Steve's Politics Blog

This is from the Democratic National Committee Rapid Response Team. It isn’t rapid, but it is a good response.

Mitt Romney’s reinvention convention is starting with the theme “We Built It.” Mitt Romney will try to sell himself to the American people as a “Mr. Fix It” who knows how to turn a business around. Of course, once you examine his record, it’s clear Mitt Romney knows less about turning businesses around and more about running them into the ground.

Mitt Romney made millions of dollars bankrupting companies, shuttering factories, offshoring jobs and putting profits before people. The theme of the Republican National Convention paints a rosy picture, but the theme of Mitt Romney’s time as a corporate raider is less flattering. Mitt Romney didn’t build that — he destroyed it.

“Mitt Romney: You Didn’t Build That — You Destroyed It”

Truth Out has the article Romney Pledges a Fed That Will Screw Workers.

The much more important policy decisions that allow people like Mitt Romney to be incredibly wealthy and the rest of the country to be struggling are totally off the media’s radar screen.

Romney’s statement about the Fed fits in the latter category because he said that he would pick a chair who supports a “strong dollar.” The implication is that he wants the Fed to run policies that keep the dollar overvalued relative to other currencies, making US goods uncompetitive in international markets.

The arithmetic on this is fairly simple. If the dollar is 20 percent above its proper value, then it means that prices of goods produced in the United States are effectively 20 percent higher relative to the goods produced in other countries. This strong dollar effectively makes imports 20 percent cheaper relative to goods produced in the United States. That naturally means that we will purchase more goods produced in Mexico, China, and other countries and fewer goods produced in the United States.

On the flip side, this strong dollar means that our exports are 20 percent more expensive to people in other countries than would otherwise be the case. This is equivalent to putting a 20 percent tariff on everything that we export. Needless to say, this will seriously depress our exports to the rest of the world.

Of course few sources other than Truth-out and my blog put the issue so simply.  If the workers could see the simple arithmetic above, they would stop slavishly following Ron Paul, hating Bernanke, and thinking of voting for Mitt Romney.

A strong dollar seems like such a good idea to people when the Republicans don’t explain its implications.  If the Republicans would just explain that a strong dollar is good for people who have money to lend, but not good for people who need to borrow money, maybe some people would by able figure out which category they belong to.

Ultimately, if the people who have to borrow money cannot pay it back, then this policy is really not good for the people who have it and lend it.  A properly valued dollar would mean the lenders have to take a bit of a haircut, but that has to be better than getting your head cut-off (let alone completely shaved).

Here is a preview of the Romney/Ryan acceptance speech at the Republican Convention later this week.

Remember, if this turns out to be accurate, you saw it here first.

In this new ad, Elizabeth Warren asks some very good questions.

Why do women have to fight the same old battles? Women still don’t get equal pay for equal work – Republicans blocked that, and even pushed a law that could have denied insurance coverage for birth control. We’re still fighting to protect a woman’s right to choose nearly 40 years after Roe v. Wade, and we could be just one Supreme Court justice away from losing it. How could this be happening in 2012?

She just left out the part that sending her to Washington as U.S. Senator from Massachusetts is part of the process of not backing down.

Talking points Memo has the article Rep. Steve King: I’ve Never Heard Of A Girl Getting Pregnant From Statutory Rape Or Incest.

A 1996 review by the Guttmacher Institute found “at least half of all babies born to minor women are fathered by adult men.”

Rep. King is willing to make all sorts of legislation without having personally seen a case, but on this issue, he must have a personal telling of a story before he will consider legislation. As Stephen Colbert might say, “Is this unbelievable, or is this the most unbelievable thing you have ever heard?”

Why do we allow people who are as ignorant of the facts of life as Rep. Steve King is to make legislation about sexuality? There should be a test of biological knowledge of all Congress critters before they are allowed to vote on, let alone propose, any such legislation. Maybe we need a voter ID law for Congress critters.

Here is an email I received from Rebuild The Dream. See the video version below the email version.

Thanks to RogerG for posting this on his Facebook page.

Ramesh Raskar presents femto-photography, a new type of imaging so fast it visualizes the world one trillion frames per second, so detailed it shows light itself in motion. This technology may someday be used to build cameras that can look “around” corners or see inside the body without X-rays.

So, how do I turn this into something political?

I suppose I could remark on how the Tea Partiers are still arguing about 19th century science while many of us are ready to move on to 21st century science.

MIT News has the article A camera that peers around corners. This is about the same research presented above. Maybe they had to use the idea of seeing around corners to sell this line of research or maybe it even originated from solving this type of problem. However, I think that these techniques will provide far deeper fundamental insights into basic physics than just looking around corners. The uses that this technology will be put to will far outstrip the imaginations of the people who invented it. It will certainly outstrip anything I can imagine right now.

I received the following email:

Steven —

Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee for president of the United States, just said this:

“No one has ever asked to see my birth certificate. They know that this is the place that we were born and raised.”

Take a moment or two to think about that, what he’s actually saying, and what it says about Mitt Romney.

Thanks,

Messina

Jim Messina
Campaign Manager
Obama for America

Maybe this gedankenexperiment (In German – an experiment carried out in thought only) suggested by Jim Messina belongs in a category with my previous post Why Do Republicans Celebrate Labor Day?

See, my science/engineering education wasn’t completely wasted.  This is where I learned the phrase “gedanken experiment” or just plain “gedanken”.  I bet it cost less than $15,000 in tuition, for all my years as a college undergraduate.  See how great inflation is for making your past debts shrink to insignificance?  I think we could use a little of that right now.

Democracy Now has the August 10 interview Romney’s Death Squad Ties: Bain Launched with Millions from Oligarchs Behind Salvadoran Atrocities. Why have you not heard of this 2 week old story?

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is facing new scrutiny over revelations he founded the private equity firm Bain Capital with investments from Central American elites linked to death squads in El Salvador. After initially struggling to find investors, Romney traveled to Miami in 1983 to win pledges of $9 million, 40 percent of Bain’s start-up money. Some investors had extensive ties to the death squads responsible for the vast majority of the tens of thousands of deaths in El Salvador during the 1980s. We’re joined by Huffington Post reporter Ryan Grim, who connects the dots in his latest story, “Mitt Romney Started Bain Capital with Money from Families Tied to Death Squads.” “There’s no possible way that anybody in 1984 could check out these families — which is the term that [Romney’s campaign] use, these families — and come away convinced that this money was clean,” Grim says. [includes rush transcript]

As I watched, in the 1980s, the news of unfolding events in El Salvador, I was struck by the fact that extremely wealthy people in countries around the world seemed to have a certain sympathy for the situations that each such family faced. It is no surprise, therefore, that wealthy families in one country could aid and support and take aid and support for and from similarly positioned families in other countries.

If you watch the video, you may understand why Romney makes such a big deal of Obama going around the world apologizing for some of the atrocities committed by the USA.

As George Bush once advised politicians, “Never apologize.”

At about 24 minutes into the video there is a reading of some quotes from Greg Grandin’s book Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism about the situation in El Salvador:

The problem was that the military groups had very little popular support due in large part to the fact that they were “preternaturally violent.” According to Reagan’s own ambassador, Robert White, their solution to the crisis “was apocalyptic: the country must be ‘destroyed totally, the economy must be wrecked, unemployment must be massive.’ and a ‘cleansing’ of some ‘3 or 4 or 500,000 people’ must be carried out”

Romney said he learned a lot from his Latin American investors. One of the things I have been fearing for a long time is that the quote above is one of the things that Romney (and the Republican Party) has learned about solving our economic problems.

Another piece of information from the video was the one about Romney’s company paying an 88% annual return to its investors over two decades. If you are an experienced investor, you know that such results are impossible to produce legally and honestly.