Interesting post by Jeff Sovern at the Public Citizen Law and Policy Blog. A lot of effort has gone into providing loan customers with the APR (which is somewhat different than the interest rate). But are consumers actually using/heeding that information? Sovern explains the quandary, and raises the issue of alternate approaches.
Robert Reich has distilled ten principles of Romneyism. I think he's compiled and articulated these accurately. Whether they SHOULD be guiding principles for the United States is an entirely separate question. Here are the ten:
1. Corporations are the basic units of society. 2. Workers are a means to the goal of maximizing corporate profits. 3. All factors of production -- capital, physical plant and equipment, workers -- are fungible and should be treated the same. 4. Pollution, unsafe products, unsafe working conditions, financial fraud, and other negative side effects of the pursuit of profits are the price society pays for profit-driven growth. 5. Individual worth depends on net worth -- how much money one has made, and the value of the assets that money has been invested in. 6. People who fail in the economy should not be coddled. 7. Taxes are inherently bad because they constrain profit-making. 8. Politics is a game whose only purpose is to win. 9. Democracy is dangerous because it is forever vulnerable to the votes of a majority intent on capturing the wealth of the successful minority, on whom the economy depends. 10. The three most important aspects of life are family, religion, and money.
Go to 6:15 of this youtube clip and you'll see Mitt Romney mocking Barack Obama on the issue of climate change at the Republican national convention. As Amy Goodman then points out, however, neither candidate (and none of the moderators) bothered to mention climate change at the debates. This is an incredibly sad state of affairs.
Glenn Greenwald: The one common strain running through these historic civil liberties assaults is war. War almost always erodes political liberties. That has always been true. Cicero famously observed "inter arma, enim silent leges" (in times of war, the law falls mute). That fact - that wars maximize a political leader's power - is a key reason they often crave war and why wars, under the Constitution, were supposed to be extremely difficult for presidents to start. As John Jay wrote in Federalist 4, "absolute monarchs will often make war when their nations are to get nothing by it, but for the purposes and objects merely personal."
Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone points out the lessons Americans have seen as a result of Hurricane Sandy:
The point is, we will end up with a big government no matter who wins next week's election, because neither Mitt Romney nor Barack Obama is supported by a coalition that has any interest in tightening its own belt. The only reason we're having this phony big-versus-small argument is because of yet another longstanding media deception, i.e. that the only people who actually receive government aid are the poor and the elderly and other such traditional "welfare"-seekers. Thus a politician who is in favor of cutting services to that particular crowd, like Mitt Romney, is inevitably described as favoring "small government," no matter what his spending plans are for everybody else. But everyone lives off the government teat to some degree – even (one might even say especially) the very rich who have been the core supporters of both the Bush presidency and Romney's campaign. Many are industrial leaders who would revolt tomorrow if their giant free R&D program known as the federal military budget were to be scaled back even a few percentage points. Mitt's buddies on Wall Street would cry without their bailouts and dozens of lucrative little-known subsidies (like the preposterous ability of certain banks to act as middlemen in transactions when the government lends money to itself). And if it's not outright bailouts or guarantees keeping the rich rich, it's selective regulation and carefully-carved-out protections from competition – like the bans on drug re-importation or pharmaceutical price negotiation for Medicare that are keeping the drug companies far richer than they would be, in the pure free-market paradise their CEOs probably espouse at dinner parties.