We Are the 47%

    
     Not since that snake-in-the-grass Richard Nixon have we seen a more loathsome political viper than Mitt Romney slither across our political landscape in an attempt to occupy that most powerful plot of real estate. Born of the worst breed of political creatures, he is among the most dangerous and most rightly to be feared. Should he and his Koch brothers' Tea Party backers be allowed to buy the nation's highest office, they will do more damage to the 47% than we can imagine in our most vulgar nightmares. Keep your feet up everybody. It will be snakes on a plane all over again.

     It's not his wealth that makes Mr. Romney so dangerous. Like Mitt, Jack, Bobby, and Ted Kennedy were also born with a golden horseshoe up their small intestines. Properly earned and responsibly managed for the larger good, wealth can be a blessing. Or it can be a curse. And it is a curse when it shields its possessors from the plight of the common folk.

     If success is determined by the bottom line, then no doubt Mitt has had a most successful business career. But the question must be asked as to how that career affected the larger community. Here is where moral failure masquerades as financial success.

     As a vulture capitalist, Mitt Romney was nothing more than a corporate raider, a robber baron of the first order. His tactic was to purchase companies in trouble, run them into bankruptcy as quickly as possible, close them down, then make off with whatever was left in the company safe, leaving the workers standing outside locked factory gates to wonder how someone could have so thoughtlessly destroyed their livelihood. This is public record, not hyperbole; capitalism unfettered to do its worst. This is business by the Golden Rule in reverse:  Do unto others before they do unto you.

     To be certain, none of the Kennedy boys were saints. Yet they seemed, because, and some times in spite of, their privileged upbringing to be on the right side of history. They were in touch with the everyday realities of those whom they were elected to serve. The working stiffs who know what it is to get up every morning, go to a job they probably don't like very much, for which they are mostly underpaid, so they can sit down at the kitchen table near the end of each month and figure out which bills will get paid and which will have to wait. 

     The Kennedy's were born to wealth, but Jack could identify with the black man in the South who couldn't vote or even set down for a burger and fries at an all-white lunch counter without getting the living shit beaten out of him. Bobby toured the poverty stricken ghettos and share croppers' shacks, sat at kitchen tables and talked with mothers whose children were forced by law to attend segregated schools. On his way back to the limo, he remarked to a reporter, "I'm going back to Washington and do something about this." Ted made health care for everyone the central focus of his legislative career.

     To be on the side of the outcast, the poor, the sick, the hungry, the jobless, of those whom the powerful choose to exclude from the political process by systematically denying them the right to vote; this is to be on the right side of history. This is where Mitt Romney is on the wrong side of history.

     We are the 47%, Mr. Romney. And very few of us are irresponsible loafers who choose not to take responsibility for our lives.We are the veterans who stand to lose 11 billion dollars from much needed assistance. We are the elderly having to choose between food and medicine and doctors visits if medicare is replaced with a voucher system. We are African-Americans who marched, demonstrated, and even died for the right to vote; a right Mr. Romney's Republican Party is hell bent to repress. We are women in need of the reproductive health care, the cancer screenings, birth control, and access to safe abortions to whom Mr. Romney would deny funding. We are the college students depending on Pell grants and low interest student loans that will provide us with economic opportunity. We are mothers on medicaid who would love to find more than a minimum wage job waiting tables so we could afford decent day care for our kids and go back to school part-time and get our degree. We are fathers who have stood long enough in the unemployment line. Mr. Romney, we are the 47%; and you right us off at your peril. 

     And, Mr. Romney, despite your Republican Party's desperate attempts to keep us out of the voting booth, we will show up, and we will vote. Because we are on the right side of history.

The Jawbone.