REMINDER: People on welfare didn’t cost us 15 million jobs and trillions in savings. People on Wall Street did.
Mitt Romney released one doctored tax return this week but he also – accidentally – released something that no one expected: some truth.
Thanks to a waiter with a small camera and gigantic metaphorical testicles, James E. Carter and David Corn at Mother Jones, we finally got a peek at the way Mitt Romney actually regards 47 percent of American voters – the laborers, the janitors the home health care workers — the working poor who in the last two decades have seen their life expectancy shrink by four years.
With a confidence and fluency that eludes him when speaking about most anything, Romney told us that what he’s learned by becoming severely conservative is that these Americas – most of whom work and pay a higher tax rate than him due to payroll taxes – are people who see themselves “victims.” To him they’re dependent moochers who can’t be forced to take responsibly for their lives.
You’d have to work 7 million years at Walmart to earn as much as the Walmart heirs. But if you work there 40 hours a week, Mitt Romney thinks you’re a moocher.
Ezra Klein has pointed out that the working poor in America aren’t avoiding responsibility, they’re drowning in it. And that’s obvious to anyone who has any sense of what’s going on in our economy.
What’s also obvious is that the only thing the GOP has learned from a decade in which giant tax breaks for the rich created nothing but a financial crisis is that the people to blame for this are the disabled, union workers and the elderly.
No one and nothing will ever cost us as many jobs as the big banks can by holding our financial system hostage. And they’re bigger than ever.
Mitt Romney’s solution? He wants to cut a trillion from Medicaid. He wants to eliminate the reforms on Wall Street we’ve put in place. He wants to give millionaires more tax breaks.
Basically: He wants to reward the people who were responsible for the financial crisis and punish those who continue suffer because of it.
Of course, Mitt can’t blame the investor class or the conservative economists who actually created the economic catastrophe that George W. Bush left America drowning in. They’re his constituency, his donors. And, of course, he can’t see America’s actual crisis of responsibility.
It’s a crisis where scientists are blamed for noticing a climate crisis, where workers are blamed when management fails, teachers are blamed when poverty is ignored, where women are blamed when they don’t get the health care or education they need.
The worst possible tendency of those who are in power is the tendency to blame the powerless. And with this video we see that Mitt Romney is a man who does just that.
All we can do is thank fate for this rare opportunity where Mitt Romney shared a little truth.
[Photo by Anne Savage.]
