One-Percenter Mitt Romney’s Obvious Lack of Empathetic Insight — His “Not Very Much” Is Your Idea of a Rigged System’s Unachievable Wealth — the Coming “So Sad” Choice in November 2012

18 January 2012

It is challenging to pretend to have heart, when you don’t — and it’s difficult to lead people, when you have nothing much in common with them

It seems that former Governor Mitt Romney generally can’t help but look like the elitist One-Percenter that he is.

When he combines that socially separating trait with an obvious lack of human empathy, the resulting demeanor reveals why he is a poor choice to lead the United States — at a time when sensible people are trying to wrestle our democracy away from the resource-stealing plutocrats who buy it at every turn.

Governor Mitt’s “tiny-soul” exposing moment came in the following exchange, regarding requests that he release his tax records for public scrutiny:

After speaking to a smaller-than-usual crowd on Tuesday morning in Florence, S.C., Mitt Romney took questions from the press and said that his effective tax rate was about 15 percent.

“It’s probably closer to the 15 percent rate than anything,” Mr. Romney said.

“Because my last 10 years, I’ve — my income comes overwhelmingly from investments made in the past, rather than ordinary income, or rather than earned annual income.”

Mr. Romney added: “And then I get speaker’s fees from time to time, but not very much.”

In fact, in the most recent year, Mr. Romney made $374,327.62 in speaker’s fees, at an average of $41,592 per speech, according to his public financial disclosure reports.

Say what?

Yup, $374,327.62 ain’t much.

And it was so hard to get, only $41,592 for a few minutes of speaking each pop.

Poor man.

The politics of envy?

Governor Romney said, after New Hampshire’s Republican Party presidential primary:

“President Obama wants to put free enterprise on trial,” Romney said in his prepared speech . . . .

“In the last few days, we have seen some desperate Republicans join forces with him. This is such a mistake for our party and for our nation.

“This country already has a leader who divides us with the bitter politics of envy. We must offer an alternative vision.”

Meaning, of course, that the Ninety-Nine Percent are lazy (and spiritually unattractive) economic dwarves.

Governor Romney’s poor insight

Mitt Romney almost certainly believes the “envy” horse plop he prattles.

Which means that he is:

(a) blind to the actual economic and social conditions around him,

(b) analytically challenged,

(c) so spoiled by wealth that he has no idea how the circumstances — that his “class” has imposed on most everyone else — force the (apparently morally lesser) Ninety-Nine Percent to live.

In a word, he is an elitist fool. Like so many of this nation’s self-serving politicians.

Why do I care? — If we don’t recognize the purely self-interested leader-fools among us for what they are, we’re going to go down with the ship

The American oligarchy is not going to be shoved off its government-owning pedestal — until the rest of us recognize how its carefully crafted lies about social and economic mobility chain us to Democracy’s now-sinking ship.

Does “brain wash” ring a bell?

The “commies” used to mold minds as a matter of government policy. Now, it’s American plutocrats.

Mitt’s even more successful dad would disapprove of his son’s behavior

Mitt’s father, George W. Romney — a Nelson Rockefeller Republican — would almost certainly disapprove of his son’s excessively greedy orientation.

Romney Senior, once chief executive officer of American Motors and Michigan Governor, turned down a substantial pay raise, so as to keep his salary in better line with those of his corporation’s workers:

George Romney, on the other hand, voluntarily turned down $268,000 in pay over five years when he was chief executive, which was equal to about 20 percent of his total pay during that time.

In 1960, for example, he refused a $100,000 bonus. Mr. Romney had previously told the company’s board that no executive needed to make more than $225,000 a year (about $1.4 million in today’s dollars), a spokesman for American Motors explained at the time, and the bonus would have put him above that threshold.

In those days, Romney’s Senior’s principled stance was not perceived as anti-enterprise.

Today, according to George Romney’s greedy son, it is.

This is almost certainly so because Romney Junior’s exploits as a predatory capitalist compare poorly, ethically speaking, with his father’s attempt to actually manufacture something.

In today’s American system, shuffling paper around — as in (a) the financial sector’s bogus invention of “securities” that no one understands or (b) predatory capitalists’ trashing of other people’s struggling efforts to produce something — is better rewarded than actually building the material objects and companies that our lives depend on.

Is this triumph of illusion over substance what you thought the United States was supposed to be about?

The moral? — Plutocracy has to be recognized as a negative social and economic condition, before we can gain the necessary political strength to overcome its anti-democratic grip on our institutions

A man who can’t recognize the nature of the Plutocracy — which Oligarchy has imposed on the United States — is hardly a good choice to lead us back to the economic and social freedom that this nation formerly stood for.

President Obama, of course, is ultimately no better. But at least he keeps the traditionally American idea of quasi-egalitarian freedom alive by pretending to believe in it.

Our 2012 choice is going to boil down to:

Re-elect a lying con man, who keeps the Dream alive, while doing what he can to destroy its achievability.

Or elect an out-of-touch, actively predatory capitalist to more honestly trash the little bit of soul-enhancing illusion that we have left.

Not much “yay” in that, is there?

PeteFree.com

One-Percenter Mitt Romney’s Obvious Lack of Empathetic Insight — His “Not Very Much” Is Your Idea of a Rigged System’s Unachievable Wealth — the Coming “So Sad” Choice in November 2012