Whether one is voting this presidential election or not, Mitt Romney’s most recent TV ad proclaims that president Obama eliminated the work requirement for welfare recipients and promises that Mitt Romney will make welfare recipients work for their benefits – unlike the lax Obama who can’t seem to exercise parental control.
Not only is the Romney TV ad not true, the ad is classic racist “code.” It is, in fact, a deliberate intent to incite racial animosity by mentioning welfare for the down and out, not welfare for the rich, Romney’s real constituency. Yet another cynical appeal to poor white voters and the growing right-wing racist fringe, it conjures up images of working people of color as lazy and non-industrious, when – in fact – the so-called “job creators,” like Romney and his supporters, are busy shipping employment overseas or engaging in high risk, high frequency trading on Wall Street where the real non-industrious can be found. Unfortunately, thanks to eight years of George W. Bush and the Great Financial Crisis that has now become a perpetual depression, we have a whole lot more poor white folks out of work, many of whom are, unfortunately, moving targets for racist appeals.
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From Willy Horton, to the white woman telling Harold Ford Jr., “call me,” the race card has long been a trusted weapon in the Republican arsenal when it comes to dividing the American people. To this mendacious ad – with more likely to surface – add voter suppression efforts and the Republican theme is glaringly obvious: Do you want a white man in the White House or a black man in the White House? And it is no surprise that all of this racist hyperbole is appearing during the emergence of the New Jim Crow, the latest ugly head rearing of Social Darwinism by the elite of a new cyber Gilded Age.
Plutocracy, Propaganda and Neo-feudalism
Racist appeals to the public by the Romney campaign conceal the fact that eight out of ten of Romney’s top donors are scurrilous banking scoundrels – the one tenth or one hundredth of the 1% who essentially run this country – and I can assure you they are not African-Americans. They are multinational corporations whose deep-pocketed CEOs have made mega-billions since the crash of 2008.
According to opensecrets.org, Mitt Romney’s top ten financial donors are the usual colluders, grifters, economic vipers and corrupt suspects one would imagine:
| Goldman Sachs | $636,080 |
| JPMorgan Chase & Co | $502,874 |
| Morgan Stanley | $476,300 |
| Bank of America | $465,850 |
| Credit Suisse Group | $421,310 |
| Citigroup Inc | $345,265 |
| Barclays | $322,400 |
| Kirkland & Ellis | $295,042 |
| Wells Fargo | $276,700 |
| Deloitte LLP | $250,510 |
What Mitt Romney offers Americans is a lurid, Dickensian future where plutocrats, banksters and corporate hucksters are society’s shot callers, drafting and writing laws allowing them to engage in criminal activity, while they dismantle regulations and directives that prevent them from continuous looting and pillage of the planet. And while the rich use grimy for-profit colleges, sub-prime mortgages and for-profit prisons to extract wealth from the poor and working class, they deliver a deracinated trail of tears, hardship, decaying environment – a toll-booth society to replace a vanquished public commons creating untold human misery. These companies traffic in poverty.
Just as an example, take Romney’s top donor, Goldman Sachs. This corrupt, global crime syndicate engages in all three activities listed above with the for-profit college Educational Management Corporation (EDMC) recently being sued for the alleged theft of billions of dollars in federal funds. Yet, they even announced recently they’re bagging a contract to provide so called “educational services” at New York City jails. This corporation is a key player among the criminals and thieves that crashed the casino economy and brought down whole countries like Greece.
Yet, instead of going to jail themselves, the CEO of Goldman Sachs is now financing the construction of burgeoning jail services for working people whose lives the corporations and their surrogates have left in ruin, some of whom will become candidates to occupy the New York city jail cells and use the Wall-Street-driven “educational service” products. The company is now trying to corner the market on financing incarceration for the poor.
According to Reuters, Goldman Sachs will invest nearly $10 million in:
… the nation’s first “social service bonds” to help fund a New York City program that aims to lower the 50 percent recidivism rate among youthful offenders jailed at the Rikers Island correctional facility.
It is quite extraordinary that the recidivist plutocrats, the corporations they run and the surrogate class that serves them are getting away with financing prison and jail “services” rather than being prosecuted, convicted and then frog marched into jail cells. Not one of the fraudsters from the Great Financial Crisis of 2008 ever ended up in Rikers Island nor any other correctional facility, federal or state, and it is doubtful any of them will.
Meanwhile, Romney will continue to accept corporate largess in untold quantities in exchange for carrying the plutocrats’ water, and he will resort to racist and sexist tactics, advertisements and outright lies to do so. With Citizens United now the law of the land, we might not know where all the money is coming from or just how much, but one thing we do know: Mitt Romney will do anything to get “selected” as CEO of America, Inc.
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