Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital

How the GOP presidential candidate and his private
equity firm staged an epic wealth grab, destroyed jobs
- and stuck others with the bill

By Matt Taibbi

The great criticism of Mitt Romney, from both sides of the
aisle, has always been that he doesn't stand for anything.
He's a flip-flopper, they say, a lightweight, a cardboard
opportunist who'll say anything to get elected.

The critics couldn't be more wrong. Mitt Romney is no tissue-
paper man. He's closer to being a revolutionary, a backward-
world version of Che or Trotsky, with tweezed nostrils instead
of a beard, a half-Windsor instead of a leather jerkin. His
legendary flip-flops aren't the lies of a bumbling opportunist
- they're the confident prevarications of a man untroubled by
misleading the nonbeliever in pursuit of a single, all-
consuming goal. Romney has a vision, and he's trying for
something big: We've just been too slow to sort out what it
is, just as we've been slow to grasp the roots of the radical
economic changes that have swept the country in the last
generation.

The incredible untold story of the 2012 election so far is
that Romney's run has been a shimmering pearl of perfect
political hypocrisy, which he's somehow managed to keep
hidden, even with thousands of cameras following his every
move. And the drama of this rhetorical high-wire act was
ratcheted up even further when Romney chose his running mate,
Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin - like himself, a self-righteously
anal, thin-lipped, Whitest Kids U Know penny pincher who'd be
honored to tell Oliver Twist there's no more soup left. By
selecting Ryan, Romney, the hard-charging, chameleonic
champion of a disgraced-yet-defiant Wall Street, officially
succeeded in moving the battle lines in the 2012 presidential
race.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/greed-and-debt-the-true-story-of-mitt-romney-and-bain-capital-20120829#ixzz24xU078ez

Rolling Stone
August 29, 2012
This story is from the September 13, 2012 issue of Rolling
Stone.

Workers at Bain-Owned Illinois Factory Bring Fight to Save Outsourced Jo...

This Video MIGHT Stop Romney From Becoming President

This Video MIGHT Stop Romney From Becoming President

Paul Ryan. Really ?

Duane Campbell

We have often argued here that the election of 2012 is critical.  As voters  we have a  major choice. Do we follow the Republican model of  continuing the current Depression, cut taxes for the rich, and cut programs for the working families?  Do we follow the lead of Bain Capital and Casino Capitalism ?  Or, do we invest in working America and put people to work ?  Do we insist that the government hire teachers, police officers, and invest in the future.

That choice has become even clearer with the selection of Paul Ryan as the Vice President candidate on the Republican ticket.

John Nichols, a progressive journalists , was the keynote speaker at an event we conducted on the media in 2002, writes from Ryan’s home state of Wisconsin. 

He says of Ryan, “ The hyper-ambitious political careerist—who has spent his entire adult life as a Congressional aide, think-tank hanger-on and House member. Or, to be more precise, a hypocritical big spender—at least when Wall Street, the insurance industry and the military-industrial complex call.

Ryan has been a steady voter for unwise bailouts of big banks, unfunded mandates and unnecessary wars. Few members of Congress have run up such very big tabs while doing so little to figure out how to pay the piper. How has Ryan gotten away with his fool-most-of-the-people-most-of-the-time politics?”

Most of all, Paul Ryan is the author and primary advocate of the Ryan Budget, the Republican plan to cut the government.  We should judge he and Mitt Romney from this plan.

Romney Attacks Teacher Unions

Mitt Romney has pledged to push back against teachers unions as president.

The former Massachusetts governor said on "Fox News Sunday," "But the role I see that ought to remain in the president's agenda with regards to education is to push back against the federal teachers unions." He continued, "Those federal teachers unions have too much power, in some cases, they overwhelm the states, they overwhelm the local school districts. We have got to put the kids first and put these teachers unions behind."

Romney said he would not "necessarily" eliminate the Department of Education, but said that it may combined with agencies and that its "reach" into the states has to be "pulled back."

Romney also criticized teachers unions in the context of the No Child Left Behind Act. "I support the principle of having states test their kids ... I did support No Child Left Behind and do support continuing to test our kids," he said. "I want to know which school districts are succeeding and which ones are failing and where they are failing. I want there to be action taken to get the teacher unions out and to get the kids once again receiving the education they need."

Romney touts dismantling of Bilingual Education

by Leslie Maxell.

Romney Touts Role in Dismantling Bilingual Education in Mass.

The Iowa caucuses are just a few days away and Mitt Romney, at least as of this morning, appears to be the frontrunner in the first contest of the 2012 presidential nomination sweepstakes.

For those of you trying to make a decision about the GOP candidates based on their education policies and philosophy, you can get a lot of insight on Romney over at Politics K-12, where Alyson Klein details the candidate's thinking about schooling by parsing a chapter from his book "No Apology: The Case for American Greatness."

Two pages in that chapter get into Romney's view on bilingual education vs. English immersion, which is interesting but not terribly surprising.

While he was governor of Massachusetts, Romney said he kept hearing that students were graduating from high schools in his state without being fluent in English. Those anecdotes were coming to him in the months after Massachusetts voters had passed a ballot initiative to curtail bilingual education in the state.

Astonished by this, the then-governor set about examining the state's bilingual education programs and asking questions about their effectiveness. He said the data were "scant" on whether bilingual programs produced better outcomes for students than English immersion programs. He picked up the phone and "called principals in California," where bilingual education had mostly been replaced with English immersion. The principals he talked to told him English immersion was better for students learning the language.

His conclusion? That bilingual education in Massachusetts had become little more than an employment program for bilingual teachers, who, he asserts, could not speak English well themselves.

When Romney sought the GOP nomination four years ago, he was upfront about his opposition to bilingual education and his support for ending it in Massachusetts. But pages 204-205 in his book's chapter on education tell us even more perhaps about the provenance of his stance.

He writes that during a visit to a Boston elementary school, he was stunned to discover that nearly all of the children enrolled in bilingual courses were American-born, not foreign-born:

At a student- body assembly, I asked how many youngsters were born outside the United States. Only a few hands went up. Surprised, I asked my next question: "How many of you are in bilingual education classes?" This time, the great majority of hands shot skyward, and the truth became obvious. Kids who were born in America, who watched television in America and played video games in America--thoroughly American kids--were being assigned to bilingual classes only to allow bilingual teachers to keep their jobs. The result that these students would be less fluent in English didn't seem to bother anybody!

Romney also says that immigrant parents he met favored English immersion for their children and that school officials often ignored their preference.

I don't anticipate that bilingual education vs. English immersion will become a marquee issue in this election cycle. But as the number of English-language learners in the United States continues to grow, it could become a matter that the president, whoever he or she may be, needs to weigh in on. And the best thing that could happen is for the debate to be stripped of the politics that continue to hang over it so that policymakers and educators could figure out what's truly best for teaching the language.