Of Bitches and Dog Whistles

Why this election is a choice, not a referendum

By Katrina vanden Heuvel, Tuesday, January 24, 10:27 AM

At the “heart of this campaign,” Newt Gingrich told his adoring followers in his South Carolina victory speech on Saturday night, is the fundamental choice between “American exceptionalism” and “the radicalism of Saul Alinsky.” America has a choice, he argued, between the vision of the founders and that of radical organizer Saul Alinsky, between a paycheck president and a food stamp president.

For a man of serial corruptions,

As far as ethics violations go, he was found guilty of one violation, which compares very favorably against Charlie Rangel and Tim Geitner.

it is ironic

I’m revoking previous laudation for accurately identifying irony. (http://www.embracethedivide.blogspot.com/2012/01/after-little-bit-of-the-primary-season.html) A professional writer and editor misusing irony? Also not ironic. Still tragic, though.

that character assassination is Gingrich’s true craft.

Whose character is he assassinating? Alinsky’s?

Dog-whistle racism — Obama as the “food stamp president”

Oh the irony—yes, actual irony—of dog-whistle racism. The thrust of the analogy is that a speaker uses language that is only able to be identified and interpreted by a racist, in much the same way as a dog whistle is only able to be heard by a dog (and other animals with broader audible ranges, but they don’t really have a place in this analogy). Of course, the tacit admission is that the outraged listener accusing the speaker of using “dog whistle racism” can hear the metaphorical dog whistle. Hence, the outraged are, by definition, dogs and/or racists. Either that or it’s all in their heads.

—    provided him his initial lift in South Carolina.

Even on the internet, I defy you to find a more stunningly inept (and succinct) misinterpretation of the South Carolina results. It assumes both that South Carolina Republicans are all racists and that Newt Gingrich tapped into that implicit racism with a single accusation—against the President, not against his rivals—in a single debate.

Few at Gingrich’s victory speech knew who Alinsky was,

[citation needed]

but they could tell from the name that he was surely unsavory and probably un-American.

Ironically—yes, actual irony—just one sentence after flubbing the interpretation of the results so badly, Katrina has perfectly exemplified why Gingrich struck a chord with South Carolina Republicans. We’re sick of being talked down to by monstrous buffoons who think fumbling their way through Kierkegard during their sophomore year at Princeton qualifies them to snivel about imagined racism or anti-Semitism while accusing us of ignorance to a question we were never given the opportunity to answer. We’re sick of the seething disdain that the media has for us, and we love Gingrich for resisting questions with logical fallacies, for not succumbing to the temptation for contrition, for giving us something to be excited about. Most of all, we wanted to reward Newt Gingrich for treating us like intelligent and sober-minded adults, for forcefully articulating his beliefs, and for refusing to apologize to sniveling piss-ants like John King.

But the Gingrich dichotomy is neither original nor unique. It is simply the gutter version of the standard Republican frame for this election.

It must be exhausting to hear dog whistles everywhere while explaining that you’re not actually a dog.

In the more tempered words of Mitt Romney, Obama is accused of trying to transform America from an “Opportunity Society” to a “European-style Entitlement Society.”

Barack Obama is the only President since Lyndon Johnson to sign a brand new entitlement into law. When the shoe fits…

No matter who wins the nomination, this will be a theme pounded on over the next months.

Only if our nominee is as aggressive as Newt Gingrich has been.

What’s odd about this frame is that it makes Republicans the defenders of the past.

That’s generally the position that opposes “fundamental [sic] transformation.”

To keep America the “shining city on the hill,” Romney and Gingrich and Rick Santorum agree, requires reaffirming the policies of . . . well . . . of George W. Bush.

Take a look at Bush’s domestic policy and that of the current Republican crop. With the exception of tax cuts, there’s not a whole lot of similarity there. This is, of course, because George W. Bush felt the need to qualify conservatism, largely in response to logical fallacies from clueless talking heads like Katrina here.

They would sustain the Bush tax cuts and add further top-end and corporate tax reductions.

Damn right. It’s a far cry from the consumption-based tax that we should have, but it’s a good start.

They would repeal financial reform and health-care reform, return to “drill, baby, drill” energy policies, sustain the military budget and lay waste to the domestic budget

Seriously, this sentence is exactly what I’m looking for from the government.

that supports everything from schools

Which is inherently a state/local issue.

to clean air

Environmental regulations should be able to pay for their own enforcement.

to the FBI.

If your opponent is burning too easily, there’s a good chance you’re fighting straw men. Not even Ron Paul is talking about cutting the FBI.

And they are busily inflating Iran as a mythical menace

Facepalm.

as threatening as Iraq was in the run-up to that misbegotten invasion.

Actually, the more appropriate analogy if you believe that Iran isn’t a threat is Kosovo. If there is any action on Iran, it will almost certainly be as a distraction from domestic problems for an irrationally dovish commander in chief.

Recycling the policies that blew up the economy is possible only because none of the Republican candidates — other than Ron Paul — bothers to offer a theory of what went wrong.

I don’t do research to support these write-ups because Googling is boring, but the Republican consensus is that the housing crisis hit because of the Democratic policies of Bill Clinton and Barny Frank. State-sponsored Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pushed initiatives to give home loans to unqualified borrowers, massively inflating housing prices and injecting risk into the system. It took about a decade and a system-wide failure to adequately price derivative risks to inject enough bad assets in the financial system to make major banks unstable. The economy will recover when the system is purged of these bad assets and prices hit bottom.

Obama’s explanation? Something about evil bankers and greed. It’s all pretty incomprehensible.

The crash was apparently an immaculate conception. The candidates simply blame Obama for the deficits,

Deficits can be controlled by controlling spending. When you’re spending 24% of GDP, there is simply no amount of taxation that can generate that revenue.

unemployment,

His policies certainly haven’t helped. He’s economically illiterate; he doesn’t know how to help.

spreading poverty and, yes, rising reliance on food stamps that followed in its wake.

Well that’s not simply a function of rising unemployment (which is still largely his fault). Food stamp reliance is a function of both cultural normalization for dependency and dogged governmental efforts to increase food stamp participation.

Tuesday night, in his State of the Union address, President Obama will also define the election as a choice — a choice between those who would go back to the policies that drove us off the cliff

Bush, like Obama, inherited a terrible economy. The dot-com bust was widely thought to be economically disastrous. The 9/11 attacks came at a time when the economy was still very frail. And yet, until 2008, the Bush economy added kicked ass and took names. Is it so unreasonable to have the same expectations for Obama?

and those who would build a new foundation for the economy.

It’s a cute shtick, but the idea that this man knows how to build a new foundation for the economy is laughable. He put all his eggs in the green energy basket and reality is currently in the process of kicking his ass.

The administration has made it clear that it plans to warn against the extreme and unsustainable inequality that is corrupting our democracy

We don’t have a democracy. We have a Republic.

and has crippled our economy.

[citation needed]

The president does this in tempered language, but the case is inescapable.

Like a black hole of inanity.

The wealthiest Americans captured essentially all of the rewards of growth over the decade before the collapse.

Oh no! She’s passed the event horizon! (Which, fortunately, means that she’ll never be able to emit inanity that will reach me. We can all rest easy.)

This wasn’t an act of nature. They used their resources to rig

Oh you pitiable little dullard…

the rules — deregulating finance, demanding lower taxes,

The case that modest deregulation and marginally lower taxes lead to economic collapse flies in the face of every hard-and-fast rule of macroeconomic theory in existence. She couldn’t have pointed to a more inaccurate diagnosis if she were blind-folded and lobotomized.

defending subsidies and privileges,

Katrina spends her life fighting tooth and nail against conservatives to preserve a bloated bureaucratic government. She believes in social spending based on specific criteria to promote certain businesses. I wonder what, exactly, she thinks subsidies are. WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU, WOMAN!?!

trampling on worker rights.

I must have missed the trials against Citigroup for violations of child labor laws. What the fuck is she even talking about?

Middle class families worked longer hours, had more jobs, and took on debt to make up for incomes that weren’t keeping up with costs.

“Middle class families” negotiate the terms of their employment with their employers. This includes wages and hours worked. No one was exploited or trampled on, even if the results weren’t what they wanted. That’s why it’s a negotiation and that’s why we have at-will employment.

Wall Street speculators went on a wilding that eventually blew out the economy.

This sentence is also mildly retarded. Speculation is an incredibly crass and simplistic description of the financial sector. This is the financial sector that makes markets that value corporations that employ millions and set interest rates, which allow for retirement planning for millions more. They also buy and sell the bonds that allow the federal government to continue to function.

Oddly, it appears that Katrina is more upset that the market eventually reverted to the intrinsic value of housing instead of perpetuating the bubble. In short, Katrina isn’t arguing against speculators or Republicans. She’s arguing against the rude imposition of reality that most of us dealt with sometime before adolescence.

The entitlement of the rich is undermining the opportunity of the many.

Funny how this disdain for entitlements doesn’t extend to things that are actually called “entitlements.” Instead, Katrina has concocted a narrative of colossal ignorance to appeal to the lowest common denominator of class envy.

Romney and Gingrich, the “vulture capitalist”

That term still doesn’t actually exist, which is again why you have to put it in quotes.

and the lavishly rewarded Washington insider,

Something about corporate greed and such and…if she’s going to phone this in then so am I.

personify not success, but the corruptions that brought us to where we are,

I actually don’t think Katrina knows where she is, let alone where the economy is.

even as they champion the same policies that took us there.

The only thing she’s actually expressed outrage over are lower taxes, deregulation, and some as-yet undefined sort of corruption.

The president should be pleased that his Republican challengers are making the race into a choice rather than just a referendum on the economy.

The referendum already happened in 2010. It was pretty ugly for the president.

Most Americans will readily agree that returning to the Bush policies doesn’t offer a way out.

Bush was only staunchly conservative on foreign policy. Domestically, he kind of had to be dragged to the table, and didn’t have a major conservative domestic policy win of his second term

Yet it’s not enough to argue that everyone should play by the same set of rules, that the wealthy should pay their fair share.

An argument necessarily voided by the tiered income tax structure she advocates further stratifying. Playing by the same set of rules and the wealthy paying their fair share are necessarily contradictory ideas in the liberal parlance.

The president’s task is to show how greater fairness — and government action —

Does she seriously equate the two of those?

is essential to getting the economy going in the short term

I suppose it would sound ridiculous to say that the engine of the economy should be hope and change and fairy dust.

as well as putting it on sound footing for the long run.

It’s both a short-term and long-term solution? And all we have to do is tax other people? What a convenient diagnosis?

Katrina, please. Grown ups are talking.

He could take forceful steps to require the banks to renegotiate underwater mortgages.

Is this some weird hybrid between nationalization of banks and post-Constitutional Chicago-style thuggishness? By what precedent does the President of the United States have authority to force the renegotiation of private contracts?

(Alternatively, if he pushes the state attorneys general to cut a sweetheart deal bailing the banks out of their mortgage frauds,

[citation needed. AGAIN]

it will sure undermine his credibility.)

Banks don’t need bailouts and there was remarkably little actual fraud that led to the 2008 crash.

He’s begun to make that case for a fair-share economy with his jobs bill that would tax the wealthy

Naturally. Is it just me, or are Democrats even more obsessed with tax rates than Republicans?

to pay for investments in infrastructure

This was the ostensible purpose of the $750B stimulus, which failed spectacularly at doing any economic benefit.

and provide help for states to protect teachers and police.

States can get their own houses in order. Look to Wisconsin for a road map.

The Republicans in Congress have made themselves less popular than communism in fighting against the jobs bill.

Congressional popularity is an asinine metric; Republicans think about the congressional Democrats and Democrats think about congressional Republicans. And for the record, congressional ratings were rock-bottom under Nancy Pelosi, too.

The Republican primaries are just a preview of what will be an ugly election.

Not based on anything the Republicans are doing. The President started telegraphing his attacks a year ago (I suspect to dissuade prominent Republicans from entering the race.)

Americans are fearful about their economic future and seeking tangible solutions.

This might be the first sentence I’ve agreed with yet.

Instead, voters are being swamped with negative ads from the two campaigns.

Is she talking about the primary? This has been the most substantive primary season in my lifetime. This is why we always seem to have two debates a week.

Republicans offer only more of what created the mess.

It would help if your diagnosis for the economy weren’t based on the ramblings of an economic illiterate.

The president offers positive initiatives, yet they don’t deal with the scale of the problem. That’s why the movement that began in Wisconsin a year ago, occupied Wall Street and spread across the country will continue to grow.

Actually, the reason for Occupy was Big Labor money, retired hippies, and a culture tolerant of shameless attention-whoring. There is no worse standard-bearer for America than the miscreant who leads these vagabonds. 

Defang the Leviathan

Mitt Romney’s flawed plan to ‘fix’ campaign financing

By Editorial Board, Published: January 17

MITT ROMNEY HAS a prescription for the super PAC problem: Allow political candidates to collect unlimited donations, instead of having the funds funneled to supposedly independent groups.

It absolutely crushed in Monday’s debate--rightfully so. Good on ya, Mitt.

“Let campaigns then take responsibility for their own words,” Mr. Romney said at Monday’s debate.

To thunderous applause.

He raises an intriguing question: Given the Supreme Court’s flawed interpretation of the First Amendment — that campaign spending equals speech;

I get that the miscreants that inhabit the bowels of the Post obsess over Citizens United with nasally wheezing and self-immolating sexual aggression, but protecting campaign donations and other expressions of political support are precisely the function for which the First Amendment was designed.

that independent expenditures on behalf of candidates, even by corporations, therefore cannot be limited —

Gasp! Corporations! (Also partnerships, unions, estates…pretty much any entity that can freely spend money can have protected speech.)

Just for the record, the Post is, itself, a corporation that decries the rights of corporations to give money to pseudocorporate PACs that will subsequently spend it on the type of services provided by the corporation that writes this guy’s paycheck…is metamasochism a word?

would the campaign finance system be better off with a regime of no limits plus full and timely disclosure of donations?

Abso-fucking-lutely.

In other words, a world where the $5 million check can go directly to the candidate? As Mr. Romney put it, “Wouldn’t it nice to have people give what they would like to to

Sad. Even Grammar Check catches a typo like that.

campaigns, and campaigns could run their own ads and take responsibility for them?”

Conversely, in a country where voters don’t like politicians that take $5 million checks, a candidate could also elect to refuse donations above a certain amount, or to refuse donations from particularly shady sources. (Recall the media of the 2010 midterms breathlessly claiming—without evidence—that GOP PACs and SuperPACs were receiving money from overseas) Giving more breadth of freedom to campaigners can only benefit the dialogue.

No. Mr. Romney’s cure not only threatens to be worse than the disease, it wouldn’t necessarily cure the disease.

No wonder the Post’s Op-Ed page sucks. This is the type of uninspired drivel that the entire editorial board can get behind? This is the type of thesis you get in 10^th grade history. (Not from me; I kick ass at this writing thing. My 10^th grade thesis was that Spanish American War and the violent transition from McKinley to (Teddy) Roosevelt irreparably undermined the Monroe Doctrine as a viable strategy for American foreign policy. It did not contain a single comma splice. I’m looking at you, Gail Collins.)

The $5 million check to the super PAC supporting the candidate is bad enough —

Why?

it creates the reality or appearance of a candidate beholden to a particular donor.

Yet it also shields the identity of the donor, making the appearance of impropriety meaninglessly vague.

Unlimited donations to candidates would be worse.

[citation needed]

Candidates would be implicated in soliciting these mega-checks, further undermining public confidence in the system.

Why? It’s not like the rule change proposed by Romney would increase or decrease the amount of money in the political system (though I have a cure for that, too). The only difference would be more information available to the public and more ammunition with which to hold candidates responsible.

Plus we might be able to avoid the specter of $35,000 dinners in which tuxedo-clad candidates are dragged through receiving lines like fucking show ponies so wealthy patrons have a customized picture to hang on the mantle for posterity. Political galas are like Space Mountain for adults that are too foolish to realize that if they just kept that money to themselves, they could buy their own Space Mountain.

The pressure would be on to allow unlimited contributions by corporations and labor unions directly to candidates;

Yes. That’s more or less what Romney proposed verbatim.

currently, they are permitted, in the aftermath of the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling, to give to super PACs.

I hope you’re happy, Washington Post Editorial Board. Your fixation on jabbing at Citizens United is decimating longstanding and much-needed guidelines for good taste in comma usage.

The Republican National Committee is already arguing in federal court that the ban on corporate contributions to individual candidates should be declared unconstitutional.

Word.

Moreover, the attractiveness of the super PAC would be diminished but not eliminated, for the very reason that Mr. Romney notes: The PACs offer a useful, look-ma-no-hands

I’m fairly certain that whoever wrote this has never successfully operated a bicycle. Regardless, he certainly has no idea that this particular idiom is used exclusively in reference to attention-seeking braggadocio, not as a way to profess innocence.  Keep in mind, whoever wrote this is a professional writer.

vehicle to do candidates’ dirty work.

Yet candidates ability to fundraise directly would a) diminish the appeal of PACs and thereby decrease the funds and b) attach a stigma to ads not associated with particular candidates.

 Why assume these groups would disappear if contribution limits for candidates were eliminated?

They don’t have to disappear to be discredited and marginalized.

Mr. Romney’s suggestion is superficially appealing because fixing the current mess seems so difficult.

He pretty much nailed it in one sentence.

A constitutional amendment isn’t likely;

Something for which we can be thankful.

neither is a total change of heart by the Supreme Court.

Scalia’d, bitches!

The FEC is dysfunctional,

It’s a government agency. Dysfunction is practically in the mission statement.

and Congress is gridlocked on this issue.

This is a cute way of saying that these proposals don’t have electoral support.

Despite all that, trying to fix what’s broken makes more sense than breaking the system further.

It’s somewhat interesting that the Post, a corporation, unquestionably has the right to issue as many political judgments as they see fit. They pay to publish the paper. They spend valuable print area that could otherwise feature revenue-generating advertisements. What makes them different from General Electric or Halliburton?

Tighter rules

The answer to a liberal is always more regulation.

on coordination could be written to prevent wink-and-nod interactions between candidates and super PACs,

You’re fucking kidding me, right? This obliviousness can only stem from an utter detachment from reality. When you’re cracking down on winks and nods, rational people realize that they’re wandering into territory ordinarily reserved for the bat-shit insane.

such as, for example, Mr. Romney’s appearance at an event sponsored by the super PAC supporting him. The flawed disclosure schedule could be improved.

This is the very definition of “nibbling around the edges.”

The emergence of the candidate-specific super PAC, dedicated to the interests of a particular politician, puts a different gloss on the Supreme Court’s wrongheaded notion

For those of you keeping score at home, that’s a corporation bitching three times that corporations political spending has been deemed protected speech. Weren’t newspapers supposed to be champions for free speech?

that independent expenditures do not pose a corruption risk.

Of course there is a corruption risk. There is always a corruption risk. What this boils down to is your belief that the American people are too stupid to see through a barrage of deceitful ads. The irony, of course, is that it is the Post, not the American people, who has been so corrupted by politics that it has jettisoned its own core ethic of impartiality.

Even this court

Scalia’d!

might be persuaded to uphold legislation treating these entities, staffed by the candidates’ longtime advisers, as arms of the campaign.

Wait wait wait…stop and break it down.

Mitt Romney’s plan is to destroy the wall between candidates and their PACs by eliminating regulation on campaign finance. The Post disagrees so vehemently that the editorial board posits a radical new counterproposal: destroying the wall between candidates and their PACs by adding new layers of regulation. Both have the exact same desired outcome and radically different ways of achieving it. Few articles so clearly articulate the difference between conservatives and liberals.

I like Romney’s plan (it gives me politi-wood), but it doesn’t address why election spending has ballooned so dramatically recently. In part, this trend is exacerbated because Obama is terrifyingly inept. The major reason (and one which long predates the current administration) is that the government continues to grow in size, influence, and power. Corporations and individuals alike donate so that they don’t wind up crushed between the cogs of the machine. Money flows from virtually every sector of the economy to candidates, PACs, SuperPACs, lobbyists, and consultants. Most donors are simply hoping that currying favor with those in power buys the right to exist hassle-free (thought some are waiting for an under-the-table payday). The solution is profoundly simple: tighten the scope of the federal government, hobble its regulators, slash the tax code and eliminate all deductions, dismantle the bureaucracy. Defang the leviathan.

The amount of money in politics is disheartening because all non-ideological spending is done with the same value proposition: that benefits derived from their cronyism will outstrip the cost of their initial investment. This year, x billion dollars will flood into the political system to get the corruptible into office.  But politicians can’t simply repay those debts out of the federal coffers (although in many ways it would be more economical if they could). Politicians have to set up and pass pet projects or earmarks in which that debt is repaid after filtering through inept middle-men with a profit margin. All the while, waste and fraud accumulate and the system snowballs upon itself. When we reduce the size of the federal government, we devalue the investments that fuel the vicious cycle; campaign finance can then take care of itself.

Capitalism on Trial; Prosecutors Guilty

After a little bit of a hiatus for the primary season (which I now regard as functionally over), ETD is back, because the Op-Ed lunacy is back, and in force. 

Vulture capitalism on trial

By Katrina vanden Heuvel, Tuesday, January 17, 9:12 AM

If you had asked me at the beginning of the Republican nomination fight what candidates like Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry would say to win, I would have said just about anything.

Considering that at the beginning of the race, Rick Perry was regarded as the stalwart conservative’s choice, who had been reluctantly dragged into the contest in the first place, (and even Calista Gingrich wasn’t talking about Newt) experience tells me that this is a bit of revisionist history.

What I couldn’t possibly imagine was that one of the things they might start saying would actually be the unvarnished, unblinking, stand-up-and-clap-for-it truth.

Look no further to why Romney is running away with the nomination: if Katrina vanden Heuvel agrees with you, you done fucked up.

With their eyes set on Bain’s bane and Mitt Romney’s career,

Isn’t it adorable how she thinks she’s a real writer? Have you ever had a small child lecture you on quantum mechanics? It’s kind of like this. I can’t help but think it’s just adorable.

Perry and Gingrich have been astonishingly and appropriately brutal.

As a result, their freefall in the polls has sparked a general coalescence of support around Romney, mostly because Romney knows that agreeing with the Op-Ed pages in the Post during a Republican primary means you done fucked up.

“There’s a real difference between venture capitalism and vulture capitalism,”

There most certainly is. One exists, and the other doesn’t.

Perry told Fox and Friends last week. “I don’t believe that capitalism is making a buck under any circumstances.”

Rick Perry is, apparently, unfamiliar with capitalism. (With the usual caveats for legality—of course capitalism doesn’t tolerate theft or fraud), capitalism is precisely making a buck under any circumstances. If the market wants iron, the capitalist goes out and mines it. If the market wants a television show about idiots, the capitalist goes out and films it. If the market want a fleet of nuclear-powered high-speed zeppelins, the capitalist hires scientists to kick physics in the nuts and make it happen.

This is precisely the reason that capitalism works so efficiently—the individual actors within the system can respond to any market demand because there is no “honorable” or “dishonorable” way to make money. (Again, and I can’t emphasize this point enough, this assumes actions strictly adherent to the laws.) Money is money, and it represents the virtue of the sweat, toil, ingenuity, and risk-taking that were required to make it. This holds true regardless of whether the object of that effort was sewage treatment or fashion design, or equity investment.

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Be careful admitting that out loud. Your editor might hear it and realize that you omitted a subject in that sentence and realize that you really are less articulate than Rick Perry.

Gingrich sharpened that point further on Bloomberg.

Bloomberg is a great example. He made his money by compiling and selling financial data to technical traders, who are mostly the snake-oil salesmen of the financial industry. These technical traders do precisely what Romney did at Bain—allocate equity, valuate risk, and minimize market inefficiency, yet they (as a field) have a provably worse track record. Yet liberals fail to impugn Bloomberg (or Tim Geitner or the dozens of other financiers in the current administration).

“The question is whether or not these companies were being manipulated by the guys who invest

They weren’t.

to drain them of their money, leaving behind people who were unemployed,”

It’s not that manipulation through aggressive divestiture is illegal—it’s functionally impossible. If you buy shares in a company, those shares are worth more than the value of the assets of the firm (less liabilities). They would have to be, or the current owners would have sold the assets themselves. This means that Romney and Bain could only dismantle a company at a loss. The presumption of rational shareholders underpins our entire system of equity valuation.

he said. “Show me somebody who has consistently made money while losing money for workers and I’ll show you someone who has undermined capitalism.”

Shareholders are not fiduciaries for workers. Precisely the opposite is true: workers are fiduciaries for shareholders. Line workers are entrusted to use and maintain assets that are not theirs; managers are entrusted with the operations and decision-making of the firm using corporate money that is not their own. Both have basic legal obligations to the shareholders.

Workers are at-will employees who earn money in return for doing a job. It is virtually impossible to “lose [sic] money for workers” unless you commit fraud or enter fiscal insolvency and fail to pay for services rendered, in which case, tort law adequately defines the debenture procedures for contractors with liens against assets. In other words, the legal system’s got this all worked out already.

Sadly, KVH and—apparently—Newt Gingrich believe that corporations exist to provide jobs for employees. They don’t; all firms exist exclusively to maximize profits for shareholders.

Sing it, Brother Gingrich.

When an avowed socialist agrees with your definition of capitalism, you done fucked up.

What’s especially ironic about all of this is how much the roles have reversed.

Credit where credit is due: what follows is, in fact, irony. I will allow her to bathe in the glory of this brief flirtation with competency.

Romney, shameless flip-flopper that he is, has stood his ground, while the rest of the Republican field is opportunistically flipping and flopping around him. That, it turns out, is incredibly lucky for the American people, allowing us as clear a picture as we’d ever had of the real Romney just at the moment he’s become the near-presumptive nominee.

You’re absolutely correct. This is the first time of the campaign that Romney has appeared genuine, and his poll numbers reflect it. When I start agreeing with Katrina, I’m worrying that I’m about to done fucked up.

His full-throated response to his Republican opponents was deliciously revealing. “In the last few days, we have seen some desperate Republicans join forces with [President Obama],”

They have.

he said during his victory speech in New Hampshire. “This is such a mistake for our party and for our nation.

It is.

This country already has a leader who divides us with the bitter politics of envy.”

We do.

He warned that we must not be “dragged down by a resentment of success.”

We mustn’t.

So that’s what he thinks of the Occupy protests,

Now, I listened to the speech, and I don’t recall any mention of Occupy, but I hope Romney regards them with nothing but seething disdain.

of the 99 percenters,

Keep in mind, calling yourself the “99%” is not an affirmation of who you are, but a small-minded assertion of what you are not. This is purely divisive. Indeed, the entire rhetoric of the Occupy movement is designed to be divisive.

of the millions of Americans who believe income inequality is a real-life problem and that they deserve a fair shot.

I guess the 1% are the people who understand that private equity’s business function is to distributes money to anyone and everyone with a good, marketable (though underdeveloped) business idea, offer management expertise, and make that idea profitable for those who chose to pursue it. It is precisely the mechanism by which inequality is undermined.

According to Romney, they’re just jealous, of him, and of people like him, who concocted rapacious ways to make millions of dollars.

Romney was successful. And his job isn’t easy. I know that because the government is so woefully awful at it. (If it were easy, the government would merely be bad at it.) Selecting companies in which to invest private equity funds is kind of like picking stocks, except that there are millions of options, information is hard to come by, accounting practices are not standardized and often unaudited, investors expect greater returns, negotiations are tense and demanding, and meaningful investments must represent large amounts of capital (so mistakes or missteps cost a fortune).

I am jealous of Mitt Romney. The dude’s clearly got chops. The difference is that I don’t resent him for it. Everything about this article, from the tone to the substance, indicates that you, Katrina, do resent him, precisely because of his success. If memory serves, that’s more or less a verbatim quote.

This is what he believes, we know, not just because of these comments, but because of his career at Bain. He’s a man who built a personal fortune practicing a form of predatory, you-are-on-your own brand of capitalism

Private equity, by definition, ties a firm to outside investors, thereby eliminating the “you-are-on-your own brand of capitalism” that she is hell-bent on discrediting. Does she even know what Bain does?

that casts workers into joblessness — by design.

Bain (like any private equity firm) lays off workers so that the firm (and the rest of the workers) can survive and the investment can grow. It’s not only necessary, logical, reasonable, and responsible (keep in mind that Bain also has fiduciary duty to it’s investors); it’s the only humane thing to do. Doctors amputate arms with an infection likely to kill the patient. That doesn’t mean that they are anti-arm.

And he’s a man who thinks those workers’ grievances

You’d think this was the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. Work conditions aren’t dangerous or illegal. The “grievances” of the Occupy “workers” are more like a rambling list of arbitrary wants off the top of a pot-addled head.

are just about his “success” and not the system he intends to propagate from the Oval Office.

Ah. Cool. So we finally get to ideology.

And so the country is being offered a rare opportunity: the chance to have a conversation about two vastly different visions for our nation and its economy.

See, I’m doing it again. Agreeing with KVH brings on a very unsettling paranoia.

On one side, the Romney Economy — a vision of deregulation,

Word.

of tax breaks for the wealthy and corporations,

Tax breaks for all.

of an assault on the middle class and the poor,

Mitt Romney punches poor people for sport, after all.

and of an attack on the social safety net.

By social safety net, she’s referring to “that web of entitlements that are slowly bankrupting the treasury and bilking unearned billions from future generations.”

But what will be the other side of that debate? We have, so far, a patchwork of answers: President Obama’s Osawatomie speech,

Honestly, I already forgot that. I’m sure he said…things…about…stuff.

Elizabeth Warren’s candidacy,

Elizabeth Warren gives progressives lady-wood. Anywhere other than Massachusetts and she’d be an unelectable hack.

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s public fight for the victims of the big banks,

Read: “shameless pandering”

the Progressive Caucus and its People’s Budget,

Read: “socialist lunacy.”

and a nascent, but potent

This is a reference to the odor. You’ll get no argument from me.

99 percent movement.

Read: “waning swell of relics of the 60’s and bored collegians pursuing a performing arts degree.”

Stitched together, they provide glimmers of a coherent,

There’s not a single thread of coherence to be found in that list of miscreants and castaways.

inspired response to the excesses and depredations of the Romney Economy.

So…modern liberalism defines itself as a reaction to a hypothetical future candidate as opposed to…say… a governing philosophy that has been mostly in power for the last six years? What, you want us to ignore Obama’s disastrous first term? Nancy Pelosi’s reign of terror and the hapless Harry Reid’s 1000 days without the senate passing a budget? The economy, brought on by bad liberal mortgage policies and exacerbated by unmitigated failures like Cash for Clunkers, the bailouts, and the punchline-inducing stimulus? The executive power grab? A muddled foreign policy split equally between deference, confusion, and holdovers from the Bush Administration?

The difference between the two isn’t only that one is about nurturing fairness and the other, very clearly, is not.

Well at least this time, I’m only agreeing with her because her intentional vagueness allows me to read it as I please.

The difference is that Romney capitalism — the kind of “vulture capitalism”

You see, “vulture capitalism” is in quotes because it’s not a real term.

represented by Bain and so many chop-shop private equity operations — undermines the strength of our economy itself, and the economy’s ability to work for working people.

This is the problem with socialists. They usually get sidetracked by reeducation and genocide before they actually understand the economy they’re trying to govern.

There is, as even Warren Buffett has pointed out, a real difference between investing and building a company that makes something or provides a service that adds value to the economy, and a barbarian-at-the-gate-style enterprise that loots and strips, making millions for its executives by ripping holes in the economic fabric.

Warren Buffet is another great example of a liberal hero who does exactly what Bain does (except even better, and usually with public companies). The problem is that he’s tilting at windmills here, because that second category doesn’t actually exist. If you believe markets are at all efficient, it follows that looting companies is functionally impossible. If you don’t believe markets are efficient, all the more reason competing private equity firms like Bain are needed to eliminate inefficiencies by driving up the price of undervalued assets. Either way, it decidedly does not rip a hole in the economic fabric.

The current rules, as set by lobbyists pushing for tax loopholes and deregulations, have been rigged to allow Romney and his friends to make out like bandits.

Tax loopholes are nothing but tax deductions for actions that the government deems beneficial. You’re right; they’re not purely capitalistic. But that’s not Bain’s fault. It’s not even the lobbyist’s fault. It’s the damn senator or congressman who voted in un-capitalistic tax laws. Blaming Romney’s private sector career for a purely public sector problem is ridiculous on its face.

For the record, I’m taking this as a tacit acknowledgement from KVH that lower tax rates spur economic growth on a microeconomic level.

And so this election doesn’t just turn on whether we will change the rules; it is a question of whether we want one of the actual bandits to be put in charge of our future.

Ugh. Those are all gross misunderstandings of Romney’s actual record, yet he is still preferable to a rabble-rousing agitator from Chicago’s south side with no private sector experience, a decidedly unspectacular legislative history, and an atrocious record as President.

Though it might be odd that such attacks on Romney have originated with Republicans themselves, that they have sparked a national conversation matters a great deal.

That is the worst constructed sentence of this whole sprawling mess, which is quite the honor.

It allows those who’ve been making the case for years to drive home the critical point that the work of people like Romney is not the stuff of natural free markets;

Somewhere in the afterlife, Adam Smith just hit Karl Marx upside the head with a tire iron because of this broad.

Wait, hold on. There’s more than one person making this asinine argument? I need bottles of wine.

it is the product of a well-funded construct of laws and rules and institutions and values

I.e. government regulation—you know, that thing that conservatives loathe and have devoted their entire movement to dismantling?

that undermine shared prosperity in a country that once took pride in supporting upward mobility.

I’ll say it again: private equity (as all sources of capital) is the engine for upward mobility.  Without it, great inventions and ideas languish until patents expire or underfunded inventors simply give up. This is, unquestionably, a natural and necessary product of the free market.

There are many smart, concrete, not pie-in-the-sky

She has a way with words, doesn’t she?

ideas about how we can recalibrate our economy,

Recalibrate? Re-fucking-calibrate? It’s not a goddamn guided missile. It has two directions: growing or dying.

return it to fairness, how we can reimagine it

Reimaging the economy is worse than recalibrating it. It’s already an abstract constract, you buffoon. It doesn’t need any re-imaging, especially not from the executive branch of the federal government (you know, the one that signs all those tax loopholes and rules and institutions into law).

as one built not on vulture capitalism but on democratic capitalism.

Stop making shit up! “Democratic capitalism” is no more a concept than “vulture capitalism” is, but it’s even more asinine. Capitalism, necessarily, is democratic. The market is the most absolute form of democratic participation ever known. That is because it is the manifestation of the freedom of choice.

The Nation recently gathered many of those ideas in a special issue,

All of them, I’m sure, (I can’t be bothered to read that pinko rag. I have standards, after all) were dumb, abstract, and pie-in-the-sky. You see what happened there? Mirroring her prose actually made mine worse. God dammit, Katrina.

Reimagining Capitalism, laying out alternative ideas for a more humane capitalism that works for communities.

In the height of irony, the new argument for socialism is simply calling it “New Capitalism.” It didn’t work for New Coke either.

This campaign promises to be an MRI of our economic system.

No, this campaign is an examination of the failures of modern liberalism and the miserable policies of Barack Obama.

If that sounds unlikely, consider that six months ago, few, if any, political leaders were talking seriously about economic inequality — and today, the king of crony politics, the governor of Texas,

When did we demote the Barack Obama?

is complaining about the immorality of vulture capitalists. A lot can change; a lot already has.

And a lot hasn’t. Six months ago, Perry was seen as a stalwart conservative. Now, he’ll be lucky if he’s able to hold onto the governor’s mansion the next election cycle. Both Perry and Gingrich have embarrassed themselves and shown their campaigns unworthy of flying the flag of conservatism. The failure of Romney to win the support of Republican voters lies in their fundamental distrust of his ideological inclinations, not in his career. The more Romney talks about Bain, the more he looks like a good conservative.