Monday, July 16, 2012

Bain and torment: Romney's pants on fire

Is outsourcing US jobs unpatriotic? Not to  multinational capitalists. They want to make money and they do so by shipping jobs to places where collective bargaining attempts are greeted by murder and torture, sometimes from their own government (e.g. China) and sometimes funded or enforced by US military aid (e.g. much of Central America, Colombia, Indonesia). The barriers to workers of the world moving to where labor is better paid (which correlates to where collective bargaining rights are observed instead of oppressed) are high, and the barriers to the flow of capital are low. This is grossly unfair and Mitt Romney simply stands for this unfairness because it works for him and his owner class.

Romney and his capitalist elite cohort are all in favor of regulation when it comes to the little people being able to move from, say, Mexico or Guatemala or Honduras to the US in search of higher paid work. Tougher immigration laws--make 'em serve in the military to enforce our resource capture around the planet or face insurmountable regulations that keep them in poor countries working for peanuts. Corporadoes love those regulations.

But try linking basic human rights to commerce and the libertarian streak comes blossoming out in the Romney sorts. Try regulating imports from countries that allow pollution and permit the use of chemicals that have been banned in the US for decades due to the democratic process of independent intellectuals (e.g. Rachel Carson) informing the public of a problem and the public insisting on a regulatory fix, and you'll hear howls of protest from superpatriots like Romney--super patriotic to the security and welfare of the elite citizenry of Richistan, not to the good of any particular country. His class of people simply uses the hard work of everyone else in this country and all around the world to enrich and protect themselves at everyone else's expense.

When Romney whines about being attacked by us for his unique "retroactive resignation" from Bain Capital and their outsourcing of many American jobs to places where workers are more properly controlled by violence, he is almost humorous. Mitt! You can't hire the top guns at Bain Capital while pretending to be on leave of absence while you were also fiddling with the Salt Lake Olympics, you can't have your name as CEO for those years and then postdate your resignation when we all notice that you were controlling the direction of the corporation that destroyed American jobs. I suppose if Mitt is elected president and presides over a new round of Pentagon profiteering for his cronies, causing the demise of much of the American economy and infrastructure even as the 1,000 foreign US military bases continue to try to enable the exploitation of cheap human and natural resources around the world, he will deny all responsibility by retroactively resigning ("I was really on a follow up missionary mission to France, not acting as a US president when it all collapsed").

I hope Americans can proactively resign Mitt in November. We don't need another Exploiter-in-Chief from the corporate world. I think the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld team did quite enough of that. At least we know that most Americans favor Pentagon spending cuts. Now to get the Commander-in-Chief, whoever he is, to take that action and stop holding our economy hostage to the Job Destroyer Pentagon.

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