Saturday, February 25, 2012

What Romney learned at Bain

To pander to his audience without meaning any of it.

He's of course applying that to politics, and even the Teapublicans can tell, despite having turned their bullshit detectors so low they can't see the arrant bullshit of the other candidates. Krugman on Rmoney:

Should those who don’t share the right’s faith be comforted by the evidence that Mr. Romney doesn’t believe anything he’s saying? Should we, in particular, assume that, once elected, he would actually follow sensible economic policies? Alas, no.

For the cynicism and lack of moral courage that have been so evident in the campaign wouldn’t suddenly vanish once Mr. Romney entered the Oval Office. If he doesn’t dare disagree with economic nonsense now, why imagine that he would become willing to challenge that nonsense later? And bear in mind that if elected, he would be watched like a hawk for signs of apostasy by the very people he’s trying so desperately to appease right now.

The truth is that Mr. Romney is so deeply committed to insincerity that neither side can trust him to do what it considers to be the right thing.
The difference between Bain's takeovers and a political campaign is that takeovers end quickly. The affected workers and executives learn by the end that you lied to them, but you don't have to convince them of anything further, since you already own their asses. Not so the Teapublican nomination.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

You leftists must have sensed that "Halliburton" doesn't work anymore. Behold the new demagog.....Bain Capital!!!

lovable liberal said...

If only you corporatist right-wingers would sense that laissez-faire doesn't work any more. Not that it ever actually did, outside the self-flattering imagination of Ayn Rand and her acolytes...

Anonymous said...

The government leaving things alone doesn't work you say, then how do you explain the success of Facebook to the that of the postal service? How about Fannie & Freddie vs. Microsoft or maybe Amtrak vs. Apple??

lovable liberal said...

Woo, good one! If by 'good' I meant completely foolish...

Come talk to me when Facebook has existed for two centuries. Oh, right, we'll both be dead.

You're probably one of those desperate free marketers for whom the 2008 financial meltdown is a complete rebuke. The free market completely failed to self-police. Everyone wanted on the bandwagon, to the point of complete disregard of prudence. Fannie and Freddie didn't start it, though you cling to that myth in order to protect yourself from the falsification of your ideology. Even Alan Greenspan confessed to a failure of the market, though he's since slipped back into old Randian habits of mental sclerosis.

The completely predictable results of financial deregulation:
- S&L scandal
- Enron scandal
- minor hedge fund bankruptcies
- the financial meltdown under Duhbya's maladministration (and completely Republican policies)

Why is it that Ayn Rand fan-boys can't understand the concept of a mixed economy? For them, the choice is total corporate freedom to rape and pillage or total government control. Just taint so - there's a middle ground. We had that in America from the end of WWII until the Reagan administration, often with the connivance of Democrats, started to undo all the financial regulations that had kept us out of a 10-year boom-bust cycle for 35 years.