In an interview with the editorial board of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Mitt Romney said that he doesn’t support foreclosure relief for the millions of Americans struggling with underwater mortgages, untold numbers of which have been the victims of fraudulent lending or foreclosure practices. “Don’t try to stop the foreclosure process,” said Romney. “Let it run its course and hit the bottom. Allow investors to buy homes, put renters in them, fix the homes up and let it turn around and come back up. The Obama administration has slow walked the foreclosure process … that has long existed and as a result we still have a foreclosure overhang.”
Here we have the classic response, probably word-for-word the way his professors at the Harvard Business School taught it. But with this heartless statement, uttered in the heart of America’s foreclosure capital, Romney evokes the memory of Andrew Mellon, the Secretary of the Treasury during the Great Depression, who famously advised Herbert Hoover to “liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate farmers, liquidate real estate… it will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up from less competent people.” Classic capitalism, of course, but wrong, unimaginative, and hostile to the interests of people who are suffering.I know Obama has been ineffective, but is this mechanistic money mouthpiece what America really wants? I would call him the Tin Man, but even the Tin Man knew he had no heart.
Romney, who ardently argued the position that Corporations are People a few weeks ago, is perhaps the only man in the country who views It’s A Wonderful Life and thinks, “Yeah, Pottersville–that’s the ticket!”