But what will be the other side of that debate? We have, so far, a patchwork of answers: President Obama’s Osawatomie speech, Elizabeth Warren’s candidacy, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’spublic fight for the victims of the big banks, the Progressive Caucus and its People’s Budget, and a nascent, but potent 99 percent movement. Stitched together, they provide glimmers of a coherent, inspired response to the excesses and depredations of the Romney Economy.
The difference between the two isn’t only that one is about nurturing fairness and the other, very clearly, is not. The difference is that Romney capitalism — the kind of “vulture capitalism” represented by Bain and so many chop-shop private equity operations — undermines the strength of our economy itself, and the economy’s ability to work for working people. There is, as even Warren Buffett has pointed out, a real difference between investing and building a company that makes something or provides a service that adds value to the economy, and a barbarian-at-the-gate-style enterprise that loots and strips, making millions for its executives by ripping holes in the economic fabric.
Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editor and publisher of the Nation magazine, vanden Heuvel writes a weekly column for The Post.
Archive
A collection of Ann Telnaes animations on Mitt Romney.
The current rules, as set by lobbyists pushing for tax loopholes and deregulations, have been rigged to allow Romney and his friends to make out like bandits. And so this election doesn’t just turn on whether we will change the rules; it is a question of whether we want one of the actual bandits to be put in charge of our future.
Though it might be odd that such attacks on Romney have originated with Republicans themselves, that they have sparked a national conversation matters a great deal. It allows those who’ve been making the case for years to drive home the critical point that the work of people like Romney is not the stuff of natural free markets; it is the product of a well-funded construct of laws and rules and institutions and values that undermine shared prosperity in a country that once took pride in supporting upward mobility.
There are many smart, concrete, not pie-in-the-sky ideas about how we can recalibrate our economy, return it to fairness, how we can reimagine it as one built not on vulture capitalism but on democratic capitalism. The Nation recently gathered many of those ideas in a special issue, Reimagining Capitalism, laying out alternative ideas for a more humane capitalism that works for communities.
This campaign promises to be an MRI of our economic system. If that sounds unlikely, consider that six months ago, few, if any, political leaders were talking seriously about economic inequality — and today, the king of crony politics, the governor of Texas, is complaining about the immorality of vulture capitalists. A lot can change; a lot already has.
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