Silver Spoon Endorses Silver Spoon

They both act sweet and cuddly, but inside they just don't care. via Newscoma
To the surprise of no one, TN Gov. Bill Haslam endorsed Mitt Romney in the Republican primary.

Romney, who has been featured in a hit piece produced by Newt Gingrich’s “Winning Our Future” SuperPAC, which has, perhaps, done the 2012 Obama election team the biggest favor ever. It clearly draws a distinction between what some on the left have called an indistinguishable difference between Romney and Obama. Obama never made millions of dollars from auctioning off American jobs for fun and profit.

But the endorsement by Haslam isn’t surprising at all. Both men grew up sucking on the same brand of silver spoons. Neither have really ever held a job they didn’t either buy, or their daddies didn’t help them get. Both of them have benefitted from a corporate welfare system, established 40 years ago by the Nixon Administration and advanced by every administration since, that values the value of wealthy people over the value of hard work.

If you want to understand why things are the way they are, start looking right there, at the shift in our value system at the highest levels.

This morning, the Washington Post is examining Romney’s gospel of “Creative Destruction”. Here’s a couple of quotes from the article:

But like Romney’s work on all the businesses Bain invested in, the primary goal with these companies wasn’t job creation but making them more profitable and valuable. This meant embracing aspects of capitalism that have unsettled some Americans: laying off workers when necessary, expanding overseas to chase profits and paying top executives significantly more than employees on lower rungs.

But some private-equity experts think the link between Bain’s deals and jobs is more tenuous.

“I’ve got a lot of admiration for Bain Capital, but jobs were the byproduct of the mission, not the product,” said Howard Anderson, a senior lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. “The product was to increase wealth, and in some cases it meant expanding the company. In some cases it meant contracting the company.”

Make no mistake about it, Romney’s creative math that shows 100,000 jobs created during his tenure at Bain completely ignores the jobs that were lost to his “creative destruction”. I’m sure, as is testified by the folks featured in Newt’s 30 min. movie, that the people who fell victim to this “creativity” feel like their lives were “destroyed”, at least for a short time.

As the Christian Science Monitor rightly points out:

Gingrich, Perry, and others are putting particular focus on the people who lost their jobs as a result of Romney’s Bain Capital. Gingrich’s Super PAC will be running $3.5 million of ads featuring emotional interviews with some of them.

But what, exactly, are Romney’s opponents proposing to do about layoffs that harm so many people? Millions of Americans have lost their jobs over the last four years – and as a result have often lost their health insurance, their homes, and their savings.

Are Gingrich, Perry, and others proposing to expand health insurance coverage for jobless Americans and their families? All I hear from the Republicans is their determination to repeal the law that President Obama championed – which still leaves millions of Americans uninsured. Do Romney’s opponents have plans to keep people in their homes even when they’ve lost their jobs and can’t pay their mortgages? No. Do they propose expanding unemployment insurance? If memory serves, most of them were opposed to the last extension.

I’m all in favor of reforming capitalism, but you’ll permit me some skepticism when it comes to criticisms of Bain Capital coming from Romney’s Republican opponents. None of these Republican candidates has exactly distinguished himself with new ideas for giving Americans more economic security. To the contrary — until the assault on Romney and Bain Capital — every one of them has been a cheerleader for financial capitalism of the most brutal sort.

The point is, don’t be fooled by Republicans who are currently engaged in attacking Mitt Romney as proponents for rebuilding the diminishing middle class. These attacks are more focused on the self-interest of the attackers…getting elected, than some ideological difference between Romney, Newt, and Perry.

Eventually, Democrats will join the fray in attacking Romney for his exploitation of both American workers and overseas tax havens that have become the rule rather than the exception for amassing great wealth while avoiding taxation. And while there are plenty on the Democratic side that are culpable for the changes in the tax code and regulations that made all this possible, it was driven, from the get go, by the Republican Party.

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