Romney’s wager, Gingrich’s hypocrisy
By Max J. Castro
majcastro@gmail.com
Mitt Romney wants to bet Rick Perry $10,000 to settle an argument over whether Romney claimed in his first book that the health care plan he instituted in Massachusetts when he was Governor of that state would be a good model for the nation. At least that’s the challenge Romney threw at Perry during last Saturday’s Republican debate in Iowa’s Drake University. Romney’s proposed wager, like John McCain’s most famous memory lapse of the 2008 campaign, speaks volumes about the world top Republicans inhabit and how that colors their thinking.
I confess my masochism is not so severe as to compel me to watch all of the seemingly countless debates among the dismal and shrinking field of Republican presidential hopefuls. But I have watched enough to know that the word boring is a kind description of what goes on in these affairs.
To start with, the views expressed by the candidates range all the way from the right to the extreme right: boring, boring.
When they do disagree, they argue about such things as who would be the worst pox on “illegal aliens” and they compete over which one can rattle the sword most menacingly at Iran, China, or Cuba. Didn’t they learn anything from the implosion of the Republican Party in California after GOP Governor Pete Wilson decided to scapegoat those same “illegal aliens?” Do they remember Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, and if so why do they still long for new and worse debacles? The politics of fear and paranoia is so last decade: boring, lethal and scary.
Like obsessives, the Republican aspirants to the Oval Office pick over and over their meager fund of ideas – lowering taxes more and more, shrinking to insignificance those parts of government that don’t deal with war, surveillance or keeping brown people on the other side of the wall but instead help ordinary Americans, like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid: boring and mean.
Like schizophrenics, the GOP contenders’ delusions are not even consistent. They vehemently insist they oppose under any circumstances any and all tax increases, period, end of story. Ah, but then they turn around and favor a tax increase on 160 million Americans, the heart and soul of the middle class and of the dwindling ranks of blue collar workers whose jobs have not yet been outsourced abroad or replaced by a robot or a computer.
In other words, Republicans are OK with increasing taxes to earlier higher levels on the vast majority of Americans who work for the money and get a check at the end of the pay period from which taxes have automatically been deducted. But they are inalterably opposed to increasing taxes to higher previous levels on people whose money works for them; the very wealthy whose income derives mostly from inheritance, trust funds, stock dividends, and capital gains, which are profits on the sale of securities, real estate, and other assets (and which already are taxed at about half the rate of the income of firefighters, teachers, brick layers, and anyone else who works for a wage or a salary.)
Republicans have twisted themselves into knots trying to explain why higher taxes for the bottom 99 percent is not really a tax increase while raising taxes on the top 1 percent is: boring, illogical, unfair, cynical, and hypocritical.
Then again why expect anything else from these people? Look at the Republican candidate in 2008 and the two still standing in 2011.
John McCain was so rich he couldn’t remember how many houses he owned, but it was somewhere in the neighborhood of eight. Most of his money came from his wife’s family fortune.
Mitt Romney could cavalierly toss out a $10,000 dare because his net worth is in the hundreds of millions. Romney is a member in good standing of the top .01 percent, the social class the GOP establishment refers to as “the job creators.” Except that Romney, like more than a few other “job creators,” made his money as a job destroyer, consulting with companies on how to make more money with fewer and lower-paid workers or buying companies outright and extracting huge profits for the top executives while eliminating jobs at lower levels. And Romney did more than just destroy jobs: he helped create a model for systematic job killing. Romney is rightly “credited” as one of the leaders in converting corporate America to the kind of savage capitalism that has come to predominate. It is based on the philosophy that the corporation has no responsibility to employees, the environment, consumers or the community. Its sole mission is maximum returns for stockholders; not coincidentally, top executives are almost always rewarded with big chunks of company stocks.
As for Newt Gingrich, the other real contender, he is not in the same league as Romney, but he still gets to have a nearly million-dollar credit line at Tiffany’s, “the diamond store,” and to get millions of dollars annually making speeches and consulting for the same financial institutions he has blamed for the financial collapse. Then again hypocrisy is no stranger to Gingrich, as his role as a persecutor of Bill Clinton over the dalliance with Monica while carrying on his own, serious affair with a staffer amply demonstrated.
The main questions now are whether Romney can buy his way to the nomination despite the well-earned distrust of the right-wing of the GOP and if the American people will exercise the poor judgment to reward the keys to the White House to either Romney, the moneybags phony, or Gingrich, the man who has made millions serving as “historian” to corporations but would like to see poor children wrested from their mothers and consigned to orphanages or learning the work ethic by cleaning floors and toilets at school.
