Building a company that pays its workers a decent wage, that pays its taxes, and delivers a product that customers are happy to pay for—is usually the outcome of genius and the hard work of many, many actors. It is actually a very rare event. To destroy such a company so a few thieves can make some quick "profits" ranks as the most odious of economic crimes imaginable. That those thieves can get away with such crimes is astonishing. That someone who made his fortune engaging in such theft is now running for President claiming his criminal acts qualify him to run a nation is crazy.
Meet Mitt Gekko—an uber vandal who promises to do to the country what he did to the companies that once provided honest employment to thousands of workers.
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Matt Taibbi: Mitt Romney Campaign 'Not Serious'
The Huffington Post | By Bonnie Kavoussi 10/16/2012
The media should be acting like Vice President Joe Biden and responding to to Mitt Romney's campaign with "contemptuous laughter" because "it's not serious," according to Matt Taibbi.
"Every single day in the newspapers it should be, 'Romney-Ryan Tax Plan Still Makes No Sense,'" Taibbi, contributing editor to Rolling Stone, told Current TV host Eliot Spitzer on Spitzer's show "Viewpoint" Monday. "They're making this extravagant promise, they're saying, 'We're going to cut everybody's taxes by 20 percent, it's going to be like Fairyland,' and yet they're being treated as though it's a serious political campaign, and they should be [getting] slaughtered by the press for this."
The Tax Policy Center recently concluded that Romney's tax plan is mathematically impossible without raising taxes on the middle class. Taibbi echoed this analysis on Current TV, saying that cutting deductions to help pay for a 20 percent cut in marginal tax rates would "disproportionately" hit the middle class and lower class, while helping the rich the most. But Romney and Ryan "haven't been forced to give those answers," Taibbi said.
Taibbi said that instead of questioning the Romney-Ryan tax plan, the press has been lionizing Paul Ryan.
"Paul Ryan serves his purpose to the mainstream media without making sense,"Taibbi said on Current TV. "We have this tendency in the press toward characterizing figures so that we have the policy wonk on the right, the policy wonk on the left. They play these roles effectively on television. Whether or not they actually make sense is kind of irrelevant to most of the cable news programming. They just have to play the parts well."
Taibbi criticized the media's credulous coverage of Romney's tax plan in a recent blog post for Rolling Stone, where he wrote that "we should take professional offense that any politician would try to whisk such a gigantic lie past us to our audiences." more
Great post, as usual.
ReplyDeleteWhat is wrong with people that so few people seem to be reading this site, if number of comments are any indication?
Here you are dealing with things that really matter, and it looks like most people would rather talk about the latest 'gotcha' verbal blunder from one candidate or another.
Keeping their eyes on the trees I guess. Forest? What forest?
Thank you for your compliment. Yes I wish there were more readers. But I am VERY happy with the approx. 500 readers that show up most days.
ReplyDeleteI would like to think that ONE of the reasons there are so few comments is because I am not writing anything very controversial. I try very hard to write things that are well beyond rational debate. The result is that smart guys like you tend to say, "right on."
So thank you for today's "right on." It means a lot.