It’s true that Governor Romney and President Obama belong to the ruling class and act more in the interest of wealthy elites than in mine. Consequently, no matter who wins, many of the issues I hold dear will remain fundamentally unaddressed. The U.S. imperial war machine will keep chugging along killing the innocent and not so innocent. Poverty and challenges facing the most vulnerable will continue to be rhetorically deplored but conspicuously underfunded. The economy will continue to lumber forward with the rich doing well, the middle-class being squeezed and the poor being crushed. For these reasons, I plan to vote for a third way and a new vision for our nation in the Green Party’s Jill Stein.
But we all know that either Obama or Romney will be the next president. I do not want Romney to win because I believe he has cobbled together a coalition that represents the most reactionary elements in national politics. There is a strong undercurrent of xenophobia and hate running through the Republican Party. They have an “us vs. them” narrative for most all of the nation’s challenges. They blame a swath of groups including teachers, unions, poor people, people of color, feminist, immigrants, Islam, and homosexuals for the slow economy, the national debt and all things gone wrong. The party’s vision is backward looking, championing a return to an imagined past America; a more racist, sexist, homophobic and White America.
The Republican Party is the home of theocrats for which the separation of church and state is a nuisance. They lead the charge to end access to abortion, limit rights of lesbian, gays, bi sexual transgendered and queer people, deny important precepts of science and seek to imprint their version of Christian values into U.S. law (thoroughly misrepresenting the teachings of Jesus in the process).
But today the people who may be the most important in helping Governor Romney are a specific set of plutocrats and oligarchs who are pouring money into his campaign. Although both Obama and Romney are supported by the ruling class, a number of them have decided to back Romney because they believe President Obama is encouraging class envy and warfare. Some have gone so far as to claim he is promoting socialism. These views appear to be most prevalent among the ultra-rich. Of course this is absurd, but it speaks to their narrow understanding of socialism and their inflated sense of worth and entitlement. A New Yorker magazine article titled “Super Rich Irony: Why do billionaires feel victimized by Obama?” does an excellent job outlining their thinking. The piece by Chrystia Freeland quotes among others Omega Advisor hedge fund founder Leon Cooperman, a Bronx-born, sixty-nine-year-old billionaire as saying, “Our problem, frankly, is as long as the President remains anti-wealth, anti-business, anti-energy, anti-private-aviation, he will never get the business community behind him. The problem and the complication is the forty or fifty percent of the country on the dole that support him.”
Instead of acknowledging their accumulation of wealth as a combination of their ingenuity, hard work, good fortune and a helping hand or encouragement from parents, teachers and mentors, Mr. Cooperman and the business community he claims to speak for appear to believe that they are self-made, rich solely due to their talents. They convey feelings of entitlement. They are the creators and the "forty or fifty percent" are takers. They dismiss the fact that their businesses are kept running by the sweat, blood and tears of the workers and dedicated experts who know their jobs inside and out. They ignore the fact that they need working class people, who toil and struggle to take care of their families, to buy their products. They take for granted all the advantages provided by the U.S. market including the most efficient worker in the world, highly developed infrastructure and magnet for global talent.
This quote from a letter to President Obama from Mr. Cooperman exposes the depth of his arrogance, "As a group we employ many millions of taxpaying people, pay their salaries, provide them with healthcare coverage, start new companies, found new industries, create new products, fill store shelves at Christmas, and keep the wheels of commerce and progress (and indeed of government, by generating the income whose taxation funds it) moving.”
Yes he wrote fill store shelves at Christmas and progress moving. In his minds they keep the world on its axis.
I don't know for sure if Romney agrees with this wing of the ruling class. Who knows what Romney believes? He is like a blank slate ready to say what he thinks you need to hear. But I suspect he does. His taped comments about the forty-seven percent who see themselves as victims and are dependent on government echoing Cooperman's sentiment is well known. I am most disturbed by his comment on the tape that these people "believe that they are entitled to healthcare, to food, to housing."
Ayn Rand
