Tag: Romney

Silences Louder Than Their Words: Effective Economic Policies Neither Candidate Advocates

By Richard D Wolff, Truthout | Op-Ed

Neither Mitt Romney nor Barack Obama even mentions six alternative economic policies that, deployed together, would reduce unemployment, increase workers’ real earnings and decrease the federal deficit.

This presidential election arrives five years into a severe economic crisis that both Republican and Democratic policies failed to end. The latest unemployment rate (7.8 percent) is not even halfway back to the 2007 level of 5 percent, from the crisis high of 10 percent. Jobs have not recovered, but corporate profits and the stock market did, thanks to huge government bailouts. Average real weekly earnings of most workers fell 2.4 percent from October, 2010, to the present – during what business, media and political leaders enjoyed calling a “modest recovery.” That 2.4 percent real wage drop means that workers lost the equivalent of six days’ wages (one week and one day) per year between late 2010 and now. Income and wealth inequalities thus deepened further across the crisis. No end of these developments is in sight.

For more on this story, visit: Silences Louder Than Their Words: Effective Economic Policies Neither Candidate Advocates | TruthOut.

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Romney continues to back Mourdock in spite of Senate hopeful’s rape remarks | The Guardian

Mitt Romney’s campaign has refused to withdraw his support from Richard Mourdock, the Republican Senate candidate in Indiana who claimed that pregnancies from rape are “something that God intended to happen.”

Both Mourdock and Romney’s campaign said that an advert Romney recorded endorsing Mourdock’s Senate bid would not be pulled.

For more on this story, visit: Romney continues to back Mourdock in spite of Senate hopeful’s rape remarks | World news | The Guardian.

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Romney’s Foreign Policy Speech: All War All the Time | The Progressive

He denounced “the abrupt withdrawal of our entire troop presence” from Iraq, though he didn’t say how long he would have kept our troops there.

And he hinted broadly that he’d keep U.S. troops in Afghanistan beyond 2014. “I will evaluate conditions on the ground and weigh the best advice of our military commanders,” he said. “And I will affirm that my duty is not to my political prospects, but to the security of the nation.”

On Iran, he also threatened war, aligning himself squarely with Benjamin Netanyahu. “I will put the leaders of Iran on notice that the United States and our friends and allies will prevent them from acquiring nuclear weapons capability,” he said.

For more on this story, visit: Romney’s Foreign Policy Speech: All War All the Time | The Progressive.

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Tax Loophole Benefiting Romney’s Estate Costs U.S. $1 Billion Over Ten Years | ThinkProgress

According to Bloomberg News, Mitt Romney is taking advantage of a tax loophole to pass off a fortune to his children without paying taxes on it. According to administration figures, this loophole costs the government $1 billion over a ten-year budget window ….

For more on this story, visit: Tax Loophole Benefiting Romney’s Estate Costs U.S. $1 Billion Over Ten Years | ThinkProgress.

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Amy Goodman: Romney Has a Jobs Plan … for China | Truthdig

ed: I’ve often thought that there are too many products with “Made in China” stickers on them. I think one reason China’s economy is so good is that they make most of our stuff. Clothes we buy at most clothing stores, toys at most toy stores, at least the big box stores, just about everything at Michael’s craft store is made in China, as is most everthing in Walmart and Target. Is America soon going to be Made in China? Amy Goodman has her own take on this below ….

By Amy Goodman

Freeport, Ill., is the site of one of the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates. On Aug. 27, 1858, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas debated there in their campaign for Illinois’ seat in the U.S. Senate. Lincoln lost that race, but the Freeport debate set the stage for his eventual defeat of Douglas in the presidential election of 1860, and thus the Civil War. Today, as the African-American president of the United States prepares to debate the candidate from the party of Lincoln, workers in Freeport are staging a protest, hoping to put their plight into the center of the national debate this election season.

A group of workers from Sensata Technologies have set up their tents in a protest encampment across the road from the plant where many of them have spent their adult lives working. Sensata makes high-tech sensors for automobiles, including the sensors that help automatic transmissions run safely. Sensata Technologies recently bought the plant from Honeywell, and promptly told the more than 170 workers there that their jobs and all the plant’s equipment would be shipped to China.

For more on this story, visit: Amy Goodman: Romney Has a Jobs Plan … for China – Truthdig.

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What Mitt Romney Doesn’t Get About Responsibility | Bloomberg

The working poor haven’t abdicated responsibility for their lives. They’re drowning in it.

“The problem is that Romney doesn’t seem to realize how difficult it is to focus on college when you’re also working full time, how much planning it takes to reliably commute to work without a car. … The working poor haven’t abdicated responsibility for their lives. They’re drowning in it.”

Imagine you’re Romney, the Republican presidential nominee: For the past year you’ve been unable to grab a clear lead in the polls against an incompetent who has been unable to get unemployment below 8 percent or reach a reasonable debt- reduction deal with Congress. Which would you prefer to believe? That you’re not good enough, not smart enough and doggone it, people just don’t like you? Or that the incumbent Democrat has effectively bought off half the country with food stamps and free health care?

For more on this story, visit: What Mitt Romney Doesn’t Get About Responsibility – Bloomberg.

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Taking Responsibility on Welfare | NYTimes.com

By LARKIN WARREN, Bethel, Conn., for The New York Times

I WAS a welfare mother, “dependent upon government,” as Mitt Romney so bluntly put it in a video that has gone viral. “My job is not to worry about those people,” he said. “I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.” But for me, applying for government benefits was exactly that — a way of taking responsibility for myself and my son during a difficult time in our lives. Those resources kept us going for four years. Anyone waiting for me to apologize shouldn’t hold his breath.

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With help, I graduated. That day, over the heads of the crowd, my 11-year-old’s voice rang out like an All Clear: “Yay, Mom!” Two weeks later, I was off welfare and in an administrative job in the English department. Part of my work included advising other nontraditional students, guiding them through the same maze I’d just completed, one course, one semester, at a time.

In the years since, the programs that helped me have changed. In the ’80s, the Basic Educational Opportunity Grant became the Pell Grant (which Paul D. Ryan’s budget would cut). In the ’90s, A.F.D.C. was replaced by block grants to the states, a program called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. States can and do divert that money for other programs, and to plug holes in the state budget. And a single mother applying for aid today would face time limits and eligibility requirements that I did not. Thanks to budget cuts, she would also have a smaller base of the invaluable human resources — social workers, faculty members, university facilities — that were so important to me.

For more on this story, visit: Taking Responsibility on Welfare – NYTimes.com.

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10 Questions Romney Should Answer About His Taxes | ThinkProgress

Think Progress has 10 unanswered questions about Romney’s taxes, beginning with:

1. After the election, when the subject of your tax returns is outside of the public glare, will you file an amended tax return to claim your full deduction of charitable contributions? Was the tax rate you reported for other years similarly manipulated?

2. Why was your 2011 income $7 million lower than you estimated it to be in January? How does someone overestimate their income by $7 million?

3. Financial disclosures show that you have as much as $82 million in your tax-deferred Individual Retirement Account, despite the fact that tax rules limited contributions into such accounts to $30,000 per year. Did you lowball the value of the assets you put into your IRA, as tax experts suspect? And did you do the same with gifts into your sons’ trusts?

4. What was the purpose of your Swiss bank account and the myriad offshore entities shown on your return, based in countries like the Cayman Islands and Luxembourg, if not to avoid taxes?

5. Can you explain what one tax expert has called a “mysterious one-time infusion of foreign tax credits” in 2008?

For more on this story, visit: 10 Questions Romney Should Answer About His Taxes | ThinkProgress.

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