10 January 2012 The beauty parlor’s filled with sailors; the circus is in town

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/romney-comes-under-attack-as-new-hampshire-primary-looms/2012/01/09/gIQAnYnjmP_story.html

By Philip Rucker, Published: January 9

“HUDSON, N.H. — An assault on Mitt Romney’s business career intensified Monday after the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination made an off-the-cuff comment that his opponents say shows he was a corporate predator who sought profits at the expense of workers.

At a breakfast of business leaders in Nashua, N.H., Romney said, “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me.” The former Massachusetts governor was referring to health insurers that don’t provide adequate care, but on the eve of the New Hampshire primary, his opponents nevertheless feasted upon the apparently unscripted remark by a habitually cautious candidate…”

Cassi Creek: For nearly four years now the GOP/teavangelists have been complaining that Obama is not trained in business, has never owned or run a business. They maintain that a POTUS with a “business background” would instantly diagnose and treat all the nation’s economic ills. We can overlook Hoover’s marked failure to stave off the Great Depression for the purpose of this argument. All those bread lines, lost fortunes, jumpers on Wall Street, and other worldwide financial crises were obviously theatrics, staged by the liberals to bring about socialism.

Now, the candidate field contains a politician with a business background. Romney has a history of corporate raiding and discarding employees of the companies he raided. This is consistent with laissez-faire capitalism and free-market economics. It is intended to sequester all the wealth it is possible to extract from a corporation. Human employees of these targeted corporations are of no concern to the raiders. In almost every instance I can recall, the old CEOs are paid off handsomely, the new bosses get hiring bonuses, and the people who actually produce products, get laid off, permanently, as the means of production close down and are shifted off-shore. Romney seems to have been quite adept at creating personal wealth while outsourcing jobs. If he has created jobs for others, they have been created in third world nations.

Suddenly, the GOP is shocked at such a business background. His opponents for nomination are now attacking his “business background.” Gingrich (who pocketed $1.6 million for “consulting” while trading on his personal political contacts) is horrified at his past business practices.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/romney-comes-under-attack-as-new-hampshire-primary-looms/2012/01/09/gIQAnYnjmP_story.html

“Former House speaker Newt Gingrich (Ga.) went further, criticizing the type of business Romney engaged in. “Look, I’m for capitalism,” Gingrich said on NBC’s “Today” show. “But if somebody comes in, takes all the money out of your company and then leaves you bankrupt while they go off with millions, that’s not traditional capitalism.”

It certainly is traditional capitalism. Collecting all the marbles, or gold, or controlling all the jobs is exactly traditional capitalism. Could it be that the clowns are starting to realize that firing all the workers may not be the best way to create jobs?

I find it highly amusing that the scorched earth corporate raiding program is now harming the prospects of all the clowns in the race. It’s very easy to connect one candidate’s “love of firing people” to all the clowns who wear that badge. The GOP/teavangelists have scorched the economic earth and carved out a desolation row with one job for every 5 people looking for that job. They’re promising to destroy the social safety nets, destroy our national education goals, and to beggar the former middle and working classes. They’re serious about it. It’s time to look around us and to close the desolation row that corporate raiding, de-regulated corporate theft, and off-shoring all the jobs has created.

A business background for the POTUS? Sure, fire the defense department and replace it with mercenaries, hand the treasury over to Wall Street, close the public schools, sell the national parks and forests, and hand all the functions of government to cronies.

“Right now I can’t read too good
Don’t send me no more letters, no
Not unless you mail them
From Desolation Row”