ON  "CITIZENS  UNITED"

        I THINK IT'S safe to say we can start calling this "The Citizens United Era".  Because the damn thing is upon us and it will not be an easy proposition to relegate it to the dust-bin of bad rulings.  Until we can manage a constitutional amendment to negate the effects of this notorious 5-to-4 Supreme Court fiasco, the political landscape, the economic landscape, hell---the White House landscape is going to be shaped by this shockingly unconstitutional piece of judicial hijinks, the likes of which is commonly referred to as "judicial activism".  I see it as much worse than that.  In my view, it is unmitigated jurist corporatism.

       If this decision is any indication of the character of the current Supreme Court---and, of course, it is---then there is no telling what we can expect from the Court as it is currently configured, until it is rehabilitated.  There is pretty good consensus that the 2012-2016 President will most likely make at least one, maybe two   appointments to the Court.  For this reason, it is crucial that Mitt Romney gets no closer to the White House than the average Washington D.C. tourist.  If President Obama does not get to make the next appointment or two, this country will be on a course for the forseeable future that my worst nightmares can't compare with.  And they are bad.

       Possibly the worst aspect of the Citizens United ruling is that it has given down-for-the-count Karl Rove a new lease on political life through his Political Action Committee.  I recently viewed an episode of Moyers & Co. in which, along with Bill Moyers, his two guests laid out a frightening scenario with Karl Rove at the center of an extreme right-wing plot to steer this country off an ultra-conservative cliff.

       If Karl Rove, Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed succeed, it's Canada-here-I-come!!

       Therefore, since I love this country and would prefer to stay, we must lay Citzens United in its grave.  And soon, before this thing has an opportunity to snowball. 

                                                                                              ---   Robert S. Moore,  9/17/2012

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          On Mitt Romney: A Synopsis of Greed

         Willard "Mitt" Romney's background in many ways suggests a man who was born to be president --- disgustingly rich from birth, raised in prep schools, no early exposure to minorities outside of maids, a powerful daddy to cleanup his missteps, and timely exemptions from military service.  In Romney's bio there are some eerie early-life similarities to other recent presidential figures.  (Is America really ready for another Republican president who was a prep-school cheerleader?)  And like other great presidential double-talkers like Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, Romney has shown particular aptitude in the area of telling multiple factual versions of his own life story.

        "I longed in many respects to actually be in Vietnam and be representing our country there," he claimed years after the war.

        To a different audience, he said, "I was not planning on signing up for the military.  It was not my desire to go off and serve in Vietnam."

        He did go to Stanford in the Sixties , which was followed by a two-year Mormon missionary term in France, then on to Harvard Business School in the Seventies.  Faced with making a career choice, Romney left Harvard, and eschewing both politics and law, entered the world of financial consulting.

        After learning the ropes at Boston Consulting Group, he joined with entrepreneur Bill Bain in 1977 at Bain & Company, where he spent another six years honing his "consulting" skills.  Bain then created a firm-within-a-firm by the name "Bain Capital".  Romney was handed the reins as this new branch evolved into a private equity firm.

        Long story short:  Toward the middle of his Bain career, Romney made a fateful strategic decision in moving Bain Capital away from creating companies like the successful STAPLES through venture capital schemes, and toward a business model that achieved iconic status thanks to Michael Douglas's Gordon Gekko in Hollywood's Wall Street.  That is to say, he began borrowing huge sums of money to take over existing firms, then extracting value from them by force.  In the Eighties, this form of financial piracy became know as a "leveraged buyout".  Avoiding the "hostile takeover" onus, Romney and Bain would simply buy off a company's management with lucrative bonuses.

        Romney consistently adopts a public posture of having been above the fray, with no blood on his hands from any of the deals he personally engineered.  "I never actually ran one of our investments", he has said.  "That was left to management."

        In reality, though, Romney was unquestionably the decider at Bain.  "I insisted on having almost dictatorial powers", he bragged years after Bain's looting of a company named AMPAD.

        Over the years, colleagues would anonymously whisper stories about "Mitt the Boss" to the press, describing him as cunning, manipulative and a little bit nuts, with "an ability to identify people's insecurities and exploit them for his own benefit".

        Even in the already colorful mix of firms in the private equity business, Bain had a reputation on Wall Street for secrecy and extreme weirdness --- "the KGB of consulting".

        Romney was a prime mover in the radical social and political transformation that was cooked-up by Wall Street beginning in the 1980's.

        Romney isn't blue or red.  He's the apostle of a revolution in which transactions are manufactured instead of products, wealth is generated without prosperity, and Cayman Islands partnerships are lovingly erected and nurtured while American communities fall apart.  If Romney is elected in November, more money will be taken from American workers and transferred into the offshore accounts of a handful of billionaires.

        Willard "Mitt" Romney is Gordon Gekko embodied, but with much better PR --- and a much bigger goal.  A takeover artist all his life, he's now trying to take over America itself.

                                                                                     -----   Robert S. Moore    10/17/12

                                              (with a nod to Matt Taibi)