Megan Izen

Romney: Don’t Bailout Detroit

I’m not going to pretend that I have a full understanding of the bailout plan the auto industry requested from Congress yesterday. I haven’t read enough yet. That said, I was disturbed by Mitt Romney’s Op Ed in the New York Times this morning. His arguments against the bailout plan made me cringe. He conjured the age-old ‘pull yourself up by the bootstraps’ metaphor for personal responsibility that has been used to deny and strip communities of color of benefits from welfare to health care. Actually, as governor of Massachusetts, Romney tried to criminalize people living without health care.

When Romney was asked about the government’s rescue plan for Wall St, he told Fortune Magazine,

“The bailout of Wall Street” was a terrible choice of words. No one wants to bail out anything, especially Wall Street. The objective of the legislation, however, had a much broader purpose: to stabilize our financial system, to keep it from complete collapse. Sometimes that broad purpose may require saving individual companies, as with AIG (AIG, Fortune 500).

Would Romney be singing the same tune if Detroit wasn’t 90% people of color?

Posted at 8:10 AM, Nov 19, 2008 in Economy | Permalink | View Comments