I’ve been following the steady stream of revelations about Mitt RMoney’s financial dealings and his desperate, flailing efforts to continue to conceal them and to brand demands for more transparency on his part as somehow below-the-belt, or “disgusting” as one of his spokespersons said.
Considering that the electorate is supposedly up in arms about the robbery perpetrated on ordinary working people by the big banks and Wall Street, I’m astonished that RMoney still has an allegedly viable candidacy. He seems to me to epitomize everything people are angry about right now — the income chasm, the lack of fairness in how and what people are compensated for, the way the whole system is rigged against people who work for a living. (Remember RMoney has claimed to be “unemployed” since 2007, yet has made in excess of $20 million a year).
I can only imagine the uproar if a Democratic presidential candidate refused to release their tax returns for all but a couple of cherry-picked years. Or if it came out that a Democrat had stashed money away in Cayman Islands and Swiss bank account, which exist primarily for the purpose of dodging taxes. Or claimed to have all his money in blind trusts, only now it’s come out that moves were made with his full knowledge and consent — some of them recently and transparently to make him look “cleaner” for his presidential run.
And luckily for RMoney, the media is still running interference, spinning the whole story as “Democrats attack … ,” not as “here’s the reality.”
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gTHMj6XYDPvMRk9mOWMALx…
RMoney and his supporters don’t even try to justify this. In fact, it appears almost as if they are giving voters the finger, in arrogant confidence that RMoney will be elected by a flood of billionaire money and a wave of voter suppression tactics, and there’s nothing we can do about it, ha ha ha.
I really hope voters are brighter than this. Among all the zigging and zagging and dodging and weaving and misleading and irrelevant statements RMoney has made to try to take control of this damaging reality, the statements of one of his supporters who attended that Koch-hosted $50,000-a-person fundraiser I posted about the other day really stands out.
http://leanforward.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/07/09/12647367-romneys-suppo…
This supporter was one of several quoted outside the event who made comments revealing of the contemptuous, condescending attitude that infects the type of people who can drop $50,000 to attend an event at the Koch home.
She said,
I don’t think the common person is getting it. We’ve got the message. But my college kid, the baby sitters, the nails ladies—all these people who have the right to vote—they don’t get what’s going on. I just feel that if you’re lower income, one, you’re not as educated, two, they don’t get how it works.
Yes, we don’t “get how it works.” We’re just “common” people who don’t “get what’s going on” because we work for a living and we weren’t lucky enough to be born into rich, powerful families. And we should be listening to our “betters” tell us how much better off we’d be if we all took less and gave them more.
I especially love the veiled suggestion that maybe those of us not gifted with wealth aren’t completely qualified to vote.
How does a candidate survive this? If someone heading into an Obama event had said anything remotely like this, it would be in the headlines for a month. Every Republican in the country would be howling that President Obama should apologize, and rebuke and denounce that supporter. Heck, they’d probably even ask that he return her donation. And given the media enabling of the right-wing narrative, he probably would.
I haven’t heard a peep from anyone demanding that RMoney repudiate these remarks, have you?
Seriously — given how openly RMoney and his supporters are sneering at the vast majority of Americans, mocking them for not being rich enough to get still richer on the sorts of financial maneuvering only available to the ultra-rich, why on earth would an average working person vote for Mitt RMoney?