"Romney’s culture remark offers peek at worldview; Often ties culture to nations’ wealth" by Matt Viser | Globe Staff, August 03, 2012
WASHINGTON — Mitt Romney made what seemed to be a presumptuous statement this week: that some countries — particularly Israel, the United States, and Chile — are more economically vibrant than their neighbors because of the cultures within those countries.
The comment triggered a firestorm, with Palestinian leaders calling it racist and his campaign trying to backtrack by saying Romney’s remarks were taken out of context. But over the past several days — as Romney himself penned an opinion article standing by them — it has become clear that they illustrate part of Romney’s core beliefs of the world, informing the underpinnings of his economic and global philosophies.
In one of his most striking, but little noticed, statements, Romney used a point made by author and former Harvard professor David Landes to state outright that certain cultures are better than others.
“The multiculturalism movement must be unmasked for the fraud that it is,” Romney wrote in his 2010 book, “No Apology: The Case for American Greatness.” “There are superior cultures, and ours is one of them. As David Landes observed, ‘Culture makes all the difference.’ ”
Landes did not respond to several requests for comment.
In a campaign that has been criticized by some who say it has been largely empty of original and thought-provoking ideas — one that has degenerated into name-calling and charges of law-breaking — the concept has triggered a vigorous debate. It also sheds light on a rare intellectual lodestar for Romney, normally a data-crunching candidate who avoids philosophical discussion, and illuminates his views of the world.
Actually, it isn't all that original when you start looking back through history. Mitt and his ilk have always felt this way.
But his critics, including the author of a book Romney has juxtaposed against Landes’s, say the presumptive Republican presidential nominee is grossly oversimplifying the argument of what lies behind national economic success.
Jared Diamond, author of “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” wrote in an opinion article Thursday in The New York Times under the headline “Romney Hasn’t Done His Homework” that Romney had “misrepresented my views” and “oversimplified the issue.”
Romney has repeatedly contrasted Diamond’s argument that societies have grown as a function of their access to natural resources as a foil to Landes’s emphasis on their human characteristics.
Referring to one Romney quote in which he said the presence of “iron ore on the land” explained how some peoples became rich and powerful, Diamond wrote, “That is so different from what my book actually says that I have to doubt whether Mr. Romney read it.”
Diamond argued that Romney’s summary that “culture makes all the difference” is “dangerously out of date.” He said culture does play a role in determining relative levels of economic success, yet it is far from the only, or even the driving, factor.
Yeah, WEAPONS, WARS, INVASIONS and OCCUPATIONS in the name of EMPIRE and CONQUEST go a long way.
Actually, that has become a culture here, hasn't it?
A nation’s climate, its geography, and its natural resources all play important roles in determining a country’s wealth, Diamond said. Whether a nation is located on the water, for example, can determine whether it has access to trading ports. Tropical countries, where diseases spread more easily and farming is more difficult, tend to be poorer than those in temperate climates.
It also determines who shall be invaded or subjected to coup attempts.
But geographic location does not tell the whole story, Diamond argues, nor do social mores.
“Rich, powerful countries tend to have good institutions that reward hard work,” he wrote. “But institutions and culture aren’t the whole answer, because some countries notorious for bad institutions (like Italy and Argentina) are rich, while some virtuous countries (like Tanzania and Bhutan) are poor.”
In his efforts to explain both his economic and social world view, Romney has been quoting Landes since at least early 2005, when he first began laying the groundwork for his 2008 presidential campaign.
“If we learn anything from the history of economic development, it is that culture makes all the difference,” Romney told a conservative audience in Spartanburg, S.C., in February 2005. “The cultural underpinnings of America are pretty clear: Americans work. We work hard.”
Under the corporate and business lash.
In making the point, Romney referred to Landes’s book, initially getting the author’s first name wrong, calling him Howard. But he would rarely stumble over his name again, as Landes would go on to become one of the authors Romney most frequently cites.
Romney mentioned Landes throughout his 2008 campaign, and has done so repeatedly this year in several of his prominent speeches — to promote his ideas on the economy at the University of Chicago; to inspire graduating evangelical students at Liberty University; and then, earlier this week, to a group of donors in Jerusalem.
It was there that Romney suggested that the Israeli culture was a key reason the country’s economy was more successful than that of the Palestinian territories.
Romney in the past had generally avoided actually comparing different cultures, but in 2010 he began highlighting economic disparities among specific nations.
“I thought of having been to Israel the first time and remarking at the extraordinary technology that the Israelis had built in their society,” he said at the National Press Club in March 2010. “And yet in the Palestinian areas, there was not that same level of technology and innovation. I looked at America versus Mexico. How could there be such a gap between two nations so close to each other? How can Argentina and Chile today even have such dramatically different prospects for their future, despite their proximity?”
It was a point Romney made again when he was in Jerusalem, in close proximity to the Palestinians, who were stung by the comparison. Palestinians contend that Israel’s control over movements of goods and people at border crossings hamstrings their economic growth.
But Romney has stuck by his comments. “The linkage between freedom and economic development has a universal applicability,” he wrote Tuesday night in his National Review Online piece, in which he seems to broaden the definition of culture to include political and economic institutions. “One only has to look at the contrast between East and West Germany, and between North and South Korea for the starkest demonstrations of the meaning of freedom and the absence of freedom.”
Romney’s campaign did not respond to questions about his beliefs, when and how he started developing his ideas about culture influencing the global economy, and who else influenced him.
In his comments about a cultural role in the economy, he doesn’t address China, for example, a country whose political and economic practices he adamantly disagrees with but one whose economy is booming.
Then he would have to acknowledge that is where he helped send jobs after companies received tax breaks and credits.
He also doesn’t address whether he believes that the current economic woes in the United States are in any way attributable to a change in the country’s culture, or whether culture plays a role in economic differences in some of the poorer states in the South versus the wealthier Northern states.
It's because we have become a culture driven and propagandized by money-junkies and war-mongers.
It is unclear whether Romney has ever met Landes or spoken with him. During a 2008 speech before the Conservative Political Action Committee, Romney quipped, “He’s a professor emeritus at Harvard University. I presume he’s a liberal. I guess that’s redundant.”
Still, Romney’s philosophy echoes a view expressed by his role model: his father, George, whose grandfather moved to Mexico and established a prosperous Mormon colony through what the family characterized as hard work. After they were forced to flee back to the United States, George Romney reflected on the tensions between Mexicans and Americans, once forced to live side by side.
“I was kicked out of Mexico when I was 5 years old because the Mexicans were envious of the fact that my people — who, when they went down there, were just as poor as the Mexicans they moved among — went to work with irrigation and dams and other things and became prosperous,” George Romney wrote in his autobiography. “The Mexicans thought if they could just take it away from the Mormon settlers, it would be paradise. It just didn’t work that way, of course.”
Related: Romney's Reminisce
Then how could he run for president?
Maybe someone SHOULD ASK MITT for his certificate!
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Also see: The Reincarnation of George Romney
“I was kicked out of Mexico when I was 5 years old because the Mexicans were envious of the fact that my people — who, when they went down there, were just as poor as the Mexicans they moved among — went to work with irrigation and dams and other things and became prosperous,” George Romney wrote in his autobiography. “The Mexicans thought if they could just take it away from the Mormon settlers, it would be paradise. It just didn’t work that way, of course.”
Related: Romney's Reminisce
Then how could he run for president?
Maybe someone SHOULD ASK MITT for his certificate!
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Also see: The Reincarnation of George Romney
No, it's not the boy.
"Points amiss in Romney’s ads on welfare; Fact checkers criticize, but voters respond" by Callum Borchers | Globe Correspondent, August 17, 2012
Mitt Romney’s ads attacking President Obama for a plan to “gut welfare reform” have been criticized by independent fact checkers but, fair or not, their message is resonating with some swing-state voters who say they’ve worked hard for a living and won’t support a president who they believe would enable free riders....
Amid the hoopla surrounding Romney’s selection of Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan as his running mate and debate over Ryan’s budget proposals, welfare overhaul has remained a major point of contention....
The only thing that is not down there is wars, what Wall Street wants, and aid to Israel.
Requests for such waivers have come primarily from Republican governors, and Romney was one of 29 members of the Republican Governors Association who made a similar plea for additional flexibility at the state level in 2005.
If you could eat political hypocrisy the poor would be full up!
And though Obama did oppose the bipartisan welfare overhaul law of 1996, the statements cited by the Romney campaign do not reveal an objection to welfare work mandates, when read in full.
Of course, Bill Clinton is now everyone's best friend in the Democratic Party.
It's amazing that the guy who presided over the construction of the globalist trading system that destroyed the American middle class is now presenting his party as the savior and protector of the middle class.
And the fact that he cut off welfare to women and children while expanding the empire overseas? Down the Democrat's memory hole.
In e-mails to reporters, the Romney campaign has provided a link to a YouTube page featuring audio of a speech Obama delivered at Carleton College on Feb. 5, 1999, when he was an Illinois state senator....
Obama went on to say he had reservations about the 1996 law because he believed it failed to address underlying causes of poverty.
From nearest I can figure the Democrats have done nothing about that for 30 years -- about the same time they starting accepting lobbyist money like the Republicans.
Hell, let's tell the truth: they aided and abated it this whole time.
But “that’s an extraordinarily nuanced explanation, and it’s difficult to get the public’s attention to tell that story,” said Franklin D. Gilliam Jr., dean of UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs.
Romney’s argument is not only straightforward but also believable, according to the Vanderbilt/YouGov Ad Rating Project. In a survey shared with the Globe before its publication, only 32 percent of independent voters rated Romney’s first welfare ad “untruthful.”
“You can quibble with the specifics of the [welfare] ad, but the core point is there, which is that Romney would be tougher on welfare work requirements than Obama,” said John Geer, chairman of the political science department at Vanderbilt University.
When are the Wall Street looters and liars going to jail for fraud?
Romney’s first welfare ad received a “pants on fire” rating from PolitiFact and “four Pinocchios” from the Washington Post’s Fact Checker blog.
Tali Mendelberg, a political science professor at Princeton University, chided the Romney campaign for what she called “implicitly [communicating] a racial message” in the ads.
“First, they dwell on Obama’s face,” said Mendelberg, author of “The Race Card: Campaign Strategy, Implicit Messages, and the Norm of Equality.” “If you contrast these against other equally critical ads on unemployment, you see that the welfare ads focus more on Obama’s face. Second, there is also the double meaning of the slogan ‘Obama isn’t Working,’ implying that Obama won’t make lazy people work and doesn’t work himself. Finally, all the visuals of people who are working are white.”
“The three components combine to send a racial cue,” Mendelberg said. “The implicit equation is black equals no work, white equals work.”
The Romney campaign has featured Obama’s face in other ads and has been using the “Obama isn’t Working” slogan for months. An aide said the campaign would not comment on racial messaging because the assertion “doesn’t deserve the dignity of a response.”
The Obama campaign also has been accused of racial coding in recent days, after Vice President Joe Biden told a diverse audience in Virginia on Tuesday that the Republican ticket would “put y’all back in chains.” Biden later said his remark was a reference to Ryan’s promise to “unshackle” the economy.
Geer said savvy strategists, like those at the Romney campaign, likely are not worried about criticism from fact checkers and political scientists.They are worried about appealing to “lunch-bucket voters in swing states” and starting “a conversation about the role of government.”
In Rhinelander, Wis., Bruce Gary said the conversation has begun among customers at the gun shop where he works part time, after retiring. “Listening to people out here, they’re fed up with these scams, these fake welfare claims and fake disability claims,” Gary said.
Gilliam, who has studied the effect of welfare-themed videos on viewers, said, “What they’re trying to do is cast Obama as ‘the other.’ They’re reminding white, middle-class voters that Obama supports people you don’t like and aren’t like you.”
“And, furthermore, he’s taking money out of your pocket to do it,” Gilliam added.
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I wonder what else he might have learned from Harvard:
"Harvard investigates 125 students for cheating on final exam" by Mary Carmichael | Globe Staff, August 30, 2012
CAMBRIDGE — Harvard University is investigating 125 students accused of collaborating on a spring take-home final exam, in what could prove to be the largest Ivy League cheating scandal in recent memory.
Nearly half the students in an introductory government class are suspected of jointly coming up with answers or copying off one another. Groups of students appear to have worked together on responses to short questions and an essay assignment, violating a no-collaboration policy that was printed on the exam itself, said Jay Harris, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education.
Although no students appear to have lifted text from outside sources, some apparently plagiarized their classmates’ work, submitting answers that were either identical or “too close for comfort,” Harris said Thursday.
A teaching fellow noticed the similarities in May while grading a subset of the exams....
In a statement, Harvard president Drew Faust said that the allegations, “if proven, represent totally unacceptable behavior that betrays the trust upon which intellectual inquiry at Harvard depends. . . . There is work to be done to ensure that every student at Harvard understands and embraces the values that are fundamental to its community of scholars.”
Tell it to the on-the-take faculty.
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"Harvard students bridle over test cheating investigation; Professor’s test rules permissive, confusing, they say" by Mary Carmichael | Globe Staff, September 01, 2012
When the Harvard University student, then a senior, turned in his take-home final exam for “Introduction to Congress” last spring, he thought he had done nothing wrong.
Yes, he had shared notes with friends in the course. But the instructions on the exam said students should consider it “completely open book, open note, open Internet, etc.” The professor had encouraged students to collaborate in their other course work. So even though the exam also included the admonition that “students may not discuss the exam with others — this includes resident tutors, writing centers, etc.,” the student said he figured it would be safe to swap a few ideas.
Besides, he knew something about tests. He had worked as a teaching assistant himself, helping another Harvard professor administer exams.
“My understanding was that you shouldn’t sit down and take a test with someone else, or take someone else’s test and present it as your own,” he said. “But I wrote my own answers on the final.”
In May, he graduated cum laude, settled into a job, and thought no more about “Intro to Congress” until early August, when the e-mail from Harvard’s Administrative Board came. He read as far as “may have an impact on your degree” before he got angry, then worried: What was he going to tell his new boss?
Dozens of Harvard students are in similar positions after Thursday’s announcement that about 125 of them — almost half of the 279-student “Intro to Congress” roster — are suspected of cheating on the course’s final exam....
Related: Ex-Harvard scientist fabricated, manipulated data, report says
Between that and the $elf-$erving conflicts of intere$t$ the kids don't need to cheat regarding the lessons of Harvard hypocrisy.
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Also see: Boston Globe School Daze: Classes Canceled at Harvard
As I will be canceling any more articles regarding Harvard as I wade through the stacks of Boston Globes.
Sorry for cheating you, dear readers.
