The Romney campaign looks desperate in the final days before the election and so has been filling the airwaves across the US with ads that, at best, distort the truth or are outright lies:
Mit Werbespots schürt er Ängste, die Chrysler-Marke Jeep wolle die
Produktion eines besonders erfolgreichen Geländewagens nach China
auslagern. Das sei eine Lüge, schoss der Konzern umgehend zurück.
(In campaign ads he stirs up fear that Chrysler Jeep is planning to transfer production of its highly successful sport untility vehicle to China. The company immediately shot back that this is a lie.)
It all got to be too much for the editorial board of the Washington Post, which over the weekend accused Romney of blatent dishonesty:
"And then there has been his chronic, baldly dishonest defense of mathematically impossible budget proposals.
He promised to cut income tax rates without exploding the deficit or
tilting the tax code toward the rich — but he refused to say how he
could bring that off. When challenged, he cited “studies” that he
maintained proved him right. But the studies were a mix of rhetoric,
unrealistic growth projections and more serious economics that actually
proved him wrong."
But the biggest lie of the Romney campaign is that Mitt Romney has a record of creating jobs and cutting debt. Worth reading in this respect is this piece in the Handelsblatt: Romney the Robber. The article discusses the tactics of Romney's old firm Bain Capital which provided rich returns to its investors by cutting jobs and loading portfolio companies with debt:
Das Ganze ist nicht ohne Ironie. Denn in seinem Wahlkampf verkauft
sich Romney gerne als den Vorstandschef, der durch seine wirtschaftliche
Kompetenz Amerikas Wirtschaft wieder richten will. Gerne greift er
Präsident Barack Obama als Schuldenmacher an, der den US-Haushalt in die
roten Zahlen getrieben habe.Dabei verschuldete Romney und seine
Untergebenen bei Bain Capital ihre Gesellschaften bis zum Anschlag.
Noch lange Zeit profitierte Romney auch nach seinem Abgang 1999 von den
Sonderdividenden, wie die Autoren Rauch und Fürth herausfanden: "Er
hielt Anteile an den entsprechenden Investmentfunds".(The whole thing is not without irony. For in his campaign he sells himself as the chief executive who through his business skills will put America's economy back on a strong footing. He likes to portray President Obama as someone who just creates more and more debt and who drove the budget deep into the red. But Romney and his subordinates leveraged their companies to the hilt. He could profit from the special dividends for a long time, even after he left Bain in 1999, the authors Rauch and Fuerth learned. "He continued to participate in the respective investment funds.")
Will the "low information" white working class voters in Ohio and Pennsylvania fall for Romney's dishonest tactics? We'll know soon enough.
