Romney "wins" Iowa; the Mexican connection

The Iowa caucus is over and although Romney’s “win” was not stellar, what is stellar is that he is considered the most “electable” Republican candidate, so much so that as many as 30% of those who voted for him may disagree (to the right) with what they perceive to be his values.

They are wrong on this issue. His leftist  achievements were conditioned by the Massachusetts liberal legislature. He is himself likely far to the right of what we have seen.  Nonetheless, he finds it useful to pick up the “centrist” mantle left by John McCain.    One of the aspects of this “electability” he likes to push is the notion that he can win Hispanic votes because his father was born in Mexico.

To that end, the Washington Post’s Nick Miroff published a puff piece on July 23, giving the Romney story in dramatic, heroic and frankly racist detail (e.g.,  the Mormon colony are said to have “some of the greenest and tidiest lawns in Mexico”).  But the article has clues in it which suggest that the Romney family may be closer to the drug problem than the article suggests.  Much closer.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/in-besieged-mormon-colony-mitt-romneys-mexican-roots/2011/07/21/gIQAFGOXVI_story.html

The article notes that the Romneys were British converts to Mormonism who came to this country not long before the Mormon trek to Utah.  Miles Park Romney was born in Nauvoo, Illinois and in Utah he founded St. George, where he was Chief of Police, newspaper editor, and architect.  What they don’t mention is that St. George was the Utah “winter capital” and resort of Brigham Young, Mormonism’s leader, and that it was famous for its hardline against gentiles, and the Mountain Meadows massacre of a wagon train by Mormons happened not far away. Miles Romney, it can be inferred, was close to Brigham Young.  In the 1880’s the polygamist Miles Romney was arrested and had his property seized so he fled to Mexico. This is rather less than it appears in that the Romneys maintained their close relationships to the church hierarchy in Salt Lake City and their Mexican offspring continued to move back and forth to Utah.  They were not truly destitute as long as they could maintain these relationships.  True, Miles had four wives and 30 children.   

Polygamy today is a system of economic exploitation.  Multiple wives file for single mother welfare and the checks are all remitted to the patriarch, who lives in comfort and style while managing the household to minimize their cost to him. It was the same in olden times with labor rather than welfare, so it is believable that Gaskell Romney, Miles' son, was exploited for his labor, and that when he returned to America, his son George W. Romney, Mitt's father, grew up poor, as the article states. George  may well have been teased as “Mexican” although he had no Mexican blood. 

However, we should not exaggerate.  Gaskell Romney married a Pratt descendant, part of the Mormon oligarchy, and George W. Romney’s cousin Marion Romney eventually served as one of the three top officials of the Mormon church.  Romneys were already in leadership positions in Montana, Utah, and New Mexico when Gaskell returned to the United States.  George W. Romney, Mitt’s father and Gaskell's son, married the daughter of an important Michigan Republican, and his Mitt married the daughter of the Mayor of Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, one of the wealthiest towns in the United States at the time.  Thus, like the Habsburgs, the Romneys have tried to make advantageous marriages and any “rags to riches” story among them has a hollow, false ring, because the family has always been important in Mormondom, with access to Mormon capital.

The article dramatically talks of the Mexican Romney family’s struggles with the drug cartels, but some of the details don’t fit that picture.   In “God’s Middle Finger: Into the Lawless Heart of the Sierra Madre” Richard Grant mentions that one feared narco gang in Mexico is run by Mormons.  Keeping that in mind, the following detail leaps out from the article:

Meredith Romney was kidnapped but not killed as is customary in cartel violence.

The  poor struggling colony with just a few hundred souls got a gleaming new Mormon temple in 1999, suggesting a very large investment of money. It would have suggested a lot of money to the cartels as well, just 25 miles from Juarez, Mexico, which has the highest murder rate in the world,  yet the colony is still there and relatively unmolested.

They were rich enough that “the family” hired a security expert from Colombia to advise them. It is doubtful that a Colombian security expert would have any technologies their U.S. relatives could not have obtained. Colombia is a source of narcotics and therefore perhaps protection.  Furthermore, some of the original investors in Mitt Romney’s 1984 start up Bain Capital came from Colombia, which was awash with new cocaine wealth at the time.

So are the Romneys in Mexico “struggling” against the Mexican drug cartels, or are they competing with them?  Is the real source of Mitt Romney’s fortune narcotics?  How is it that a colony of rich Yankees near the one of the most violent cities in the world would have escaped destruction? Are the cartels out to destroy the Mexican Romneys as they claim, or are the Romneys helping run cartels?

What is clear is that Mormon mythology has a certain propaganda “pattern.”  Thus we are told that Miles Romney was an ideal polygamist (much like southerners are all descended from ideal slaveowners). We are told that prayer and the miracle of a broken aquifer saved their Mexican colony (although typically aquifers are diverted through human action, but water piracy has a less romantic ring to it).  We are told that “honesty” is one of the family virtues along with a square jaw and blue eyes (despite the fact that every criminal likes to point to his own integrity).  You could read similar things in any Mormon history, and thus longtime Mormon watchers have developed a talent for reading between the lines, and in the case of the Romneys, there is a shocking possibility between the lines.

Romney rejects European "socialism"; Germany reports highest employment ever

In his republican debates, Mitt Romney has been very clear that we don't want to be like nasty old failed Europe.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/republicans/8783948/Mitt-Romney-European-socialist-policies-not-right-for-US.html

But today, Germany announced that its employment has reached a record 41 million, 50% of its population of 82 million. In contrast, United States employment remains around 142 million, 45% of our population of 313 million.  We would need 15 million more jobs to employ people at the level currently enjoyed in Canada and Germany.

http://www.thelocal.de/money/20120102-39863.html

In truth, both the president and Romney are wrong in their beliefs. The president thinks we need more education, more global trade, and more competitiveness.  Germany has an indifferent higher education sector, rampant protectionism, and yet they consistently run a big trade surplus.  What they do have is higher pay, shorter hours, affordable medical care, civil rights in employment,  and worker representation on every board of directors.

Romney would be far worse than the president, as would any Republican.  Romney says he will force China to revalue its currency, but President Bush treated China with kid gloves, claiming they were models of fair trade as late as 2008, and Romney's former management consulting employer, Bain & Co., was one of the biggest firms recommending offshoring jobs to China in the 1990s, second only to Accenture (the former Andersen Consulting).  Now Bain has done a study of 2,000 and clients and said, whoops, only 10% were successful in offshoring.  The U.S. lost jobs and didn't gain any profits from it (reference in the below article).  Romney has yet to get that memo and probably won't, even with focus groups telling him people don't want one-way trade with China.

.http://www.dfma.com/truecost/revisited.pdf

Romney ties to Utah child torture camps tarnished last campaign

We know that Idaho Senator Larry Craig, arrested for gay solicitation at the Minneapolis airport,  was one of Romney's biggest supporters until the ambition mad Romney tossed him under the bus on national television.  But Romney may need to be in full-bore flight from other supporters, who make Obama's problems with William Ayres seem trivial by comparison.

Romney's 2008 campaign finance chair in Utah, the most important position on the Romney campaign one would think, given his need for support there, was heavily involved in a children's charity entangled in accusations of torture, kidnapping, and abuse, including allegations of sexual abuse not unlike Second Mile.  Since these allegations mostly occurred before Robert Lichfield was Romney's finance chairman, one must assume Romney approved of the torture and "tough love" reformation of teens.

http://lizditz.typepad.com/i_speak_of_dreams/2007/06/robert-lichfiel.html

The accusations were apparently not unfounded as Lichfield's business partner was convicted of false imprisonment and assault on a child. 

http://robertlichfield.blogspot.com/


Lichfield, like Jerry Sandusky calling his autobiography "Touched", had some curious naming conventions for his troubled teen charity, calling the camp's transport service the "Teen Escort Service."  The charity still exists in form, although it is not in business anymore.

What Mitt Romney tells us is that he is a brilliant manager.  Yet, here he hired someone as Utah finance chairman who was accused of multiple crimes against children.  When the business partner was convicted, Lichfield resigned from the Romney campaign, but the question is what sort of hiring manager Mitt Romney would be as president, and the indications are not encouraging.

Time's Joe Klein tries to position Romney as a Centrist

It is perhaps not surprising to see a Mitt Romney puff piece in Time Magazine (“Why Don’t They Like Me?” Dec. 12) since Time Inc.’s chief is a well-known ultramontane Catholic and Joe Klein, the author, is less than progressive.  Indeed, one could well expect that Bain Capital and or Romney and or LDS might be shareholders in Time Warner.

What is vaguely surprising is the attempt to seem “balanced” by charting Romney’s flip flops while stuffing the text with weird pro-Romney statements.  This may be an effort to limit and channel the opposition to Romney rather than to win support, as the media establishment struggle to provide the republicans with a “centrist” candidate.

The entire first page of the article is dedicated to praising Romney for his courage in resisting ethanol subsidy pandering in this campaign, as opposed to his conduct in 2008.  That there might be another explanation, namely that Romney  is following Cheneyomics in wanting to keep oil prices HIGH and establish “energy independence” using US and Canadian tar sands, something threatened by subsidized (or unsubsidized) ethanol,  does not occur to Klein.  In 2008, when gasoline prices doubled in a few months, there was fear in both parties that the American consumer would revolt, since it affected him worse than the oil shocks of the 1970s.  Most urban sprawl has been built subsequent to those shocks, meaning the consumer has less choice to resist oil price hikes now since he has further to travel.  But subsequent shocks and the lack of any urgent public demand to punish oil companies has persuaded conservatives they can safely ignore the public’s feelings on gasoline prices.  To Romney, an old investor in foreign oil companies, it must be a welcome relief.

The second page talks about flip flopping but does not really explain it.  Klein suggests Romney had to pretend to be liberal to get elected in Massachusetts, and he has to pretend to be conservative to get the Republican nomination, but Klein’s belief that makes him a centrist is unfounded and suspect.   Since the Massachusetts legislature was solidly left, all Romney’s “achievements”  in office were bound to have a left tinge, and do not imply any kind of liberalism.  Indeed, some of the small things he did, like the petty way he tried to stop gay marriage in Massachusetts by refusing to print corrected  forms, and his refusing to grant new liquor licenses, suggests that confusion of religious and secular mission which people fear from the Mormons. Klein concedes that Romney may “really” be a social conservative, but his idea that Romney may “really” be an economic relative liberal seems a wild fantasy, as though he is trying to label Romney as the “centrist” Republican candidate in defiance of the candidate.  

 The evidence Klein offers, Romney’s support for the City Year service organization, is laughably out of place. The Mormon hierarchy has been pushing national service  for 80 years and it is an obsession of virtually all Mormon politicians.   To argue that Romney’s support for City Year and non-attacks on Americorps are “Centrism” is to misunderstand Mormon orthodoxy, which views national service as a way to get the rest of America to pay for, copy, and validate their mission  program, and stop Mormons feeling behind the curve professionally with others of their age cohort.  Indeed, Klein even goes so far as to suggest Romney “probably” opposes Americorps, which is a brazen thing to say about a high Mormon official, essentially implying he does not follow his church.  Mormons consider national service "their" issue, and they think that the whole country would benefit from being forced to do service work, as long as their own missionaries might receive public funds.


That Romney has tried to stay closer to the center of Social Security and Medicare means he reads polls, and does not say one thing about what he would do as president.

Klein then launches into a bizarre and laudatory summary of Romney’s business career.  Bain Capital were not “turnaround” artists under Romney but predatory vultures seeking often to limit competition within an industry by pillaging the companies they bought and selling them to competitors.   Klein ends with the now obligatory softball criticism of Romney’s style (“robotic” or “lawn sprinkler”) while indicating Romney may well be the only Republican who can win.  It is as though Klein thinks these bald assertions can forestall any lurking liberals from investigating behind the Bain Curtain.

The important thing is to understand the point of articles like this.   If you are going to puff Romney, why bother with saying anything negative?  The answer is the target readers of the Time article are not Romney fans but enemies.  By taking a jaundiced view of the man but slipping in uncritical admiration of his business and centrism, Joe Klein is trying to disarm Romney’s opponents, to circumscribe and define their thinking so as to make ideas like “Romney is a skilled manager,” something which is not true, a matter of consensus among people who oppose him and narrow the channel where attacks on him will come from to “flip flopping,” where Obama has a similar problem; and style, which is trivial.

T. Coleman Andrews III

Mitt's partner in founding Bain Capital, and a major source of funding for his campaign today, is the grandson of a man who ran for president on the segregationist States' Rights Party platform!

Has anything really changed in America? The GOP continues to push states' rights.  T. Coleman Andrews was also against the income tax.   Does Romney have an unstated agenda to eliminate this as well?  Is Romney a Republican, or a States' Righter?!

Actually, it's none too clear.  T. Coleman Andrews called his party "States' Rights" but it was not the States' Rights Democratic Party that nominated Strom Thurmond in '48, nor the National States' Rights Party of white supremacy today, nor the American Independent Party that nominated George Wallace in '68, nor the Constitution Party of old-right wing fame although one online biographer misleadingly identifies it as Andrews' party .  It was  a Segregation Party and a party against the Income Tax, but it was really just a handy label for Andrews and his running mate, a California republican.  They only got 107,000 votes, chiefly in Virginia.   He was also a supporter of General Walker of JFK assassination conspiracy theory fame.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._Coleman_Andrews

Bain Capital: the money came from Latin America

Mitt Romney is very rich, and most of that money comes from one source: Bain Capital, a company he founded in 1984 with T. Coleman Andrews III and Eric Kriss. Before that, Romney was just a consultant with Bain & Co., well paid but just a hired management consultant.  Management consultants are not so much experienced business experts, but young MBAs sent out to promote a series of  theories the management consultancy is selling. Bain Capital was started with $37 million in capital, most of it from countries like El Salvador, Panama, Colombia, and Venezuela. (Gee who had excess cash to invest in Colombia in 1984? Think about it!).  It was also the time of the "Latin American Debt Crisis" when elites throughout Latin America were encouraged to "recycle"  American loans into American businesses, and force the middle class and working class of these countries to go into poverty working to pay off the stolen loans.   The biggest investor, or the only one clean enough for Romneys to talk about today, is the Poma family of El Salvador, which at the time owned that country's largest auto dealerships, some hotels, and a real-estate and construction firm.  Let's be clear on this: El Salvador was a small, poor country. Being one of the elite from El Salvador in those days was not like being a Dallas billionaire: it was like being a big shot in Dothan, Alabama.  Yet somehow from this narrow base, the Pomas managed to plunk down $13 million into Romney's company.

The Pomas it turns out, however, aren't so clean.  Not only did they financially support ARENA, the party behind the death squads that murdered tens of thousands in El Salvador in that era, which one might understand as leftist guerillas had kidnapped a Poma; but they were also involved with Cuban exiles, employing men implicated in terrorist attacks in Cuba:

 http://www.cubanet.org/CNews/y98/oct98/27e6.htm

ARENA and the Poma family:

 http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/01/28/444617/-Mitt-Romneys-ties-to-El-Salvadors-death-squad-backers


In short, the Pomas are so political, that one wonders if it was the Reagan administration and the intelligence community that wanted Bain Capital created and Romney was just along for the ride!  That he became very rich from Bain Capital is not proof to the contrary. Samuel Cummings was a CIA analyst who founded a private company to deal in small arms that the military wanted to dispose of. He became a billionaire.

The Audacity of Evil

Today I was shocked to see a pro-Mormon puff piece on the site 365gay.com.  There can not be much integrity behind a site that claims to represent gays when it attempts to legitimize Mormons, for nobody has done more to encourage violence, discrimination, and hate against gays in the United States than the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

In 1993 a surprise decision by the Hawaii Supreme Court indicated that finally the period where gay rights were considered secondary or even pornographic in the legal field was coming to an end.  There was still no hint that the religious hate which was behind all anti-gay laws would be seen for what it was, but once the first domino had fallen, there would likely be strong pressure in other states to see reason.

The Mormons swung into action. They created a pressure group, ostensibly non-Mormon, and then delivered most of its funding.

http://www.affirmation.org/news/1998_26.shtml

The Mormon front group immediately engaged in illegal fundraising, and likely in flat out bribery of the Hawaiian legislature.

http://www.affirmation.org/news/1998_04.shtml

Gay marriage was stopped in Hawaii.

They continued their reign of terror in Vermont, which has almost no Mormons, but where they managed to drop something like a million dollars, leaving Vermont temporarily with civil unions rather than marriage.

And they have continued their practices in every state, most infamously in California where they accounted for $22 million and 25,000 volunteers,  and are apparently even today the financial muscle behind the "NOM"

http://www.affirmation.org/news/2009_069.shtml

Mormons have even been involved in advocating violence against gays in Uganda.

And yet a lesbian and gay website was so hard up for cash they allowed the Mormons to place a puff piece on their site, even while the Mormon presidential candidate who will benefit from this p.r. campaign, has signed a pledge to "investigate" the alleged "persecution" of  the those who deny gays marriage.

It is clear that the editors of 365gay.com are the dumbest, most turncoat gays on the planet.  And it shows that the Mormons will tell any lie and pursue any avenue in order to take over the government. And then Romney's true evil will be unveiled.

From the 2008 campaign, a small sampling of Romney's lies.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeP5A5cczqk

Romney engages in what's called "Lying for the Lord,"  a sanctioned Mormon practice where Mormons are encouraged to fool the gentiles if it leads to the betterment of the church, such as controlling the national executive would be.  They are so arrogant they think they can fool even gays into voting for a man dedicated to violence against gay people.

http://www.mormonwiki.org/Lying_for_the_Lord

Yes, all religions to some extent practice this, but few so baldly state it as a virtue.