Would you hire someone to be your cook if you knew he never
cooked a meal? Would you be reassured if he said the only knowledge he has of
food is how to eat it? Well, my friend, this is what Mitt Romney wants the American
people to do, asking them to elect him and let him run their GDP kitchen where
they need someone to make the economic pie grow at a faster rate.
The reality is that economies exist because people make
goods and render services, both of which are referred to as wealth. The people
who contribute in the making of that wealth are also the people who consume it.
Thus, every able individual gets into the kitchen and participates in making
the pie that everyone shares at meal time. Because as a species we are no less
noble than the animals, we too feed our young before they can participate in
the production of the wealth. And because we are more noble than the animals,
we share the pie with those who can no longer help produce it.
But like the scavengers in the animal kingdom who are too
lazy to hunt, there exist human hoarders who enter the kitchen by stealth and
get a free meal. When caught and proven guilty, these people are dealt with
according to the law. Other people develop the kind of greed that makes them
covet more and more of the pie they do not participate in producing. What they
do instead is develop the tricks and the sophistication by which they freeload
as much of the pie as they can without appearing to break the law. They do it
with the help of collaborators who bless them with a stamp of approval and let
them get away with it.
What makes it possible for these people to do what they do
is that the GDP kitchen of a modern economy requires all sorts of natural
resources to produce the goods and the services that people buy. For this to
happen, a modern economy requires an additional ingredient called money which
is also referred to as liquidity. The source of money is the central bank, out
of which liquidity flows and moves through conduits to make its way to every
nook and cranny of the economic pie where it becomes an inseparable part of it.
Financial institutions were created to serve as the network
of conduits that move the money throughout the economic kitchen. What the human
hoarders do when bent on scavenging what belongs to others, is make themselves
a part of that network of conduits. Once they sense they have been firmly
installed where they need to be, they pretend to let the money flow unimpeded
to where it is going but in reality, retain as much of the liquidity as they
can get away with. Thus, they become fabulously wealthy in the process without
ever stepping into the kitchen or help bake the pie.
But for them to succeed in doing the work of the devil,
these people recruit and keep on their side the individuals who are supposed to
police the network and guard it against theft. These would be the regulators
who make the rules as well as the inspectors who enforce the rules. The
hoarders – now in the role of conduits – make those individuals collaborate
with them for a few pieces of the pie they kickback to them at the appropriate
time and in the appropriate manner – all in accordance with the rules they
shape together to make all moves look legitimate. In return, the hoarders receive
the blessings of the regulators and the inspectors, something they get in the
form of an official stamp of approval for the unethical if not illegal
activities they perform day in and day out.
Financial institutions come in many forms, one of which
being the private equity firm where people like Mitt Romney invite other
portfolio managers to come invest in their operations. These would be the
managers in charge of endowment funds of all sorts, retirement funds of every
kind and pools of money that seek a return on the savings of their members.
Romney and those like him take that money and do the things that the other fund
managers would fret doing. What they do is act like vultures that feed on
wounded enterprises they take over, and do the things that give them a high
return while taking the smallest possible risk if no risk at all.
They pull this sort of tricks by maximizing the pain they
inflict on others, especially the workers they often dismiss without adequate
notice or compensation. The vultures also take maximum advantage of the laws
they helped formulate in the first place. These would be the laws in which the
loopholes were carved to help them avoid paying the tax where they should be
paying it. To this end, they would have set up multiple corporations which are
nothing more than shell corporations created for the purpose of playing the
shell game by which they spirit the money out of the country and hide it in
offshore tax havens as well as secret personal accounts.
So now, this Mitt Romney who never entered a kitchen to bake
a pie but ate from them all, wants the people of America to hire him thus make him
the chief law enforcers in charge of upholding the laws and the loopholes that
made him the successful vulture he has become. And he wants to get there even
before he has had the time to digest the flesh of those on whom he has been
feasting.
He promises to make the American GDP grow faster than it is
growing now not because he knows how to bake the pies that go into the GDP but
because he knows how to eat from those pies and enjoy them all. And the proof
of this, he says, is that he is one of the fat cats populating not the street
they call Wall Street where all the saints live and work but the alley they
call Alleycat which exists nowhere except in the imagination of the 47% losers
that make up the American population.
Way to go America ,
way to go!