The Coming Romney Implosion

Although, like so many others, I've been very disappointed in President Obama's performance, especially in the policing of the banking industry, the drone war in the Middle East (and the Presidential power to murder anyone anywhere in the world deemed a "terrorist"), and his signature health-care bill that enshrines the profits of insurance companies; I can't help enjoying what appears to be the unraveling of the Romney campaign these days, over his prevarications regarding his control of Bain Capital after 1999 (when it became a job exporter & destroyer), and his refusal to make his tax returns public. An aura of  slickness and dishonesty is forming around him, and the more he tries to "clarify" things by splitting hairs in business-speak, the more he begins to sound like Clinton trying to fend off accusations of sexual impropriety by implying that oral sex is not true sex, without mentioning the former (remember, "It depends on what your definition of 'is' is"?) Both Charles Blow and Gail Collins offered revealing columns on this subject in Saturday's New York Times (July 14).

So the Republican Presidential campaign is beginning to implode, and the Democrats are gleefully nudging it along, as they should. By the time we get to the national convention at the end of August Romney's stink might be so great the would be GOP kingmakers may actually betray their distaste while praising him on the podium, and the gut-based voters back home may get the subliminal message. How long can Boehner and others insist that the election is not about who Romney is or what is leadership would be like, but only about getting rid of that usurper in the White House and replacing him by anybody (even a Bush retread??)? Can non-racists, non-Obama haters (who think he's both the devil and a socialist) actually swallow this?

The problem is that any Republican nominee would have the same problem. Since they're all really working for the big corporations and giant banks and don't give a whit about the poor (whom they try to prevent from voting—and soon, eating, judging by their recent attempt to defund food stamps while preserving big agribusiness "farm" subsidies) corporate malfeasance, the environment, infrastructure, education, etc. etc., the GOP election strategy is perforce to crap on the opponent and stay as mum as possible about the character and background of their nominee. Fortunately, we still have some investigative journalism left, and the Boston Globe has been doing the digging around Romney, requiring him to make 5 network TV appearances to split those hairs over his disssociation with Bain (despite a 6-figure salary) after he accepted the unpaid position as Salt Lake City Olympics chair in 1999.

This season is going to be fun.

Day 21: The Occupy Wall Street Protests Gain a Foothold in the Public Imagination

On Friday, October 7, WBAI’s Jordan Journal with Howard Jordan, featured New School economics professor Rick Wolff on the Occupy Wall Street movement and protests. Wolff has become the unofficial guide to this historical phenomenon, and he’s the perfect person to do it, with his grasp of history, solid grounding in both mainstream and Marxist economic theory, his personal acquaintaince with many of the players on the economic scene today, including Ben Bernanke and many corporate bank officials, and his talent for explaining complex things simply and clearly. Yesterday he was quoting Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke that the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protest was of little significance.

To the contrary, he said. Knowing Bernanke as he does, the Fed Chairman is truly worried, as are the Wall Street (criminal) bankers. They don’t know how this is going to end. They had dismissed the Tea Party movement, which attacks them, as no-nothings, though necessarily tolerated by the Republican establishment, since they have such an extensive following. But they weren’t expecting a challenge from the left to gain traction. After all, the mainstream media had managed to either ignore, dismiss or quarantine them in the form of the large anti-war demonstrations of the past decade—whose truth counted for little or nothing in the media marketplace.

But these young protesters are different. Even though relatively small in number, they’re persisting into their third week of a very prominent occupation. They’ve had run-ins with the police and come out on top, garnering world attention and much public sympathy. They understand the crimes of the banks all too well, much better than the Tea Partyers. And now the mainstream media are coming around, with detailed reports in the Times and warmly sympathetic opinion pieces by commentators like Paul Krugman (in Friday, Oct. 6's Times). Moreover, they’re expressing the feelings of millions of people—the new Silent Majority—who are furious at the banks for bringing down the economy, causing so much pain, and escaping any real punishment. Theirs is the fear of the guilty. Wolff pointed out that the politically less active are waiting to see if the movement will persist before signing on, and now with mainstream media attention and endorsement, it seems to be snowballing into an established challenge from the left—the hitherto moribund left, which the conventional wisdom had been accustomed to dealing with in obituary mode.

But now, even NYC Police Chief Ray Kelly says he won’t bother the protesters as long as they don’t block traffic and stay within police barricades during their marches. He knows he risks another black eye if he tries to harrass them. I suspect Mayor Bloomberg is feeling some Schadenfreude towards his “friends in the (criminal) banking industry that a “rag-tag” group of young (desperate, jobless, victimized) protesters is giving voice to truths that not even the New York Times permitted itself to utter, and that this is resonating across the country and throughout the world. The People are becoming more aware of what really happened, and they’re supporting those who affirm these truths by sleeping on cardboard in the open, under plastic tarps in a public (private) park—the only one in the city, incidentally, where it’s permitted to stay overnight. No responsible spokesperson, from the President on down, can afford to dismiss them any more. They’ve established a beachhead in the public imagination.

Meanwhile, the reactionary media, Fox “noise” (—Keith Olberman’s pun) commentators Bill O’Reilley and Ann Coulter are angrily twisting around with their worn-out clichés in a pathetic attempt to discredit the protesters. For example, O’Reilley called Prof. Frances Fox Piven, who spoke to the OWS encampment this week, a “Communist sympathizer, who was outed by Glenn Beck.” Can anyone take this seriously? What Communists are left to sympathize with, the Albanians? And Beck! He lost his job at Fox after his ratings plummetted 15% in about a week, after he got the Tahrir Square protests exactly wrong, calling them a rabble. Of course, now he’s pimping for Netanyahu. (Remember this is a Mormon, who, like us Jews, are an economically highly successful group who dote on their history of persecution as validating a conveniently permanent victimhood). Coulter has ominously warned her listeners that these dangerous occupiers are similar to those who started the French and Russian Revolutions—those horrendous turns of History that threw out an old order she so dearly loves.

So the relatively simple act of sleeping in the re-dubbed Liberty Square is apparently enough to deflate the Murdoch Empire! Listen to the children! The Emperor has been naked for years, and the 80-year-old Murdoch is no pin-up.

I feel incredibly honored that my photograph of artist Dinorah Delfin from last April, holding Adbusters’ corporate US flag against a background of the scuttled ships along the Arthur Kill waterway in Staten Island, was used as their page-poster in the September-October issue (reprinted in the following issue as well) to exhort us to Occupy Wall Street.