Steve's Politics Blog

Remember that Mitt Romney made his private sector fortune by promising to take over a company, cut its expenses, improve its profits, make fortunes for its investors, and  save the company from bankruptcy.

His secret plan that he applied almost every time was to borrow money to take over the company, strip out and sell all its valuable assets, fire the workers, steal from the pension funds, steal from the health care funds, load the company with all the debt that the temporarily improved cooked books showed, and walk away with a fortune for himself.

The employees lost their jobs and their pensions and their health care, the people who lent the company money lost everything when the company went bankrupt, and all the investors that bought shares to buy Romney’s stake to take the company public again lost their shirts.

Romney’s whole career is about selling people magic solutions.  Magic solutions always sound nicer than real solutions.  The reality in life is that there is no magic.  In the end, the books have to balance, the math has to work out, and when someone steals, someone else loses.

I accidentally discovered that when I tried posting this comment on Politico, that it was secretly  accessing your Facebook account.  It never occurred to me that Politico was doing that.  I thought that signing into my Politico account was enough.  This time I accessed Politico before I separately logged into Facebook. That’s when I discovered that you could not post a comment without also being logged into Facebook.  I guess Politico will just have to do without my brilliant insights.

I may also have to be more careful about logging out of Facebook before I leave a Facebook page and navigate to some other place.

Women’s Voices – Join Women for Obama.

It’s up to all of us to make sure women’s voices are heard in this election. Watch women speak about what’s at stake and why they’re supporting President Obama, then help spread the word by clicking on your favorite graphic below and sharing this video with your friends on Facebook.

Here is a video of Scott Brown mentioning his model for an excellent Supreme Court Justice.

How come Clarence Thomas doesn’t get the respect he deserves?

That said, now you have another reason not to vote for Scott Brown for Senator. There will be Supreme court vacancies in the 6 year tenure of the next Senator from Massachusetts. I know I’d much rather have Elizabeth Warren voting on these choices instead of Scott Brown.

Apparently the rest of the world went to a different debate from the one that Sharon and I saw. I guess it turned out much better than the one we saw (at least half of) by sitting in some place that we thought was the Tsongas Center in Lowell. Coincidentally, there were 5,000 in the audience where we were, too.

If you have not seen the debate, at least the first 33 minutes of it, don’t bother. Just take Andy Hiller’s word for how it turned out.

If you saw the movie The Fighter about the boxer Mickey Ward from Lowell and you saw the endorsement of Elizabeth Warren from a coach at the gym where Ward learned to box and continued to train, then maybe you come away with an understanding of the Warren strategy. According to the movie, Ward won a lot of fights by just standing there and taking such a terrific beating that his opponents wore themselves out delivering the beating. When Ward delivered the knockout punch, they had no energy left to defend themselves.

Well, I have seen Warren take beating after beating. I am just hoping that Brown is wearing himself out so that he won’t be ready when she finally punches back.

I suppose I am like most of the people portrayed in the movie who thought Ward was nuts to use this strategy, but it all worked out in the end. Here is hoping life follows art.

NECN had coverage of the pre-debate festivities in Lowell in the article Brown, Warren supporters convene in Lowell, Mass.

Steve Greenberg, a Warren supporter from Sturbridge, Mass. said, “I hope they get back onto the issues and not the silly side show, but I don’t know, but I think Elizabeth will be prepared to handle anything that gets thrown her way.”

They left out the part where I told them that Elizabeth Warren predicted exactly how the housing bubble would burst several years before it happened. I told them that she understands how this all happened far better than Scott Brown ever would. They chose to leave that out and instead quoted a person who said that she didn’t think Elizabeth Warren understands the middle class.

As proof of Elizabeth Warren’s understanding the middle class, read her book The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents are Going Broke by Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi (Aug 17, 2004) .

If you are in the middle class and read this book you will find out information on how you got into the predicament you are in that you might never have seen expressed quite so well.

As the debate turned out, I am embarrassed by my remarks that did make it on air.

This is the poster we are taking with us to the debate in Lowell tonight.  We won’t bring it into the arena, but will be standing in front of the arena for a few hours before the debate.

You can use this poster where ever you find it appropriate.

The Boston Globe has the article Banks’ Record-Low Interest Rates Frustrate Nation’s Savers on its front page today.

Neil Silverman, a Framingham engineer, diligently saved for decades, accumulating a nest egg worth more than $1 million.

But when Silverman reached retirement age, he encountered an unexpected hurdle: interest rates so low that his savings are generating little income. Even $1 million in the bank at 1 percent interest yields just $10,000 a year — not much to live on.

In my reaction that I posted on the web site of The Boston Globe, I said:

What is a retiree with over $1million  nest egg doing investing in CDs?  With high quality companies with decades long records of paying increasing dividends now paying at rates from 3 to 5%, that $1million could bring in $50,000.  Along with Social security, Silverman could be taking in $70,000 per year, and the increasing dividends would also lead to capital gains.

Just shows that the idea of people taking care of their own retirement investments is not such a good idea even for people as smart as a retired engineer.

I am a retired engineer also.  My nest egg is almost back to pre-2009 levels and I have been living off the income from this nest egg for over 6 years.

They say that the worst thing that can happen to your retirement savings is to have a severe loss of value in the first years of your retirement.  Well, that is exactly what happened to me.  However, my diversified portfolio of high quality, dividend paying stocks has kept my income at a comfortable level quite independent of the current market value of my stocks.

Maybe the Globe could do all retirees a favor by researching and then explaining how this type of strategy works.  I’d be glad to help the Globe, if they were interested.

Since the subject of the article lives in Framingham, maybe I should have mentioned my cousin in Framingham who could do an excellent job of explaining the investment strategy that I mentioned.  He is a better practitioner of that strategy than I am, and I am doing well enough with the strategy to be satisfied.

The New York Times has the David Brooks column The Conservative Mind.

… there was another sort of conservative, who would be less familiar now. This was the traditional conservative, intellectual heir to Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk, Clinton Rossiter and Catholic social teaching. This sort of conservative didn’t see society as a battleground between government and the private sector. Instead, the traditionalist wanted to preserve a society that functioned as a harmonious ecosystem, in which the different layers were nestled upon each other: individual, family, company, neighborhood, religion, city government and national government.

Who could argue with the definition of a political philosophy like that?  If you want to label that a style of conservatism, then it is one to which I could subscribe.

Later on, he comments,

The two conservative tendencies lived in tension. But together they embodied a truth that was put into words by the child psychologist John Bowlby, that life is best organized as a series of daring ventures from a secure base.

That really describes something that I believe.  I get frustrated with the really radical left that wants to throw everything out and start again from scratch.  No system is perfect, but my hope is that a system can be improved to become nearer to perfection.  If you have something that has worked pretty well for hundreds of years, you are taking a mighty big risk to throw the whole thing out and think you can replace it with something better.  I don’t say for sure that it can’t be done, but at this point I don’t think it is worth the risk.  At some point in the future things might get so bad that it does become worth the risk.  Let us hope that the people currently driving it in the race to the bottom for the middle-class some how wake up and realize to what their drive will ultimately lead.

Thanks to RogerS for the link that lead to my initial reading of the article.  And thanks to RichardH for urging me to get off my duff and post this.

I wish there were a G rated version of this, but it is too good to pass up if you are willing to put up with the language.

From wtfu2012.com there is this partial transcript:

Sorry my friends but there’s no time to snore

An out-of-touch millionaire has just declared war

On schools, the environment, unions, fair pay

We’re all on our own if Romney has his way…

This is all sponsored by the Jewish Council for Education and Research.

Thanks to JimG for bringing this video to my attention.

One of the things that I frequently hear is that “I work so hard, that I just don’t have the time.” Also, “I have to work two jobs to keep my head above water, so I don’t have the time.”

I understand that problem, and I have no immediate solution for the people suffering this problem. I know it doesn’t help to notice that making people work this hard to make ends meet is a great way to keep them from being politically active and demanding their rights. If you look down the road to where this spiral is taking us, you might see that when it gets so bad that people have nothing else to lose, then they will find time to get active. Right now, people think they might be able to save something of the American dream, and don’t want to risk getting off the treadmill to protest.

The Daily Kos has the article, Romney to teacher “I didn’t ask you a question”.

The Daily Kos article provided the transcript:

When I was asked to speak with Mitt Romney it seemed like a very important thing to me, and I wanted to put a lot of careful thought into what I would say. So, I went to the round table discussion very optimistic and interested in hearing what he had to say.

When he sat down, one of the first questions he asked was, he said “I understand there is a teacher here today, which one of you is a teacher?”

So, I raised my hand, thinking that’s a good thing, he’s interested in education, but it wasn’t a good thing. I felt like his view was a little old-fashioned and I was surprised by it. He went on to kind of lecture me about schools and how bad they are. He talked bad about the teacher’s union. He was talking about the importance of private schools and voucher systems.

At one point, I said to him, “I have an answer for that.” And he said, “I didn’t ask you a question.”

Perhaps the lack of listening skills shown here explains why Mitt Romney thinks jet airplanes should have roll down windows. I’ll provide a link to the roll down windows brouhaha when and if I can find a video of him making these remarks. Until then, I don’t really know if he was serious or if he was joking.