Romney's Qualifications

On September 23’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos Robert Reich, Professor at the University of California at Berkeley, said what struck him most about the 47% video was the way Romney displayed himself; people don’t really know him but in that video he comes forth as passionate or indignant, there’s a commitment there but the trouble is that passion and commitment is about elite-ism, it’s not about caring for most Americans…it was so disdaining, it was so condemning…this video cannot be separated from the Romney/Ryan budget which cuts dramatically taxes on the very wealthy and also at the same time cuts programs that average working people and the poor depend on. After his successful debate on October 3 in which he only told one truth, Romney on October 5 on Fox News said when talking about the 47% - “in this case I said something that was completely wrong”. 

The September 5 Huffington Post article called Romney's Success at Bain Capital: The Business as Scam Model - gives great detail about how Bain Capital functions and says it is important to understand that Mr. Romney is not a successful business person in the same way as other people who have built successful companies. Private equity (PE) companies like Bain Capital are not primarily about producing wealth. They profit largely by siphoning off wealth created elsewhere in the economy. There are many different ways in which this diversion of wealth is accomplished. The simplest and most common trick is gaming the tax code. It's not just the tax code that PE companies game. By loading the companies they acquire up with debt, PE firms like Bain make them much more vulnerable to bankruptcy. The debt is always held by the acquired company not by Bain-If a Bain-owned company goes under these inadvertent creditors can take big losses. In the case of pensions part of the loss will come back to the taxpayer through the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation. In short…There is no doubt that one individual or one company can get enormously wealthy if they are able to do this successfully. However you cannot have an entire economy that is premised on the idea that it will siphon off wealth produced elsewhere. It is not clear that Mitt Romney understands that fact but certainly the general public should when it goes to vote this fall. I saw many, many, articles on Bain causing Americans to lose jobs. 

So Mitt’s qualifications and experience is – none with foreign policy, none in earning a decent wage through honest hard work, and none with the US Congress. He does have is a vast knowledge of scamming Americans through tax codes and practices created by Republicans, flip-flopping positions and actual lying to scam people into believing what they hear in the moment, and one term as a state Governor in which its education rating dropped while he was in office. Sorry Ann, I don’t feel lucky that Mitt is running for President.