Recent news headlines are a clear intimation that the gods are not on our side. “Our” in this case can be read as the U.S., the West, or the Planet we call Earth – all apply. Here’s a sampling:

“Dismal Job Market Pushes Dow into 275-Point Plunge”
(DailyFinance)

“Obama Ordered Cyber Attacks on Iran”
(New York Times)

“American Nuns Fight Back Against Vatican Crackdown”
(Daily Beast)

“Israel Deploys Nuclear Weapons on German-built Submarines” (how weird is THAT!)
(Spiegel)

“Florida GOP Takes Voter Suppression to the Extreme”
(Rolling Stone)

“World Bank Blasts Europe’s Euro-Crisis Management”
(Spiegel)

And, finally, this lulu:

“Bill Clinton criticizes Obama's Bain attacks, praises Romney's ‘sterling business career'”

Imagine: A liberal ex-president multimillionaire who went from rags to riches in politics has the gall to heap public praise on the business career of a self-styled “severe conservative” wannabe president and multimillionaire who went from riches to more riches through a process he calls “creative destruction” in a business that specializes in “corporate raiding” – that is, taking over tired businesses, stripping away the good stuff and forming fresh new companies, laying off workers at the old ones in the holy name of efficiency (i.e., profit), loading them up with debt to finance the new operations, and if necessary (i.e., expedient) declaring the take-over target bankrupt (i.e., extinct). In the process, many workers who rely solely on “earned income” rather than tax-advantaged “capital gains” (as both Clinton and Romney, for example, do) go from blissful solvency to…well, rags.

There’s another possible explanation for Clinton’s ostensible defense of Willard Mitt Romney’s business dealings. Clinton has been accused of nefarious things, most of which he is quite probably guilty of, but nobody with half an ounce of existential objectivity has ever accused him of being stupid – he could be the cover boy for a lead story about the half dozen shrewdest politicians in American history.

It’s perhaps not too much of a stretch to imagine that Clinton made his otherwise incomprehensible defense of Romney in order to better position himself as a credible, business friendly, but nonetheless enthusiastic Obama backer. How better to blunt Republican attacks on Democrats who, as a collective menace to all things God-fearing Americans revere, are hostile to corporate enterprise – the backbone of the once-mighty U.S. economy – at a time when the job market, not to mention the stock market, is reeling?

A word about Willard Romney’s wealth: it’s not simply a reflection of a “sterling business career”; nobody knows that any better than William Jefferson Clinton. Unlike Clinton and 99% of the rest of us, Romney was born rich. It’s not exactly incidental that no questions have been raised about HIS birth nor is it meretricious to note that he subsequently decided to devote the middle decades of his life to getting richer in the profit-driven world of private equity, only later to discover his sacred calling to public service.

In 2010, Romney reportedly garnered the tidy sum of $21,700,000, or nearly $60,000 a day, every day. (Do the math: $21,700,000/365 = $59,452.)* If Mitt Romney worked a 40- hour week his hourly wages would come to $10,400. (40 hrs. X 52 weeks = 2080 hrs.; $21,700,000/2080 = $10,432/hr.) For record, the national average hourly wage is around $22 now.

If Joe Blow went to work every day for 40 years and made an average of $45,000 per year, Romney would make Joe’s lifetime earnings in just one month. (40 X $45,000 = $1,800,000 lifetime income; $59,452 X 30.27 = $1,800,000) In the casino where Joe sometimes blows his paycheck, Romney’s $10,000 bet and J.B.’s $20 bet would be about the same, relatively speaking. But of course Romney doesn’t frequent casinos and when he did (does) make big bets it was (is) with other people’s money.

Fine, you say, but why should the gods be angry? Romney didn’t do anything evil, illegal or, arguably, even wrong, did he? Since when did the avid pursuit of the almighty dollar become something to apologize for here in the Land of Opportunity? And why should J. B. care how much money Romney has, where it came from, or how he got it?

In fact, polls suggest that the average Joe does not resent Romney for being rich or intend to vote for the other guy – you know, the incumbent African-American with the improbable name who among the 44 men to have held that high office was hands down the least likely at birth to become President of the United States. And that’s not too surprising because President Obama has failed to bring either the dysfunctional US Congress or the disgruntled general public, including many who voted for him in 2008, under his spell. Indeed, the spell he cast in the 2008 campaign dissipated the day he took the oath of office.

And it’s not just the gods and rednecks becoming angry these days. The liberal cognoscenti are restless, too. Charles Pierce (Esquire) and Andrew Bacevich (TomDispatch) both wrote blistering articles last week denouncing Obama’s proclivity for secret wars, drone strikes, and “kill lists”. Obama, they imply, has found the temptation use “national security” and the much-abused “just war” doctrine as a fig leaf. Abroad he can order the military to blow things up whenever he chooses, whereas at home, he can’t blow his nose without asking John Boehner (another J.B., coincidentally) and Eric Cantor.

The headlines certainly seem to tell the story of a topsy-turvy world plunging headlong into chaos. It’s entropy not order, peace, progress, or “development” that has the upper hand. Perhaps it’s an illusion – a Western conceit – to think that it’s ever been any different or even that it could be any different. Perhaps the gods aren’t angry after all; perhaps they are just amusing themselves at our expense. If so, the outcome of this election won’t matter.

One way or the other, the outlook for Joe Blow, Barack Obama, and Uncle Sam is all gloom and doom. Meanwhile, the outlook for Willard Mitt Romney and his fellow Ivy Leaguers is bright – as always.


*Thanks to Jack Brooks for doing the math and sending the results my way. That Jack’s initials also happen to be “J.B.” is purely coincidental, of course.