A New Hampshire poll gives Obama a 51% approval rating and a 10 point lead over Romney in the general election. The last poll gave Romney a 3 point lead, so to be fair I call Obama's lead at about 6 points. The state's 4 electoral votes could be pivotal in the 2012 election. For example if Obama won several of the upper Midwest states plus NM, CO, and NV he could lose OH, VA, NC, SC, & Florida and be at 268 electoral votes, with a NH win putting him over the magic number of 270 electoral votes. 

Obviously, the reverse would hand the election to Romney. Wouldn't it be a uniquely American story if two hundred years after a man left hard-scrabble Vermont, discovered a religion in New York, the religion so flourished out in the new West that the spirit of the man, Joseph Smith, would now return to New England to claim the U.S. Presidency? Perhaps we should detach ourselves from the raucous political process and look at both stories, Obama's and Romney's. Is there someone claiming that freedom in America has declined?

Before the process of deconstructing Willard Romney began in earnest a month ago it was difficult to objectify that special world of Finance which exists as a form of supra-capitalism I choose to call Financiocracy---a Confederation of institutions and individuals who in a multi-national context make money with money. 

The Confederation exists in an ethos which is literally not anchored to our traditional form of locale-specific capitalism. One of the most vivid examples of such un-connectedness is when, in the invention of Mortgage Backed Securities, sold and traded world wide, home mortgages in the U.S.were severed from the established grounding of actual paperwork and signatures, and the physical recording of mortgages in the municipalities where the asset resides, a centuries-old practice, was violated. 

Romneyville crystalizes one aspect of this brave new world of finance so discreetly and clearly that it is likely to remain as Exhibit A of a practice known as Private Equity for a generation to come. Romneyville rests on several important privileges extracted from the government and populace of the U.S (see below).

It is almost impossible to understate the achievements of Bain Capital and Mitt Romney, but I'll try.

Bain capital financed a new Mall store retail chain called Staples. The idea came from two veteran Retailers. Home Depot, for example, had been in existence for over 15 years before Staples and served as a model of how a bunch of Mom and Pop building supply stores could be put out of business, products bought from China and prices reduced for the benefit of consumers. Staples is one of about fifty retail segments so reorganized and financed in the U.S. Its total sales are a fraction of Walmart, for example, and about one one thousandth of the retail sector as a whole.