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Some TACers might remember a couple of Monty Python sketches relating to rich people. In one Michael Palin approaches John Cleese and asks him to contribute money to a fund for orphans. Cleese cannot figure out why he would want to do something like that and questions what the orphans will do with the money. He then goes off into a reverie about how wealthy he is, “Yes, yes I am extremely rich. Quite extraordinarily rich, really.” In another sketch Graham Chapman plays an upper class twit who has a multiple and incomprehensible surname which he then explains “…is pronounced Luxury Yacht.”
Python came to mind when I read the Mitt Romney tax story today, $6.2 million paid in tax on $42 million in income over the past two years. I cannot even imagine what $42 million in income, not assets, must look like and it is hard for me to imagine what Romney has in common with most Americans. Does he really understand what has happened to the economy and to the middle and working classes over the past five years?
I have followed the debate over Bain with some attention and do understand how a company in trouble sometimes has to be taken over, reorganized and restored to health, or dissolved if it is beyond saving. But is that really what Romney did? How often was a company taken over only because its assets exceeded the takeover price, meaning that the company was then stripped of assets and allowed to go out of business, resulting in the loss of jobs and livelihoods as “collateral damage.” Was this some kind of benign intervention or predatory capitalism at its worst? Clearly, whatever it actually was resulted in a vast fortune for Romney which I have seen estimated to be in the $250 million range. Romney’s father George was also a rich man but at least he built cars to make his fortune. What has Mitt built? And why would we want a man whose life as a “businessman” has revolved around such an enterprise to be our president?
i’m in thorough sympathy with the post but:
“Was this some kind of benign intervention or predatory capitalism at its worst?”
i thought this was normal capitalism. which has become my problem.
Actually his name is spelt “Raymond Luxury Yacht,” but is pronounced “Throat Wobbler Mangrove.” He’s a very silly man …
BTW, I should add that I share the concerns of your post. It worries me that people with that level of wealth are at best oblivious to the average person’s lot.
Thanks Dylan! Couldn’t quite remember how it went…Throat Wobbler Mangrove is perfect!
Am I missing something?
Unless there’s evidence that Romney was stripping companies whose stock happened to fall below liquidation value, this just seems to be unworthy innuendo – premature at best.
Romney supported bailouts for his bankster cronies with the usual pious bilge about the urgent need to save capitalism and the financial system.
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/oct/11/news/la-pn-romney-bailouts-20111011
For everyone else he prescribes the stern law of free enterprise, i.e. he turns into an asset-stripping vulture.
Also in the episode with Raymond Luxury-Yacht is the “It’s a Living” sketch which describes Wall Street to a “T”.
“Hello, good evening, and welcome to ‘It’s A Living’. The rules are very simple: each week we get a large fee; at the end of that week we get another large fee; if there’s been no interruption at the end of the year we get a repeat fee which can be added on for tax purposes to the previous year or the following year if there’s no new series.
You can find the transcript at:
http://www.ibras.dk/montypython/episode19.htm
I think the much larger problem is that Mitt Romney has little knowledge of foreign affairs and history. He would be another moron in the White House along the lines of G W Bush.
Romney’s campaign song should be the Byrds’ “I Wanna Grow Up to Be a Politician” (or Martin Mull’s “Flexible”).
Newt, of course, is the “Duke of Earl.” (Perry was “Desperado.”)
Ron Paul — old tune, new words — “I’m in with the Out Crowd.”
Santorum does not seem to inspire a song. (“I’m So Bored” etc.?)
I’m less critical of this aspect of Romney’s history than others. My issues revolve around his many Mitt Flops, combined with a brazen foreign policy informed by seemingly little more than his devotion to the religion of American Exceptionalism.
Obviously, it is a tragedy when any company gets bought out, taken apart, assets sold off, and labor outsourced. But, to be blunt, companies in those situations are usually headed for bankruptcy anyway, in which case the entire company may end up being dissolved, with no one keeping their job anyway.
If we think back a few decades, most of us can remember the constant warnings about what would happen if our educational system kept turning out an illiterate, barely functioning citizenry.* Decades later, this is part of why we are where we are.
Peace be with you.
* I’m not arguing for or against any particular change, whether federal, state, or local. It just seems like this fact if too often overlooked when we discuss our current economic and cultural state of affairs.
Is Mike Milken still alive? Maybe the convention could draft him.
Don’t forget this is the jerk who drove with his mutt lashed down to the top of his car. Doesn’t sound too connected to me. Or observant, either: were there no laps open?
What I find most amusing is when Mitt is on the stump desperately imploring people that “I know how to make jobs!” “I know how the economy works!” “I make jobs”! Listen to me! Please!
It reminds of a funny scene from that great movie called “Office Space”. When the consultants (“the Bob’s) come in to downsize the company they are interviewing one employer to decide his worth. While they interview him he keeps yelling at them “But I am a people person! I am good with people!!!!!!
Romney is pathetic. He will be a pathetic President. He is cynical because he has no ideas. He doesn’t care about ideas. He only cares about money. And being President. Why? Because there is really nothing else for him to do. Becoming President for Romney is like stamp collecting. He has collected 0.25 billion dollars. So he needs some new stamps.
[…] for accusations that he is out of touch — even The American Conservative’s Philip Giraldi wondered if the ex-Massachusetts governor could have been cast in one of Python’s sketches skewering the wealthy, such as one in which the “very, […]