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Money for Mitt Romney but not the nation

By: Cahir O'Doherty | Published Wednesday, July 18, 2012, 9:45 AM | Updated Wednesday, July 18, 2012, 9:45 AM

What's happened is appalling but it's easily explained: the world of Mitt Romney, the world of America's super rich, has simply decoupled itself from the United States.

As the rest of the world develops new technologies, bolsters its space programs and discovers new subatomic particles, here in the United States Mitt Romney's visionary plan for our future involves throwing 30 million people off Obamacare and ballooning the deficit through further unproductive tax cuts to rich people like himself who don't need them.

After that he'll rest presumably.

Then on the eight day he'll probably de-fund Planned Parenthood and commence throwing the gays out of the military, the City Hall's, the Pentagon, the White House and Utah, possibly.

It will be back to the future. What I don't expect from Mitt Romney is any departure from the aims, objectives, philosophies, foreign policies or achievements of the George W. Bush administration. (Yes I just wrote the achievements of the George W. Bush administration).

Meanwhile, commentators are saying it's looking increasingly like Romney paid no taxes at all in 2009. Not one thin dime. And when he does actually pay taxes he pays only 14 percent, which at his level of annual income is next to nothing.

It's standard practice for presidential candidates to release at least six or ten years of back tax returns. They do this to illustrate to the rabble that they are regular citizens, insofar as that goes.

We have never had a richer candidate for the office. We have never had a candidate receive more record funding from billionaires. We have never had a candidate that has thumbed his nose at the ordinary contingencies of the political vetting process in the entitled way that Romney has. Could these things be connected?

Romney lives in an alternative America, the one where even your car has its own dedicated elevator. It's the America where he hasn't answered to the little people in his life. He's not about to start now.

The rich, wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald, are different. They have enough money to sound proof the walls. Shouts of outrage and anger do not reach them. They never have and they never will.

Meanwhile in the real America that you and I live in, you know the one with the working stiffs fighting to get (or keep) a job, balance their bank account, keep the phone connected and the  lights on - the nation where more and more people are ruminating darkly about the health and likelihood of a functioning democracy - well against all odds things have been slowly improving for us. There's a sliver of light on the horizon.

But Romney and his cadre of fat cat billionaires want to refinance that silver lining, offer it sub prime loans with the option to renegotiate, then they want to move it offshore to China where they can avail of non-union wage drops and unsafe working conditions to produce it a much lower cost.

We're told there's no money to invest in the nation's economy, in health care, in industry, in infrastructure, in construction, or in our stagnant wages. But there's no limit on the amount being donated to the candidate who will best serve billionaires.

There truly is two America's. They never see each other now. Mitt Romney will never live where the rest of do.

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