Mitt Romney's Economic Ideology Is Representative of The Corrupt Elitist Winner-Take-All "Casino Capitalism" Which Now Dominates Wall Street And Washington

On Mitt Romney and his role in what Robert Reich calls "Casino Capitalism"

"[T]he real issue here isn’t Bain’s betting record. It’s that Romney’s Bain is part of the same system as Jamie Dimon’s JPMorgan Chase, Jon Corzine’s MF Global and Lloyd Blankfein’s Goldman Sachs—a system that has turned much of the economy into a betting parlor that nearly imploded in 2008, destroying millions of jobs and devastating household incomes. The winners in this system are top Wall Street executives and traders, private-equity managers and hedge-fund moguls, 
and the losers are most of the rest of us."

Quote from: "Robert Reich: Mitt Romney IS the Economic Crisis" by Dartagan at Daily Kos via Alternet.org, July 4, 2012


The concern over Mitt Romney's religious affiliations with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints as an issue is for the most part a distraction from issues which can and have been raised over Romney's business deals which reflect his attitudes and ideology and in the end define who Mitt Romney is as a person.

Romney is an elitist and a ruthless calculating greedy materialist who judges success by material wealth and sees the world through the prism of of 19th century economic and social Darwinism. If anything Romney's religion offers him a rationale for being a greedy winner-take -all capitalist. Romney's belief in "vulture " or " Casino" capitalism fits with the theology and mindset of the Latter Day Saints and with the prevalent conservative Evangelical Christian attitudes towards success and the accumulation of wealth ie The Prosperiety Gospel and the Seven Mountains Prophecy. In considering the Seven Mountains Prophecy Romney has control over his family as the Patriarch and is a dutiful adherent to his faith that is Mormonism and he has been successful in terms of business and in the political sphere. So as president Romney would represent a number of Mormon values and those of Conservative Evangelicals and of secular social and economic conservatives.

Mitt Romney is in fact one of the people who has benefited from the current economic system of "Casino Capitalism". So as president of the United States Romney in the economic sphere will help to further benefit the top 1% at the expense of the 99% . Romney and the rich elite are not interested in economic fairness or economic justice since they believe they are entitled to their success and fabulous wealth . For all the critcisms of Darwin 's theory of evolution by the religious right and the secular right are always at the ready to defend 19th century economic and social Darwinism.

"Robert Reich: Mitt Romney IS the Economic Crisis" by Dartagan at Daily Kos via Alternet.org, July 4, 2012

Robert Reich says the attacks on Romney's tenure at Bain Capital miss the larger point, one which the White House is not even prepared to acknowledge: Mitt Romney is not simply a callous vulture capitalist, he is the living embodiment of the financial catastrophe that brought this country to the edge of ruin.

"[T]he real issue here isn’t Bain’s betting record. It’s that Romney’s Bain is part of the same system as Jamie Dimon’s JPMorgan Chase, Jon Corzine’s MF Global and Lloyd Blankfein’s Goldman Sachs—a system that has turned much of the economy into a betting parlor that nearly imploded in 2008, destroying millions of jobs and devastating household incomes. The winners in this system are top Wall Street executives and traders, private-equity managers and hedge-fund moguls, 
and the losers are most of the rest of us."

The thousands of job losses caused by Bain's "bad bets," while providing rich fodder for the Administration's campaign ads, are really just a microcosm of a self-perpetuating, labyrinthine tax system geared to rewarding the wealthiest with the privilege of betting their fortunes on money they've neither earned nor done anything to deserve, with little or no personal risk. Reich calls it "casino capitalism:"

"The biggest players in this system have, like Romney, made their profits placing big bets with other people’s money. If the bets go well, the players make out like bandits. If they go badly, the burden lands on average workers and taxpayers."

" We’ve entered a new Gilded Age, of which Mitt Romney is the perfect reflection. The original Gilded Age was a time of buoyant rich men with flashy white teeth, raging wealth and a measured disdain for anyone lacking those attributes, which was just about everyone else. Romney looks and acts the part perfectly, offhandedly challenging a GOP primary opponent to a $10,000 bet and referring to his wife’s several Cadillacs. Four years ago he paid $12 million for his fourth home, a 3,000-square-foot villa in La Jolla, California, with vaulted ceilings, five bathrooms, a pool, a Jacuzzi and unobstructed views of the Pacific. Romney has filed plans to tear it down and replace it with a home four times bigger.

We’ve had wealthy presidents before, but they have been traitors to their class—Teddy Roosevelt storming against the “malefactors of great wealth” and busting up the trusts, Franklin Roosevelt railing against the “economic royalists” and raising their taxes, John F. Kennedy appealing to the conscience of the nation to conquer poverty. Romney is the opposite: he wants to do everything he can to make the superwealthy even wealthier and the poor even poorer, and he justifies it all with a thinly veiled social Darwinism."

...Reich believes too few in the Democratic Party are willing to acknowledge the obvious, either because they are similarly tethered to Wall Street's millions, or because to acknowledge that Romney is in fact the perfect face of the economic crisis would be to acknowledge the overwhelming pervasiveness of the problem. And to acknowledge the scope of the problem would require them to come up with solutions. Circling above all of this discussion, of course, is the haunting shadow of Citizen's United. But for Reich, the "clear and present danger" facing this country is the plutocrat about to accept the Republican nomination for the Presidency--

"at the very time in our nation’s history when these views and practices are a clear and present danger to the well-being of the rest of us—just as they were more than a century ago. Romney says he’s a job-creating businessman, but in truth he’s just another financial dealmaker in the age of the financial deal, a fat cat in an era of excessively corpulent felines, a plutocrat in this new epoch of plutocrats. That the GOP has made him its standard-bearer at this point in American history is astonishing."

and more questions about Romney's secret and somewhat shady business dealings

"Where the Money Lives " by Nicholas Shaxon at Vanity Fair , August 2012

For all Mitt Romney’s touting of his business record, when it comes to his own money the Republican nominee is remarkably shy about disclosing numbers and investments. Nicholas Shaxson delves into the murky world of offshore finance, revealing loopholes that allow the very wealthy to skirt tax laws, and investigating just how much of Romney’s fortune (with $30 million in Bain Capital funds in the Cayman Islands alone?) looks pretty strange for a presidential candidate.

A person who worked for Mitt Romney at the consulting firm Bain and Co. in 1977 remembers him with mixed feelings. “Mitt was … a really wonderful boss,” the former employee says. “He was nice, he was fair, he was logical, he said what he wanted … he was really encouraging.” But Bain and Co., the person recalls, pushed employees to find out secret revenue and sales data on its clients’ competitors. Romney, the person says, suggested “falsifying” who they were to get such information, by pretending to be a graduate student working on a proj­ect at Harvard. (The person, in fact, was a Harvard student, at Bain for the summer, but not working on any such proj­ects.) “Mitt said to me something like ‘We won’t ask you to lie. I am not going to tell you to do this, but [it is] a really good way to get the information.’ … I would not have had anything in my analysis if I had not pretended.

“It was a strange atmosphere. It did leave a bad taste in your mouth,” the former employee recalls.

This unsettling account suggests the young Romney—at that point only two years out of Harvard Business School—was willing to push into gray areas when it came to business. More than three dec­ades later, as he tried to nail down the Republican nomination for president of the United States, Romney’s gray areas were again an issue when he repeatedly resisted calls to release more details of his net worth, his tax returns, and the large investments and assets held by him and his wife, Ann. Finally the other Republican candidates forced him to do so, but only highly selective disclosures were forthcoming.

Even so, these provided a lavish smorgasbord for Romney’s critics. Particularly jarring were the Romneys’ many offshore accounts. As Newt Gingrich put it during the primary season, “I don’t know of any American president who has had a Swiss bank account.” But Romney has, as well as other interests in such tax havens as Bermuda and the Cayman Islands.

To give but one example, there is a Bermuda-based entity called Sankaty High Yield Asset Investors Ltd., which has been described in securities filings as “a Bermuda corporation wholly owned by W. Mitt Romney.” It could be that Sankaty is an old vehicle with little importance, but Romney appears to have treated it rather carefully. He set it up in 1997, then transferred it to his wife’s newly created blind trust on January 1, 2003, the day before he was inaugurated as Massachusetts’s governor. The director and president of this entity is R. Bradford Malt, the trustee of the blind trust and Romney’s personal lawyer. Romney failed to list this entity on several financial disclosures, even though such a closely held entity would not qualify as an “excepted investment fund” that would not need to be on his disclosure forms. He finally included it on his 2010 tax return. Even after examining that return, we have no idea what is in this company, but it could be valuable, meaning that it is possible Romney’s wealth is even greater than previous estimates. While the Romneys’ spokespeople insist that the couple has paid all the taxes required by law, investments in tax havens such as Bermuda raise many questions, because they are in “jurisdictions where there is virtually no tax and virtually no compliance,” as one Miami-based offshore lawyer put it.

and see : " What's in Romney's Offshore Accounts? " by Ben Adler at The Nation via Common Dreams.org, July 4, 2012

Mitt Romney has been very reluctant to release his tax returns. In all his previous campaigns he refused to release any of them. This time, under pressure, he has given us only the last two years.