Sorry Mitt Romney, I Don't Want a Businessman for President

[SunsetDreams]

What kind of businessman is Mitt Romney? That's the question that is coming to animate the campaign. It's Mitt's fault, really. He ran as a man who would bring business experience to running government, someone who had turned around companies so could turn around our economy. He boasted that he has been a job-creator so he would know how to put American workers back to work.

So it was fair game for first his Republican rivals and now the Democratic incumbent to ask that same question: What kind of businessman is Mitt Romney?

In answering that question, we've heard he's a "vulture capitalist," who "off-shores" and "outsources" money and jobs, and whose business brilliance was ensuring himself a profit whether companies in his care flourished or failed. He was an ultimate speculator, a contract-breaker, a union-buster, a man whose business, in the words of a Bloomberg headlines, "yielded private gains, socialized losses."

He's a Gordon Gekko who espoused the idea that "greed is good," a Patrick Bateman of "American Psycho" whose line between amoral and immoral long ago evaporated. He's a man of the modern economy, not creating a product, but moving numbers to create personal wealth. He's a millionaire with endless tax write-offs, shockingly low tax rates and years of secret tax returns, hidden foreign accounts and, as the title of his memoir, "no apologies."

In short, he's no George Romney.

This is an awesome read IMO

More here: http://www.wnyc.org/blogs/its-free-blog/2012/jul/17/opinion-sorry-mitt-romney-i-dont-want-businessman-president/

[Arkana]

1. Last three businessmen that ran this country ran it into the ground.

Hoover, Bush, and Bush II.

Not a great track record for guys who want to "run the country like a business".

[oldhippydude]

2. four years after the first MBA President...

that worked swell didn't it!

[Gregorian]

3. My great uncle used to say that the Republican party is the party of business.

And it's true. By removing the things that protect people and the environment, businesses can explode with unbridled growth. But they don't realize that by doing so, they're actually making the country, and world, a worse place to live. Of course it's not that simple. But that is the negative side of it.

[Ruby the Liberal]

4. The kind that enriched himself on the backs of the taxpayers?

Option 1: Take $100 million on your $5 million investment and put the $20 million pension on the taxpayers to bail out through PBGC.

Option 2: Take $80 million on your $5 million investment and leave the pension fund intact.

AmPad. Willard chose option 1.

[Hoyt]

5. I agree. Where I live many of the candidates are running as "business people." It's bad enough

being ripped off by people trying to make an extra buck off folks in the private sector, why impose that on government where the issues are different.

Now, I have no issue with running sectors of government -- say roads -- in an efficient manner, but I don't want someone who finds lying, greed, callousness, etc., OK as long as it's done under the guise of doing business.

Another thing that gets me, I've worked for businesses and government. Truthfully, I found businesses just as screwed up, if not a much more so than government.

The worse business men (and, of course women) are those who think anything is OK when done for a profit or a bonus. Sending jobs overseas, ripping off people, and worse, is really not OK except in right wing schools of business. Such principles are only adopted by simpletons.