Romney’s detachment unacceptable

Former House speaker and current presidential candidate Newt Gingrich will never be on a list of people I admire most. He is a shameless demagogue and practitioner of the worst that Washington, D.C. has to offer. Yet, even a broken clock is right twice a day. Gingrich has recently launched a sustained attack on Republican frontrunner Mitt Romney and his stewardship of the private equity firm Bain Capital. Gingrich, though I never imagined I would write these words, is absolutely right.

Indeed we should be having this conversation about Mitt Romney and his work at Bain. Following the 2008 financial meltdown the United States had a robust discussion about the behavior of the banks and mortgage houses. And even though most of their activity-the CDO's, hedging and CDS's-were legal in our capitalist system, that did not prevent our debating their outsized roles in the debacle. Romney's situation is not dissimilar. His business practices were perfectly legal but that should not eliminate any discourse about why he made certain decisions and the effects of those decisions on communities and workers.

Romney and Bain, in 1994, invested $18 million into a company named Steel Dynamics, which is located in DeKalb County, Ind. Romney's investment made Bain the company's largest domestic stakeholder, according to the Los Angeles Times. The officials of DeKalb County offered Bain more than $30 million in grants and subsidies to locate the plant in DeKalb.

And in order for our country to pay for this corporate welfare, county officials implemented a new income tax on its residents, which many residents fought, and a "new quarter-percent tax" to finance infrastructure spending, like roads and job training, the Los Angeles Times reported. Bain did put the company in Indiana and five years later sold its stake and made an $85 million profit that was subsidized by tax dollars.

I have no problem with government investing in business. I do, however, have a problem with outrageously hypocritical and dishonest politicians, like Mitt Romney, who made millions with the aid of government help but who then criticize government assistance for middle class and working class people as European-style social welfare.

Many conservatives, rallying to Romney's defense, have become pyromaniacs in fields of straw men. They have labeled these attacks on Romney's record as an attack on capitalism and free enterprise itself. One of Romney's New Hampshire supporters even claimed that the attacks were anti-American.

This is, of course, ridiculous partisan poppycock, and it is not unexpected coming from a party that continues to drift further into the abyss of stupidity. Moreover, American capitalism is not running for president. Mitt Romney is running for president and he chose to make Bain the central aspect of his candidacy.

Therefore it is an offense to our democracy and an insult to our intelligence to then say we the people have no right to scrutinize and interrogate his record. Romney is the one schlepping around the country selling himself, erroneously, as a job creator. Bain's number one job was not to make jobs, but to earn high returns on the investments it put into businesses, even if that called for laying off thousands of workers. The former Massachusetts governor should merely say this instead of making himself into something he is not.

This is another problem that will haunt Romney if he wins the Republican nomination because he, in the words of conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg, has an "authentic inauthenticity problem." He began wearing Gap jeans when he was criticized as being too formal. He awkwardly joked to a group of Floridians last summer that he too was unemployed; and in the run up to the New Hampshire primary he—a Harvard MBA/JD—informed an audience of his own past worrying about pink slips.

Yet occasionally the real Mitt Romney, the aloof elitist snob, rears his head. Last week he remarked, "I like being able to fire people who perform services for me." Such a comment is bad no matter how one slices it. No one gets pleasure out of having to fire people in any context, except Mitt Romney it seems. Romney also, when asked if economic injustice should ever be talked about, replied, yes it should, but in "quiet rooms."

Who will be in these quiet rooms? I assume not the American people, maybe just multi-national corporations, millionaires and their whore puppets in Congress? What sort of twisted country does this selfish man envision? Judging from his actions and his words I can only assume he foresees an unequal plutocratic society where multi-millionaires, like himself, get rich with government aid while attacking the rest of us as begging for handouts and being envious and jealous of him, as he implied last week when he accused President Obama of practicing the politics of envy.

What the elitist Romney, in his stunning detachment, fails to realize is that we do not want his life. I surely do not. He can't even drink; I would die without my beloved Burgundy wine and whiskey sours. What we do want, however, is fairness. If the government is helping millionaires like Romney, they'd better help young people like me go to college.

If the government is investing in training for Romney's workers, they should also be training Americans who are out of working and looking for employment. Americans don't envy or resent the wealthy. All we want are decent jobs and the opportunities to build comfortable lives for ourselves. We don't want a hand out; we want a fair shot. This isn't envy; it's reaching for that so-called American dream that has become more and more the exclusive domain of the Mitt Romneys of America.

—Juan Thompson '13 is a political science major.