Political Duplicity
Prior to becoming the 43rd Governor of Michigan in 1963, George Romney was the Chairman and President of American Motors Corporation. Romney was born in the Mormon Colonies located in the Sierra Madre Mountains in northern Mexico. As a result of the Mexican Revolution that took place from 1910 through 1920, the Romney family fled to the United States.
Romney served his two-year mission on behalf of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) in the United Kingdom and thereafter attended a number of universities, but never graduated from any of them. Romney had a successful lobbying career in Washington, DC with ALCOA (Aluminum Company of America) before accepting a position with the Automobile Manufacturers Association in Detroit, eventually advancing to become its President.
After participating in rewriting Michigan’s constitution, Romney declared himself a member of the Republican Party. It should be noted that, for the most part, a majority of LDS members are conservative and Republican. Romney attained the level of a high priest. As a moderate, however, the size of government was greatly increased under Romney.
In November of 1967, Romney announced his intentions to run in the Republican primary for President of the United States – he withdrew at the end of February in the following year. Richard Nixon who won the primary and later the presidency named Romney to the position of Secretary of Housing and Urban Development – he held that position for four full years.
Living mostly as a leader in volunteering, Romney only came back into politics once. He campaigned on behalf of his son Mitt during the 1994 U.S. Senate election in Massachusetts. That election was won by Edward “Ted” Kennedy who eventually held that seat from 1962 to 2009. Romney considers himself a moderate to centrist Republican.
On to George’s son his concluding child, Mitt, whose actual first name is Willard. Like his father before him, Mitt served a two-year LDS missionary requirement – his in France. After a postgraduate degree at Harvard in jurisprudence as well as acquiring an MBA, in 1977 Mitt Romney went to work for Bain & Company in Boston, Massachusetts, eventually becoming CEO of Bain Capital in 1984. Much of Romney’s success with Bain has been characterized by actor Richard Gere's portrayal of Edward Lewis in the movie “Pretty Women”. Lewis used corporate-raiding pursuits in buying corporations nearing insolvency, shrewdly closing them down, and then profiting from the sale of their real estate.
After successfully bringing financial stability to the Salt Lake City Winter Olympic Games in 2002, Romney ran for governor of Massachusetts and won. With a 55% voter turnout, Romney defeated Democrat Shannon O'Brien by 5% of the vote – neither candidate getting over the 50% mark. After losing in the Republican Party Presidential Primary of 2008 to John McCain, he was successful in 2012 but lost the presidency to Barrack Obama by close to 5 million votes.
When Republican Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah retired in 2018, Romney took up residency in Holladay, Utah, and ran for Hatch’s office and won. Holladay is located in the east-central portion of metropolitan Salt Lake City nestled up against the Wasatch Mountain Range.
In most cases, a moderate-to-centrist Republican is essentially the equivalent of a moderate-to-centrist Democrat. In the Senate Republican ranks, it is often difficult to surmise or predict the vote or favor of the Republican Party because ideologies like that of Romney may differ from the majority. He is often joined in this by Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.
According to a CBS News article entitled, “Mitt Romney's shifting views on climate change”, Romney opposed the use of mandatory limits on carbon dioxide to deal with global warming. He admitted that he did not know how much of human activity was involved in climate. Yet he is now supporting a carbon tax to thwart climate change.
In the linked YouTube video, Romney says, “The folks at MIT, as you probably know, built a model saying, ‘Okay, what things that we do, will actually reduce emissions, reduce temperatures or hold temperatures from going up as fast as they have it. What can we do?’ And the number one thing, and frankly, the only thing that had a major impact was having a price on carbon, the carbon tax either through or through a whole series of mechanisms, but a carbon tax or some kind of price on carbon with border adjustment taxes. That’s the only thing that has a significant impact”.
The MIT he refers to is the Massachusetts of Institute Technology, yet as with every defender’s affirmation of anthropogenic climate change, they use a model to formulate and illustrate their findings – reality never works for climate advocacy. Further in this video, Romney admonishes the Democratic Party for not doing enough to punish the people because of climate change. Romney who is reported as being worth more than one-quarter of a billion dollars is a politician that seems to progressively virtue signal that the average taxpayer needs to pay more for energy.
To further prove Romney’s breach of trust with colleagues, he failed to endorse or support fellow Utah Senator Mike Lee in this year’s election. Mike Lee is an outspoken detractor of human-generated climate change and any green new deal to combat the theory. Despite the subversive action by Romney, Lee was re-elected.