Mitt Romney’s Positions on Social Issues Dictated by Church Leaders

Posted: May 12, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: U.S. Politics, 2012 presidential campaign, 2012 primaries | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | 47 Comments

Mormon Temple, Salt Lake City, Utah

On January 26, I wrote a post about an excerpt from the biography The Real Romney that had just been published by Vanity Fair. The Vanity Fair article detailed Romney’s cruel treatment of women when he was a Bishop and later Stake President in Boston’s Mormon community.

In doing a little further research on one of those women, Judith Dushku, and came across an earler interview with Dushku in which she recounted a conversation with Romney in which he told her he had been given permission by his church leaders to lie about his views on abortion and LGBT rights. A few years before, Romney had cut Dushku out of his life because she supported a women who had to choose between having an abortion and losing her own life. Here’s the relevant excerpt from my post:

A few years after the friendship ended, Romney ran for the Senate in 1994 against Ted Kennedy. Dushku was very surprised to learn that Romney was running as a pro-choice candidate. Dushku:

I was pleased and called, asking to see him. I told him I suspected that we had our differences, but that maybe I could work with him if he’d come to a really good position on women and childbirth.

And he said – Yes, come to my office.

I went to his office and I congratulated him on taking a pro-choice position. And his response was – Well they told me in Salt Lake City I could take this position, and in fact I probably had to in order to win in a liberal state like Massachusetts.

Suzan Mazur: Who’s “THEY”?

Judy Dushku: I asked him the same question. And he said “the Brethren” in Salt Lake City.

In other words, Romney was consulting with his church elders before deciding his positions on the issues, and they told him to lie!

Last night The Daily Beast published a post by famed investigative reporter Wayne Barrett that adds weight to Dushku’s testimony. Barrett begins by discussing portions of another Romney biography, Mitt Romney: An Inside Look at the Man and his Politics, by R.B. Scott, a former reporter for Time and a “distant cousin” of Mitt Romney’s, as well as an adviser to Romney early on. In the book, Scott writes about

numerous trips Romney has taken to the mountaintop to square his positions on social issues like abortion and gay rights with church hierarchy….[and] he describes how Romney came away from these Salt Lake treks bolstered by a flexible understanding he reached with the brass: He was able to moderate his views during his runs for Senate and the governorship in liberal Massachusetts, yet he could still find his way back to doctrinal purity once in the governor’s mansion and safely on to his way to the White House….

Scott says that 1993 trip “established a pattern” that Romney “would follow in years to come when deliberating about whether to run for Massachusetts governor in 2002, and, especially, before announcing his candidacy for president in 2007.”

In the spring and early summer of 2005, while Romney was still Massachusetts governor and preparing to set up his first presidential PACs, he visited Salt Lake so often that one senior church official said he “basically camped out” at church headquarters, according to Scott. Gordon Hinckley, the president and prophet with decades of ties to the Romney family (he and Mitt’s father, George, went to high school together), reportedly found the frequency and “dithering,” as Scott put it, “a little tiresome.”

During the Republican primaries this year, there was much discussion about Jack Kennedy’s famous speech to Southern Baptist ministers in Dallas in 1960. Kennedy was forced by constant questioning to pledge his independence from the Roman Catholic Church–even though Kennedy never traveled to Rome to seek guidance on political issues and was never a member of his church’s hierarchy as Romney was for many years.

Why is Romney being given a pass on his lack of independence from Mormon church leaders? Why do you suppose these church leaders gave Romney dispensation to hide his “severely conservative” views from voters until he had taken office as Governor of Massachusetts? Here is Scott’s answer, as reported by Barrett (emphasis added):

In 1993, Romney went to Salt Lake with a Mormon pollster and poll results showing that he couldn’t win in Massachusetts without moderating his positions on those sorts of issues. “They realized it would serve no purpose to quibble—the greater good was to get him elected and give him a shot at realizing the victory his father booted 40 years earlier,” Scott writes. “Did they see him as a future presidential candidate? Did he? Do the statues of Angel Moroni atop every Mormon temple always face east?”

In other words, Scott is contending that the church in effect licensed Romney’s better-than-Kennedy promises on gay rights, as well as his pink flyers at the Gay Pride Parade in 2002 that beckoned: “All citizens deserve equal rights, regardless of their sexual preference.”

I won’t belabor the White Horse Prophecy myth again, but it certainly appears that Mormon church leaders very much want a man in the White House who will follow their “advice.”

Caturday: Let’s get liturgical…

Posted: May 12, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: just because | 58 Comments

…or let’s say we did, and look at lolcats instead!

Here’s your late morning-ish meow, news junkies:

  • Did you know it is National Train Day? I enjoyed USA Today’s feature about 10 great places to celebrate. Here’s my favorite entry, though I went to school in St. Louis and I have to say there is a huge gaping editorial omission by not mentioning that the station has been converted into a shopping mall:

St. Louis Union Station
While train traffic has waned, this station still bustles with a museum, food court and attached hotel. Breslin says the site was a transfer point for millions of immigrants heading to the country’s interior. “It was a massive station at the height of train travel in this country. It was the Ellis Island of the Midwest.” 800-916-0092; explorestlouis.com

  • …and Hillary 2016! (Public Policy Polling shows Hillary with a “commanding early lead” in Iowa. The LA Times sez our badass advocate-in-chief Hillary “blows the speculative Democratic competition out of the water.” Well, ain’t that somethin’.)
  • Hillary honors Dorothy during keynote at the 25th annual “Celerating Women” breakfast. That is MY Madame President… Happy Mother’s Day:

“My mother had a resilience and a commitment to her family that she worked hard on every day. And I often wondered, How did that happen?” Clinton said. “When I got old enough to understand, I remember asking my mother … she said, At critical points in my life somebody showed me kindness, somebody gave me help.”

  • Joyce has an excellent Queer Talk post up at TM.com right now on this week’s developments. She speaks for me–best commentary I’ve seen yet on the subject anywhere, which is no surprise as Joyce has so diligently highlighted time and again the true everyday ordinary heroes and heroines of our American story as it unfolds, with her signature focus on the grassroots work of LGBT & other human rights advocates. Read it now:

“Obama & Marriage Equality – The “Personal is Political,” but It Isn’t Necessarily Policy.

  • Meanwhile, Mittens addresses Falwell U. Great way to shift to general election mode and not alienate more Independents. A sample of his nauseating speech, via the CNN link:

People of different faiths, like yours and mine, sometimes wonder where we can meet in common purpose, when there are so many differences in creed and theology,” Romney said. “Surely the answer is that we can meet in service, in shared moral convictions about our nation stemming from a common worldview. The best case for this is always the example of Christian men and women working and witnessing to carry God’s love into every life.”

Yes, the best case for this is always a big white evangelical cross. Also best case? Hoisting oneself with their own petard, Mr. Romney. We’re all morons with millions of campaign dollars to burn on idiotic campaign strategies, just like you. Seriously, you’re not going to win over the fundies who aren’t already willing to vote for you–they think you have everlasting celestial Mormon cooties, get it? The new Age fundies who don’t hate you because you are Mormon are already voting for Obama. You need to carve out YOUR own base of constituencies to reach out to–greedy and/or ill-informed “fiscal conservatives” who could not care less about social issues + people disaffected by Obama in this economy. You’re competing against Voldemort Axelrove et al. now, not the Sanctimonium “proletariat”–get it together, already. If it’s going to be a crappy election, the least you could do is not bore us to death. Occupy Politics 101, okay?

And, with that Sky Dancers, I’m off! You know what to do in the comments.

My Jaded Crystal Ball

Posted: May 11, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Bailout Blues, Banksters, Equity Markets, financial institutions | Tags: , , , | 11 Comments

Okay, this is wonky.  I’ve been avoiding writing about securitization for awhile because it can even get the best of people that know financial markets. You may remember that some one asked me where the next bubble lurked and I said commodities.  Now, that’s actually a dangerous place for a bubble because commodities are things you eat and things that make your house light up and your car run.  The housing bubble pretty much wiped out middle class wealth in the west.  What would a commodities bubble burst do in the right markets?  Well, think Mad Max or at least The Grapes of Wrath. Conversely, it could lead to a massive drop in key prices like that of oil.  Imagine that one!

Here’s some interesting finds from FT Alphaville on the securitization of commodities. It’s titled “The subpriming of commodities” for effect.

It’s always been common practice for commodity inventory to be financed by banks by being pledged as security for the loans in question.

The problem comes if such enterprises, instead of using the inventory for general business purposes, are encouraged to stockpile for the sole purpose of liquidity provision and the opportunity to punt on the underlying commodities themselves. It’s a process which arguably artificially pumps up demand for the underlying inventory.

Bundle all those loans together, meanwhile — ideally into a product that can be sold to buyside investors seeking exposure to  commodities — and suddenly you’ve got a direct source of funding for an ever-more speculative game.

When it comes to the larger players,  meanwhile, this arguably transcends ‘trade finance’ even further — especially if it involves the setting up of a large number of special purpose vehicles to accomplish the process.

Here, for example, are the thoughts of Brian Reynolds, chief market strategist at Rosenblatt Securities, regarding what’s going on:

A little more than a year ago we picked up on a trend that we termed the “sub-priming” of commodities. Wall Street has been increasingly been doing structured finance deals wrapped around commodities, and this has added a bid for them while also making them vulnerable to downdrafts.

We know that many equity investors think (or at least hoped) that, after the disastrous record of wrapping pipeline and telecom assets in the 1990’s and sub-prime housing in the last decade, financial market reforms such as Dodd-Frank would have eliminated structured finance as a macro driver. When Dodd-Frank was proposed it envisioned standardized derivatives being placed on exchanges and clearinghouse. We felt it would encourage more non-standardized, exotic, and opaque structures to be created, and in the two years since it was enacted that’s what seems to have happened.

Important trends indeed. Yet, as Reynolds also notes, they’re also very hard to quantify given they mostly occur off-balance sheet:

This process is virtually impossible to quantify. We know that’s a disappointment to equity investors who are used to dealing with voluminous information, but that’s the nature of structured finance. Many structured finance deals are private in nature. As such most people, even those in the credit markets, did not know the full extent of the structuring going on in the 1990’s or the last decade until those firms, which were trapped by “Special Purpose Vehicles” (SPVs), such as Enron, WorldCom and Citigroup, became forced sellers. But over the last year we’ve heard more and more anecdotal evidence of Wall Street increasingly structuring commodity deals, such as structured notes and swaps and even using commodities as collateral.

In Reynold’s opinion — even though he’s not a commodity expert per se — this activity significantly increases the risk of a sharp drop in oil in the coming year, especially since structured finance transactions usually come with caps and floors, which act as important support and resistance levels.

That’s an interesting analysis for oil or copper.  However, what happens if the commodities in question happen to be food?  The only place this used to happen significantly was the gold market.  Actually, it’s understandable for oil too.  But is Wall Street so hungry for  financial innovation that they’re willing to bet the world’s food supply on it?  Yes, of course.  They’ve already done it several times.  History teaches us that it drives the prices up to unreasonable and unsustainable levels that take all kinds of people down when prices collapse.

Here’s an interesting bit on a contango that happened in the wheat market that already led to a food price crisis in 2007-2008.  This one had the Goldman Sachs brand all over it.  Last year, a similar situation occurred with the Oil Market and the same player.

On Monday, April 11, Goldman Sachs told its clients to sell commodities, and the market reacted with a $4 tumble in the price of West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil and sell offs in other commodities.

On Thursday, April 14, the leaders of the “BRICS” nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), meeting in Sanya, China, continued to press for a new world monetary system that has a much lower reliance on the dollar, and called for stronger regulation of commodity derivatives to dampen excessive volatility in food and energy prices.

We are in another commodity price run up, like that experienced in the 2005-2008 period.  Such commodity price frenzies have devastating consequences for the world’s poor who, in some instances, already spend half of their income on food.  Today, in the U.S. itself, the rise in the price of gasoline to more than $4 per gallon threatens an economy still struggling to free itself from the still lingering effects of the last bursting bubble.

It appears that the Western economic systems have become ever more volatile over the past decade.  That is, bubbles, followed by severe contractions, are appearing more often and with increased severity.  This is in stark contrast to the dampening of the business cycle we observed, and celebrated, in the 1980s and 1990s.  So, what changed?

In Harper’s last July, Fredrick Kaufman wrote an article entitled The Food Bubble, which explained the reasons for the run up in agricultural commodity prices just prior to the ’08 financial meltdown and worldwide recession.  The popular business media gave the article short shrift.  But, most of what Kaufman observed as the causes of the commodity price run up in the ’05-’08 period is now being repeated, a short three years later.

I’m finding all this interesting as I watch Jamie Dimon squirm on the big hedge loss reported by JP Morgan.  That’s the $2 billion mark to market loss that makes me thing we’re on the verge of 2007 redux.  Specifically, the market concentration is incredible because “the whale” created a huge problem for tons of hedge funds.  Also, the regulator appeared to be asleep at the switch.  You remember are old friends the Credit Default Swaps?

99 per cent of all CDS trades live in an information warehouse called DTCC, to which the regulators of the banks have access in however much detail they want!!! What kind of regulator doesn’t go and look at the that, when the mere public, aggregated info shows this?

Go check out the accompanying graph.

Anyway, I’m not going to get long winded and all financial economist on you, but sheesh, how many times does history have to repeat itself in markets before we get some one to do something useful?   I’m just reminded of all the little canaries that died on the way to the big 2007 blow up that people ignored.   How many canaries have to die this time out before we get another big one

Friday Reads

Posted: May 11, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: morning reads | Tags: , , , , , , , , | 34 Comments

Good Morning!

I found a few interesting things for us to look at this morning.  I’m going to start off with the increasingly creepy role Big Pharma plays in what your doctor prescribes for you when you probably don’t need it.   Only one catch here.  You might’ve asked for it based on the constant and perpetual bombardment you get daily of Big Pharma’s ads for Life Style Drugs.  Here’s a great article from Alternet called: “Ask Your Doctor if This Big Pharma Scam Is Right for You: The Dangers of a Drugged Up America; In medicated America, the fix for every problem is just a prescription away. Except that it’s not”.

In the past three decades, America’s healthcare system has radically metamorphosed from a public service network (largely run by independent physicians and nonprofit hospitals) into a corporate profit machine–one that Dr. Arnold Relman, the renowned former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, calls the Medical-Industrial Complex. Drugmakers have been among the most ambitious, in-your-face pushers of this transmutation of medicine into just another commodity to be sold by hook or crook. In this system, the concept of “care” has been reduced to “caveat emptor,” with the shareholders’ interest in monetary gain overriding all other interests.

A fast-moving, systemic epidemic called DTC has swept across America, endangering public health, jacking up our costs, and weakening the curative connection between health professionals and patients. DTC stands for “Direct-to-Consumer” drug advertising. It’s a plague of marketing, empowering profiteering corporations to short-circuit the judgment of doctors by using all of the tricks of Madison Avenue (including lies) to convince viewers and readers that (first) they’re suffering from a particular malady, (second) the advertiser’s brand-name medicine is the very best cure, and (finally) they must go to their doctors pronto to insist on getting a prescription for that specific drug. The essence of this marketing scheme is to turn consumers into sales representatives for drug peddlers. Brilliant.

Greece might be in a better bargaining position than German Bankers would like.  Here’s an interesting article from Bloomberg called: “Greeks May Hold $510 Billion Trump Card in Renegotiation”.

“Greece has got some strong cards to persuade them to go easy on austerity,” said John Whittaker, an economist at Lancaster University Management School in England. “Everyone fears a Greek departure from the euro because they’ll lose money and lose political capital.”

European governments have poured money into Greece since its first rescue was agreed to in April 2010 in a bid to keep the country in the euro and prove that monetary union, a symbol of European post-war integration, is irrevocable.

After receipt of a 7.5 billion-euro tranche in March, Greece now owes other countries more than 80 billion euros in bailout funds. The European Financial Stability Facility said 4.2 billion euros of rescue cash will be disbursed to the nation today.

The ECB also stands to lose much if Greece walks away from its obligations. First, the central bank bought about 50 billion euros of the government’s bonds to push down yields and help the nation retain access to the capital markets.

Al Franken’s career has been a delight to follow.  He’s pressing the DOJ to explain why it’s tracking people via their cellphones. This is via The Hill.

In a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, Franken asked how often the Justice Department requests that wireless carriers turn over the location data of their customers and what legal standard the department believes should apply.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) releaseda report last month that found that local police across the country regularly gather cellphone location data, often without a warrant. The ACLU called the practice “pervasive and frequent.”

The Supreme Court ruled earlier this year in United States v. Jones that tracking a suspect’s car using a GPS device qualifies as a search under the Fourth Amendment.

Franken said that police who obtain location records from wireless carriers might be “working around” the Supreme Court’s decision.

“I was further concerned to learn that in many cases, these agencies appear to be obtaining precise records of individuals’ past and current movements from carriers without first obtaining a warrant for this information,” Franken wrote. “I think that these actions may violate the spirit if not the letter of the Jones decision.”

Franken asked Holder to explain how the Supreme Court’s decision affects the gathering of cellphone data and whether the Justice Department’s practices have changed since the ruling.

Our budget problems are not due to programs that help Low-Income Americans.  Here’s some analysis from the Center on Budget Priorities on what is driving our budget problems.

Several conservative analysts and some journalists lately have cited figures showing substantial growth in recent years in the cost of federal programs for low-income Americans.  These figures can create the mistaken impression that growth in low-income programs is a major contributor to the nation’s long-term fiscal problems.

In reality, virtually all of the recent growth in spending for means-tested programs is due to two factors:  the economic downturn and rising costs throughout the U.S. health care system, which affect costs for private-sector care as much as for Medicaid and other government health care programs.  Moreover, Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projections show that federal spending on means-tested programs other than health care programs will fall substantially as a percent of gross domestic product (GDP) as the economy recovers — and fall below its average level as a percent of GDP over the prior 40 years, from 1972 to 2011.  Since these programs are not rising as a percent of GDP, they do not contribute to our long-term fiscal problems.

Specifically, federal spending for mandatory (or entitlement) programs outside health care (including refundable tax credits like the Earned Income Tax Credit) averaged 1.3 percent of GDP over the past 40 years.  This spending reached 2.0 percent of GDP in fiscal year 2011, a substantial increase.  But CBO projects that it will return to the prior 40-year average of 1.3 percent by 2020 and then remain there.

Federal spending for low-income discretionary programs is virtually certain to fall as a percent of GDP in the coming decade as well.  Under the Budget Control Act’s funding caps, non-defense discretionary spending will fall over the decade to its lowest level as a percent of GDP since 1962 (and probably earlier).

As a result, total spending for low-income programs outside health care — both mandatory and discretionary programs — is expected to fall over the coming decade to a level below its prior 40-year average.

I’m going to let you know exactly why I would never live in Nebraska again.  A nice Lincoln lady explains why gays shouldn’t be protected from bullying or severe beatings.  Be sure to pay careful attention as to why both Hillary and Judas are ‘homos’.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

As Governor, Romney Tried to Eliminate a State Commission Focused on Protecting LGBT Youth

Posted: May 10, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, open thread, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , , | 25 Comments

Gov. Mitt Romney at a 2006 press conference

Wow! Today is not a good day for Mitt Romney. First the Washington post comes out with a major article on his career as a bully and gay bash in high school and now Talking Points Memo has learned that Romney was so up-tight about Boston’s gay parade in 2006, that he threatened to get rid of an LGBT anti-bullying commission formed by previous Republican Governor Bill Weld in 1992 after he learned about the shocking rate of suicide among gay school children.

Check this out from a May 12, 2006 Boston Globe article (via TPM):

Angered that his name appeared on a press release touting a gay pride parade, Governor Mitt Romney moved yesterday to curtail the activities of a 14-year-old advisory commission on gay and lesbian youth.

The commission chairwoman, Kathleen M. Henry, said she was called yesterday by Beth Myers, the governor’s chief of staff, who told her that the governor planned to issue an executive order ”revoking our existence” and creating another youth commission whose purview would be all of the state’s youth, not just gays and lesbians. The commission would have all new members, she said.

Romney later backed down after being “inundated…with outrage.”

Administration sources said Romney’s aides were angered by an ”unauthorized” news release issued by the commission March 27 announcing this weekend’s Youth Pride parade. The release, which described the celebration of ”gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer youth and their supporters,” went out on official state stationery, with the names of Romney and Lieutenant Governor Kerry Healey appearing with the names of the commission chairwoman and vice chair.

They were apparently also freaked out by a meeting with Brian Camenker, a right wing “activist,” who showed them pictures of the previous year’s parade and suggested Romney wouldn’t go over well as a national candidate if he lent his name to such shocking goings-on.

”Last year [at the parade] they had boys in fishnet stockings and high heels parading down Boylston Street,” Camenker said. ”They had boys dressed as women embracing. We presented stuff, and they were visibly sickened by what they saw. I said, basically, this group has to go. It’s so manifestly destructive to kids that you have to get rid of it. They said they’d do something.”

Allowing the commission to remain in existence demonstrates ”pure cowardice on the governor’s part,” he said. ”This shows that Romney probably doesn’t have what it takes to run the country if he can’t even make a decision about this.”

Eventually the anti-bullying group started an independent commission so they wouldn’t have to deal with Romney’s squeamishness about homosexuality. And this guy is running around the country claiming President Obama is living in the past.

Feel free to use this as an open thread.

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →