Romnesia

[Gob]

We could call it Romnesia: the ability of the very rich to forget the context in which they made their money.

To forget their education, inheritance, family networks, contacts and introductions. To forget the workers whose labour enriched them. To forget the infrastructure and security, the educated workforce, the contracts, subsidies and bailouts the government provided.

Every political system requires a justifying myth. The Soviet Union had Alexey Stakhanov, the miner reputed to have extracted 100 tonnes of coal in six hours. The US had Richard Hunter, the hero of Horatio Alger's rags-to-riches tales.

Both stories contained a germ of truth. Stakhanov worked hard for a cause in which he believed, but his output was probably faked. When Alger wrote his novels, some poor people had become very rich in the US. But the further from its ideals (productivity in the Soviet Union, opportunity in the US) a system strays, the more fervently its justifying myths are propounded.

As the developed nations succumb to extreme inequality and social immobility, the myth of the self-made man becomes ever more potent. It is used to justify its polar opposite: an unassailable rent-seeking class, deploying its inherited money to finance the seizure of other people's wealth.

Rich lists are stuffed with people who either inherited their money or who made it through rent-seeking activities: by means other than innovation and productive effort. They're a catalogue of speculators, property barons, dukes, IT monopolists, loan sharks, bank chiefs, oil sheikhs, mining magnates, oligarchs and chief executives paid out of all proportion to any value they generate. Looters, in short. The richest mining barons are those to whom governments sold natural resources for a song. Russian, Mexican and British oligarchs acquired underpriced public assets through privatisation, and now run a toll-booth economy. Bankers use incomprehensible instruments to fleece their clients and the taxpayer. But as rentiers capture the economy, the opposite story must be told.

Scarcely a Republican speech fails to reprise the Richard Hunter narrative, and almost all these rags-to-riches tales turn out to be bunkum. ''Everything that Ann and I have,'' Mitt Romney claims, ''we earned the old-fashioned way.'' Old fashioned like Blackbeard, perhaps.

Two searing exposures in Rolling Stone magazine document the leveraged buyouts which destroyed viable companies, value and jobs, and the costly federal bailout which saved Romney's political skin. (Greed and Debt & Romney's real agenda.)

Romney personifies economic parasitism. The financial sector has become a job-destroying, life-crushing machine, which impoverishes others to enrich itself. The tighter its grip on politics, the more its representatives must tell the opposite story: of life-affirming enterprise, innovation and investment, of brave entrepreneurs making their fortunes out of nothing but grit and wit.

There is an obvious flip side to this story. ''Anyone can make it - I did without help'' translates as ''I refuse to pay taxes to help other people, as they can help themselves'' - whether or not they inherited an iron ore mine from daddy. In the article in which she urged the poor to emulate her, Rinehart also proposed that the minimum wage should be reduced. Who needs fair pay if anyone can become a millionaire?

In 2010, the richest 1 per cent in the US captured an astonishing 93 per cent of that year's gain in incomes. In the same year, corporate chief executives made, on average, 243 times as much as the median worker (in 1965 the ratio was 10 times lower). Between 1970 and 2010, the Gini coefficient, which measures inequality, rose in the US from 0.35 to 0.44: an astounding leap.

Equal opportunity, self-creation, heroic individualism: these are the myths that predatory capitalism requires for its political survival. Romnesia permits the ultra-rich both to deny the role of other people in the creation of their own wealth and to deny help to those less fortunate than themselves.

[MajGenl.Meade]

He likes to give a buck a rest

[Econoline]

Source, Gob?

[MajGenl.Meade]

A potent myth is being used to justify economic capture by a parasitic class.
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 24th September 2012

http://www.monbiot.com/2012/09/24/romnesia/


Gob's in bed I think - probably immersed in the Grauniad.

Meade

hi eco

[dgs49]

The Perpetually Envious never seem to come to grips with the realities of creating wealth.

I know dozens of hard-working, talented poor people. I know dozens of marginally talented people who were good businessmen (not necessarily educated) and have done very well for themselves. In fact, the auto mechanics who do best financially are not the best mechanics, but the ones who figure out how to make money - usually by hiring other talented people to do the work for them. Many people find this troubling.

If I buy a company that is losing money and worthless, then make changes to turn it around and make it profitable - then sell it for a mountain of money, I have earned every penny of that profit. Had I not come along, the company would have gone along for a while and eventually gone under - costing everyone their jobs and livelihood.

Mitt Romney earned his fortune without using his inheritance, other than to pay for his schooling. He has been successful at everything he has done in life, and made a mountain of money doing it. And it drives liberals crazy.

The pity of it is, very few people are even curious about Our Beloved President's meteoric rise to the Presidency. While Romney has been figuratively subjected to a gauntlet of body cavity searches, no one is curious about how Barry transferred into an Ivy League school (which is almost unheard of), got into Harvard Law, and became Editor of the Law Review - all with no money and mediocre grades. Not curious at all.

And while Romney's Mormonism has been subjected to a constant stream of criticisms and snide comments (most recently by Asshole Reid), no one ever brings up Barry's sitting for 20 years in the pews of that race baiting Rev. Wright, and for years acclaimed him as a father-figure.

The most telling point of the little essay above is the following: "I refuse to pay taxes to help other people."

You know what? That is EXACTLY correct. I pay federal taxes to fund the legitimate functions that are set forth in the Constitution. And "help for other people" ain't in there. Under our system, "help for other people" is supposed to be funded by PEOPLE, private charities, and to a lesser extent, state and local governments.

[dales]

[Gob]

Gob's in bed I think - probably immersed in the Grauniad.

Icky!!

Source, Gob?

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/ ... 26xal.html

[Gob]

If I buy a company that is losing money and worthless, then make changes to turn it around and make it profitable - then sell it for a mountain of money, I have earned every penny of that profit. Had I not come along, the company would have gone along for a while and eventually gone under - costing everyone their jobs and livelihood.

Mitt Romney earned his fortune without using his inheritance, other than to pay for his schooling. He has been successful at everything he has done in life, and made a mountain of money doing it. And it drives liberals crazy.

Ignoring Dave's "Mormonism" strawman, let's look at the facts...

According to the candidate's mythology, Romney took leave of his duties at the private equity firm Bain Capital in 1990 and rode in on a white horse to lead a swift restructuring of Bain & Company, preventing the collapse of the consulting firm where his career began. When The Boston Globe reported on the rescue at the time of his Senate run against Ted Kennedy, campaign aides spun Romney as the wizard behind a "long-shot miracle," bragging that he had "saved bank depositors all over the country $30 million when he saved Bain & Company."

In fact, government documents on the bailout obtained by Rolling Stone show that the legend crafted by Romney is basically a lie. The federal records, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, reveal that Romney's initial rescue attempt at Bain & Company was actually a disaster – leaving the firm so financially strapped that it had "no value as a going concern." Even worse, the federal bailout ultimately engineered by Romney screwed the FDIC – the bank insurance system backed by taxpayers – out of at least $10 million. And in an added insult, Romney rewarded top executives at Bain with hefty bonuses at the very moment that he was demanding his handout from the feds.



http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/ne ... y-20120829

A last matter is Romney’s role in the venture capital firm Bain Capital. Bain is known to have engaged in some very negative behavior, buying going concerns that then stripping them of their assets, laying off workers, and moving whatever is left abroad, to China or Mexico, where labor costs are cheaper. Romney has tried to escape the blame from this universally loathed behavior by claiming that since 1999, he has only been a “passive” investor in Bain Capital, not responsible for the activities of the company.

The problem is that the company’s own corporate documents, filed annually with the Securities and Exchange Commission, list him during the period 1999-2002 as CEO, Chair, managing director and sole owner of Bain Capital. They also say he was paid at least $100,000 a year for his work for the firm during that period--a period that saw a number of American companies killed off and shipped abroad, leaving their US workers jobless.

Romney has pooh-poohed the idea, claiming that those titles were meaningless, and were just “boilerplate.” In fact, he insists, he was just a passive investor in Bain.

Well, here again is where Romney’s missing tax forms come in. If he were to release his 2001 and 2002 tax forms, as his father would have done when he released a decade’s worth of his taxes, the American public and journalists would be able to see whether he checked the box stating whether he was an “active” or a “passive” investor in Bain when he earned that money. It is likely that he would have checked “active,” since the tax advantages to being an active investor over being a passive one are substantial under US tax law.

http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2012/08/27 ... ign-trail/

[Sue U]

No matter, Gob, Dave has never been one to let facts get in the way of his opinion.

[Gob]

Oh look, I've said it before, and I don't mind saying it again; I disagree profoundly with most of what Dave says, but respect his steadfastness in his, (very wrong,) beliefs, and his willingness to put them up for debate here.

[dales]

[Econoline]

The most telling point of the little essay above is the following: "I refuse to pay taxes to help other people."

You know what? That is EXACTLY correct. I pay federal taxes to fund the legitimate functions that are set forth in the Constitution. And "help for other people" ain't in there. Under our system, "help for other people" is supposed to be funded by PEOPLE, private charities, and to a lesser extent, state and local governments.

Yeah, Dave, I'm sure you're right. I ought to defer to your (half-)vast knowledge of the U.S. Constitution. It certainly never EVER would have crossed the mind of any of the authors of the Constitution that anything within that document could be construed as an intention to promote the general welfare. I guess it's just that funny-looking, hard-to-read 18th century cursive writing that makes the phrase "promote individual welfare" LOOK like "promote the general welfare", since promoting anyone's welfare other than one's own would surely be unconstitutional. (Similarly, reducing institutionalized economic injustice and inequality in the name of insuring domestic tranquility would of course be even more unconstitutional.)

[MajGenl.Meade]

Gob's in bed I think - probably immersed in the Grauniad.

Icky!!

Source, Gob?

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/ ... 26xal.html

I can't believe you use secondary or even tertiary or even er..... 4-thingie sources! I would never have given you credit for finding the original Monbiot if I'd realised I could just refer to some copiest. Ag, shame!

Plus the newsprint runs all over one's skin, which is why fish and chips don't taste so good any more.

Meade