You already know how the scions of the John Birch Society, David and Charles Koch and Organized Crime boss (and Communist China agent) Sheldon Adelson have dumped tens of millions of dollars into electing Romney and other Republicans. Now we find out another crooked financial predator, Ameritrade's Joe Ricketts, has pledged $12 million towards replacing democracy with an oligarchy. Romney met with a bunch of these self-entitled billionaires a few months ago and gave them his underlying philosophy about America-- namely that:
"there are 47% of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47% who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…These are people who pay no income tax... my job is is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives."
Its so fucking ass backwards, because it's Romney himself-- and so many of his friends-- who spend millions to hire armies of tax lawyers so they can cheat on their taxes.
Even Republican Congressman Ron Paul said he won't endorse Romney until he releases his tax returns like every other presidential candidate. But if there is a class of people in America who are moochers and parasites and who believe they are entitled to own everything, it's Mitt Romney and his virulently anti-democracy cohorts.
The people who acyually receive the lion's share of government spending are not the poor, that is a lie perpetuated by those who carry water for the wealthiest Americans.
No.
They are Republicans.
They are senior citizens.
They are white men with high school degrees.
As Bill Galston of the Brookings Institution has noted, the people who have benefited from the entitlements explosion are middle-class workers, more so than the dependent poor.
Romney’s comments also reveal that he has lost any sense of the social compact. In 1987, during Ronald Reagan’s second term, 62 percent of Republicans believed that the government has a responsibility to help those who can’t help themselves. Now, according to the Pew Research Center, only 40 percent of Republicans believe that. 30 years of right wing vilification has seen to that.
The Republican Party has shifted over toward a much more hyper-individualistic social view-- from the language of common citizenship to the Randian absolutes of makers and takers.
The worst of this video, is that it shows Mr. Romney knows nothing about ambition and motivation. The formula he sketches is this: People who are forced to make it on their own have drive. People who receive benefits have dependency.
Utter bullshit of course, no affluent or middle class parent acts as if this is a fact. These parents don’t deprive their children of money, food, or medical care so they can learn to struggle on their own. They shower benefits on their children to give them more opportunities-- so they can play sports, go on trips learn about other cultures and develop more skills and understanding.
People are motivated only when they feel competent. When they have a sense of agency and security.
They are motivated when they have more opportunities. Ambition is fired by possibility, not by deprivation, as a trip to ANY impoverished nation will show.
But we have seen the right ignore empirical facts for more than a generation now.
Nate Shinigawa (NY-23) created this info-graphic to help explain to voters in his district just how wrong Romney was in his nasty remarks:
