From Robert Reich: http://robertreich.org/post/26229451132
By Robert Reich
Saturday, June 30, 2012
Saturday, June 30, 2012
The election of 2012 raises two
perplexing questions. The first is how the GOP could put up someone for
president who so brazenly epitomizes the excesses of casino capitalism
that have nearly destroyed the economy and overwhelmed our democracy.
The second is why the Democrats have failed to point this out.
The
White House has criticized Mitt Romney for his years at the helm of
Bain Capital, pointing to a deal that led to the bankruptcy of GS
Technologies, a Bain investment in Kansas City that went belly up in
2001 at the cost of 750 jobs. But the White House hasn’t connected
Romney’s Bain to the larger scourge of casino capitalism. Not
surprisingly, its criticism has quickly degenerated into a “he said, she
said” feud over what proportion of the companies that Bain bought and
loaded up with debt subsequently went broke (it’s about 20 percent), and
how many people lost their jobs relative to how many jobs were added
because of Bain’s financial maneuvers (that depends on when you start
and stop the clock). And it has invited a Republican countercharge that
the administration gambled away taxpayer money on its own bad bet, the
Solyndra solar panel company.
But the real issue here isn’t Bain’s
betting record. It’s that Romney’s Bain is part of the same system as
Jamie Dimon’s JPMorgan Chase, Jon Corzine’s MF Global and Lloyd
Blankfein’s Goldman Sachs—a system that has turned much of the economy
into a betting parlor that nearly imploded in 2008, destroying millions
of jobs and devastating household incomes. The winners in this system
are top Wall Street executives and traders, private-equity managers and
hedge-fund moguls,
and the losers are most of the rest of us. The
system is largely responsible for the greatest concentration of the
nation’s income and wealth at the very top since the Gilded Age of the
nineteenth century, with the richest 400 Americans owning as much as the
bottom 150 million put together. And these multimillionaires and
billionaires are now actively buying the 2012 election—and with it,
American democracy.
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