Mitt, Drugs, and Money

« July 2012 »


It seems like it's only been a week since the last Mondays With Mitt, but here we are again. Time marches on. Still no theme song, I'm afraid. It turns out that fighting the crack legal team of The Bangles over the appropriate fair use of "(Just Another) Romney Monday" isn't worth the hassle. Plus, apparently Mitt -does- have to run day.

"Unfortunately, a lot of young folks haven’t had the opportunity to really understand how the economy works, and what it takes to put people to work in real jobs, and why we have banks, and what banks do. I understand — it’s a very understandable sentiment if you don’t find a job, and you can’t see rising incomes. You’re going to be angry and looking at someone to blame. But the people to blame and the person to blame is the president and the old school liberals that have not gotten this economy turned around." - Romney, addressing OWS protestors who were picketing Bank of America.

Oh, Mittens. Could you try that again, only this time be more patronizing, condescending, and flat-out wrong? You can't? You say that actually would violate the law of conservation of douchebaggery? Well, I concede your point that I just made up for you. Because I'm just that fucking gracious.

Yeah, people don't understand why we need banks. We don't understand what banks do. First of all, any protests outside a bank aren't a protest of the CONCEPT OF BANKING. It's not like the Move Your Money protests advocated transferring all your funds from Wells Fargo to Strongbox Under The Bed. It's about ethical and acceptable behavior in pursuit of profit, which is something Mitt Romney defines very, very differently than most of us do. To the extent that he wonders why those adjectives are even in that sentence in the first place.

We know what banks do. That's the problem. We watched them run up the housing bubble through unscrupulous mortgage brokers. We watched them gamble trillions of dollars of our money on things we don't understand, most of THEM don't understand, and when they lost it all, get their trillions back from the Fed while we suffered. And then we watched them foreclose on homes they didn't own, because they cut corners and used robo-signers and didn't bother fucking well keeping track of who owes what, and who paid what, on an individual level. And if Mitt doesn't understand why that's worthy of protest, then it's not the rest of us who have the goddamned comprehension problem.

"This was not a loss to the taxpayers of America; this was a loss to shareholders and owners of JPMorgan and that’s the way America works. The $2 billion JPMorgan lost, someone else gained." - Mitt Romney, unconcerned with massive losses at JPMorgan.

Of course, at the time, the losses were only two billion. Now, it turns out, they're NINE million. And while I'd actually kind of agree with Mitt if the shareholders and owners of JPMorgan were actually jumping out of fucking windows and walking down the street wearing fucking BARRELS FOR CLOTHES after this loss, we're all well aware that this is not, in fact, how the financial system works. Nor does it work like losing your wallet, where the forty bucks you lost is forty bucks someone else found and gets to spend. I'm not saying I understand how JPMorgan's trading losses work, but I know other people didn't end up with that nine billion dollars. Imaginary money can vanish, as the last crash taught us.

"The states have rights under their constitution to do what they think is best. The governor here is trying an idea, and I'm not going to disagree with Governor Scott. The idea of people being tested is something, which, we'll see what the results are." - Mitt Romney, being a lying-ass tribalist shithead.

If you're wondering whether a Republican you know is a lying, tribalist shithead, all you need to do is ask them what they think about Rick Scott's plan to drug-test state workers and welfare recipients. Because here's the thing. The results are in. And the results are that, first, it's unconstitutional to a degree that the Obamacare opponents could only wet-dream about. Florida's lost as many cases as it's been possible to have, given the pace of the legal system and the amount of time these laws have been ostensibly in effect.

Even more importantly, though, they cost more than they save. The number of people who fail these tests don't actually cover the cost, in lost wages/benefits, of testing everyone in order to catch them. Which means it's actually cheaper to just accept that some people you think are undeserving are gonna get high once in a while than it is to try to uphold some psychotic principle rooted in an unnatural hatred of public employees and poor people.

These results were in long before Mitt Romney said Rick Scott's experiment was fine by him. Which means he's either ignorant of these results, which is a disqualification for the presidency, or he's a lying-ass tribalist shithead, which is apparently qualification enough to keep this thing close. The tribalist shithead constituency is pretty damn huge, after all.