I’m going to miss my senator Mittens. Not because he’s a good legislator, in fact he’s terrible, but because he blurts out things our feral elite keep on the down-low. When Mittens ran for president in 2012 against Obama he told a heckler who was bitching about the domination of the US political process by corporations–“Corporations are people too, my friend”. And in a private fundraiser he complained that “47% of Americans are takers”.

Mittens is retiring because his feeling were hurt by MAGA voters, but his story is illustrative. Mittens is portrayed as a “sensible centerist” Republican but the only reason that he’s portrayed as “slightly more moderate” is that he came out against Trump. What’s ironic is that private equity vampires like Mittens helped create the economic devastation that made a Trump presidency possible. Donald Trump’s value to the American people in 2016 was in shining a light on the political and economic power in the US that has impoverished the majority of us.

Mittens is nothing if not shameless. He epitomizes the financialization of the American economy, where an ethic of “productivity” was replaced by one of “looting.” Romney’s career at Bain Capital is an example of this phenomenon. His father got rich building cars at American Motors. Mitt made his millions buying existing companies—such as a now-defunct Toys R Us,—loading them down with debt, then collecting profits and management fees even as workers were turfed out onto the street.

Does Romney sound like a “maker” or “taker”?

I’ve long wondered at the motivations of our leaders. Is it money, ideology or blackmail that keeps the evil flowing? Mittens is representative of a certain kind of striver that seems to make up a sizable portion of our putative elite. Many of us strive because it gives us a certain kind of pleasure. Whether we strive for good or bad unfortunately seems to be highly choreographed. In earlier days, the most intelligent strivers among the 0.1% were to be found in the Ivy League schools ergo the CIA and FBI recruited from them almost exclusively. The theory was that if you caught them young and indoctrinated them well then they will take their places in the deep state. 

Mittens and the so-called “sensible centerists” that manage the American empire have never met a war of foreign intervention that they haven’t cheered on. These are the same class who promoted the Iraq WMD and Russia-gate frauds, which were both politically motivated, state-sponsored, psy-ops. Their implied goals were to deceive the American public into supporting the foreign policy goals of the deep state. And they have all been rewarded and advanced by lying endlessly about terrorists, spies and fake threats to the republic. It’s illuminating that no one from the FBI or CIA has been arrested or charged for the Russia-gate fraud.

What’s striking is the shrill doubling down of support for Israel by the US political and media classes. In his latest reveal, Mittens, said that banning TikTok has such strong support in Congress because the social media platform has hurt Israel’s public relations battle. “Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down, potentially, TikTok or other entities of that nature,” Romney said at the McCain Institute this past Friday. “If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians relative to other social media sites, it’s overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts.”

The official justification for targeting TikTok is the thus far unfounded allegation that it’s a Chinese spy tool because its parent company, ByteDance, is based in China. But Romney’s comments suggest the real purpose of the renewed push to ban the app after a similar effort failed years ago was to censor news coming out of Gaza and pro-Palestinian content.

And it’s not just Mittens, our political system has been sabotaged. For years the corporate media has been running a series of clueless articles wondering why Trump won the 2016 election, and why Americans continue to support him. Trump won because Republicans like Mittens are presented as respected job creators and a moral counterpoints to the president, while in reality they’re both criminals who’ve looted the republic under the watchful eye of the corporate media.  Trump also won because of the behavior of the so-called opposition party.

The ultimate takeaway is that Mittens can pose as a “sensible centerist” because the Biden Administration and the Democratic Party also support the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine and Israel’s genocide in Gaza.