Criminal Court, which we should be participating in with great relish. The fact that we don't doesn't make us an exceptional country, it tells the world we as a people accept that we're basically, uh, cowards. The reason we don't participate in world bodies like the ICC is that we wish to be free to behave like criminals, regardless of how many conventions and treaties we sign on to. Anybody with an ounce of brains or a sense of common decency knows that about us and knows why we won't cooperate. We wouldn't be able to bomb and kill people at will. We'd be forced, at least, to behave in an justifiable and explainable manner.
• Republicans -- conservatives, whatever -- used to be colleagues with which we could and did have reasonable disagreements. No more. They're tools of the plutocracy and pimps for the rich. They have no reasonable purpose other than to steal as much money without doing time as they can. They have utter contempt for the poor, near-poor, and the middle class. Their messaging has evolved to the point that we shouldn't have straight faces while listening to them. They are among the most irreligious people on the face of the planet, their faux religiosity notwithstanding. Take them seriously, yes, but don't engage them as if they didn't know the larceny in their own hearts. They do, and we should act like it at all times. We can be civil but not cowardly. Confront the bastards mercilessly.
• Our problem, those who align with the Democratic Party, is that the Democrats are only marginally better. We can't delude ourselves. It's okay to support the Democrats as far as it goes, but don't believe for one minute that the party as a rule goes one-tenth of the way it needs to in order to accomplish what this country desperately requires. So the other nine-tenths needs us to move forward boldly and be prepared to leave the Dems in the dust. Seriously. An example: Jay Rockefeller. Nuff said.
• Give in to the fact that as a country we can't really take the cure until we give up our warlike ways. We must become a nation of peace, similar to Japan and Germany (no irony there). Hell, China has been, once free of Mao, a far more peaceful country than the U.S. Shocking, when you think of it. War is for cowards. It takes some real guts to give up our guns. Let's keep a good self-defense force and chuck the rest -- and join the civilized world. I'm tired of being a cowboy, or at least being forced to ride with them. An example: Rick Perry. Nuff said.
• On a final note for now: We've been behaving very badly as a country of late because of the way we've used the War On Terror to justify the destruction of the Bill of Rights. Oh, fine, we can still carry guns and kill each other in random, indiscriminate ways (and some rather discriminating ones as well), but by and large our Fourth Amendment rights are in tatters, and the right to free speech and assembly are rapidly becoming a joke, were it not so tragic. Free speech zones! WTF! Freedom to assemble and demand a redress of grievances, my ass! An example: Michael Bloomberg and NYC under Ray Kelly. Nuff said.

I could go on and usually do, but enough for now. Over the coming weeks as we get further into the election year and hopefully further into the resurrection of the Occupy Movement, I'm going to cut the crap out of my weak-tea liberalism and move toward the real deal. It starts with admitting the truth and standing up to the man. How we all do that can be a matter of style, as long as we're not simply pandering or, more like it, whimpering. Tea Party people, you wanna take back the country? From whom, for what? You already have taken it back and you don't even know it. Why? Because the Republicans stole it from you while you were busting up town-hall meetings, that's why.

It's the Left who have lost the country, and I hope, as we come to reclaim it, we show you what a real patriot looks like. I've got a feeling I'm not the only one who is mad as hell.

And it starts with being mad as hell at myself. Count me back.

What If We Stand and Fight?

After spending time determining what I believe -- in the public-policy sphere -- I offered the proposition that the U.S. might not be the place to look for an advanced (or at least advancing) society. We might best just move to where the cool people are, like the Netherlands or Denmark. Some might think of that as pragmatic. Others might think of it as cowardly. I understand why either might be valid.

What if, as the Republicans might suggest, you decide not to "cut and run?" What if we decided to stand and fight? What form then does our struggle look like?

If only it were true...

In taking the position that we couldn't turn to violence, where we follow the lead of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi (you know the drill), I'm left to say our fight has to be a political one, using the tools our Constitution -- and the state constitutions and local ordinances that derive from it.

Eric Alterman wrote a fascinating and spot-on critique of the recent liberal strategies in his New York Times piece called "Cultural Liberalism Is Not Enough." Here's the money quote of his thesis:

In other words, economic liberalism is on life-support, while cultural liberalism thrives. The obvious question is why. The simple answer is that cultural liberalism comes cheap. Supporting same-sex marriage or a woman’s right to choose does not cost the wealthy anything or restrict their ability to become wealthier. But there is more to it than that.

The "more than that" is all about this:

The failure of liberals to plan for the failure of their plans — what Saul Bellow once called the “Good Intentions Paving Company” — resulted in a bitter, resentful scramble for the remaining scraps. Liberal politicians proved unable to face up to the harsh realities. “The great liberal failing of this time,” Daniel Patrick Moynihan observed as early as 1968, was “constantly to over-promise and to overstate, and thereby constantly to appear to under-perform.” This not only alienated key constituencies, but it also diminished the trust between the governing and the governed that previous generations of liberals had worked so hard to earn.

 The problem is not that liberals had it wrong. We just over-promised. Interestingly, Ronald Reagan over-promised: His supply-side, tax-cutting, "Morning in America" agenda delivered us a gargantuan national debt. Since, however, that debt financed a decent economic boom -- 80 percent of which ended up in the hands of the wealthy where it largely remained -- conservatives have been able to crow ever since.

Now, I knew how to over-promise!

Conservative pragmatists like George H. W. Bush paid for their pragmatism by being voted out. Clinton was luckier. His pragmatism, which led to the first federal surplus in generations, was fought tooth and nail. His economic boom was fueled not by debt but by over-investment in the dot-com dream, which did lead to a minor recession at the beginning of the George W. Bush years.

Next, W. fueled his tepid economy with tax cuts and deficit-funded defense spending. Since none of those tax cuts, primarily for the wealthy, did much trickling down, what passed for economic growth for much of his last six years was funded by private debt, especially in the housing markets. This bubble popped, not only bringing our country -- and much of the world -- to its knees but also exposing the shadow banking industry for what it was: a giant Ponzi scheme financed by mortgage-backed securities and credit default swaps that turned out to be largely a fantasy world of funny paper.

"Hey Geitner, if we give some back, can we do it again later?"

Barack Obama, tagged from the beginning by the lunatic fringe as illegitimate, much as Bill Clinton was, did his best to get a stimulus package through that could do some serious Keynesian magic. Some say it was worthless (that view is demonstratively fallacious), some say that is saved our economy, though not doing nearly enough, and some say that Obama never fought for a package much larger, saying that it was the best he could do. Some leaked memos unfortunately paint a portrait of a less ambitious Keynesian.

Still, combined with TARP, bailouts for the auto industry, ample unemployment compensation extensions and payroll tax holidays, Obama was able, in concert with the Fed's various quantitative easing programs, to get and keep our economy out of the ditch -- just barely.

Many of us, watching this process, came to realize that Barack Obama was the moderate he appeared to be, if you were actually listening to him back in '08, his inspirational rhetoric notwithstanding. Am I disappointed? With his failure to hold the previous administration responsible for crimes against humanity, yes. With his continuing acquiescence to the expanding surveillance society and tragic softening of our 4th Amendment rights, yes. With his war on government or journalistic whistle-blowers, yes. With his less than heroic but at least pragmatic health care solution, yes. I haven't found any way around this disappointment other than to concede that the conservatives are so much worse. And that's slim comfort.

I'm moderate, so neither side likes me much. You'd think I would have foreseen that.

As Obama ratchets up the rhetorical games -- showing some serious populist outrage, which is heartening -- and Mitt Romney lets the "centrist" rhetoric slowly -- and not so Etch-A-Sketch-like -- seep into his speeches, we head into the general election with a very slippery contest. Obama is actually a recognizable version of his rhetoric, and he appears more genuine in his abandonment of appeasement. From my perspective, I've no choice but to vote for him. Mitt Romney, on the other hand, is nothing other than one, basic litmus test: you dip a strip into him and it comes out either red or blue. It's up to you to decide. His game is that he doesn't want anyone to actually know what the colors mean. I hope he doesn't succeed with this charade.

A liberal would never vote for Romney. A conservative has no choice but to. The so-called independents who aren't actually in the middle (there is no middle) are Romney's targets. "What do you want me to be? I'm him!" is the core of his message. Listen or take him seriously at your peril.

I hope President Obama does get mad, does get honest, and stands up and fights. As tepid as my support is (and I do support him), a mad-as-hell Obama that calls out the conservative agenda is an easier candidate to stand with. I'll grant him that. I'll stand with him, hoping he leads rather than follows. Which it will be isn't apparent yet.