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Votes are counted in the tiny village of Dixville Notch Matt Rourke/AP/Press Association Images
US 2012
First votes of New Hampshire primary see Romney under pressure
Voters are heading to the polls in the first presidential primary of the campaign to win the Republican nomination.
8.47am, 10 Jan 2012
1.1k
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REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL frontrunner Mitt Romney has come under heavy fire from his rivals as voters head to the polls in the first primary of the Republican campaign in New Hampshire.
The New Hampshire event – along with last week’s vote in Iowa, a more informal caucus – is seen as crucial in shaping the course of the campaign to come.
Romney, a relatively moderate former governor of neighbouring Massachusetts, is considered the heavy favourite after narrowly winning the vote in much more conservative Iowa.
But his rivals, including Iowa second-placer Rick Santorum, libertarian Ron Paul, Jon Huntsman, Texas governor Rick Perry and former House speaker Newt Gingrich, have been doing their best to narrow his lead.
Yesterday they seized on a comment in which Romney said “I like being able to fire people,” saying it showed the wealthy businessman was out of touch with everyday Americans, the LA Times reports.
Romney made the comment in the context of the right of individuals to choose their own health services and reject ones they did not like.
There was mixed news for Romney in the tiny village of Dixville Notch – famed for successfully predicted the Republican candidate in every election since 1960.
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Nine voters there cast their ballots in the traditional vote just after midnight – polls open from 12.00 to 12.01am, for reasons explained by WNYC here.
Romney and Huntsman received two votes each. Coming in second with one vote apiece were Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul.
This AP video shows the first ballots being cast (AssociatedPress via YouTube):
The primary is taking place as a record number of Americans rejected both Democrats and Republicans to officially identify themselves as independents.
According to a Gallup poll, 40 per cent of people now say they are independent, against 31 per cent Democrat and 27 per cent Republican.
In some primaries, only registered Democrats or Republicans can vote for their party’s presidential candidate. However, it is sometimes possible to register on the day of the ballot.
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@torpedo, their focus should not be on giving a few jobs, they should focus on continuation of their successful growth strategy, if they succeed jobs will follow.
They are obviously working in a very challenging environment and there is still some way to go before new jobs will emerge. A profit of less than 4% on sales suggest that further cost cutting will be needed to remain competitive.
Much of these profits have been made on the back of an illegal price-fixing cartel operating in the.concrete and cement industries. Ongoing legal actions taken by Framus Ltd and Goode Concrete serve to demonstrate the extent of the crippling stranglehold CRH have over many small businesses in this country. Compounding this is the negligence of the Competition Authority who steadfastly refuse to investigate the industry despite the severity of the allegations laid at the door of CRH. The term Regulatory Capture comes to mind here.
CRH operate a cartel with others in the cement, concrete and tarmac markets in Ireland. They have been selling concrete below average variable cost in the Dublin concrete market and abused their dominant position in their upstream cement and aggregates markets by doing so. This is illegal and criminal but they are being protected by the successive Governments due to a term called political and regulatory capture.
CRH has been found to have operated a price fixing cartel in Northern Ireland between 1985 and 1992. CRH was fined by the European Commission in 1994 for conducting a pan European cartel. In 2007 CRH was fined €530,000 for obstructing an antitrust investigation and destroying evidence. In 2009 CRH was fined €25 million for participation in a price fixing cartel in Poland.
CRH is doing monumental damage to the Irish economy by overcharging for cement and tarmac and using this money to subsidise a corporate eviction strategy which is costing the economy jobs.
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