Friday, January 11, 2019

MONICA SHOWALTER - MITT ROMNEY POOH-POOHS THE INVASION OF AMERICA FROM MEXICO - IS HE HISPANDERING FOR THE ILLEGALS' VOTES?

Mitt Romney pooh-poohs idea of any crisis at the border



Fresh from the shellacking he got for his ill advised, ill timed, tin-eared op-ed opposing President Trump in the Washington Post, and underscored with the chilly reception he got in the Senate for it, Mitt Romney is refusing to change course.
Now the embittered former presidential candidate is pooh-poohing President Trump's border wall showdown with intransigent Democrats, saying the drugs, illegal aliens, criminals, and smuggling operations pouring over our border are really not much of a crisis.
"I don't want to see a declaration of national emergency," Romney told MSNBC.  "I think that's an action that would be taken in the most extreme circumstances, and, hopefully, we don't reach that."
This rather contradicts Romney's earlier claim that a border wall is necessary and that he supports one.  Here he was, just the other day, as reported by HuffPo:
"I would vote for the border wall," Romney, former Republican presidential candidate, told CNN's Jake Tapper in a Wednesday afternoon interview.
"We should have a wall on the southern border," the former governor of Massachusetts added.
Maybe Romney thinks a wall's necessary, but only if he's the one building it, not President Trump.  Maybe he thinks it's OK, but only if Democrats give permission.  Or worst of all, maybe it's something he just says at election time or to spin out of a crisis.  He sure as heck doesn't believe it now.
Whatever it is, this is not the time to be blasting Trump on his border wall.
What we have here, in fact, is a failure to recognize the political situation.  Trump knows that if he doesn't get his border wall, he's pretty well finished, because the migrant caravans are organizing, and they're about to pour in.  But it's more than a migrant issue, even with these migrants being the most expensive migrants, given the number of social services they will avail themselves of once they roll in illegally – or the high numbers of crimes they will commit against Americans, which, frankly, is a crisis.  It's also a drug issue.  Here's a recent headline in Axios, intended to suggest that costly illegals are less of a problem than this: the border's deadliest threat: opioids.  No question, they are right that that is a deadly problem, one that has cost 42,249 Americans their lives in 2018 alone, and more than $500 billion in costs.  That's the work of drug-smugglers, a large number of whom use the U.S. border to bring in their deadly wares.
The Democrat solution to this is to force innocent Americans to pay for the whole thing by attaching extremely expensive mandated drug treatment costs to their insurance policies, driving up the cost of their Obamacare.  It never bothers them that more and more of Americans' incomes are suctioned in to pay for the rising price of health insurance, and it certainly doesn't bother Obamacare-model Mitt.  
The serious solution is to make the drug-dealers pay for it instead, by shutting their operations down at the border.  Tens of thousands of lives are at stake, and here Mitt is, trying to soil Trump's efforts to end this crisis, taking the side of implacable political opponents, allowing these people, who govern from exactly one house of one branch of government, to have the full call on the matter.
All because he hates Trump.
There's a crisis, all right, and that crisis is political.  Mitt's job is to stand by and support Trump on this most commonsense of commonsense proposals, a cheapie border wall to keep a building wave of criminals and spongers out.  The dead bodies of Americans and the gargantuan costs to everyone else are the evidence (as are the billions earned by the cartels who oppress Mexico and Central America), yet there Mitt goes, saying there's no crisis.  Perhaps it's because the killings, both opiate and criminal, are occurring among his famous 47% that he sees no crisis.
More to the point, he fails to recognize the implacable nature of the political opposition to the piddly little wall by a party that is literally in political debt to illegal aliens and their interests ahead of those of Americans.
Instead, Romney wants to get right in and start with business-as-usual politics, not Trump's politics of effectiveness.
Trump wins when he stands firm on issues.  It helps a lot when Republicans stand with him, we all know Democrats stood by Obama in lockstep to get his agenda through.  And, as the last midterm showed, the Republicans who refused to stand with Trump tended to get trounced.  There was a reason why Jeff Flake decided not to run for re-election last midterm, and it doesn't do him credit.
All of that flies Mr. Magoo-style over Romney's well pompadoured head, and he's started right in, as Whoopi Goldberg likes to say, "pooping on people."
Mitt, Mitt, Mitt.  This isn't starting well.  You aren't learning.  You're Talleyrand's Bourbons, learning nothing and forgetting nothing, same old mistake-maker.  Can Lindsey Graham maybe talk to you about political horse sense?  This isn't going to end well for you.
Maybe it's time you started over.


ROMNEY VOWS TO SERVE OBAMA AND TRUMP’S BANKSTERS EVEN MORE THAN BILLARY AND HILLARY CLINTON!


FAIL YOUR WAY TO THE TOP?
“Of course, one of the main reasons the nation is now “divided, resentful and angry” is because race-baiting, Islamist, class warrior Barack Hussein Obama was president for eight long years. Romney himself is personally to blame for Obama’s second term. Maybe if Romney had bothered to prepare for his final two presidential debates with Obama or put together a competent get-out-the-vote effort the 44th president’s time in office could have been cut short.” MATTHEW VADUM

 “Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes.  This is the way a great country is raided by its elite.” – Karen McQuillan  AMERICAN THINKER.com
THE DEMOCRAT PARTY’S WAR ON AMERICA’S LEGAL WORKERS, BORDERS AND LAWS as they build the LA RAZA welfare state on our backs.
One in every eleven persons born in Mexico has gone to the U.S. The National Review reported that in 2014 $1.87 billion was spent on incarcerating illegal immigrant criminals….Now add hundreds of billions for welfare and remittances!  MICHAEL BARGO, Jr…… for the AMERICAN THINKER.COM
"Chairman of the DNC Keith Ellison was even spotted wearing a shirt stating, "I don't believe in borders" written in Spanish.

According to a new CBS news poll, 63 percent of Americans in competitive congressional districts think those crossing illegally should be immediately deported or arrested.  This is undoubtedly contrary to the views expressed by the Democratic Party.

Their endgame is open borders, which has become evident over the last eight years.  Don't for one second let them convince you otherwise." Evan Berryhill Twitter @EvBerryhill.

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/07/assault-on-american-worker-college-grad.html






REMITTANCES ….. are only part of Mexico’s looting… and billions for anchor baby breeders, billions for heroin sales and then do the numbers!




Mexicans abroad sent home nearly $2.4 billion in transfers in November, 24.7 percent higher than a year earlier, marking their fastest pace of expansion since March 2006, according to Mexican central bank data on Monday…







Jorge Ramos: Border Wall ‘Symbol of Hate and Racism’ for ‘Those Who Want to Make America White Again’



jorge-ramos-fox-news
Fox News
2:13














Univision anchor Jorge Ramos thinks President Donald Trump’s border wall would be nothing more than a “symbol of hate and racism” for “those who want make America white again.”

In a Wednesday New York Times op-ed, Ramos notes that Trump “is not the first president to ask for money for a wall.” He points out that former Presidents George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush “built fences and walls along the southern border” while former President Barack Obama “maintained the resulting system of roughly 700 miles of physical barriers.”
“So why don’t we want Mr. Trump to build his wall? What is different?” Ramos asks. “The difference is that Mr. Trump’s wall is a symbol of hate and racism, it would be completely useless, and it does not address any national emergency.”
Ramos, who said the United States has a responsibility to “absorb” caravan migrants, says the fight against the border wall “is about more than just a wall.”
“The wall has become a metaphor to Mr. Trump and his millions of supporters,” he writes. “It represents a divide between ‘us’ and ‘them,’ a physical demarcation for those who refuse to accept that in just a few decades, a majority of the country will be people of color.”
Ramos accuses Trump of trying to “exploit the anxiety and resentment of voters in an increasingly multicultural, multiethnic society” with his promise of a border wall, which Ramos says is nothing more than “a symbol for those who want to make America white again.”
“The chant ‘Build that wall, build that wall’ became his hymn — and an insult not just to Latinos but also to all people who do not share his xenophobic ideals,” Ramos continues. “The wall went from a campaign promise to a monument built on bigoted ideas. That is why most Americans cannot say yes to it. Every country has a right to protect its borders. But not to a wall that represents hate, discrimination and fear.”
He concludes by arguing that Trump “is the wall” because “the concept of America as an unwelcoming country to immigrants and uncomfortable for minorities is already here.”


WHAT DOES MEXICO DO WITH THEIR OWN ILLEGALS???







THEY DEPORT THEM ON THE SPOT!!!

 

 

Mexico has a single, streamlined law that ensures that foreign visitors and immigrants are: 
1.) in the country legally;
2.)  have the means to sustain themselves economically;
3.) not destined to be burdens on society;
4.)  of economic and social benefit to society;
5.)  of good character and have no criminal records; and
6.)  contributors to the general well-being of the nation.
The law also ensures that:
7.)  immigration authorities have a record of each foreign visitor;
8.)  foreign visitors do not violate their visa status;
9.)  foreign visitors are banned from interfering in the country’s internal politics;
10.)  foreign visitors who enter under false pretenses are imprisoned or deported;
11.)  foreign visitors violating the terms of their entry are imprisoned or deported;
! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !
GET THIS:

12.)  those who aid in illegal immigration will be sent to prison!!!!!!!!!

MEXICO VOWS A NEW INVASION HAS BEGUN, FINANCED BY U.S.

THE NEXT MEXICAN INVASION IS AT HAND:

"Mexican president candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador called for mass immigration to the United States, declaring it a "human right". We will defend all the (Mexican) invaders in the American," Obrador said, adding that immigrants "must leave their towns and find a life, job, welfare, and free medical in the United States."

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/07/mexican-president-andres-manuel-lopez.html

"Fox’s Tucker Carlson noted Thursday that Obrador has previously proposed granting AMNESTY TO MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS. “America is now Mexico’s social safety net, and that’s a very good deal for the Mexican ruling class,” Carlson added."

"Many Americans forget is that our country is located against a socialist failed state that is promising to descend even further into chaos – not California, the other one. And the Mexicans, having reached the bottom of the hole they have dug for themselves, just chose to keep digging by electing a new leftist presidente who wants to surrender to the cartels and who thinks that Mexicans have some sort of “human right” to sneak into the U.S. and demographically reconquer it." KURT SCHLICHTER

Billionaire Mexicans tell their poor to JUMP U.S. OPEN BORDERS and LOOT THE STUPID GRINGO… and loot they do!
Billions of dollars are sucked out of America from Mexico’s looting!

1) Mexico ended legal immigration 100 years ago, except for Spanish blood.
2) Mexico is the 17th richest nation but pays the 220th lowest minimum wage to force their subjects to invade the USA. The expands territory for Mexicans, spreads the Spanish language, and culture and genotypes, while earning 17% of Mexico's gross GDP as Foreign Remittance Income.

Central Americans Riot in Mexican Immigration Detention Center



ad4ca970-41a8-4f22-a50c-5b4b7785df36-AP_Central_America_Migrant_Caravan
Moises Castillo, AP
  116
2:21

A group of Central American migrants being held in a Mexican immigration detention center in Mexicali began rioting Wednesday afternoon, requiring the deployment of police and troops.

A group of 23 migrants pending deportation, primarily back to Honduras, began a riot on Wednesday by burning a mattress and causing damage to bathrooms, according to local reporting. Responding municipal fire personnel were unable to enter the facility because they were met with resistance by the migrants who began throwing objects and liquids while shouting they were members of “Los Maras.” The label is commonly used to identify the violent transnational criminal gang, the MS-13.
Due to the violent behavior, state cops and elements of the Mexican Army were deployed. The center was eventually brought under control when riot police forcefully entered with stun grenades, according to confidential law enforcement sources.
Many of the Central Americans were dealing with drug addiction problems according to Ranulfo Figueroa, head of the regional office of the Mexican immigration agency. Breitbart sources said the migrants were protesting their forthcoming deportations. It is unknown if they were part of the original migrant caravan that began to arrive in the region in mid-November. Migrants in this center were taken into custody in Mexicali after not qualifying to stay in a shelter due to drug use or other criminal factors.
Breitbart News reports extensively on the estimated 7,000 to 9,000-plus migrant caravan, which began in Honduras on October 12, 2018, and traveled through Guatemala to the United States border with Mexico. On November 14, nearly 400 migrants in eight buses were filmed traveling through the northern border state of Sonora, escorted by Mexican federal and state police. Approximately a day later, another 900 Central Americans in 22 buses passed through Sonora. Many in the migrant caravan stayed in Mexicali after the shelters of Tijuana were filled to capacity. Secondary camps were set up for those waiting to make an asylum request with U.S. Department of State. Mexicali is approximately 110 miles east of Tijuana.
Robert Arce is a retired Phoenix Police detective with extensive experience working Mexican organized crime and street gangs. Arce has worked in the Balkans, Iraq, Haiti, and recently completed a three-year assignment in Monterrey, Mexico, working out of the Consulate for the United States Department of State, International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Program, where he was the Regional Program Manager for Northeast Mexico (Coahuila, Tamaulipas, Nuevo Leon, Durango, San Luis Potosi, Zacatecas.) You can follow him on Twitter. He can be reached at robertrarce@gmail.com



Mexico: Where Is Your Shame?
At a demonstration Wednesday in Mexico City against Arizona's law.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Immigration: Mexico's government gloated triumphantly after a federal judge's injunction blocked Arizona's immigration law. But it's no victory for Mexico. In fact, Mexico's leaders ought to be mortified.
As radical immigration activists crowed with glee and the Obama administration claimed victory, Mexico's government joined the applause. 
Calling Judge Susan Bolton's injunction Wednesday "a step in the right direction," Mexican Foreign Minister Patricia Espinosa declared: "The government of Mexico would like to express its recognition for the determination demonstrated by the federal government of the United States and the actions of the civil organizations that organized lawsuits against the SB 1070 law."
In reality, it ought to be ashamed. Supposedly framed as an issue of federal power pre-empting state power, it's hardly Mexico's business. But Mexico made a big show of saying its interest was in protecting its nationals from the dreadful racism of Arizona that its own citizens, curiously enough, keep fleeing to.
Espinosa said her government was busy collecting data on civil rights violations and her department had issued an all-out travel warning to Mexican nationals about Arizona. 
That's where Mexico's hypocrisy is just too much.
First, Mexico encourages illegal immigration to the U.S. Oh, it says it doesn't, but it prints comic book guides for would-be illegal immigrants and provides ID cards for illegals once they get here. In Arizona alone, Mexico keeps five consulates busy.
 That's not out of love for its own citizens, but because Mexicans send cash back to Mexico that helps finance the government.
Instead of selling its wasteful state-owned oil company or getting rid of red tape to create jobs in Mexico, Mexico spends the hard currency from remittances. It fails to look at why its citizens leave.
According to the Heritage Foundation-Wall Street Journal 2010 Index of Economic Freedom, Mexico's big problem is — no shock — government corruption, where it ranks below the world average.
That's where Mexico's cartels come in.
Mexico's encouragement of illegal immigration undercuts its valiant war against its smuggling cartels. The cartels' prowess and firepower have made them the only ones who can smuggle effectively across the border. U.S. law enforcers say they now control human-smuggling on our southern border.
Feed them immigrants and they grow more cash-rich — and right now, immigrant smuggling is about a third of the cartels' income.
Mass graves and car bombings are signs of criminal organizations getting bigger, and more powerful. Juarez, which has lost 5,000 people this year, bleeds because cartels fight over not just who gets the drug routes, but who gets the illegal-immigrant smuggling routes, too.
Aside from the cartel mayhem in Mexico, the bodies are piling up in the Arizona desert and U.S. Border Patrol rescues of abandoned illegals left to die have risen. 
 It's not the desert's fault, and it's certainly not Uncle Sam's fault, as activists claim. No, it's the fact that Mexicans are encouraged to emigrate. Criminal cartels don't fear abandoning their human cargo in the desert, as long as Mexico does nothing and blames Uncle Sam.
Hearing Mexico's government now cheer the Arizona ruling, which will only encourage more illegal immigration, gives the country's regime a pretty inhuman face. 
If Mexico had any decency, it would do all it could to discourage illegal immigration and keep a respectful silence about Arizona.
It needs U.S. support for its war on cartels. Instead of insulting American citizens, Mexico should confront directly the reasons why its people are so desperate to leave, and do all in its power to destroy the cartels that are slowly killing the nation. That includes defunding the murderous gangs by halting illegal immigration. 

BORDER AGENT RESCUES DROWNING MIGRANT INVADERS…. Mexico ships them back over the border to register Democrat and collect their anchor baby welfare!

 

https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/12/pelosis-open-borders-border-patrol.html

 

*

"The newly elected president, Andrés López-Obrador, was gleeful during the election when he told his compadres they should all move to America, illegally.  His encouragement along with his pro-poverty policies will set the stage for another tsunami of illegal immigration." COLIN FLAHERTY

*

"They will destroy America from within.  The leftist billionaires who orchestrate these plans are wealthy. Those tasked with representing us in Congress will never be exposed to the cost of the invasion. They have nothing but contempt for us who must endure the consequences of our communities being intruded upon by gangs, drug dealers and human traffickers.  These people have no intention of becoming Americans; like the Democrats who welcome them, they have contempt for us." PATRICIA McCARTHY

*

The immigration debate has been raging for years.  Advocates for open borders can be found on both sides of the political aisle and in a wide variety of special interest groups who have come to see the immigration system that delivers an unlimited supply of cheap and exploitable labor, an unlimited supply of foreign tourists, and unlimited supply of foreign students and, for the lawyers, an unlimited supply of clients. MICHAEL CUTLER



VICENTE FOX OF NARCOMEX SAYS “MUCK AMERICA!!! YOU BELONG TO US!



BUT DOES FOX BELONG TO THE LA RAZA HEROIN CARTELS?


"Also, Rubin did not mention the moral responsibility of the child’s father who brought her through the desert in an apparent effort to use the catch-and-release Flores loophole to get past border guards. The loophole was created by Judge Dolly Gee who has ordered border officials to release migrants after 20 days if they bring a child with them."



Nolte: Mitt Romney Is an Idiot

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/01/03/nolte-mitt-romney-is-an-idiot/

 

3 Jan 2019413
4:59

As the freshman senator from Utah, Mitt Romney is a long way from the presidency. That has to be especially tough on a two-time presidential loser with You-Know-Who sitting in the Oval Office, a guy who took the brass ring by doing the exact opposite of what you did.

My opinion of Mitt Romney has changed over the years. When he lost the Republican nomination to John McCain in 2008, I thought he was a classy guy with a future. When he lost the general election to Barack Obama in 2012, I thought he was a good man with a glass jaw. When he repeatedly got on his high horse to sabotage Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016, I thought he was an opportunistic sleaze bag gorging on sour grapes and his own monstrously selfish sense of virtue.
But now, after reading his Washington Post jihad against Trump, I finally figured what Mitt Romney really is … an idiot.
Romney might have a high IQ, but he’s a political moron.
Let’s first dispel with the idea that Romney wrote this op-ed out of some pressing moral need to condemn Trump’s supposed indecency. Decent people don’t contribute to the far-left Washington Post, a news outlet that published a countless number of lies to sabotage Romney, that attacks the children of Republicansthat tells almost as many lies as CNN.
Secondly, decent people sure as hell do not then run to a blacklisting, violence-promotinggangster outfit like CNN to promote that op-ed, and do so specifically with a presidential-penis-obsessed serial liar like Jake Tapper, who is so gosh-darned virtuous he remained silent as his own audience booed a rape victim.
Oh, and let us never forget the series of fake news depth charges CNN dropped on Romney in 2012.
So why would Romney do such a thing? Why would Mr. Decency align himself with objectively indecent organizations and people?
And now we come to the part about Romney being a moron.
Just as his fellow moron John McCain believed in 2008, I think Romney actually believes two things…
1) Sucking up to the media by backstabbing the sitting Republican president is a path to another shot at the Oval Office.
2) When he does run for president again, the same media that relentlessly tarred him as a sexist, racist, plutocrat, job-killing corporate raider who tortures dogs, bullies gays, and gives women cancer, will appreciate him this time.
As far as number one, I think I speak for many Republican voters, including those who vigorously supported Romney in 2012, when I say kiss my ass. Screw you, you preening, backstabbing, undermining, half-witted peacock whose first official act as an incoming U.S. Senator is to sucker punch  Trump, the man who not only endorsed you in Utah, but did so graciously after you launched a series of unhinged and very personal attacks against Trump during the 2016 campaign.
If Mitt Romney were on fire, I wouldn’t spit on him.
And then there’s number two, Romney the Vichy Republican betraying our president to the Washington Post and CNN and Tapper, the worst of the worst of the worst. “Tone deaf” doesn’t even begin to explain it.
Is there not a single one of Mitt Romney’s handlers who can see what is going on here? Are all of these so-called professionals so blinded by hate and arrogance that they truly cannot grasp how their boy is being played? Do they actually believe this siren song….?
Dear Willard:
We were so, so, so, so wrong about you in 2012, and we are so, so sorry. The Bad Orange Man has returned us to our senses and now we see that you are a pure and noble man who deserves to be president. So how does this sound… Let’s bury the hatchet, you come on over, and we’ll destroy Trump together and make you president!!!!
XXXOOO,
The Establishment Media
Although the rest of us can see the open maw of this trap from a mile away, this nitwit still hasn’t figured out that this charade is only about one thing — putting a Democrat back in the White House in 2020; and the best shot the media have of accomplishing that is if an insecure simpleton can be fooled into running a destructive primary campaign against Trump.
And this is the best part… Even if Romney were somehow able to win the 2020 (or even the 2024) Republican nomination, his cowardice has doomed him with a GOP base that will never-ever support a weasel who attacks Republicans with unbridled glee and has no stomach to go after Democrats.
In other words… Dear #GOPSmartSet: Past is prologue. My God, you people are stupid.
But that’s the least of it.
The media will then turn Willard the Noble into — you guessed it — a sexist, racist, plutocrat, job-killing corporate raider who tortures dogs, bullies gays, and gives a woman cancer.
Honestly, what kind of spineless, squealing little gerbil kisses up to the monsters who launched one audacious lie after another to aggressively destroy his presidential ambitions?
What kind of mewling, bitter, sore loser crybully allows himself to be used as a prop in the un-American campaign to overturn the 2016 presidential election through impeachment?
I’ll tell you what kind…
An idiot, a moron, a stupe, a sleazy stooge.
 Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNCFollow his Facebook Page here.

*
“If you care about America, you ought to oppose the exploitation of Americans, whether it’s happening in the inner city or on Wall Street.” TUCKER CARLSON

 

“Under our current system, an American who works for a salary pays about twice the tax rate of someone who’s living off inherited money and doesn’t work at all. We tax capital at half of what we tax labor. It’s a sweet deal if you work in finance, as many of the richest people do. In 2010, for example, Mitt Romney made about $22 million dollars in investment income. He paid a federal tax rate of 14 percent. For normal upper-middle-class wage earners, the federal tax rate is nearly 40 percent. No wonder Romney supports the status quo.” TUCKER CARLSON

 

“Bain Capital all but invented what is now a familiar business strategy: take over an existing company for a short period of time, cut costs by firing employees, run up the debt, extract the wealth, and move on, sometimes leaving retirees without their earned pensions.” TUCKER CARLSON

 

Tucker Carlson: Romney’s Trump Attack Indicative of a Ruling Class Who ‘Feel No Long-Term Obligation to the People They Rule’

 

https://www.breitbart.com/video/2019/01/03/carlson-romneys-trump-attack-indicative-of-a-ruling-class-who-feel-no-long-term-obligation-to-the-people-they-rule/

 

Wednesday on Fox News Channel’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” host Tucker Carlson opened the program by reacting to Sen-elect Mitt Romney’s (R-UT) public critique of President Donald Trump.

Carlson reminded viewers of Romney’s path to prosperity at Bain Capital and how his exploitation of the “finance-based economy” had implications on real Americans. Carlson said it was indicative of the broader problem of how the ruling class is harming the country overall, which led to the election of Trump.
Transcript as follows:

Good evening and welcome to Tucker Carlson Tonight. Happy New Year. Newly-elected Utah senator Mitt Romney kicked off 2019 with an op-ed in the Washington Post savaging Donald Trump’s character and leadership. Romney’s attack and Trump’s response this morning on Twitter are the latest salvos in a longstanding personal feud between the two men. It’s even possible that Romney is planning to challenge Trump for the Republican nomination in 2020. We’ll see. But for now, Romney’s piece is fascinating on its own terms. It’s a window into how the people in charge, in both parties, see our country.

Romney’s main complaint is that Donald Trump is a mercurial and divisive leader. That’s true of course. Beneath the personal slights, though, Romney has a policy critique. He seems genuinely angry that Trump might pull American troops out of the Syrian civil war. Romney doesn’t explain how staying in Syria would benefit America. He doesn’t appear to consider that a relevant question. More policing in the Middle East is always better. We know that. Virtually everyone in Washington agrees.

Corporate tax cuts are also popular in Washington, and Romney is strongly on board with those too. His piece throws a rare compliment to Trump for cutting the corporate rate a year ago. This isn’t surprising. Romney spent the bulk of his business career at a firm called Bain Capital. Bain Capital all but invented what is now a familiar business strategy: take over an existing company for a short period of time, cut costs by firing employees, run up the debt, extract the wealth, and move on, sometimes leaving retirees without their earned pensions. Romney became fantastically rich doing this. Meanwhile, a remarkable number of those companies are now bankrupt or extinct. This is the private equity model. Our ruling class sees nothing wrong with it. It’s how they run the country.

Mitt Romney refers to unwavering support for a finance-based economy and an internationalist foreign policy as the “mainstream Republican” view. He’s right. For generations, Republicans have considered it their duty to make the world safe for banking, while simultaneously prosecuting ever more foreign wars. Modern Democrats generally support these goals. There are signs, however, that most people do not support this, and not just in America. In countries around the world — France, Brazil, Sweden, the Philippines, Germany, and many others — voters are suddenly backing candidates and ideas that would have been unimaginable just a decade ago. These are not isolated events. What you’re watching is populations revolting against leaders who refuse to improve their lives.

Something like this has been in happening in our country for three years. Donald Trump rode a surge of popular discontent all the way to the White House. Does he understand the political revolution he harnessed? Can he reverse the economic and cultural trends that are destroying America? Those are open questions. But they’re less relevant than we think. At some point, Donald Trump will be gone. The rest of us will be too. The country will remain. What kind of country will be it be then? How do we want our grandchildren to live?

These are the only questions that matter. The answer used to be obvious: the overriding goal for America is more prosperity, meaning cheaper consumer goods. But is that still true? Does anyone still believe that cheaper iPhones, or more Amazon deliveries of plastic garbage from China are going to make us happy? They haven’t so far. A lot of Americans are drowning in stuff. Yet drug addiction and suicide are depopulating large parts of the country. Anyone who thinks the health of a nation can be summed up in GDP is an idiot.

The goal for America is both simpler and more elusive than mere prosperity. It’s happiness. There are a lot of ingredients in being happy: Dignity. Purpose. Self-control. Independence. Above all, deep relationships with other people. Those are the things that you want for your children. They’re what our leaders should want for us, and would if they cared. But our leaders don’t care. We are ruled by mercenaries who feel no long-term obligation to the people they rule. They’re day traders. Substitute teachers. They’re just passing through. They have no skin in this game, and it shows. They can’t solve our problems. They don’t even bother to understand our problems.

One of the biggest lies our leaders tell is that you can separate economics from everything else that matters. Economics is a topic for public debate. Family and faith and culture, those are personal matters. Both parties believe this. Members of our educated upper-middle-classes, now the backbone of the Democratic Party, usually describe themselves as fiscally responsible and socially moderate. In other words, functionally libertarian. They don’t care how you live, as long as the bills are paid and the markets function. Somehow they don’t see a connection between people’s personal lives and the health of our economy, or for that matter, the country’s ability to pay its bills. As far as they’re concerned, these are two totally separate categories.

Social conservatives, meanwhile, come to the debate from the opposite perspective, but reach a strikingly similar conclusion. The real problem, you’ll hear them say, is that the American family is collapsing. Nothing can be fixed before we fix that. Yet, like the libertarians they claim to oppose, many social conservatives also consider markets sacrosanct. The idea that families are being crushed by market forces seems never to occur to them. They refuse to consider it. Questioning markets feels like apostasy.

Both sides miss the obvious point: culture and economics are inseparably intertwined. Certain economic systems allow families to thrive. Thriving families make market economies possible. You can’t separate the two. It used to be possible to deny this. Not anymore. The evidence is now overwhelming. Consider the inner cities. Thirty years ago, conservatives looked at Detroit or Newark and were horrified by what they saw. Conventional families had all but disappeared in poor neighborhoods. The majority of children were born out of wedlock. Single mothers were the rule. Crime and drugs and disorder became universal. What caused this nightmare? Liberals didn’t want to acknowledge the question. They were benefiting from the disaster, in the form of reliable votes. Conservatives, though, had a ready explanation for inner city dysfunction: big government. Decades of badly-designed social programs had driven fathers from the home and created what they called a “culture of poverty” that trapped people in generational decline.
There was truth in what the conservatives said. But it wasn’t the whole story. How do we know? Because virtually the same thing has happened decades later to an entirely different population. In many ways, rural America now looks a lot like Detroit. This is striking because rural Americans don’t seem to have much in common with people from the inner city. These groups have different cultures, different traditions and political beliefs. Usually they have different skin colors. Rural people are white conservatives, mostly. Yet the pathologies of modern rural America are familiar to anyone who visited downtown Baltimore in the 1980s: Stunning out of wedlock birthrates. High male unemployment. A terrifying drug epidemic.

Two different worlds. Similar outcomes. How did this happen? You’d think our ruling class would be interested in knowing the answer. Mostly they’re not. They don’t have to be. It’s easier to import foreign labor to take the place of native-born Americans who are slipping behind. But Republicans now represent rural voters. They ought to be interested. Here’s a big part of the answer: male wages declined. Manufacturing, a male-dominated industry, all but disappeared over the course of a generation. All that remained in many areas were the schools and the hospitals, both traditional employers of women. In many places, women suddenly made more than men. Before you applaud this as a victory for feminism, consider the effects. Study after study has shown that when men make less than women, women generally don’t want to marry them. Maybe they should want to, but they don’t. Over big populations, this causes a drop in marriage, a spike in out of wedlock births, and all the familiar disasters that follow: more drug and alcohol abuse, higher incarceration rates, fewer families formed in the next generation. This isn’t speculation, or propaganda from the evangelicals. It’s social science. We know it’s true. Rich people know it best of all. That’s why they get married before they have kids. That model works. Increasingly, marriage is a luxury only the affluent in America can afford.

And yet, and here’s the bewildering and infuriating part, those very same affluent married people, the ones making virtually all the decisions in our society, are doing pretty much nothing to help the people below them get and stay married. Rich people are happy to fight malaria in Congo. But working to raise men’s wages in Dayton or Detroit? That’s crazy.

This is negligence on a massive scale. Both parties ignore the crisis in marriage. Our mindless cultural leaders act like it’s still 1961, and the biggest problem American families face is that sexism is preventing millions of housewives from becoming investment bankers or Facebook executives.

For our ruling class, more investment banking is always the answer. They teach us it’s more virtuous to devote your life to some soulless corporation than it is to raise your own kids. Sheryl Sandburg of Facebook wrote an entire book about this. Sandburg explained that our first duty is to shareholders, above our own children. No surprise there. Sandburg herself is one of America’s biggest shareholders. Propaganda like this has made her rich. What’s remarkable is how the rest of us responded. We didn’t question why Sandburg was saying this. We didn’t laugh in her face at the pure absurdity of it. Our corporate media celebrated Sandburg as the leader of a liberation movement. Her book became a bestseller: Lean In. As if putting a corporation first is empowerment. It’s not. It’s bondage. Republicans should say so.

They should also speak out against the ugliest parts of our financial system. Not all commerce is good. Why is it defensible to loan people money they can’t possibly repay? Or charge them interest that impoverishes them? Payday loan outlets in poor neighborhoods collect 400 percent annual interest. We’re ok with that? We shouldn’t be. Libertarians tell us that’s how markets work: consenting adults making voluntary decisions about how to live their lives. OK. But it’s also disgusting. If you care about America, you ought to oppose the exploitation of Americans, whether it’s happening in the inner city or on Wall Street.
And by the way, if you really loved your fellow Americans, if it would break your heart to see them high all the time. Which they are. A huge number of our kids, especially our boys, are smoking weed constantly. You may not realize that, because new technology has made it odorless. But it’s everywhere. That’s not an accident. Once our leaders understood they could get rich from marijuana, marijuana became ubiquitous. In many places, tax-hungry politicians have legalized or decriminalized it. Former Speaker of the House John Boehner now lobbies for the marijuana industry. His fellow Republicans seem fine with that. “Oh, but it’s better for you than alcohol,” they tell us. Maybe. Who cares? Talk about missing the point. Try having dinner with a 19-year-old who’s been smoking weed. The life is gone. Passive, flat, trapped in their own heads. Do you want that for your kids? Of course not. Then why are our leaders pushing it on us? You know the reason. Because they don’t care about you.

When you care about people, you do your best to treat them fairly. Our leaders don’t even try. They hand out jobs and contracts and scholarships and slots at prestigious universities based purely on how we look. There’s nothing less fair than that, though our tax code comes close. Under our current system, an American who works for a salary pays about twice the tax rate of someone who’s living off inherited money and doesn’t work at all. We tax capital at half of what we tax labor. It’s a sweet deal if you work in finance, as many of the richest people do. In 2010, for example, Mitt Romney made about $22 million dollars in investment income. He paid a federal tax rate of 14 percent. For normal upper-middle-class wage earners, the federal tax rate is nearly 40 percent. No wonder Romney supports the status quo. But for everyone else, it’s infuriating. Our leaders rarely mention any of this. They tell us our multi-tiered tax code is based on the principles of the free market. Please. It’s based on laws that Congress passed, laws that companies lobbied for in order to increase their economic advantage. It worked well for those people, but at a big cost to everyone else. Unfairness is profoundly divisive. When you favor one child over another, your kids don’t hate you. They hate each other. That happens in countries too. It’s happening in ours, probably by design. Divided countries are easier to rule. Nothing divides us like the perception that some people are getting special treatment. In our country, some people definitely are. Republicans should oppose that with everything they have.
What kind of country do you want to live in? A fair country. A decent country. A cohesive country. A country whose leaders don’t accelerate the forces of change purely for their own profit and amusement. A country you might recognize when you’re old. A country that listens to young people who don’t live in Brooklyn. A country where you can make a solid living outside of the big cities. A country where Lewiston, Maine seems almost as important as the west side of Los Angeles. A country where environmentalism means getting outside and picking up the trash. A clean, orderly, stable country that respects itself. And above all, a country where normal people with an average education who grew up no place special can get married, and have happy kids, and repeat unto the generations. A country that actually cares about families, the building block of everything.

What will it take a get a country like that? Leaders who want it. For now, those leaders will have to be Republicans. There’s no option at this point. But first, Republican leaders will have to acknowledge that market capitalism is not a religion. Market capitalism is a tool, like a staple gun or a toaster. You’d have to be a fool to worship it. Our system was created by human beings for the benefit of human beings. We do not exist to serve markets. Just the opposite. Any economic system that weakens and destroys families isn’t worth having. A system like that is the enemy of a healthy society.

Internalizing this won’t be easy for Republican leaders. They’ll have to unlearn decades of bumper sticker-talking points and corporate propaganda. They’ll likely lose donors in the process. Libertarians are sure to call any deviation from market fundamentalism a form of socialism. That’s a lie. Socialism is a disaster. It doesn’t work. It’s what we should be working desperately to avoid. But socialism is exactly what we’re going to get, and soon, unless a group of responsible people in our political system reforms the American economy in a way that protects normal people.

If you want to put America first, you’ve got to put its families first.

Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor

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