Precision, what morality is, really, that's the issue. Not the fable kind or magic kind or pompous, polemic, or promised kind, but real morality.
Morality means evolving governance over our vanity, and increasing our awareness of other's suffering. You know, human values. Understanding and forebearing so we can work and live together in peace. Prosper.
Willard "Mitt" Romney is a bully. His morality is relative, flexible, self-defining, every moment. He was given too much. It ruined him.
The school days assaults never stopped, really. They became commercial pillaging, worker screwing. All because the Bain Capitalists were swaggering rich fucks who made everyone they encountered their fag blonde bitch. Now this temporary right-fielder Mitt wants to veto regulations and run the Supreme Court line-up. Religious schools will be mandatory, and gay made illegal again –– and they are a generation or two away from just such a grand slam if Bishop Romney becomes President Pope. Pope-voters, that's what we have going on here. Every family wealthy, every man a Cardinal. Romney, the infallible Mormon pontificator...well, maybe not, but he'll have a hell of a security force to back up his proclamations, so who cares if he's fallible?
American conservatives, wake up. This isn't the rich guy who wants you to be rich, too. He's one of the chief assholes who absconded with your sacred relics over the last eighteen years: opportunity, fair play, a square deal, an honest game, the dignity of work––and replaced them with something about maybe a discount plasma screen someday and shut the fuck up, fag. He and his ilk rigged the game so money could be redistributed to the short list, so unions had no unity and overseas workers could be pittanced, the rest of the profit pocketed. Ca-ching! but the sound gets fainter every day for the rest of us.
And he means you, Joe the plumber and John and Jane TiPartay. Not us liberals. He tsks at us because we spoil the narrative, but that's ok, when he takes office it will be surveillance and new Guantanamos, tasers and sprays, cordoned demonstration areas and no-account detentions all over again.
It's all for you, all his pretence and shit-cicle lies, conservative America. If he can fool enough of you into thinking rubes are welcome, too, then he'll get Air Force One and the right to make shipping concessions with Putin that close the Panama Canal. All the world's frieght, across the newly unfrozen Siberian coast. The shorter route. The giant Russian ships are already kingdoms on the sea, without worker safety or union protection. The Bainists give away our industrial might, and our merchant marine. They give away whole industries. Watch that happens, when Willy boy gets here.
Let's not be held down and fleeced of our liberty and pursuit of happiness by Kettlejaw McDumbney and his golfing buddies, shall we?
Congressional Subcommittees, subpoena power, this way please, front and center. Let's start with the mortgage merry-go-round, to slow their flow of cash. Let's tax overseas holdings, personal and corporate, hell, just because, and we'll make it cheaper to keep the jobs and expertise here. Want to keep the wealth you accumulate using our financial system, infrastructure, raw materials, and good will? Then pay an inheritance tax to any public works or defense or tech dev entity of your choice. But pay you must. Vast rapid weath should only permit you a large measure of comfort and opportunity, the rest should be recycled, and all you get is the sacred privilege of shaping positive growth by choosing from hundreds of orgs, individuals, schools, technologies, commodities, or creative arts that improve, replenish and uplift us. It must stop being the pile that never shrinks, for a few greedy assholes, the pyramid of gold on the bleak, hot horizon. Let's vote in some transaction fees. Let's send accountants to the Caymans and Switzerland, with a Marine escort if necessary, and use the loot we find to staff and fund oversight with teeth.
Then let's see some bloody teeth.
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BTW, I was in college alongside many RF's, and all of them lead tenuous, miserable lives.
god, i love you on a soapbox almost as much as i love you as a poet.
thanks, for speaking up. gonna go read jeremiah's post now.
To some extent, I'm willing to grant Mitt or anybody -- including myself -- forgiveness for youthful indiscretions. After all, we're told the part of the brain governing judgment isn't fully developed in males until around age 23. In my case, it took a good deal longer.
However, no such dispensation applies to a man who makes bullying his modus operandi as a "business" man. And you can add Jack Welch, Donald Trump and a host of other "successful" business men to that deplorable list. The sooner we stop making role models of such men, the sooner we will be on the road to real recovery. (By the way, that early in his presidency Obama praised guys like Jamie Dimon is not to his credit either.)
The real proof that Mitt is a bully, that he is a pathological liar -- and quite possibly a sociopath -- is his laughing when confronted about this episode. I say liar and sociopath because it is simply inconceivable that Mitt doesn't remember such an incident -- unless he is a sociopath. Certainly, a number of other people involved remember it vividly.
Mitt's behavior was so inappropriate that even his Fux News interviewer was confounded. Were I confronted about such an incident in my past, I would reluctantly confess my sin and offer a heartfelt apology. I am not Mitt -- thank god, I wouldn't trade places for all his money and power.
No, instead of an apology, Mitt laughs, just as he laughed about strapping his family dog to the roof of the car for an 1100 mile trip, another case in which his Fux News interviewer (Chris Wallace) was confounded by Mitt's laughing-off that sort of cruelty. And there have been several other examples of Mitt's utterly inappropriate laughter.
Such responses provide ample proof Mitt means it when he says he enjoys firing people.
If the tundra melts in Siberia, you'll get the world's largest swamp.
Most of the rest of the world will be a desert by the time it dries out.
Putin can't manage to build decent roads in European Russia, he's not going to build fix up the largely defunct BAM (a second rail line north of the main trans-Siberian route). Chinese goods get imported to Moscow via ship to Europe than on the highways, not by the Trans-Siberian route.
Forced to choose, I'd pick Mitt as a success for the US economy over Putin doing a thing to develop Russia --- and that's not an endorsement of Romney, it's a comment on Putin.
It's always amazing to me how much big, bad Russia scares are repeated by people who know nothing about Russia. You'd have had a decent rant about Romney without adding a clueless sidepoint about Russia into it.
As to your point, you might not be aware of recent developments regarding that northern sea route. The ships are completing the trip from Finland and Sevastopol to Alaskan and Canadian ports for two years already, undercutting the time and expense of all other routes. Also because Russia now controls over 50% of the world's merchant shipping. So much so that they are building "super-pans", ships deliberately too build for the Panama Canal, and putting in re-fueling stops along the Siberian coast. Try out " John McPhee's "Looking for a Ship" for a good intro to these developments.
We no longer set the rates. Russia does. Perhaps you could persuade us that controlling market prices is not terribly significant, but then we would have to revisit most of the history of the 2nd half of the 20th century, starting with OPEC's impact on our politics, policies, and consumer habits. The low-down shipping prices Russia instigated empowered the Walmart revolution and the influx of (unregulated quality) Chinese products, the dismantling of American Main Street small business, increased debt to China, and on and on and on. Shipping is crucial. I would be very interested in how you either disprove these longstanding facts of Russia hegemony on the seas or explain how absolute mastery of intercontinental commerce is not very important. From 50,000 Merchant Marine jobs to less than 200 in 25 years is a a catastrophe that made a handful of equity capitalists wealthy, empowered non-democratic nationalists, and put us at a long-term disadvantage. I await your civil response.