I hope you make it very clear

So I first saw a general mention that Mittens had told some business dudes to tell their employees to vote for him, and made a mental note of what I wanted to write about that, but it was premised on a mistake on my part. That mistake: underestimating Romney’s dickishness. Odd that I should still be making that mistake at this stage, but some things are just too big to wrap your head entirely around, and Romney’s dickishness is one of them.

I was going to say that it just showed Twitt’s inability to understand the true relationship between Americans and their bosses that he thought that employees so respected their bosses and were so eager for instruction from their social superiors etc etc.

But in fact, once I saw his actual words, I realized that he understood perfectly that the employer-employee relationship is based on economic and extra-economic coercion: “I hope you make it very clear to your employees what you believe is in the best interest of your enterprise and therefore their job and their future in the upcoming elections.” No, there is no part of the dynamic he recommends here that involves respect in either direction. The employer just makes it “very clear” what he expects his workers to do, if they want to keep their job and their future, and the employees don’t have to respect their boss, they just have to eat his shit; in this case, the shit happens to be man-sized and Mormon.

There’s another problematic word in that sentence I’d like to highlight: “in the best interest of your enterprise and THEREFORE their job”. There’s no therefore about it. Romney likes to describe his economic policies as being about jobs jobs jobs, but they are actually about expanding corporate profits. As the history of American capitalism and Bain Capital show, if a corporation can increase their profits by employing more people, they’ll do it, but if it can do so through mechanization or off-shoring, they’ll do that.

In the writing of this post, I spent several seconds carefully deliberating between the words “dickishness” and “prickishness.” When you have a blog, these are the kinds of decisions you have to make every single day.

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