Mitt Romney: Banker and Pornographer

[Better Believe It]

Weekend Edition January 13-15, 2012
Lest We Forget
Mitt Romney: Banker and Pornographer
by DAVID ROSEN

Mitt has proved the artful dodger. So far, he’s succeeded as the political chameleon, effectively rebranding himself from socially-moderate opportunist politician to corporate-conservative bottom-line businessman. To do this, he has effectively remade his past; he’s slippery, no one knows who he is or what he really stands for.

Increased media attention, driven by (of all parties) Newt Gingrich, has spotlighted his role at Bain, making clear he is less a businessman than a greedy banker, the quintessential representative of the current economic crisis. As a former employee of a manufacturing company he gutted observed, “All he knows is how to shovel cash from one pile to another pile.”

His tenure as governor of Massachusetts is quickly passed over; he has transformed himself from publically financed health-care advocate to sink-or-swim preacher, from passive defender of Roe to anti-choice moralist, from approver of same-sex unions to anti-gay bigot.

One issue of Romney’s past has yet to emerge in the 2012 campaign is his role as a pornographer. This scandal played a little-appreciated but critical role in his failed 2008 Iowa presidential campaign; it was not mentioned in the 2012 Iowa Republican caucuses battle, let alone in the New Hampshire run.

Read the full article at:

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/01/13/mitt-romney-banker-and-pornographer/

[BlancheSplanchnik]

1. NO Rmoney!!! NO NO NO!!

I hate this guy more than all the others, because he is a master fraud, yet looks good....and we know how leading man looks can make people's decisions for them.

“Marriott is a major pornographer,” intoned Phil Burress, president of Citizens for Community Values (CCV), an Ohio-based anti-pornography group. “And even though he may have fought it, everyone on that board is a hypocrite for presenting themselves as family values when their hotels offer 70 different types of hardcore pornography.”

As early as 2000, Burress started challenging Marriott over offering in-room TV porn. In 2006, he pulled together a coalition of Christian conservatives to wage his campaign; the coalition included Focus on the Family, the American Family Association of Michigan and the CCV. It took out a full-page ad in USA Today demanding the Department of Justice crack down on hotel porn, specifically targeting the Marriott and Hilton chains. No action was taken.

<snip>
Nevertheless, the greatest fiction of the Romney campaign is that he presents himself as a businessman, indistinguishable for the small retail-store owner who lives or works next door. As one of the victims of his hedge-fund calculations reminds us, “All he knows is how to shovel cash from one pile to another pile.” He is, first and foremost, a banker, a speculator, a white-shoe gangster, a moneylender making a buck through usury. (emphasis mine)

While on the Marriott board, Romney’s support for offering porn signified his adherence of capitalism over Christian morals. It seems that for Romney, the church (Mormon, Evangelical or Jewish) was then – and remains – a parallel institution to the state; where one imposed moral discipline and conformity, the other functions as an apparatus of power and tax-collection serving corporate interests. Both serve the same goal, insuring the authority of the 1 percent. Watching him on the campaign stump, it seems that he still believes this in his heart-of-hearts. If he still has a heart.

[Jello Biafra]

2. Well.....it doesn't make him a pornographer...

it just makes him a hypocrite....

[Better Believe It]

3. A hypocrite who made money off porno.

[BlancheSplanchnik]

4. I wasn't really focusing on the porn part

except in that it's yet another stone on the cairn of disgusting slimy lying horror that he would mean for all of us people, if he were to end up as the Big Boss.