The Taliban is a movement so backward; its members blame the act of rape not on the perpetrator but on the victim. At times, these people go as far as kill the woman that has already suffered the indignity and the violence of being raped. And Mitt Romney has just shown to the world he has a cultural maturity that does not surpass the level of the Taliban.
He did so by blaming the culture of the Palestinian people for their low level of income even though they are the victims of a Jewish military occupation that has not stopped to rape their motherland for a single day since the invasion long ago.
It is not that Mitt Romney understands the Jewish culture but does not understand the Palestinian culture. It is that he understands no culture at all except perhaps his own personal thing -- to which I shall come in a moment. As to his possible understanding of the Jewish culture, the latest of his gaffes to come to light is the fact that he scheduled a fund raising dinner in Israel on a Jewish holiday, thus proving that he knows as much about the “Western” protocol of getting to know your host before meeting him, as do the Taliban. Needless to say the dinner in Israel was canceled.
Now, about Romney's personal culture. It has to do with what he believes is success in business. Like Bernie Madoff, Mitt Romney does not differentiate between getting rich by creating wealth and getting rich by accumulating wealth. He does not see that entrepreneurs create wealth by producing goods and/or services they sell to the public or to other enterprises. This contrasts with the fact that some people exploit the weaknesses of the system in order to do the kind of financial engineering which allows them to accumulate wealth that is created by someone else.
These people may or may not break the law; they may or may not do their thing discretely enough, it is impossible to prove they broke the law. But in the end, the techniques they use are the same whether or not they go over the threshold and become a Mitt Romney who got away with it, or become a Bernie Madoff who got caught.
Romney inherited seed money as well as fame from a father who, from all indications, was a true entrepreneur. Using the money and the good name of the father, Mitt practiced the worst kind of financial engineering. That is, he attracted other investors and used their money to buy the enterprises of small entrepreneurs -- zeroing in on a given industry.
He laid off the people that worked in those enterprises and shut down the operations. This done, he reorganized the companies in such a way as to produce and sell low quality goods made partially or entirely from imported parts and components. This is what everyone calls getting into a race to the bottom with the Third World , but he calls being efficient. No surprise there; it's all part of the same mentality and personal culture.
And this is the business culture that Romney and a few other “corporate raiders” have brought to America . You can see that it is bad for the country from Romney's performance in Israel when he praised the Marxist business model there saying it is a model that everyone should want to emulate. No doubt, if elected president of the United States , which he wants to be, he will try to impose that model on America .
What differentiates Romney from the other corporate raiders is precisely that he wants to be president. This is why he went abroad where he managed to display not a political and cultural prowess of presidential caliber but a clumsiness that put him in league with the Taliban. And he has shown he is more than a run of the mill corporate raider, he is a Marxist corporate raider devoid of culture and low on Western protocol.
He ought to be shipped to Israel or Afghanistan if North Korea refuses to take him.