Here is a belated response to a really frightening set of  comments that Mitt Romney made earlier this week to a group of GOP donors to his campaign in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem.  The press picked up the comments in a way that led most readers to conclude that Romney was both stupid and perhaps racist-- which are reasonable conclusions, but more here is really involved.

Looking at Israel and praising its accomplishments(not the socialist agricultural collectives or Kibbutzim, not the achievements since the early days of Histradut, the Jewish Labor Organization which preceded the establishment of the state, but the fact that the areas "managed" by Israel had more than twice the per capita GDP of the areas managed by the Palestinian Authority(which has existed only in this generation, Romney as a good corporation man saw this as the only  statistic worth praising. 

  Romney  this attributed this  per capita GDP gap to both the "physicial characteristics" of the land, citing Jared Diamong  a scientist who went  from physiology  and studies of evolutionto  to Geology and  the study of society  Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fate of Human SocietiesHe also threw in Harvard "neo-liberal" economist and  "megahistory" theorist David Landes. author of The Wealth and Poverty of Nations as convincing him that cultural factors "make all the difference."

 I am no great fan of either of these two, although I would distinguish Diamond, who is a serious materialist scholar whom I respect even in disagreement,  with Landes, whom I see  as an apologist for  "neo liberali" contemporary global capitalism and, to use Thorstein Veblen's good old term, an  salesman  of the "higher superstition." 

In the case of Landes, who borrowed from Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations to write "The Wealth and Poverty of Nations" free markets and capitalism, cultural and environmental factors, explain wealth and poverty.  The profits from slavery and colonialism were not significant factors.  The British and Dutch turned religion into the "Protestant Ethic" and along with other Northern and Western Europeans and later North Americans developed a scientific outlook, saved and invested, etc.

But Romney if anything was putting forward a kind of lower superstition.  Jared Diamond responded fairly  that his work dealt with larger ecological material conditions, not the physical characteristics of the land, and wondered if Romney had read his book.  I would wonder why Romney used the "physical characteristics of the land" which are pretty much the same in the whole region to explain the difference in per capita income. 

Diamond also mentioned that Landes dealt with much more than cultural factors.  That is certainly true, and if anything, Romney should have found Landes general thesis blending ideology and environment to  make class struggle, racism, and imperialism vanish, much more useful than his lame comments on culture as the defining factor

It gets worse.  The New York Times quoted research by the CIA of all people which showed that the per capita GDP difference between Israel and the Palestinian Authority was more like 10 to 1 and also criticized Israel's punitive trade restrictions especially against the Hamas controlled Gaza region.  Of course, per capita income averages themselves don't really tell that much about the distribution of income among real people according to class.  Perhaps Romney if he reaches the presidency, will cut the CIA research division's budget for supplying the information that made him look particularly stupid

And then, in a statement that the press has largely buried, it gets much worse.  After the A.P published what Romney had said, his campaign responded that it had "grossly micharacterized" his remarks and came forward with this "clarification,  claiming that Romney after mentioning the GDP income difference between Israelis and Palestinians then said " and that is also between other countries which are near or next to each other.  Chile and Ecuador.  Mexico and the United States."

"Cultural differences" explain the wealth of the U.S. and the poverty of Mexico?  No Mexican American War?  No dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz inviting foreign capital and even Romney's polygamous great grand parents into the country while the masses lived in destitution poverty under the brutal control of local landlords?    No U.S. opposition and intervention in the Mexican Revolution of 1911 which drove Romney's grand parents and his then Mexican born  four year old father, George,  and others from their Mormom colony in Mexico back to the U.S?  Not the Reagan-Bush policies of Mexico's most corrupt and disgraced  president in modern history, Carlos Salinas, negotiator of NAFTA, when Romney raking in millions in the 1990s as a "venture vulture" capitalist?  Not even the mention that both the working people of Mexico and the U.S. have both suffered from these recent policies?

Romney might in dealing with Mexico  have thrown in the Protestant Ethic, which Landes  in his general work does bring back a bit, even though most U.S. protestants probably didn't consider the Mormons to be Christian sat the time that his great grandparents left Utah for Mexico. after the Mormon Church leaders repudiated polygamy in order to gain admission to the union.  As an overwhelmingly Catholic country, Mexico is not exactly a poster nation for the Protestant ethic(neither are Israelis or Palestinians)

Although I doubt he would say it, President Barack Obama, born in lush Hawai of a Christian caucasian European mother and an African Muslim father, who did not come from corporate wealth like Mitt or become a finance capitalist like Mitt, might have have the "cultural factors" to be president of the United States. 

For the world's peoples, Romney's statements go far beyond Israelis and Palestinians.  They are a blaming of the victims of all forms of exploitation by denying the exploitation of colonialism. institutional racism, and imperialism. 

 For the people of the United States, they are perhaps a foretaste of what we might expect from a Romney administration challenged to address questions of unemployment, declining wages, foreclosures, increased poverty--that is, blaming all of that on "cultural factors" and using statistics of income gaps between whites and blacks, anglos and latinos, men and women, to justify the gaps in terms of those cultural factors. 

Norman Markowitz