July 30, 2012
What A Country: After Wall Street Screws Us, 45% Of Americans Want A Wall Street Guy To Be Our Next President
by Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash
Here comes Mister One Percent. Mitt the Twit Romney. He used to be a leveraged buyout specialist, which was what these private equity guys were called before they got ashamed of the name.
Leveraged buyout means you put a company in debt, and use the money you extract from it to partly buy the company. You also use this debt to pay yourself huge fees and get tax benefits. Basically you're looting the company, which is why many leveraged buyouts end in bankruptcies. The excuse these guys use for what they do is that they bring "efficiency" -- one of those meaningless hide-my-hypocrisy phrases like "free market" and "collateral damage."
So Mitt Romney is a dyed-in-the-wool Wall Streeter, engaged in one of its most egregious practices. He also has money stashed away in the Cayman Islands, may still have a Swiss bank account, has helped export jobs overseas, and is building an elevator for his cars. His wife drives a couple of Cadillacs, and he pays 15% in taxes.
He is what one may safely call a caricature of a Wall Street fraudster. The perfect plutocrat. So obviously slumming among us hoi polloi that he comes off as awkward. And he also happens to be a serious serial liar.
Yet 45% of Americans want him to be our next President. He bought himself his nomination, burying his rivals in negative ads, outspending them by a factor of 10 or more. And Americans are OK with that. They'd rather have a rich Wall Street guy run our country than anyone else.
Are we totally crazy? Didn't Wall Street just screw us? Didn't their gambling with our homes cost over a 100 million jobs around the world? Didn't their shenanigans screw up the retirement of millions? Didn't they cause the Great Recession?
And has any of them been prosecuted?
Hurrah for America! Let our next president be a Wall Street shyster!
Talk about Stockholm Syndrome. It's like we want our rapist to be our therapist. We're really happy to ensure that our democracy remains a plutocracy. Bring on tax cuts for the wealthy. It's perfectly OK that all the productivity gains of our workers should go to management (if our productivity gains were reflected in our earnings, the median income of American households would be $92,000 a year instead of just under $50,000 a year -- that's $42,000 a year that the rich are stealing from us).
Americans, the eternal victims. Bring the noose here, darling, and put it around my neck. Let me hang myself with my vote for Romney.
What can one say? The mind boggles. Are the white people of America really this stupid?
(Afternote: I have a book out, self-published at the moment, based on my many provocative posts to 3QD. It's called The Real Obama: Progressive Tiger or Wall Street Poodle? You'll never have more fun reading about politics. Only $12 -- order a copy here: lulu.com/product/paperback/the-real-obama-progressive-tiger-or-wall-street-poodle/18939747)
Posted by Evert Cilliers at 12:02 AM | Permalink
Comments
We're back to the same conundrum:
Either 'Hobson's Choice' or 'The lesser of two evils'
God save America
Posted by: Félix E. F. Larocca, MD | Jul 30, 2012 6:28:17 AM
People don't vote on issues or even on logic. They vote on "culture" matters. As long as he's againt egual treatment under the law for minorities and against abortion, he'll get nearly half (or more) of the votes. That's as clear a portrait of America as there is. America is Honey Boo-Boo's trailer and the rest of us just live in it.
Posted by: Ray Butlers | Jul 30, 2012 10:27:37 AM
How did you figure out the productivity gains numbers?
Posted by: Stopher | Jul 30, 2012 7:47:10 PM
this is tangential to your main argument, but I notice that you said "are White people that stupid"? does that imply that yellow and green people are less stupid? Just curious..
Posted by: omar | Jul 30, 2012 8:13:46 PM
I think Ray hits close to the mark. I've been trying to figure out why large portions of the population vote this way. I think many simply reject the equality movement. They realized that it would actually make the lives harder - true meritorious social and economic system means that skin color has little ability in determining if you get a job. They of course complain that being in the majority conveys them no special privileges. These are same people that complain China is cheating by essentially having cheap workers. If you are in a truly market based economic system, its totally acceptable to use what you have, cheap labor included. Anyway, what it looks like to me is that a large segment of he population has agreed with Lucifer from Milton's Paradise Lost, better to get the scraps from the oligarchs, than to profit equally from our shared common wealth.
Posted by: cod3fr3ak | Jul 30, 2012 9:20:22 PM
"are White people that stupid"?
Probably not, but electing another dumb rich white guy is not going to help.
Posted by: Dave Ranningdd | Jul 30, 2012 11:07:55 PM
cod3fr3ak
I usually boil it down to racism, but it's more nuanced than that. It's the decades-long loss of certain privilages such as whiteness , straightness, maleness and American-ness. Those things are lost to history, but many cling to every form of repression they can get. Therefore, they resist equal treatment for women (notice that they supress birth control pills but not Viagra) and homosexuals. Notice that the black man in the white house is routinely slandered as a foreign, Muslim, drug-taking bisexual. It makes them look like a bunch of sex-mad puritans...which is exactly what they are.
Posted by: Ray Butlers | Jul 31, 2012 9:42:17 AM
Holy book in one hand and x-rated magazine in the other. That’s probably representative of a majority of the 45%. Puritanical hypocrites,not all of them ‘white’. This contradictory mindset,however, is not restricted to Americans.
As to Obama,he is an expedient politician without principle. But, at the end of the day, he is preferable over Romney.I’ll hold my nose and vote for him.
Posted by: waqnis | Jul 31, 2012 11:39:55 AM
Lets be honest. Americans are thick. Easily the dumbest people in the western world. So it's hardly surprising that they consistently vote against their best interests.
Posted by: Frank | Jul 31, 2012 12:51:56 PM
Frank, you are right. I could feel the bell curve shifting downwards when I moved from Canada to the U.S. That such stupid people could have large suburban houses and two S.U.Vs in the driveway is sheer dumb luck. It can't last.
Posted by: Olavi Valo | Jul 31, 2012 2:39:48 PM
People have to stop voting the lesser of two evils because there is no lesser, they are both evil. If for nothing else you should vote 3rd party' Jill Stein or Ron Paul or vote for yourself, let these politicians know with a protest vote that the jig is up! It doesnt really matter which of them gets in, they're both bought by big business. They laugh at the idea that we think that our vote counts! Let them know we are on to the game, and although it may take time we are going to vote their asses out. Stop walking down the same street and falling in the same hole, that's insanity!
Posted by: Carol | Jul 31, 2012 10:37:30 PM
Elections in the US two party system is like tossing a coin in which both sides are tails. That is the choice voters have and that is what they get.
Posted by: Raza | Jul 31, 2012 11:06:19 PM
The Dems and the Repugs serve the corporatocracy.
Rocky Anderson is another choice:
http://www.voterocky.org/
Carol is absolutely right.
Posted by: Louise Gordon | Jul 31, 2012 11:50:47 PM
Whoever is president in the next four years will almost certainly name the next three Supreme Court Justices. If you seriously think Obama and Romney would do no differently from one another in making these appointments, then you are beyond the reach of that I might make on your attention. Someone else will have to try to talk with you. Also -- of the two men who are contending now for the presidency, one is likelier than the other to start a war with Iran, to destroy the scant progressive legislation still in effect in the US, to set back any hope of economic recovery, and to incite tremendous hatred abroad for our country.
Please understand me -- I am not saying Barack Obama is a saint. I am saying he's not Mitt Romney. The difference I refer to could mean literally everything, and it is an irony, on this thread, to see people who consider themselves intelligent enough to bemoan the stupidity of their compatriots just not picking up on that.
This year, your vote is more important than it has ever been. Throw it away because you are angry or disappointed (who isn't?), and you may have blood on your hands, like the people who helped to elect Bush II by voting for Nader in 2000 do.
It's not a time to indulge anger and disappointment unless you are working for Mitt Romney, who will be the only one who profits from pissed off Democrats mighty easy to divide and conquer. It's a time to limit damage and reposition. We have been shown what a pretty good Democrat in the Oval Office can no longer accomplish, and the reasons for why he did not accomplish it have nothing to do with his being a poodle. Why not look a little deeper? Why not try to buy the time you need to make a real difference, with real activism?
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Aug 1, 2012 1:20:07 AM
Elatia---
This is not about ideas and law---
This is material, and we need to remove these thugs from power and the ability to cause harm.
Reformist politics have failed, and we are running out of time.
200 species went extinct today.
There is blood in the streets.
Posted by: Dave Ranningdd | Aug 1, 2012 1:24:41 AM
Got it, Dave. But how is Mitt Romney going to help? Do you think the peasants will rise up just like that? You don't need to persuade me the system is rotten, because I am not thinking how to prop it up. I am only thinking about lives that might not be lost and other disasters that might be averted. Clearly we are in for some big changes, but they do not have to start with the presidency of a man who has baptized the dead.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Aug 1, 2012 1:33:17 AM
http://www.aclu.org/national-security
Posted by: Louise Gordon | Aug 1, 2012 11:10:46 AM
Elatia:
"This year, your vote is more important than it has ever been."
While I have sympathies with what you are saying, isn't it telling that you probably would have uttered this sentence in 2000, 2004, and 2008 (forgive me, but I'm guessing that this is true)? Isn't it odd that every election seems to take on this newly apocalyptic level of importance?
If you're right, and every successive election features an even MORE dangerous republican candidate, then something systemic is going horribly wrong, such that the American voter, instead of voting for the best candidate, is finding herself forced, every year, to vote for the least disastrous one. This is the sort of thought, I think, that motivates the "radicals" you're dismissing: it shouldn't have to be like this, and a vote for Obama is, in an important sense, a vote for that same status quo, because the Democratic party benefits from the current situation.
Posted by: Joe | Aug 1, 2012 12:19:01 PM
"Every four years the naive half who vote are encouraged to believe that if we can elect a really nice man or woman President everything will be all right. But it won't be."
Gore Vidal
Posted by: Olavi Valo | Aug 1, 2012 2:58:53 PM
You've got me wrong, Joe. Although I certainly believe the vote of any American is still far too valuable to cast cynically. I don't begin to know what you probably thought and said in previous election years, so I would appreciate your returning the favor, and not being assumptive about my own history that way.
Yes, things are getting worse. We live in a corporatocracy now, where Sheldon Adelson is the one who counts. And I am dismissing chat room revolutionaries, not radicals. If anyone on this thread lives hand to mouth because the real work of radical reform consumes them, then I will certainly offer them an apology for giving the appearance dismissing them.
No, it shouldn't have to be like this. But it is. Know it or not, we all have to busy one hand putting a finger in the dike while building that better sea wall with the other hand. If my finger in the dike results in the appointment of three relatively sane Supreme Court Justices, and prevents one death in yet another gruesomely unnecessary war, then -- good.
In a two party system, you often find yourself voting for the least bad option, and pondering the significance of differences too small for your liking between two candidates. Crucially, however, there are differences. This year, for instance, you could have a deeply religious bully billionaire who, over his long personal history, has abused at least one dog, hurled to the pavement and shorn at least one effeminate boy, impersonated on numerous occasions the police to scare other frat boys, muddied up his staggering net worth and the taxes he has paid en route to amassing it, and represented the foulest worst of our nation whenever he sets foot outside it. Politics aside, now, that's the guy. Or, you could have Obama. While I do not in the least share the contempt for the President that many people left of center can summon, I will say his first four years were different than I had hoped. I think I have seen, and seen full well, the way the corporatocracy shackles almost any Democratic president. And I'm old enough to have seen it coming. That's quite a different matter from naively or cynically disapproving of the President.
Now, I have to detach from this thread. I don't see any interesting arguments -- my own is quite recherche, and almost goes without saying. As to yours? Well...
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Aug 1, 2012 3:18:56 PM
http://metanoia-films.org/lifting-the-veil/
http://metanoia-films.org/the-power-principle/
Posted by: Louise Gordon | Aug 1, 2012 4:02:40 PM
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