Yesterday I watched the deconstruction of Rick Santorum start when it moved beyond damning gay sex to rating the moral quality of the sexual acts of married heterosexuals. Behind that, we saw the teeth of the real monster which would not only determine what we do in the bedroom, but also if we have a room and a bed.
A determined member of Occupy Boston managed to get to Mitt Romney in New Hampshire. I don’t know the moral quality of Mark Provost’s sexual activities on the Santorum scale, but his determined push showed a flash of what our future will look like if the hand the nation over the people funding and sustaining Mitt Romney.
Here, as reported in the Huffington Post, is part of the exchange
Mark Provost: I'm Mark from Occupy Boston and Occupy New Hampshire. Congratulations on your victory last night. You've said that 'corporations are people,' but in the last two years, corporate profits have surged to record highs, directly at the expense of wages. That's in a JP Morgan report. Now, it seems that the U.S. is a great place to be a corporation then, but increasingly a desperate place to live and work. So would you refine your statement from 'corporations are people' to 'corporations are abusive people?' And would you be willing to reverse the policies of the Obama administration and his predecessors around corporate-centric economic policies, that only see wealth and income strata just go to the top, record highs seemingly every -- faster every year. And the people in this country are in a permanent economic stagnation. So I just want to see some color on that.
Mitt Romney: Where do you think a corporation's profit goes?
Provost: It depends. If they retain it, there's retained earnings. That means that they're not spending it, they're not distributing it in dividends, and that means they're not using it for capital expenditures. You know, so they can just hoard it. That's retained earnings. Right. But it's profits. It goes to shareholders. So it goes to the one percent of Americans who own 90 percent of the stocks. . . .
Romney: No? He's got dividends and retirement plans, 401ks. They're filled with the dividends that come out from corporations. That's number one. Number two, you are right, they can go into retained earnings which can then be used for capital expenditures, or growing the business, or hiring people, or working capital. When a business has profit it can do good things. Give it to the shareholders and grow the enterprise. And by the way, the only way it can hire people is if it grows the enterprise.
Corporations, they're made up of people and then of course the buildings that people work in. The buildings don't pay taxes. The only entities that pay taxes are people. So corporations are collections of people that are trying to have good jobs for themselves and promote the future. Corporations are made up of people and the money goes to people either to hire people or to pay shareholders. So they're made up of people. So somehow thinking that there's something else out there that we can just grab money from and get taxes from and everything would be better, that doesn't involve people, why, they're still people.
And what I want to do is make America a place where those corporations that have that money decide to invest here. I was with a guy who runs a big chemical company. He said, 'We've just announced a $20 billion factory in Saudi Arabia.' I said, 'Why.' He said, 'We wanted to build it in Pennsylvania but the regulators in this country are not willing to act to allow us to get ahold of the natural gas, so we're going to have to go somewhere else.' Tens of thousands of jobs lost, not by the corporations, but by the government not doing its job. I want this to be the place where corporations -- people from all over the world -- want to invest here, grow here, start their businesses. I've had the occasion of helping start businesses, trying to make them better, trying to grow them. That's how we get jobs.
The only two places we can get jobs: one is for government, everybody working for government. We've seen nations that have tried that. It hasn't worked out. The only system that's ever worked in the history of the world, to lift people out of poverty, is free enterprise. Nothing else has worked. Look at Cuba, look at North Korea, look at the Soviet Union. They're bankrupt. Only free enterprise. Look at China. All these years under communism, socialism -- poverty, impoverished for generations. They finally adopt some form of free enterprise like we have, allowing corporations to exist and have profit. Guess what happens? Tens of millions of people a year come out of poverty. It's marvelous.
Please note that neither the name of the man who told Mitt Romney this story nor the name of the company is provided. This anecdote may be misleading or as fictional as Reagan's welfare Cadillac, which Republicans have been driving through America's imagination for 30 years. Now someone will have to go back and fact check this.
The terrifying implication of this is that in Mitt Romney’s world the jobs he’ll allegedly create will be purchased at any price to the American people. The full force of globalized greed will not only push up against his administration but flow and be focused by it. If we want jobs we’ll allow unregulated fracking which poisons our water. We’ll allow pollution. We’ll gut all labor regulation. We’ll accept an inevitable descent to the standard of living of Chinese slave laborers. We’ll grant huge subsidies paid for by taxes levied on the working class.
We know Mitt Romney will do this, because this is what he did at Bain Capital. Over and over again he “created jobs” by relocating existing, often struggling enterprises to non union areas with the support of government subsidies. The companies were quickly run into the ground, probably exploited as some sort of tax dodge. Many of these companies were shut down after a few years, though Bain Capital managed to show a profit. Today those products are made in China and Mitt Romney and many other “free market” Republicans believe the only answer it to accept the conditions forced on the people of China. Any sort of protection for ordinary people such as seen in Europe is an intolerable compromise.
Most of these acts of slash and burn "capitalism," which isn’t a sustainable capitalistic model, took place in small towns. One was Gaffney in my own state of South Carolina. The 125 jobs created there with Government support later disappeared. “For Bain, the plan was a financial success: Holson Burnes raised $24 million from its initial public offering on the over-the-counter trading market, with Bain executives retaining the majority of the company's shares. Bain, in the end, reaped more than double the return on its initial investment. But workers were left jobless just as the local economy began to slump. “ http://www.standard.net/...
Bain Capital did this across the country. (see video) It’s great success stories, such as Staples, stock shelf upon shelf of goods made in China while they leveled locally owned business supply companies across the nation.
Rick Santorum wants a world where gay sex is illegal and heterosexual copulation between married people must be directed at procreation. Apparently heterosexual copulation between married people aimed at procreation is "perfect."
Mitt Romney wants a world where government and business work together to level every barrier on earth protecting working people and where the standards for industry, wages and quality of life of everyone on the planet follows Karl Marx’s iron law of wages to the basement.
I don’t know what type of sex Mark Provost likes. He’s not a member of the 1%, just a occupier and a citizen taking one of thousands of stands. However he and many other people recognize what is a stake in this election: the choice between a world of desperation where wealth and control are concentrated in the grip of a few and ordinary people are powerless to control even the outcome of their own sexual activity, in order to produce more people to exploit.
Mark Provost didn’t have the opportunity to wring that admission out of Mitt Romney, who will have the backing of monster super PAC money from billionaires to distract, distort and deceive us. We have to make the final connection to the regular people we meet who might, in their rising desperation, surrender their future for the promise of jobs without understanding what little that promise means to the men and money which own Mitt.