From The Guardian UK: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jul/12/mitt-romney-offer-government-billionaires
In the Romney candidacy, the Republican party has found the apotheosis of the fact that it now represents solely the super-rich
"Too much money" sounds like an oxymoron, especially when applied to American politics. But in the last week, Republicans are beginning to learn that lots of money can have its downside. Thursday's story that Romney may have actively directed Bain Capital three years longer than he claimed
– a period in which Bain Capital-managed companies experienced
bankruptcies and layoffs – caps what must be the worst weekly news cycle
of any modern American presidential candidate. From images of corporate
raiding, to luxury speedboats, to offshore accounts in the Cayman
Islands, to mega-mansions in the Hamptons, this week's stories suggest
that the candidacy of Mitt Romney – poster-boy for the symbiotic relationship between big money and the modern Republican party – is in serious trouble.
Last
weekend's photos of the Romney clan on a luxury speedboat cruising
around a lake in New Hampshire, where their multimillion-dollar compound
sits, were startling in their tone-deafness. And just to make sure the
sentiment wasn't lost on anyone, at a campaign event the same week,
Obama recounted childhood memories of touring the US with his
grandmother by Greyhound bus, even the thrill of staying at a Howard
Johnson motel. In a smart political calculation, the Obamas chose to
forgo their annual summer vacation in Cape Cod (a nice upper-middle
class vacation spot, mind you, but nowhere near the same league as the
Romney estate). Instead, Obama was photographed visiting a senior
citizens' home in the battleground state of Ohio.
And the hits kept coming. Next, Vanity Fair published an article listing the Romneys' various offshore investment accounts
worth potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in the secretive tax
havens of Cayman Islands and Bermuda, as well as a since-closed Swiss
bank account. Democrats
stoked the predictable outrage from the revelations. On the Sunday ABC
news program "This Week", Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley thundered:
"Mitt Romney bets against America. He bet against America when he put his money in Swiss bank accounts and tax havens and shelters."
On the same program, Bobbie Jindal, Republican governor of Louisiana, could only lamely respond:
"In terms of Governor Romney's financial success, I'm happy that he's a successful businessman."
While
there is no evidence that the Romneys illegally evaded taxes through
their various offshore accounts (their secretiveness making it
impossible to tell), the reek of entitlement became overwhelming when it
was revealed that the Romneys had accumulated somewhere between $20m
and $101m in an "IRA", a tax-advantaged retirement account designed for
middle-class savers, limited to a few thousand dollars a year
contribution. As one commenter parried,
"I may be stupid, but I ain't no fool." In other words, we might be too
stupid to understand how Romney was able to obtain all these tax breaks
legally, but we aren't fooled about unfairness of it all.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment