SO, today's award-eligible assignment: crank out 771 words on the outrage of Jon Huntsman and Rick Perry, who are currently splitting 0.5% of the Republican vote, making such a huge issue of Mitt Romney saying he enjoys firing people, even though that's clearly Not What He Meant in Context.
Watch for Kathleen's two-volume monograph Khrushchev Didn't Really Mean "Bury" In That Way, coming this spring from Random House.
Seven-hundred seventy-one words. You'd think maybe if this was an issue she could have hit eight hundred?
Would this be something different if we hadn't been playing Gotcha in Presidential politics since Gerald Ford announced he'd never heard of the Soviet Union? Or if in the intervening thirty-five years we hadn't pretty much dredged the very concept through some particularly vile sewer system, fished it back out, run it through a Cuisinart, then had a panel of reality show producers punch it up? Hell, Romney just got done doing the precise thing to Barack Obama. How do you win a Pulitzer and remain oblivious? I'm kiddin'.
Mitt Romney made millions as a corporate raider. We don't call them "corporate borrowers". Or "corporate angels". They fucking revel in that Half-Piratical Randian I Need Viagra To Get It Up For My Poolboy But I'm A Big-Balled Capitalist Out of my Way shit. And now it's fucking unpopular? Shame on us, then, shame on you, shame on the Pulitzer committee for the last thirty years of acting as though Rich People buttfucking the rest of America was all part of Our Sacred Heritage.
And y'know what else, Kathy? Shame on Mitt Romney, too. He presents himself as a moral man. As the paragon of a moral man. And he fucked with people's livelihoods on the grounds that there was money to be made by doing so. And he was already rich. He had enough money to live comfortably. He had enough money to put less fortunate people to work, not out of it. Mitt Romney shouldn't be running for President. Mitt Romney shouldn't be griping about his words being taken out of context. Mitt Romney should be sitting alone in a room somewhere, thinking of ways to atone for how he's spent his life.
But the job-killing idea has picked up additional sauce, sticking as we are with the baloney theme, with criticism that Romney’s leadership of Bain Capital also resulted in some people losing their jobs. Indeed they did. That’s what happens sometimes when companies are purchased, salvaged from poor management, revamped and, assuming competence at the top, made profitable.
Since when in a free, capitalist nation is it a sin to buy a company and turn a profit?
Since when in America is it not a sin, or a crime, to fuck with innocent lives?
You don't have to answer me, Kathleen. I lived through the 1980 elections.
Catchy idea, though. I hope Mitt adopts it as his slogan.
7 comments:
"Since when in a free, capitalist nation is it a sin to buy a company and turn a profit?"
Sadly, it's not quite short enough to fit on a bumper sticker and still be readable from a distance. I'd recommend Mittens go with "Got Envy?" instead.
Exactly. Apologists for the class of rapacious capitalists who are eating us alive these days really have to stretch the Sacred Text to the breaking point, don't they? This is just embarrassing:
That’s what happens sometimes when companies are purchased, salvaged from poor management, revamped and, assuming competence at the top, made profitable.
For a start, equity vultures don't "purchase" a company, they saddle a company with huge debt to essentially purchase itself, transferring ownership to the equity firm of all assets, people included. Then, thanks to friends in Congress writing the laws, they don't so much salvage the company from poor management as turn the company into salvage, pocketing the pension funds and relegating jobs and people to the scrap heap. The "competence at the top" is the awesome ability of Number Crunching Wonder Boys like Romney at Bain Capital to legally strip mine piles of lucre from businesses they leave bankrupt and desiccated, without ever finding themselves impaled on a pitchfork.
"Since when in a free, capitalist nation is it a sin to buy a company and turn a profit?"
88% annual returns during Romney's romp at Bain. There are many racketeers in America. Few can top those returns. Turning a profit?
The system selects. Romney reflects the system.
Maybe it's a sign of my dotage but I've been getting more and more hints of the 1980 election too, I have a clear memory of shock and disbelief that the nation was going to elect a dangerous clown.
Calling these guys vulture capitalists is just wrong. Vultures don't kill what they eat.
"Since when in a free, capitalist nation is it a sin to buy a company and turn a profit?"
When the profits where taken from the company to go into Romney's pockets and the weakened company was left to die, that's when.
What, Ms. Parker thinks that's not a sin? I guess we'll have to agree to disagree.
Gerald Ford volunteered his statement that Poland was not under Soviet control, so it wasn't a Gotcha moment! As neither Carter nor the moderator could believe that a Republican would say something so stupid [back in those innocent days] that they gave him the opportunity to correct himself but Ford persisted in his stupidity (showing he was a true Republican) !
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