Extraordinary Financial Gifts

“What the president’s campaign did was focus on certain members of his base coalition, give them extraordinary financial gifts from the government, and then work very aggressively to turn them out to vote,” Romney said during a call with campaign donors Wednesday.

The Los Angeles Times reports that Republicans are distancing themselves from Romney's comment.  Here's a prime example: 

“We as a Republican Party have to campaign for every single vote. If we want people to like us, we have to like them first. And you don’t start to like people by insulting them and saying their votes were bought. We are an aspirational party,” Jindal said.

OK, but not dissing most of the population is only one reason to pull back from this comment. But whose supporters get the most extraordinary financial gifts?

More likely the Republicans don't want people to start talking about the much more direct and lucrative financial benefits they send their supporters.  After all, corporations would not be meeting their legal obligations to their shareholders if their political contributions weren't investments to increase their corporations' future income. 

And political investments seem to be remarkably efficient and lucrative for those who are skilled at it. 

The gap between the top 1% and everyone else hasn't been this bad since the Roaring Twenties

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/15-charts-about-wealth-and-inequality-in-america-2010-4?op=1#ixzz2Chg6Ktk3

The gap between the top 1% and everyone else hasn't been this bad since the Roaring Twenties

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/15-charts-about-wealth-and-inequality-in-america-2010-4?op=1#ixzz2Chg6Ktk3

The Project on Government Oversight (POGO) reports on Pentagon Contractors, – Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon:

• The average worker in the U.S. earned $45,230 last year. These CEOs were paid more in an average day than the average American worker was paid all of last year.
• According to a 2011 Congressional Budget Office analysis, the median compensation (including basic pay, allowances for food and housing, and tax advantages) for enlisted U.S. military personnel with ten years of experience was about $64,000. Thus, the Pentagon could afford to pay the salary of 335 soldiers with the money from just one top defense contractor’s compensation package.
• The CEOs of these top Pentagon contractors are also making significantly more than their own workers. According to a Deloitte study, the average wage (just salary, not benefits) for the entire aerospace and defense industry in 2010 was $80,175. For the price of one CEO then, these firms could pay the salary of 268 defense and aerospace industry workers.
• Even compared to other CEOs these Pentagon executives are making an enormous amount of money. An Associated Press study of S&P 500 CEO’s (i.e. the largest publicly traded companies) found that the typical CEO received $9.6 million in total compensation last year. Thus, the top Pentagon contractors could afford two CEOs with the compensation they’re using to pay their current CEOs.

These five CEOs weren’t even the highest paid heads of Pentagon contractors. That honor goes to David Cote, the CEO of Honeywell, whose $35.7 million compensation package made him the sixth highest paid CEO in the U.S. last year, according to the Associated Press study.

Now these companies know enough that they have to give to both parties, but they seem, over time, to give more to that party that seems to think that military power is the best way to lead the world and got us into the Iraq war.  The chart below from Open Secrets
shows political contributions by defense contractors:

Screen shot from Open Secrets

And the accumulated effects of Republican tax policies and deregulation have resulted in the greatest wealth disparity in over half a century.  (And they couldn't have done this without the cooperation of Democrats.)

Business Insider offers 15 charts in "15 mindblowing facts about income wealth and distribution in America" starting with one titled,

"The gap between the top 1% and everyone else hasn't been this great since the Roaring Twenties."

The other 14 charts are of interest too.

And, by the way, if Obama was trying to help the 99%, and minorities in particular, maybe that was good policy.

The Washington Post shows us that minorities were hurt from Bush policies way more than whites in the recession:

Between 2005 and 2009, the median net worth of Hispanic households dropped by 66 percent and that of black households fell by 53 percent, according to the report. In contrast, the median net worth of white households dropped by only 16 percent.

The median net worth of a white family now stands at 20 times that of a black family and 18 times that of a Hispanic family — roughly twice the gap that existed before the recession and the biggest gap since data began being collected in 1984.

So, yeah, I think Republicans, probably are acting rationally, finally, when they start distancing themselves from Romney's remarks.   Oh, that last line of Jindal's "We are an aspirational party."  I don't think you're there yet.  Success used to be much easier for white males because of the all the extra barriers non-white folks and women faced.  While many still exist, many have come down and now white males have to work harder to get what they used to get coasting.  And I suspect that's behind a lot of Republican anger.  See this Jon Stewart riff on O'Reilly and Goldberg complaining about losing traditional America. 

The Presidential Race As A Sporting Event - Part 1

Anyone else getting tired of the sporting event treatment of the presidential election?

The political season, it seems, has less than a month to go and we're into the playoffs.  There are two basic themes I hear in the coverage:

1.  Who's up and who's down?  There's a sense of the multistage competition of gymnastics or diving.  Each event (from the primary elections to the debates) gives the candidate to gain or lose in relation to the other competitors.  The announcers discuss their strengths and weaknesses and what they are going to have to do to gain points and to avoid errors in each event. But there's also the one-to-one battle of boxing.  Other sports metaphors abound.   Some examples:

San Francisco Chronicle:

"Obama, Romney rematch could set TV ratings records"

Forbes:

"It’s almost kick off time to the second presidential debate. Before we begin, a few things to watch for—

. . . the key for Governor Romney will be to make a connection with the people in the audience who will be posing the questions. If Romney can make the people believe that he ‘feels their pain’, it will be difficult for Romney to be declared a loser tonight, no matter how well the President may perform. For President Obama, it is not just a matter of ‘showing up’, he is going to have to both defend the past four years and, more importantly, lay out a very clear vision for what he has in mind for the next four years. He will also need to find a way to be far more aggressive than his first debate performance without crossing the line into Joe Biden territory

From the Washington Post website:

More from PostPolitics

Second debate: Winners and losers

Chris Cillizza OCT 16

THE FIX | The second presidential debate is history. Who did the best? Who did the worst?

2.  Then there is the addition of fact checking this year.  It's been there in the past, but mostly it was done on blogs.  Now fact checking has gone mainstream.  This would seem to be a positive development.  Someone is paying attention to what people are actually saying, not just whether they look and sound presidential saying it.

But it's mostly "did he say X on this Tuesday and Y on Monday?"   Tuesday night I heard them checking whether Obama had used the word terrorism in his Rose Garden speech after the Benghazi consulate was attacked.  Yes, fact checking is important, and I applaud this addition to the scene.  But often it too becomes trivial.  What's missing are the bigger questions about policy and what it all means.

Generally,  the fact checking is just an extension of 1) - who is up and who is down?  We aren't checking facts in a quest for truth and understanding, but to get closer to determining who will win or lose.

For the media, it probably makes sense to treat elections the way they treat sporting events.  It reduces the election to a contest to determine the winners and losers, not to elevate everyone's understanding of the issues.  It raises suspense.  It doesn't require a lot of research or figuring out how to interpret complicated subjects like health care or the economy.   The hype brings in viewers.  More viewers mean more ad revenue.

And for most of us, it simply doesn't matter.

The candidates have figured out that most people already know how they will vote.  Because the winner is chosen by the electoral college vote and not the popular vote, most states aren't even in play.   Even if a candidate wins by a million votes in California, that extra million doesn't count for anything.

So, the candidates' focus is on the small group of undecideds in a few states.  270TOWin identifies eleven states.  (270 electoral votes are needed to win the election.)

The LA Times, in May, created a map that shows 8 "battleground" (sports announcers love war imagery) states.   Let's look at who the candidates are wooing. 

State- 270 To win list	% undecided	LA Times List	Total Reg Voters	Number of Undecided
Colorado	5	√	2,300,000	115,000
Florida	5	√	8,000,000	400,000
Iowa	5	√	1,500,000	75,000
Michigan	6		5,000,000	300,000
Nevada	5		1,000,000	50,000
New Hampshire	6	√	700,000	42,000
North Carolina	3	√	4,500,000	135,000
Ohio	4	√	5,600,000	224,000
Pennsylvania	4		6,000,000	240,000
Virginia	9	√	3,500,000	315,000
Wisconsin	2	√	2,900,000	58,000
Total USA:	1.4%		137,000,000	1,954,000

HTML Tables

   
According to this, all the media coverage we're getting is about  less than 2 million people, 1.4% of registered voters, who can't make up their minds.  Bill Maher's comment on this situation, summed up from this video, is:

"And that, in a nutshell, is America's celebrated, undecided voter: put on a pedestal by the media as if they were Hamlet in a think-tank, searching out every last bit of information, high-minded arbiters pouring over policy positions and matching them against their own philosophies. Please, they mostly fall into a category political scientists call 'low information voters,' otherwise known as 'dipsh*ts.'"

I imagine that people who can't make up their minds are NOT going to decide whom to vote for based on the issues.  It's going to be how they feel about the candidates.
So,  the candidates are pretty much ignoring the 135 million people who either have made up their minds already or are in states where the outcome is pretty certain and they're  pouring their campaign attention and dollars on the 1.9 million undecideds in the 'battleground' states.

The only thing the candidates want from the rest of us is money and labor to turn those undecideds  and to make sure their supporters vote.  I've heard of Anchorage political volunteers being used to call people in Colorado. 

The media, on the other hand, need all of us to watch or read or listen, so they are using the simplest and most successful story line they know:  a sports battle. 

This is politics as entertainment.  It's not politics as an opportunity for national discussion about our future.  It's not analysis of critical issues.  It's simple, black and white:  who's going to win and who's going to lose?  Foreign policy, the economy, the environment, education, war, and all the other burning issues we face are just tea leaves for pundits to ponder to predict who will win and and who will lose. 

And this probably isn't very different from every other election in our history. A little more divisive maybe, but just as simplistic. 

Do You See The Employment Glass 92.2% Full Or 7.8% Empty?

The media regularly publish the UNemployment percentage, but rarely the employment percentage.   For those among the 7.8% unemployed, the impact runs from liberating (a very few) to seriously problematic to disastrous.  And economists are quick to point out that another 20% may be underemployed.  But even 72.8% 'fully'  employed, means that a high percentage of people in the US have jobs that fit their qualifications and they receive what some would say is appropriate remuneration for their work.

My brain can't help but wonder, why those who are fully employed (or otherwise economically secure), can't be grateful for their luck in life (to be born into a family situation that led them to be suitable employee (or entrepreneurial) material, to be born at a time when getting a job was relatively easy, having an aptitude and being prepared for the kind of job that hasn't disappeared, etc.) and ready to share a reasonable portion of their economic rewards with those who have not been so lucky. 

Of course, many of the fortunate 72.8% are willing to share.  Even among the underemployed,  there are people sharing their more limited bounty.  They recognize and act on the charitable principles of most major religions to help those less fortunate.

On the other extreme (I'm assuming a continuum) are those who see such sharing of the bounty as foolish rewarding behaviors that lead to unemployment or underemployment - impracticality (ie majoring in art or history), lack of ambition (following their bliss), lack of hard work, lack of ambition.   People like Romney seem to acknowledge economic problems make getting a job hard when attacking Obama, but for the most part, their  seem to believe when people aren't working, it's somehow their fault.  

And I admit to thoughts about people I see around me whose lifestyles exceed their incomes and who then complain when disaster hits - a spouse loses a job, or they lose the spouse, or the housing or stock markets drop.  Relatively few Americans, it seems, given our levels of debt and savings - even before the economy tanked - are able to arrange their lives with the future in mind.  And there are those people who expect, when starting out, to live a lifestyle that took their parents 25 years to reach, without having to work too hard or at all.  It's tempting to ask, "Am I supposed to share from what I saved by living below my means while they spent freely?"  Yes, I identify with the ant more than the grasshopper. And I don't feel an obligation to help anyone maintain an above average lifestyle.  But I tend away from judging and lean to questions about what in their lives caused them to have these expectations and work habits and how do we create a society in which most kids are raised to be able to succeed?  (I'm leaving the definition of succeed wide open here.)

Nevertheless, if we are, as Romney proclaimed in his 47% speech, "the most prosperous nation in history," how is it that we can't take care of those who, for whatever reason, aren't able to make it in the US?  Why can't we provide minimal immediate emergency assistance now, and good schooling and childhood health care for the long run? 

I know, I know, it's complicated.  And Romney will tell us he is compassionate and his path to helping these people is by freeing the market to create jobs.  He sees the waste and inefficiency in government, but not the waste and inefficiency and inequity of the free market.  Neither is perfect.  Both can go terribly wrong.  But each needs the other as a complement, in the right balance.  And that is, perhaps, the crux of the difference between those who swing to the left and those who swing to the right - where they see the right balance.

But, I allowed this post to get hijacked.  Yes, my title focused on the the glass 92.2% full or 7.8% empty question.

But I did want to use this as an example of a recurring problem -   how we as individuals, and collectively as societies,  so often focus on the wrong thing and how that can  distort reality.  The media's constant use of the unemployment figure, instead of the employment figure is one example.

Another comes from Steven Pinker's book The Better Angels of Our Nature which argues that overall, violence is declining historically, but because the media focus on acts of individual and group violence, our perception is that we have become more violent.

I haven't read the book and there is criticism.  And from what I understand, he focuses on the number of people killed in relation to the total population.  That itself, may be a similar distortion.  I understand why it's important to frame things that way.  But even if killings/100,000 people is down, our increased population could mean that more people are killed than in history.  (I don't know that, I need to read more of what he writes.)

Tigers, Human/Nature Relationship, Free Enterprise, Romney

The tigers are coming, but hold on for some context.

Contrasting world views is an important underlying factor in the sharp political divisions in the US today.  Republicans call this "the culture wars."  There are lots of factors to consider, but let's look narrowly at one very important one:  differences in people's idea of the relationship between humans and nature.

John Vaillant, in his book Tiger:  True Story of Vengeance and Survival (here's a previous post on that book), looks at how differing world views clash in the frontiers of the Russian Far East. His book focuses on the survival of wild tigers, but the process is repeated all over the world with different species and different indigenous peoples.

The modern world came about when humans began to apply science to most human activities including the economy.  With science, it was believed,  humans were no longer at the mercy of nature.  Using science, humans could now control, even conquer nature.

Science has enabled humans to create what in previous times would have been considered miracles.  Free enterprise enabled us to make and sell the amazing feats of science.  We became gods who could rearrange nature to suit us.  But there have been terrible side effects.  So let's go to Vaillant's Russian Far East - near Kharbarovsk - to see the contrasting views on nature and humans.

"Prior to the arrival of Chinese gold miners and Russian settlers, there appeared to be minimum conflict between humans and tigers in what is now Primorye.  Game was abundant, human populations were relatively small, and there was plenty of room for all in the vast temperate jungles of coastal Manchuria.  Furthermore, the Manchus, Udeghe, Nania, and Orochi, all of whom are Tunguisic peoples long habituated to living with tigers, knew their place;  they were animists who held tigers in the highest regard and did their best to stay out of their way.  But when Russian colonists began arriving in the seventeenth century, these carefully managed agreements began to break down.  People in Krasny Yar still tell stories about the first time their grandparents saw Russians: huge creatures covered in red hair with blue eyes and skin as pale as a dead man’s." (141)

Earlier in the book he wrote about how the indigenous populations in other parts of the world - like the Bushmen in the Kalahari desert - who had similar relationships with lions.   He also makes comparisons between the Russian Far East and the conquest of North America. 

"Some of these newcomers were Orthodox missionaries and though they were unarmed, their rigid convictions took a serious toll on native society.  The word “shaman” is a Tungusic word, and in the Far East in the mid-nineteenth century, shamanism had reached a highly evolved state.  For shamans and their followers who truly believed in the gods they served and in the powers they wielded, to have them disdained by missionaries and swept into irrelevance by foreign governments and technology was psychically devastating - a catastrophic loss of power and status comparable to that experience by the Russian nobility when the Bolsheviks came to power.  (141-142)

Anyone familiar with Alaska Native history is familiar with stories of Native drumming and dancing being banned and  kids having their mouths washed out with soap for speaking their own languages at school. And I can't help think that part of today's cultural wars are due to the same sense of loss of power and sense of entitlement by those Americans who are threatened by the rapid changes in the world today. 

In Primorye, this traumatic process continued into the 1950s.  The Udeghe author Alexander Konchuga is descended from a line of shamans and shamankas, and he grew up in their company.  “Local authorities did not prohibit it,”  he explained.  “The attitude was, if you’re drumming at night, that’s your business.  But the officials in the regional centers were against it and, in 1955, when I was still a student, some militia came to my cousin’s grandmother.  Someone must have snitched on her and told them she was a shamanka because they took away her drums and burned them  She couldn’t take it and she hanged herself.”  The drum is the membrane through which the shaman communicates with, and travels to, the spirit world.  For the shaman, the drum is a vital organ and life is inconceivable without it. 

Along with spiritual and social disruption came dramatic changes in the environment.  One Nanai story collected around 1915 begins, “Once upon a time, before the Russians burned the forests down . . .” (142)

It wasn't until the arrival of foreign settlers with livestock that tiger problems arose.  Vaillant met and interviewed Valery Yankovsky and writes about the history of settlement with a focuses on the Yankovsky family. 

“. . . the Yankovsky family hadn’t lived in their new home a year before they registered their first losses.  Between 1889 and 1920, tigers killed scores of the Yankovskys’ animals - everything from dogs to cattle.  Once a tiger dragged one of their hired men from his horse.

In the eyes of the Russian settlers, tigers were simply four-legged bandits, and the Yankovskys retaliated accordingly.  Unlike the animist Udeghe who were native to the region, or the Chinese and Korean Buddhists who pioneered there, the Christian Russians behaved like owners as opposed to inhabiters.  As with lion-human relations in the Kalahari, the breakdown began in earnest with the introduction of domestic animals.  But it wasn’t just the animals, it was the attitude that went with them.  These newcomers arrived as entitled conquerors with no understanding of, or particular interest in, the local culture - human or otherwise.  Like their New World counterparts across the Pacific, theirs, too, was a manifest destiny:  they had a mandate, in many cases from the czar himself, and they took an Orthodox, Old Testament approach to both property and predators.  (148) (emphasis added)

So similar to whites moving into Indian country in North American, and Westerners colonizing much of the world.  There was a sense of their superiority.  Manifest destiny.  They had better weapons, better ships, and better science created technology, not to mention religion.  Many truly believed they were entitled to take over, because of their perceived superiority, and some - particularly the missionaries - believed their presence would "help the natives."

Vaillant compares Yankovsky world view to that of an indigenous inhabitant of the region.

“. . .Even a hundred years later, Ivan Dunkai’s son Vasily’s description of his relationship to the local tigers stands in stark contrast to a Russian settler’s.  “You know, there are two hunters in the taiga:  a man and a tiger,”  he explained in March 2007.  “As professional hunters, we respect each other:  he chooses his path and I choose mine.  Sometimes our paths intersect, but we do not intrude on each other in any way.  The taiga is his home;  he is the master.  I am also a master in my own home, but he lives in the taiga all the time;  I don’t.” 

This disparity between the Yankovskys and the Dunkais is traceable to a fundamental conflict - not just between Russians and indigenous peoples, but with tigers - around the role of human beings in the natural world.  In Primorye, ambitious Russian homesteaders operated under the assumption that they had been granted dominion over the land - just as God had granted it to Noah, the original homesteader:

1.   Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth
2.  And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth

Implicit in these lines from Genesis 9 is the belief that there is no room for two on the forest throne.  And yet, in a different context, these words could apply as easily to tigers as they do to humans.  In so many words, God puts the earth and all its creatures at their disposal:

3.  Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you;  even as the green herb have I given you all things.  (150)

. . .It is only in the past two hundred years - out of two million - that humans have seriously contested the tiger’s claim to the forest and all it contains.  As adaptable as tigers are, they have not evolved to accommodate this latest change in their environment, and this lack of flexibility, when combined with armed, entitled humans and domestic animals, is a recipe for disaster.  (151)

The past two hundred years.  The onset of the modern world in which science was applied to human enterprise and the market system, articulated by Adam Smith in 1776, began to  develop into the industrial revolution.

 Mitt Romney seems clearly entrenched in the modern ideal of science  helping humans conquer nature, which has led to globe threatening development.  Romney referred to this period this week in his talk at the Clinton Global Initiative:

The best example of the good free enterprise can do for the developing world is the example of the developed world itself. My friend Arthur Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute has pointed out that before the year 1800, living standards in the West were appalling. A person born in the eighteenth century lived essentially as his great-great-grandfather had. Life was filled with disease and danger.

But starting in 1800, the West began two centuries of free enterprise and trade. Living standards rose. Literacy spread. Health improved. In our own country, between 1820 and 1998, real per capita GDP increased twenty-two-fold.  (emphasis added)

While modern medicine and agriculture have improved the lives of many, and living conditions of Europe and the United States improved greatly, those European nations had colonies around the world that gave them cheap resources and labor.  The US, itself a colony before it broke off from England, took advantage of the enormous wealth of North America by displacing the indigenous populations and exploiting the resources, with slave labor, with waves and waves of immigrant labor, and with imported, cheap Asian labor.

Also, the world population has increased from a billion in 1804 to over 7 billion in 2012.  Yet despite the improvements Romney cites the World Food Programme reports that:

10.9 million children under five die in developing countries each year. Malnutrition and hunger-related diseases cause 60 percent of the deaths;

Actually another of their statistics shows that the number of hungry people in the world today is almost as high as the total world population in 1804.  So, there is probably much more suffering in the world today than 200 years ago.

• 925 million people do not have enough to eat  and 98 percent of them live in developing countries. (Source: FAO news release, 14 September 2010)

And during that period, to achieve the physical standard of living that the most 'developed' countries have,  humans have had to destroy the world's forests and oceans and sky, so that most indigenous populations have been either physically or culturally annihilated, and untold numbers of animal, bird, and plant species have gone extinct and more are threatened with extinction at an even faster rate today.  See Global Issues, library index, Forest Transitions, or the Sustainable Scale Project for details.

Vaillant's The Tiger details some of that change from living in harmony with nature to the sense of entitlement and dominance over nature in one small part of the world. 

Mitt Romney would continue this trend by expanding US businesses into every possible country where they can continue to exploit the resources to the detriment of the inhabitants.  Romney, like the Russian Czars and the Soviet bosses, sees this as humans' natural dominance over nature and doesn't seem to consider the possibility that Western colonization and exploitation of African and Asian nations (where most of today's world poverty exists) might have something to do with the poverty in those continents today.  To him it's simply the lack of free enterprise, not because they were the victims of free enterprise.

Conditions among indigenous peoples around the world may have been primitive compared to modern Western standards, but most of those cultures had survived intact over the millennia and now many, if not most, have been destroyed or are endangered - usually because their habitats have been devastated by deforestation or other resource extraction by Western business interests. Romney goes on:

"As the most prosperous nation in history, it is our duty to keep the engine of prosperity running—to open markets across the globe and to spread prosperity to all corners of the earth. We should do it because it’s the right moral course to help others." (emphasis added)

We are, he tells us, the most prosperous nation in history.  And so we have a duty to spread the free market system:

To foster work and enterprise in the Middle East and in other developing countries, I will initiate “Prosperity Pacts.” Working with the private sector, the program will identify the barriers to investment, trade, and entrepreneurialism in developing nations. In exchange for removing those barriers and opening their markets to U.S. investment and trade, developing nations will receive U.S. assistance packages focused on developing the institutions of liberty, the rule of law, and property rights. (emphasis added)

Let's see, in order for us to help you, we, the most prosperous nation in history, require you to open your markets to our powerful corporations to take your raw materials (forests, oil, minerals, etc.) with no pesky environmental protections, use your cheaper labor,  and sell our products to your citizens.

Explain to me how the new businesses in these most undeveloped countries are going to compete with the businesses in the most prosperous nation in history.  Tell me how Romney will keep foreign business interests from bribing the local politicians even more blatantly than they do our politicians.  How he will keep them from spoiling their environments and setting up horrible working conditions like in the factory in China Romney bought.

I want to be clear here.  I believe that the free market does unleash human energy and creativity and allows the growth of wealth.  But it's not a panacea.  It comes at a cost.  Economists have noted externalities as a failure of free enterprise.  These are things like pollution and other side effects businesses do NOT pay for when manufacturing their products, but end up as costs to the society as a whole.  As pollution clean up, as health problems, as destroyed forests and cultures. 

These externalities are destroying our planet.  Free enterprise, without government controls to make corporations assume the costs of those externalities, destroys our natural world and those cultures that don't embrace our economic system.

Romney appears to be the bearer of the philosophy that destroyed the forests in the Russian Far East.  It's not the philosophy of free enterprise, because the Soviets destroyed the Russian Far East with the help of the Chinese.  Rather it is the philosophy that man can conquer nature rather than man must live in harmony with nature.  I'm not excusing Obama in this either, though he does, at least, talk about the need to stop global climate change and protect the environment.  But you can't raise enough money to run for national office without the help of all those corporations that want access to foreign markets and easing of government oversight.  But Romney seems to believe all this stuff about the great effects of the unbridled market place. Of conquering nature through science.  Has he been to Russia lately?  Has he inspected the oil fields of the Amazon?  Or in Nigeria? 

One value of Vaillant's book is to show us up close this clash of values in one location in the world.  There are many other books that show how it happened in other locations.  In Alaska we see how Russian fur traders did the same thing to indigenous peoples of our coastal areas as they almost brought extinction to the sea otter population.  And American whaling ships almost wiped out the whales that summer in Alaska waters.  Elsewhere we see it in the depletion of various Atlantic fish species.  And the near extinction of wild tigers.

The free enterprise system has to be restrained so that its profit doesn't come from the depletion of the earth's resources.  We need world views that understand that for humans and other living things, to survive, we must live in harmony with nature. 

The Working Rich and And Chinese Factory Girls From Romney's 47% Speech

As I wrote the title of this post, I realized "the 47% speech" might be as linked in history to Romney as Gettysburg address and Lincoln are linked.  But that's not what this post is about.

Jamie left a comment on my post that raised questions about whether Romney had Asperger Syndrome symptoms.  In the comments other readers declared Romney a sociopath.  Jamie wrote (in part):

What I find more disconcerting is how Romney represents to so many The Real American®™ by exhibiting said traits that also define a sociopath, in other words, he exemplifies the model businessman.
Case in point is the hand-waving over that “47%” secret recording of the talk he gave to wealthy elite donors. But what’s most disgusting of all (and a most telling symptom that reveals more of our own culture) is how virtually nobody is focusing on his off-the-cuff recounting during that speech of his visit to the Chinese factory. This where the women workers were corralled and treated like cattle, even kept from escaping their barracks by barbed wire and guards.
Romney never morally flinched, didn’t even think of them (or for that matter anybody poor today) as actual, live human beings, they were just assets, cogs in the machine he was buying. Ethically no different than the one-time revered pillars of society that upheld everything from the days of the robber barons to the horrors of institutionalized slavery in our own not-too distant national history.

Jamie raises a whole slew of issues.  But my first reaction was, "What Chinese factory comments?"  I'm afraid the 47% part was significant enough and I confess I didn't go looking for the rest of the speech.  Well, it's up and probably worth listening to.  Mother Jones has highlighted some parts they thought significant.

But I had to read the text to find the Chinese factory part Jamie referred to.  Jamie's point was that (I'm taking some liberties here, but you can see Jamie's words above)  the Romney model of a capitalist businessman (yes, man), is quite a bit like the heroes of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged.   They apply principles of efficiency and no other values need be considered.  They work hard and deserve the wealth that inevitably comes from it.

In fact here's a comment from an audience member at the infamous speech:

Romney: Yeah, yeah.
Audience member: My question to you is, Why don't you stick up for yourself? To me, you should be so proud of your wealth. That's what we all aspire to be—we kill ourselves, we don't work a nine to five. We're away from our families five days a week. I'm away from my four girls five days a week and my wife. Why not stick up for yourself and say, "Why is it bad to be, to aspire to be wealthy and successful? You know, why is it bad to kill yourself? And why is it bad to cut 30 jobs that protect 300?" And, when people talk about you cutting jobs, you save companies that were failing...[unintelligible]. So my question is, when does that stand up…[unintelligible].

Let's see.  The important things in life are:

• being wealthy and 'successful' 
• killing yourself working
• not seeing your kids and wife five days a week?

Actually, this is vaguely the American ideal.  To work hard and 'succeed' by getting rich. In some families this macho capitalism, demonstrated by millions of dollars, and mansions and yachts, is the definition of success.  We can see it in HBO's Mad Men and many other portrayals.  This was the ethics-free creed that caused people in the home financing business to make loans that they knew could not be repaid, because they got their hefty cut upfront.  That creates multi-million bonuses for bankers while people are losing their houses because of those bankers.

Our military are away from their families for months at a time, shouldn't they have a cool million on separation from the military?  Instead those millions go to oil companies to pay for fuel, food suppliers, the weapons manufacturers, and a whole host of contracted companies that in turn pay hefty salaries to contract workers from first world countries (if you're from Bangladesh, your contract pay only looks good to your family back home who compare it to local salaries.) And our soldiers fight with the VA to get help with the war souvenirs in their heads.

And there are lots of poor folks whose work life is killing them with long days too, but it's not by choice.  They get up early to feed the kids and take long bus rides across town to clean the houses of better off folks.  They work as service people in various retail establishments often without health insurance or much hope of increasing their salaries. 

I was lucky to have a family that modeled being a good human being over being a rich human being and gave me the opportunities to choose a career that added value to human beings and our society and gave me a comfortable, but by no means luxurious, life.  And gave me time to spend with my family every day.  Some of that came from choices we made such as living a five minute walk from my work so I didn't spend my time or money on transportation to and from work.  Some of it was the luck of coming into the job market at a favorable time.   Some was not coveting more than I could afford.  My point here is that being wealthy, in and of itself, is not, in my mind, a noble life goal.

But let's look at the Chinese factory part of Romney's talk that Jamie cited:

And I remember going to—sorry just to bore you with stories—but I was, when I was back in my private equity days, we went to China to buy a factory there, employed about 20,000 people, and they were almost all young women between the ages of about 18 and 22 or 23. They were saving for potentially becoming married, and they worked in these huge factories, they made various small appliances, and as we were walking through this facility, seeing them work, the number of hours they worked per day, the pittance they earned, living in dormitories with little bathrooms at the end with maybe ten rooms. And the rooms, they had 12 girls per room, three bunk beds on top of each other. You've seen them.
Audience member: Oh, yeah.

Romney: And around this factory was a fence, a huge fence with barbed wire, and guard towers. And we said, "Gosh, I can't believe that you, you know, you keep these girls in." They said, "No, no, no—this is to keep other people from coming in. Because people want so badly to come work in this factory that we have to keep them out, or they'll just come in here and start working and try and get compensated. So, we—this is to keep people out." And they said, "Actually, Chinese New Year, is the girls go home, sometimes they decide they've saved enough money and they don't come back to the factory." And he said, "And so on the weekend after Chinese New Year, there'll be a line of people hundreds long outside the factory, hoping that some girls haven't come back and they can come to the factory. And so, as we were experiencing this for the first time, for me to see a factory like this in China some years ago, the Bain partner I was with turned to me and said, "You know, 95 percent of life is settled if you're born in America." This is an amazing land. And what we have is unique, and fortunately it is so special we're sharing it with the world.

Jamie's point, as I understand it, is that Romney looks at these terrible conditions and is easily persuaded that these conditions are so good that people have to be fenced out.  And he's more than happy to have work done for 'a pittance' in China under terrible conditions, because it will improve his bottom line, because he will make millions from the labor of these young Chinese women.  And he's actually doing them a favor because they'll earn enough money to get married.  And Americans are sharing our amazingly blessed life with these people by giving them a chance to work in these wretched factories.  While American factories are shut down and Americans lose their jobs and saw their American dream disappear.  But these, for Romney, are all problems caused by Obama's oppressive regulations on business.

This is the model of the American businessman that Jamie is disgusted with and I can't say I disagree with him.  If you watch the videos, you wonder what the waiters who walk back and forth in front of the camera were thinking.  To the wealthy, these servers are invisible, and they can comfortably talk about the problems of being misunderstood because of their wealth in front of them without considering their lives or what they are thinking.

Here are some links to see or read more of what was said at this event:

Mother Jones piece with highlight clips from the talk, including:

• Mitt Romney on Obama voters
• Mitt Romney on treating Obama gingerly
• Mitt Romney on his consultants
• Mitt Romney on what wins an election (money from his listeners)
• Mitt Romney on the economy

Mother Jones second piece with highlight clips including:

• Mitt Romney on the Mideast Conflict
• Mitt Romney on Iran's Nuclear Program
• Mitt Romney on Obama's Foreign Policy

Mother Jones complete transcript of the speech.


Romney might even be right on some of the topics.  But it's his certainty that he is right about everything that is so distressing.  These are not things that anyone can be certain about.  And one might be skeptical that this is, in fact, what Romney really thinks, since he seems to tailor his comments to his audiences.  Except this seems to be an audience of his economic peers, so he may think that what they want to hear is what he truly believes.

Another interesting exchange began with a question about whether there might be an opportunity like Reagan had with the Iran hostage situation that faced Jimmy Carter. (Reagan is alleged to have worked out a secret agreement with the Iranians to keep the hostages through the election and as it happened, the hostages were freed immediately after Reagan's inauguration.)

Audience member: If you get the call as president, and you had hostages…Ronald Reagan was able to make a statement, even before he became, was actually sworn in—

Romney: Yeah—
Audience member: the hostages were released—
Romney: on the day of his inauguration, yeah.
Audience member: So my question is, really, how can you sort of duplicate that scenario?
Romney: Ohhhh. [A few chuckles in audience.] I'm gonna ask you, how do I duplicate that scenario.
Audience member: I think that had to do with the fact that the Iranians perceived Reagan would do something to really get them out. In other words [unintelligible]…and that's why I'm suggesting that something that you say over the next few months gets the Iranians to understand that their pursuit of the bomb is something that you would predict and I think that's something that could possibly resonate very well with American Republican voters.
Romney: I appreciate the idea. I can't—one of the other things that's frustrating to me is that at a typical day like this, when I do three or four events like this, the number of foreign policy questions that I get are between zero and one. And the American people are not concentrated at all on China, on Russia, Iran, Iraq. This president's failure to put in place a status forces agreement allowing 10-20,000 troops to stay in Iraq? Unthinkable! And yet, in that election, in the Jimmy Carter election, the fact that we have hostages in Iran, I mean, that was all we talked about. And we had the two helicopters crash in the desert, I mean that's—that was—that was the focus, and so him solving that made all the difference in the world. I'm afraid today if you said, "We got Iran to agree to stand down a nuclear weapon," they'd go hold on. It's really a, but…by the way, if something of that nature presents itself, I will work to find a way to take advantage of the opportunity.

Is this why Romney jumped to condemn Obama when he first learned about the Egyptians attacking the US embassy in Cairo?  So many things to think about.

Last Week Republicans Thought Taxes Were Evil, Now They Think People Who Don't Pay Taxes Are Evil!

Until last week, all I heard from Republicans was that taxes were evil and should be avoided if at all possible.  For years, Grover Norquist has been twisting Republican congressional arms to sign a taxpayer protection pledge.

Some members of congress major in tax loopholes and when they graduate from congress they get high paying jobs helping the wealthy avoid taxes.  And Romney, we've been told, avoids taxes with the best of them including off-shore accounts in the Caymans and Switzerland.  When you fly over to check on your accounts it's probably tax deductible too.

Yesterday my head spun as it followed the Republican tax philosophy tennis ball being slammed in the other direction.   I learned that Romney disdained the 47% of Americans (actually US households, not people) who didn't pay income taxes.  You'd think he'd admire their ability to legally avoid income taxes, just as he thinks we should admire his ability to avoid taxes.  But no, it turns out he doesn't.  They think they're victims, he said.  Hell, all this time I believed that Republicans thought people who PAID taxes were victims.

He also thinks they're all Democrats or at least they plan to vote for Obama.  If that's true, then why doesn't Romney just concede the election now?  After all, there must be other US tax paying Americans like myself who plan to vote for Obama.  If just 3.1% of us income tax payers voted along with the 47% deadbeats - in the right states of course - Obama would win.

Mitt, I hate to tell you this, but what people say they believe and what they actually do are two different things.   I know because I live in the socialist Red state of Alaska where we follow the Republican Wally Hickel's (may he rest in peace) Owner State philosophy.  We collectively own the oil on the North Slope (and elsewhere) and we collectively get paid dividends on it.

Just yesterday our Republican governor's Revenue Commissioner announced that this year's checks would be  $875[8].    And big families like yours Mitt, five kids, get seven checks!  We're all like shareholders in the state of Alaska. We don't pay state income taxes, we don't pay state sales taxes, and we get a check from our collective ownership of the state's natural resources.  Yes, we're all victims, dependent on the state.  And just like corporate victims whose companies get federal contracts and various tax breaks, we use the money to create jobs.

And we're a red state that will, without a doubt,  vote for you in November Mitt.  I hope you can explain all this to me. 

Click here to see a CBS fact checking and explaining post of the 47% figure here.

Office Jerk, Asperger Syndrome, and Mitt Romney

Lynne Curry, a local management consultant who has a weekly advice column in the Anchorage Daily News, had a letter today from an employee who'd been sent by his boss to "charm school" and he though it was a big waste of time:

"I was given hundreds of nonsensical suggestions. These included saying "please" and "thank you" when asking employees to do tasks they're paid to do. I was also told to listen to "all others" without interruption, even when idiots talk and I've got things I need to do.

I told my boss he could choose between me being "nice" and me getting my work done. He told me to call you."

The gist of Curry's answer was:

"Allow me to shorten the list of suggestions to just one: Stop being a jerk."

It's easy to dismiss this as far-fetched and conclude the letter is a hoax.  But I suspect many of you know someone like this.  So I'm going to continue on the assumption it's for real.

For everyday practical responses, "Stop being a jerk" probably works for all of us reading it, but what about the guy who wrote the letter?  Or Mitt Romney?* (Curry does say more, but it is all in the same vein that he's already dismissed as 'nonsensical suggestions.')

Labeling someone - especially a pejorative like 'jerk' - doesn't work well if the person truly doesn't understand what the problem is.  And even if they do understand, this will likely make them defensive, though in some cases it might work. 

My preference is to try to understand the underlying reasons one gets put into the 'jerk' category and whether there might be other ways to phrase it.  Jerk just means 'you aren't a good person.'  But people don't choose to be jerks. They may choose behaviors that cause others to label them jerks, but being a jerk is a side effect of how they act, not their goal. 

They need more help understanding their 'jerkhood.' 

In fact, his behaviors remind me of Asperger Syndrome.  (I confess that I see Asperger symptoms a lot.  I don't know if this is because my understanding of mental health is so limited I apply Asperberger inappropriately or that there really are a lot of people who display a few or more Asperger symptoms.)

 About.com's overview of Asperbergers offers a simplified list of symptoms from the Cambridge Lifespan Asperger Syndrome Service(CLASS) in UK.  Let's look at the list with my comments applying them to Curry's letter writer.

• I find social situations confusing.
• Clearly the case here.
  
• I find it hard to make small talk. 
• Seems to be the case here
  
• I did not enjoy imaginative story-writing at school. 
• No evidence presented.
• I am good at picking up details and facts. 
• Seems to do his job well which may involve these skills.  Not sure.
• I find it hard to work out what other people are thinking and feeling. 
• Definitely
• I can focus on certain things for very long periods. 
• Again, possibly.  He focuses on his work and isn't distracted by the social aspects at work and doesn't like to be distracted by others asking him questions
• People often say I was rude even when this was not intended. 
• Definitely
• I have unusually strong, narrow interests. 
• We don't have enough evidence, but he does his work - possibly one of those strong interests -  and it seems like those interests do not broaden out to things his co-workers are interested in, or even to his co-workers themselves.
• I do certain things in an inflexible, repetitive way.
• May explain why he's so impatient with how others do things or even listening to them making suggestions.  And he certainly doesn't want to change how he interacts with them.  They are the problem, not he.
• I have always had difficulty making friends.
• Definitely true at work and I suspect elsewhere.

This doesn't mean he has Asperger Syndrome, but it does suggest it's a possibility.  Even if he doesn't, it lays out some of his issues in relatively neutral language that he can understand.  People with Asperger Syndrome can be highly functioning and highly intelligent, but have difficulty picking up social cues. 


I looked for the source of the checklist above and found a paper at MD Junction which appears to have as the lead author the head of the Cambridge Lifespan Asperbers Syndrome Services, Simon Baron-Cohen. (For the interminably curious, Wikipedia says he is the cousin of actor Sacha Baron-Cohen.)  Here are some of the most relevant symptoms to Curry's worker's case from in Appendix A of the paper.

• doesn't think it's their problem if they offend someone (EQ27
• can't always see why someone should have felt offended by a remark (EQ29)
• prefers to do things on own rather than with others (AQ1)
• finds friendships and relationships difficult so tends not to bother with them (EQ12) .
• often told has been impolite even though they think they have been polite (AQ7)
• Lack of social or emotional reciprocity (e.g. not knowing how to comfort
  someone; and/or lack of empathy).
• finds it hard to see why some things upset people so much (EQ21)
• does not spot when someone in a group is feeling awkward or uncomfortable (EQ26)
• is not upset by seeing people cry (EQ32) 
• makes decisions without being influenced by people's feelings (EQ39) 
• does not get emotionally involved with friends' problems (EQ59)
• does not enjoy social chit-chat (AQ17)
•  is not good at social chit-chat (AQ38)
• can't tell if someone else wants to enter a conversation (EQ1)
• can't work out what other person might want to talk about (EQ54)
• not a good diplomat (AQ48)
• often finds it difficult to judge if something is rude or polite (EQ14)
• is very blunt without being intentionally rude (EQ34)

Read more here: http://www.adn.com/2012/09/16/2627671/prince-charmless-doesnt-want-to.html#storylink=cpy

As I understand it, people with Asperger Syndrome aren't willfully being jerks, but rather they don't 'see' the signals most people see.  They either don't pick them up or their brains don't know how to interpret them.  It's like interpersonal deafness or colorblindness.

*I think Mitt Romney's more awkward behaviors could be pinned to these lists.  In fact his  comments to wealthy donors reported yesterday sound familiar: 

“There are 47% of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47% who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care of them, who believe that they are entitled to healthcare, to food, to housing, to you name it,”

"[M]y job is not to worry about those people,” Romney said, referring to Obama supporters. “I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives."

The message is the same as Curry's office 'jerk':  

I'm not the problem, the other people are impossible and unreachable so why should I bother?  

OK, I acknowledge that Romney's problem is bigger than Asperger Syndrome, but I suspect Asperger - or something similar - is part of it. 

Read more here: http://www.adn.com/2012/09/16/2627671/prince-charmless-doesnt-want-to.html#storylink=cpy

Romney's Cotton Candy Acceptance Speech

Reading through Romney's acceptance speech again, a few days later, it's cotton candy.  It's soft, sugary, fluffy, and full of air.  There's absolutely no substance.  When you try to sink your teeth into it, it simply evaporates.

It has the signs of being designed by the marketing department - based on focus group feedback about what words and phrases push people's emotional buttons and then written to push them.  Neither reality nor honesty is a factor.  Tell them what they want to hear.  But since there are almost no facts, it's safe from the fact checkers.   It's the same stuff as glossy magazine ads - empty promises that Americans, individually and collective, can be an impossibly and perfectly beautiful people.

It's guys in the back room poring through the data and coming up with a formula to grab the audience.   But unfortunately for Romney, it's based on data, not on a caring or even intuitive sense of the people behind the data.


Note:  When I got to the end of this post, without having covered that much of Romney's acceptance speech, I asked myself why I was doing this?  Who cares?  Does it matter?

It only matters if people think this is more than just marketing, if people actually believe that there is something here.  So for that reason alone, it makes sense to go through the speech.  My approach is to try to pull out of it the key parts and to try to get at what the speech is about.   And to show there isn't any meat.  It's basically empty words.

Going through the speech, these are the themes that I see.  They aren't necessarily in order in the speech, but rather are scattered about and sometimes they overlap:  

• Trying to show different constituencies that the Romney's presidency would care about them.
• To outline what Romney believes the USA is all about.
• To outline why Obama should be replaced by Romney. (And why people who had hoped that Obama would do great things, should now abandon him for Romney.)
• To show that Romney has both the personal and professional skills necessary to fix the problems Obama hasn't fixed.

In this post I'm just going to focus on the first theme, showing the different constituencies Romney tries to touch.  Or more realistically, those marketing guys in the back room saying, "We need to get various demographics."

Romney's a product and this is an attempt to interest consumers into buying the product.  [Mind you I don't expect much different at the Democratic convention, but I suspect the marketing team will do a better job of connecting with the prospective consumers.]

My quotes come from NPR's transcript of the speech.

The Independent Voters and maybe some Democrats:

"Four years ago, I know that many Americans felt a fresh excitement about the possibilities of a new president. That president was not the choice of our party but Americans always come together after elections. We are a good and generous people who are united by so much more than what divides us. . .

But today, four years from the excitement of the last election, for the first time, the majority of Americans now doubt that our children will have a better future.

It is not what we were promised."

Parents, Small Business Owners, Students:

"Every family in America wanted this to be a time when they could get ahead a little more, put aside a little more for college, do more for their elderly mom who's living alone now or give a little more to their church or charity.

Every small business wanted these to be their best years ever, when they could hire more, do more for those who had stuck with them through the hard times, open a new store or sponsor that Little League team.

Every new college graduate thought they'd have a good job by now, a place of their own, and that they could start paying back some of their loans and build for the future."

Norman Rockwell miniatures of the perfect America.

And those struggling to get by:

"You deserved it because during these years, you worked harder than ever before. You deserved it because when it cost more to fill up your car, you cut out movie nights and put in longer hours. Or when you lost that job that paid $22.50 an hour with benefits, you took two jobs at 9 bucks an hour and fewer benefits. You did it because your family depended on you. You did it because you're an American and you don't quit. You did it because it was what you had to do.

But driving home late from that second job, or standing there watching the gas pump hit 50 dollars and still going, when the realtor told you that to sell your house you'd have to take a big loss, in those moments you knew that this just wasn't right."

Immigrants:

"When every new wave of immigrants looked up and saw the Statue of Liberty, or knelt down and kissed the shores of freedom just ninety miles from Castro's tyranny, these new Americans surely had many questions. But none doubted that here in America they could build a better life, that in America their children would be more blessed than they."

Well, at least the white European immigrants coming through Ellis Island and those escaping communism in Cuba.  Those coming from non-communist Central or South America or from Asia aren't as directly recognized.

Even astronauts:

"God bless Neil Armstrong."

Will this blessing be backed with cuts to NASA's budget?  Maybe a fire sale of NASA assets to private companies?

And women.  Oh yes, he didn't forget women:

"Those days were toughest on Ann, of course. She was heroic. . . I knew that her job as a mom was harder than mine. And I knew without question, that her job as a mom was a lot more important than mine. . . Ann would have succeeded at anything she wanted to.  . .

When my mom ran for the Senate [she lost by a huge margin], my dad was there for her every step of the way. I can still hear her saying in her beautiful voice, "Why should women have any less say than men, about the great decisions facing our nation?"

I wish she could have been here at the convention and heard leaders like Governor Mary Fallin, Governor Nikki Haley, Governor Susana Martinez, Senator Kelly Ayotte and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

As Governor of Massachusetts, I chose a woman Lt. Governor, a woman chief of staff, half of my cabinet and senior officials were women, and in business, I mentored and supported great women leaders who went on to run great companies.  [But he didn't choose a woman as his running mate.]

Of course, the PR guys writing this don't seem to realize that this next quote could just wipe out all their other attempts to win women voters:

"He [Dad, George Romney] convinced my mom, a beautiful young actress, to give up Hollywood to marry him. He moved to Detroit, led a great automobile company and became Governor of the Great State of Michigan."

 Maybe the guys will be impressed that Papa Romney got a beautiful young actress, but women aren't going to be excited about him talking her out of her Hollywood career to move to, yeah, Detroit.

And, of course, a coded wink to the religious conservatives:

"As president, I will protect the sanctity of life. I will honor the institution of marriage. And I will guarantee America's first liberty: the freedom of religion."

Even though he didn't say it explicitly, they knew he meant - fight abortions, fight gay marriage, and support such evangelical goals as getting prayer back into public spaces.



How much time should I actually spend going through this speech?  Did anyone actually expect him to say anything?  It's really a pretty cynical speech.  To me, these mentions of the various constituencies are just that - mentions.  They don't reflect a deep understanding of who these constituencies are.  They don't hone in on the issues that might resonate with them - except the religious conservatives.  Rather they are a marketer's attempt to convert focus group data into some votes.

More telling is that there is no substance.  It's simply various ways of saying "Obama failed, but I'll deliver" with nothing that offers how he's going to do it.  Well, yes, his 5 point plan is going to create 12 million new jobs by cutting regulations and taxes and giving parents school choice, and cutting the deficit.  How he's going to cut taxes and the deficit without pretty much shutting down the government he didn't explain.

It's a speech that needed to cover certain things, and I guess it did, but without grace or wit or, as I've said already, substance.

"I love the way he lights up around his kids" and other Republican speech thoughts

First, let me take something totally out of context, the way the Republicans are running with Obama's inept comment about entrepreneurs. 

Here's Romney's comment about his running mate Paul Ryan:

"I love the way he lights up around his kids . . ."

Wow, I thought when I heard this.  But it makes sense from a man whose religion forbids smoking.  It must be thrilling to see someone have the freedom to light up around his kids.  Of course, I'm assuming it meant tobacco and not that medicinal herb, cause then we'd need to know about Ryan's health issues. 

Fortunately for the Democrats, they don't have to take an out of context comment like this and run ads riffing on it, because Romney and his colleagues like Rep. Akin say enough real stuff to give them serious political ammunition.

I heard Marco Rubio and part of Romney's speech.  A few quotes from Rubio I thought worth commenting on:

"Our national motto is "In God we Trust," reminding us that faith in our Creator is the most important American value of all."

It's interesting that Romney, a little later would say:

"And I will guarantee America's first liberty: the freedom of religion."

Let's remember exactly what the First Amendment to the Constitution says:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Given the first Amendment's prohibition on the establishment of religion by Congress, it seems strange to claim 'faith in our Creator' as the most important American value of all. I understand the First Amendment was to get government out of the religion business and letting people practice as they please.  I would think justice and freedom would be higher on the list.

 Wikipedia reminds us "In God we Trust" was not the motto of our founding fathers. 

Never codified by law, E pluribus unum was considered a de facto motto of the United States^{[citation needed]} until 1956 when the United States Congress passed an act (H.J. Resolution 396), adopting "In God We Trust" as the official motto.^[4]

And reports tell us that the convention protestors were not allowed to assemble any closer than 10 blocks from the convention.


Rubio spoke movingly about his dad.

My dad was a bartender. . . A few years ago during a speech, I noticed a bartender behind a portable bar at the back of the ballroom. I remembered my father who had worked for many years as a banquet bartender.

But I couldn't help think that if everyone in the US shared Mitt Romney's values about drinking alcohol, Rubio's dad wouldn't have had a job.

And then there was the homage to the convention theme of American exceptionalism:

"For those of us who were born and raised in this country, it's easy to forget how special America is. But my grandfather understood how different America is from the rest of the world, because he knew what life was like outside America."

Rubio's granddad, as I understand it, before coming to the US only knew Cuba - the country the US has been boycotting since Castro came to power over 50 years ago.    I have no doubt that Rubio's grandfather loved his life in the US, and his gratitude for living here is appropriate.  But I'm not buying his expertise on how things are in all the rest of the world 'outside America."  There are a lot more options than Cuba. 

The US is an amazing country and has been an inspiration to people around the world.   But so was Germany before WW I. After the humiliating Treaty of Versailles,  Hitler promised Germans he'd regain their former greatness.  Rubio suggests Romney, too, will restore the US to its former greatness and beyond:

Mitt Romney believes that if we succeed in changing the direction of our country, our children and grandchildren will be the most prosperous generation ever, and their achievements will astonish the world.

Pride is one of the seven deadly sins.  Given that Rubio had already ranked faith in the creator as his number one value, you'd think he would remember this line from Proverbs:

Pride goes before destruction, And a haughty spirit before stumbling.

I hope you realize this has not been a review of Rubio's (and certainly not Romney's) speech.  I've just taken a few lines.  Some of my comments are more serious than others.

I hope enough Americans realize, when they hear speeches like this analyzed by the media, that they too are taking what they see as the most interesting lines or the lines most likely to gain hits for their online articles.  Listen to or read the speeches yourself.

Rubio's speech.
Romney's speech.

If You Vote For Obama Are You Voting For A War Criminal?

Obama's continuation of many of the Bush administration's war on terrorism actions are troubling - torture, the right to kill American citizens who are terrorists, the continued war in Afghanistan, etc.

Shannyn Moore posted a loooong conversation between John Cusack (the actor, who is also, clearly someone who thinks) and Jonathon Turlock a law professor and expert for various media.

Basically, they ask the question - Can you really vote for a president who violates the constitution and commits war crimes because "he's better than Romney" or because "I like his social programs?"

My personal rational has been that if a Republican appoints the next two Supreme Court justices, the chance to save democracy will be postponed another generation. 

There is also the assumption they make that Obama is in fact a war criminal.  It seems that they are guilty of convicting him without a trial, the same crime they accuse him of with his powers to assassinate people like Osama bin Laden, and worse, American citizens.  It's seriously disturbing, and that's why the media should cover it so there can be a full blown debate and the facts and interpretations can be examined.

Crossing the Rubicon is the metaphor they use repeatedly - is there no point past which Obama could go before you wouldn't vote for him? 

The alternatives to voting for Obama aren't nearly as well developed as the argument that he is a war criminal.  

“Look, you’re not helping Obama by enabling him. If you want to help him, hold his feet to the fire.”
Turley: Exactly.

If, like me, you live in a strongly red state, you can vote for a third party candidate as a protest vote.  No matter how I vote, it won't cost Obama any electoral votes.  People in blue states run the risk of too many people protesting and giving electoral votes to Romney.  When people voted for Nader in 2000 they were blamed for losing the election and the mainstream Democrats didn't get the message that people were protesting Clinton's moving so far to the right. 

So, I guess now we need to be sending messages to Obama that we are voting for one of the third party candidates unless he pledges to change his ways.  USA Today reported that there would be five third parties that will be on the ballots in more than five states:

• Libertarian
• Green
• Constitution
• Party for Socialism and Liberation
• Justice Party

Here are some excerpts from the conversation between Turley and Cusack:

Some of the charges against Obama:

Turley: Well, President Obama outdid President Bush. He ordered the killing of two U.S. citizens as the primary targets and has then gone forward and put out a policy that allows him to kill any American citizen when he unilaterally determines them to be a terrorist threat. Where President Bush had a citizen killed as collateral damage, President Obama has actually a formal policy allowing him to kill any U.S. citizen. . .

Cusack: Does that order have to come directly from Obama, or can his underlings carry that out on his behalf as part of a generalized understanding? Or does he have to personally say, “You can get that guy and that guy?”
Turley: Well, he has delegated the authority to the so-called death panel, which is, of course, hilarious, since the Republicans keep talking about a nonexistent death panel in national healthcare. We actually do have a death panel, and it’s killing people who are healthy. . .

Turley: Well, the framers knew what it was like to have sovereigns kill citizens without due process. They did it all the time back in the 18th century. They wrote a constitution specifically to bar unilateral authority.
James Madison is often quoted for his observation that if all men were angels, no government would be necessary. And what he was saying is that you have to create a system of law that has checks and balances so that even imperfect human beings are restrained from doing much harm. Madison and other framers did not want to rely on the promises of good motivations or good intents from the government. They created a system where no branch had enough authority to govern alone — a system of shared and balanced powers.
So what Obama’s doing is to rewrite the most fundamental principle of the U.S. Constitution. The whole point of the Holder speech was that we’re really good guys who take this seriously, and you can trust us. That’s exactly the argument the framers rejected, the “trust me” principle of government. You’ll notice when Romney was asked about this, he said, “I would’ve signed the same law, because I trust Obama to do the right thing.” They’re both using the very argument that the framers warned citizens never to accept from their government. . .

On the lack of media coverage:

Cusack: Oscar Wilde said most journalists would fall under the category of those who couldn’t tell the difference between a bicycle accident and the end of civilization. But why is it that all the journalists that you see mostly on MSNBC or most of the progressives, or so-called progressives, who believe that under Bush and Cheney and Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzalez these were great and grave constitutional crises, the wars were an going moral fiasco’s — but now, since we have a friendly face in the White House, someone with kind of pleasing aesthetics and some new policies  we like, now all of a sudden these aren’t crimes, there’s no crisis. Because he’s our guy? Go, team, go? . . .

It seems to me that there was media coverage about the Bush administration because there were lots of Democrats opposed to what Bush was doing.  But there isn't any noticeable Republican opposition to torture or assassination so there is no opposition and the press doesn't cover it. 

Who Ya Gonna Vote For?

And so then it gets down to the question, “Well, are you going to vote for Obama?” And I say, “Well, I don’t really know. I couldn’t really vote for Hillary Clinton because of her Iraq War vote.” Because I felt like that was a line, a Rubicon line –
Turley: Right.
Cusack: — a Rubicon line that I couldn’t cross, right? I don’t know how to bring myself to vote for a constitutional law professor, or even a constitutional realist, who throws away due process and claims the authority that the executive branch can assassinate American citizens. I just don’t know if I can bring myself to do it.
If you want to make a protest vote against Romney, go ahead, but I would think we’d be better putting our energies into local and state politics — occupy Wall Street and organizations and movements outside the system, not national politics, not personalities. Not stadium rock politics. Not brands. That’s the only thing I can think of. What would you say?
Turley: Well, the question, I think, that people have got to ask themselves when they get into that booth is not what Obama has become, but what have we become? That is, what’s left of our values if we vote for a person that we believe has shielded war crimes or violated due process or implemented authoritarian powers. It’s not enough to say, “Yeah, he did all those things, but I really like what he did with the National Park System.”
Cusack: Yeah, or that he did a good job with the auto bailout.
Turley: Right. I think that people have to accept that they own this decision, that they can walk away. I realize that this is a tough decision for people but maybe, if enough people walked away, we could finally galvanize people into action to make serious changes. We have to recognize that our political system is fundamentally broken, it’s unresponsive. Only 11 percent of the public supports Congress, and yet nothing is changing — and so the question becomes, how do you jumpstart that system? How do you create an alternative? What we have learned from past elections is that you don’t create an alternative by yielding to this false dichotomy that only reinforces their monopoly on power.
Cusack: I think that even Howard Zinn/Chomsky progressives, would admit that there will be a difference in domestic policy between Obama and a Romney presidency.
But DUE PROCESS….I think about how we own it. We own it. Everybody’s sort of let it slip. There’s no immediacy in the day-to-day on and it’s just one of those things that unless they… when they start pulling kids off the street, like they did in Argentina a few years ago and other places, all of a sudden, it’s like, “How the hell did that happen?” I say, “Look, you’re not helping Obama by enabling him. If you want to help him, hold his feet to the fire.”
Turley: Exactly.
Cusack: The problem is, as I see it, is that regardless of goodwill and intent and people being tired of the status quo and everything else, the information outlets and the powers that be reconstruct or construct the government narrative only as an election game of ‘us versus them,’ Obama versus Romney, and if you do anything that will compromise that equation, you are picking one side versus the other. Because don’t you realize that’s going to hurt Obama? Don’t you know that’s going to help Obama? Don’t you know… and they’re not thinking through their own sort of self-interest or the community’s interest in just changing the way that this whole thing works to the benefit of the majority. We used to have some lines we wouldn’t cross–some people who said this is not what this country does …we don’t do this shit, you had to do the right thing. So it’s going to be a tough process getting our rights back, but you  know Frankie’s Law? Whoever stops fighting first – loses.
Turley: Right.

Now That Olympics Are Over, What Do Romney's Olympic Predictions Tell Us?

On the eve of the Olympics in London, as everyone knows, Mitt Romney, when asked his thoughts, told the Prime Minister that he had concerns about London's readiness.  Now that the Olympics are over, and were very successful if the press can be believed,  it seems appropriate to consider what this might reveal about the candidate.

1.  Social Graces

Romney clearly has trouble with his sense of appropriateness in interpersonal relationships.  He appears to be much more task oriented (thinking about the games) and lacking in his people orientation (not understanding this was like asking "how are you? or that as a guest you should say positive things when you first meet, not criticize.)

Asked a ritualistic question about the Olympics, which any guest should know is supposed to be answered politely and positively  - "Oh, it looks to be a great Olympics!" he took the question literally, and gave an negative assessment.

This insensitivity to non-verbal communication, to social customs, is a serious problem for a president.  Much of the job is to ceremonially represent the United States.  Much of the job requires the ability to assess the character, sincerity, and capacity of people advising you as well as inspiring their confidence in you.  This is hard to do when you are tone deaf to social signals.
 

2.  Assessment Skills

The lack of social skills is problematic.  For some people, this is made up in other skills.  But Romney, someone who has worked on a previous Olympics, was wrong in his assessment of the London Olympics.  The Olympics went well and there was no security breach, something he specifically noted as a concern.  So his assessment on a topic he is a reputed expert on, was wrong.  I must acknowledge that we don't know if there were no terrorist issues because of how good the security was or simply because no one attempted to disrupt the Olympics.  But ultimately, his assessment - inappropriate as it was to share at that moment - was wrong.

Some might argue shouldn't jump to conclusions here.  Was this something he had studied or was he just reflecting the media accounts?  But what we do know is that his inability to read the human aspect of the situation, led him to think that his opinion was being seriously sought.  And, again, due to his lack of sensitivity to basic etiquette, instead of praising his host's efforts, he criticized them, implying that there were likely to be problems - a prediction of sorts.  A prediction he never had to make.  One that now turns out to be wrong. 

If he was wrong about the odds of a successful Olympics, what does that tell us about his assessments of things like the economic crisis, health care, tax policy, etc.?

In terms of the social problems, this is just one more in a long series of such incidents.  In terms of his assessment of the Olympics this doesn't tell us too much, but we learn about people by adding up bits of information over time.  So I'm just taking notes that can be compared to his other pronouncements. (We could, say, add this to what we know about someone who set up a health care  plan as a governor that is remarkably similar to Obama's national plan that Romney tells us is terrible.) 

But I think this episode tells us, at least, this much:

• His sense of appropriate behavior and etiquette are out of synch with most folks
• He takes things literally, missing the social meaning
• His first response was to point out the potential negatives
• He was wrong 

[As I reread this, I realize that it sounds like I'm pussy-footing around here, treating Romney way too gingerly.  My rationale is that much of the debate going on over the presidential candidates has been about things which are difficult for the average no-too-involved observer to assess.  But this Olympics incident, thought not big, is something where we can look at the facts and come to a pretty clear conclusion that most people can understand easily.]