NORTON META TAG

31 August 2012

WATCH: Mitt Romney Accidentally Calls the United States a "Company" 31AUG12

mitt romney didn't misspeak, he sees the U.S. as a business and we are all expenses that must be cut to increase the profitability of America for the 1% who have bought him his candidacy, his running mate and who expect a handsome return on their investment. This is from Mother Jones, you may also want to check out my earlier post Matt Taibbi: 'Mitt Romney Is One Of The Greatest And Most Irresponsible Debt Creators Of All Time' 29AUG12 & Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital SEP1012 http://bucknacktssordidtawdryblog.blogspot.com/2012/08/matt-taibbi-mitt-romney-is-one-of.html 

and Uygur: Did David Koch buy Paul Ryan the VP slot? 25AUG12 http://bucknacktssordidtawdryblog.blogspot.com/2012/08/uygur-did-david-koch-buy-paul-ryan-vp.html

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney held a rally in Lakeland, Florida, on Friday morning, just hours after his much-anticipated acceptance speech at his party's national convention.
Romney must still be tired from last night's big hurrah. In his stump speech on Friday, he mistakenly referred to the United States as a "company." With his running mate Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.), Romney told supporters, "We will reach across the aisle and find good people who, like us, want to make sure this company deals with its challenges. We'll get America on track again."
Here are Romney's full remarks on the US' tepid economic recovery:
"It's not that [Obama] wasn't trying, in my view. He was pulling the wrong direction. He didn't know what it takes to actually make the economy work. Paul Ryan and I understand how the economy works. We understand how Washington works. We will reach across the aisle and find good people who, like us, want to make sure this company deals with its challenges. We'll get America on track again."
It's not surprising Romney would make this slip. He made his name—and his fortune—turning around failing companies first at the consulting firm Bain and Company, and then at private equity firm Bain Capital. Indeed, his experience turning around failing or bloated companies is central to his pitch to voters for why he should be elected president. But voters may not appreciate Romney confusing the USA with an LLC.

Republican candidate assumes women at Ryan event are ‘talking about shoes’ 31AUG12

I am from Pennsylvania and still consider Scandia, PA my home. But I am horrified and embarrassed the Commonwealth that used to be known as a bastion of good education, good jobs, a good state to live in and be proud of it has become the Mississippi of the North politically. Ignorance and stupidity, along with greed, racism, deception and dishonesty are the trademarks of the gop'ers / tea-baggers in office or seeking office in this election. Here is just another example from The Raw Story...
By David Edwards
 
Tom Smith at Paul Ryan campaign event
 
A Republican Senate candidate from Pennsylvania who said that out-of-wedlock pregnancy was similar to rape is being accused of a second sexist comment after video emerged of him telling women at a Paul Ryan campaign event that he assumed they were “talking about shoes.”
Pennsylvania Democrats released video on Thursday that shows Tom Smith approaching two women — who he called “girls — at an event in Pittsburgh.
“Alright, what are we talking about here?” Smith asks, taking the women by the hand. “Two girls together talking.”
“We’re talking about the power of petite women,” one woman responds.
“My guess would’ve been you were talking about shoes,” Smith replies.
The video also contains a clip from a Monday event at the Pennsylvania Press Club, where Smith said that President Barack Obama and Sen. Bob Casey trying to fix the economy was like when a “your wife wrecks the car” and tries to “take it to the beauty salon to get it fixed.”
Earlier this week, Smith had compared rape to out-of-wedlock sex after he was asked to comment on Rep. Todd Akin’s (R-MO) assertion that women could not get pregnant from “legitimate rape.”
“I’m pro-life, period. And what that Congressman said, I do not agree with at all,” Smith said, adding that he did not support any exceptions to abortion bans, including in cases of rape, incest or life of the mother.
“How would you tell a daughter or a granddaughter who, God forbid, would be the victim of a rape, to keep the child against her own will?” The Associated Press’ Mark Scolforo wondered.
“I lived something similar to that with my own family,” Smith said, explaining that his daughter had gotten pregnant “out of wedlock.”
“That’s similar to rape?” Scolforo pressed.
“No, no, no, but… put yourself in a father’s situation, yes. It is similar,” Smith replied. “A life is a life, and it needs protected. Who’s going to protect it? We have to. I mean that’s, I believe life begins at conception. I’m not going to argue about the method of conception. It’s a life, and I’m pro-life. It’s that simple.”
Watch this video, uploaded to YouTube Aug. 30, 2012.
(h/t: Think Progress)


http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/08/31/republican-candidate-assumes-women-at-ryan-event-are-talking-about-shoes/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheRawStory+%28The+Raw+Story%29

Mitt Romney said Barack Obama began his presidency with an apology tour 31AUG12

mitt romney, a man of faith, a leader in the mormon church, deliberately lied throughout his speech at the gop / tea-bagger convention in Tampa yesterday. So much for honesty counting for anything among mormons and the right wing Christians among his supporters. This from PolitiFact.....

The Truth-O-Meter Says:
Romney

Barack Obama began his presidency "with an apology tour."

Mitt Romney on Thursday, August 30th, 2012 in remarks at the Republican National Convention in Tampa

Mitt Romney said Barack Obama began his presidency with an apology tour

In his speech accepting the Republican nomination for president, Mitt Romney repeated a charge he’s made before: that Obama has traveled the world apologizing for America.

"I will begin my presidency with a jobs tour. President Obama began with an apology tour. America, he said, had dictated to other nations. No, Mr. President, America has freed other nations from dictators," Romney said.

We first fact-checked this claim back in 2010, when Romney published a book, No Apology: The Case for American Greatness.

Obama’s apology tour, Romney wrote, "is his way of signaling to foreign countries and foreign leaders that their dislike for America is something he understands and that is, at least in part, understandable. There are anti-American fires burning all across the globe; President Obama's words are like kindling to them."

"In his first nine months in office, President Obama has issued apologies and criticisms of America in speeches in France, England, Turkey, and Cairo; at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and the United Nations in New York City. He has apologized for what he deems to be American arrogance, dismissiveness, and derision; for dictating solutions, for acting unilaterally, and for acting without regard for others; for treating other countries as mere proxies, for unjustly interfering in the internal affairs of other nations, and for feeding anti-Muslim sentiments; for committing torture, for dragging our feet on global warming and for selectively promoting democracy."

It’s a common theme for some anti-Obama websites and commentators. But is it accurate?

Obama’s early travels and remarks

We looked at the seven separate speeches Romney mentioned in his book as apologies. (We've compiled those passages in a separate document.)

At times, Obama uses an on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand formulation that he tends to employ right before he talks about two sides coming together.

At a town hall meeting in France in 2009, for example, Obama encouraged Europe to work with the United States, and admitted that the United States "has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive." But he immediately said that Europe has been guilty of a "casual" and "insidious" anti-Americanism.

At a major address to the United Nations, Obama said, "I took office at a time when many around the world had come to view America with skepticism and distrust. Part of this was due to misperceptions and misinformation about my country. Part of this was due to opposition to specific policies, and a belief that on certain critical issues, America has acted unilaterally, without regard for the interests of others. And this has fed an almost reflexive anti-Americanism, which too often has served as an excuse for collective inaction."

At a speech in Cairo on relations between the U.S. and the Islamic world, Obama got very close to regretting decades-old U.S. actions in Iran. But then he immediately countered with criticism of Iran. He did not make a formal expression of regret, but suggested both countries simply "move forward."

Looking back at those 2009 speeches, we noticed that Obama was most conciliatory when discussing torture and detention at the U.S. military installation at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Typically, Obama would say that the U.S. must always stay true to its ideals, and that's why Obama "unequivocally prohibited the use of torture by the United States, and I have ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed by early next year."

Apologies -- or diplomatic language?

In 2010, we quizzed several experts about whether Obama had apologized. Here’s a brief recap of what they had to say (read more here):

• Nile Gardiner, a foreign policy analyst with the the conservative Heritage Foundation, said Obama was definitely apologizing. He co-wrote an analysis on the topic: "Barack Obama's Top 10 Apologies: How the President Has Humiliated a Superpower."

"Apologizing for your own country projects an image of weakness before both allies and enemies," Gardiner said. "It sends a very clear signal that the U.S. is to blame for some major developments on the world stage. This can be used to the advantage of those who wish to undermine American global leadership."

• John Murphy, a communications professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, studies presidential rhetoric and political language. He said Obama used conciliatory language for diplomatic purposes, not apologizing.

"It's much more a sense of establishing of reciprocity," Murphy said. "Each side says, okay, we haven't done great, but we have a new president and we're going to make a fresh start and move forward. I don't think that's an apology."

• Lauren Bloom, an attorney and business consultant, wrote the book, The Art of the Apology, advising businesses and individuals on when to apologize and how to do it.

She said Obama's words fell short of an apology, mostly because he didn't use the words "sorry" or "regret." "I think to make an effective apology, the words 'I'm sorry' or 'we're sorry' always have to be there," Bloom said.

Obama's remarks were really non-apologies, and they're not good in business or personal relationships, Bloom said. The one area where they can be useful: international diplomacy.

"Gov. Romney is trying to appeal to the inner John Wayne of his readers, and that has a certain emotional appeal," Bloom said. "For the rest of us, a level assessment of less-than-perfect human behavior is perfectly reasonable."

• We spoke with Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann, a professor who tracked international human rights issues via the website Political Apologies and Reparations. Many of the apologies in the database relate to genocide or slavery.

"To say the United States will not torture is not an apology, it is a statement of intent," Howard-Hassman said. "A complete apology has to acknowledge something was wrong, accept responsibility, express sorrow or regret and promise not to repeat it."

Obama's Cairo address in particular was a means of reaching out to the Islamic world, not an acknowledgement of wrongdoing, she said.

"Whether he's apologizing or not, he's saying 'I respect your society and I respect your customs.' Maybe that's what Romney considers an apology, that gesture of respect," she said. "But a gesture of respect is not an apology."

Actual apologies

In the years since we first looked into this matter, Obama or someone in his administration has formally apologized for U.S. actions. In 2012, Obama apologized for the accidental burning of copies of the Quran, the holy book of Islam. Obama sent the apology in a letter to Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Officials hoped the formal apology would quell violent reactions against U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

A few months later, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton apologized to Pakistan for a Nov. 26, 2011, incident involving the death of Pakistani troops. The apology was made as part of an effort to re-open supply routes to U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

We should note that these apologies came toward the end of Obama’s first term, while Romney said Obama "began" his presidency with an apology tour.

Our ruling

Romney said Obama began his presidency "with an apology tour."

But a review of Obama’s foreign travels and remarks during his early presidency showed no evidence to support such a blunt and disparaging claim. (In later years, we found two formal apologies, but they were not at the start of his presidency and not part of a tour.)

While Obama's speeches contained some criticisms of past U.S. actions, he typically combined those passages with praise for the United States and its ideals, and he frequently mentioned how other countries had erred as well. We found not a single, full-throated apology in the bunch.

Calling those remarks "an apology tour" is a ridiculous charge. So we rate his statement Pants on Fire

About this statement:
Published: Friday, August 31st, 2012 at 12:22 a.m.
Subjects: Foreign Policy
Sources:
Republican National Convention, Mitt Romney’s remarks, Aug. 30, 2012

PolitiFact, Obama's remarks never a true 'apology,'March 15, 2010
Mitt Romney, No Apology: The Case for American Greatness, 2010
The Heritage Foundation, Barack Obama's Top 10 Apologies: How the President Has Humiliated a Superpower, June 2, 2009
The American Spectator, Conservatve (sic) Leaders Speak Out Against Obama's Apology Tour, Sept. 25, 2010
Rush Limbaugh, Obama Attacks America Again Ahead of Muslim Apology Tour, June 2, 2009
The White House, Remarks by the President at a town hall in Strasbourg, France, April 3, 2009
The White House, Remarks by the President at joint press availability in London, April 1, 2009
The White House, Remarks by the President at a news conference in London, April 2, 2009
The White House, Remarks by the President in Cairo, Egypt, June 4, 2009
The White House, Remarks by the President on national security at the National Archives, May 21, 2009
The White House, Remarks by the President to CIA employees, Langley, Va., April 20, 2009
The White House, Remarks by the President to the United Nations General Assembly, Sept. 23, 2009
Interview with Nile Gardiner of the Heritage Foundation
Interview with John Murphy of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Interview with Lauren Bloom, author of The Art of the Apology
Interview with Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann of Wilfrid Laurier University
Wilfrid Laurier University, Political Apologies and Reparations database
The National Archives, speech of President Bill Clinton in Rwanda, March 25, 1998
The National Archives, remarks of President Bill Clinton "in apology for study done in Tuskegee," May 16, 1997
The National Archives, speech of President George W. Bush at Goree Island, Senegal, July 8, 2003
The National Archives, remarks of President George W. Bush with King Abdullah of Jordan, May 6, 2004
Fox News, Bush apologizes for prisoner abuse, May 7, 2004
The White House, Remarks by the President at the Acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize, Dec. 10, 2009
Foreign Affairs, The Carter Syndrome, by Walter Russell Mead, January 2010
The Wall Street Journal, U.S. Apologizes to Pakistan, Says Supply Routes to Reopen, July 3, 2012

U.S. State Department, Statement by Secretary Clinton on her Call With Pakistani Foreign Minister Khar, July 3, 2012

CNN, Obama apologizes to Afghanistan for Quran burning, Feb. 23, 2012

Written by: Angie Drobnic Holan
Researched by: Angie Drobnic Holan
Edited by: Bill Adair



http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/aug/31/mitt-romney/mitt-romney-said-barack-obama-began-his-presidency/

Matt Taibbi: 'Mitt Romney Is One Of The Greatest And Most Irresponsible Debt Creators Of All Time' 29AUG12 & Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital SEP1012

MATT Taibbi tells it like it is, proving mitt romney's business strategy is to rape and pillage companies, extracting huge profits through layoffs and outsourcing, with no care or concern about American workers left unemployed or working for lower wages and less or no benefits (i.e. insurance, pensions, sick time). This is the business expertise he will being to America if elected president. Fortunately all those voluntarily ignorant tea-baggers and right wing fanatics who aren't part of the 1% will be suffering right along with the rest of us, they will reap what they have sown. This from HuffPost and be sure too read the Rolling Stone article that follows to find out who mitt romney really is and how his policies will destroy our nation, turning it into a plutocracy.....

Matt Taibbi Mitt Romney
Matt Taibbi criticized Mitt Romney's stance on debt in an article in Rolling Stone published online Wednesday.
According to Rolling Stone contributing editor Matt Taibbi, Mitt Romney made his fortune exploiting two strategies that the Republican presidential candidate now decries: creating massive amounts of debt and milking federal government handouts.
"Mitt Romney is one of the greatest and most irresponsible debt creators of all time," Taibbi wrote in a Rolling Stone article published online Wednesday. He also slammed the hypocrisy of what he considers Romney's scare tactics about the national debt: "By making debt the centerpiece of his campaign, Romney was making a calculated bluff of historic dimensions."
While Romney -- whom Taibbi describes as a "new and improved" Gordon Gekko -- ran Bain Capital, he would saddle acquired companies with the same debt he used to buy those companies, as well as steep management fees. This burden forced many Bain-run companies to fire workers and cut employees' pay and benefits. It amounted to "raping and pillaging," Taibbi wrote.
Moreover, according to Taibbi, Romney's Bain Capital was able to "loot" so many companies because it could deduct taxes on the interest on the debt used for the takeovers.
"Romney is the frontman and apostle of an economic revolution, in which transactions are manufactured instead of products, wealth is generated without accompanying prosperity, and Cayman Islands partnerships are lovingly erected and nurtured while American communities fall apart," Taibbi concluded. "It seems a little early to vote for that kind of wholesale surrender."
You can read Matt Taibbi's full takedown of Mitt Romney in Rolling Stone here.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/29/matt-taibbi-mitt-romney_n_1838974.html?ref=topbar
Rolling Stone

Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital

How the GOP presidential candidate and his private equity firm staged an epic wealth grab, destroyed jobs – and stuck others with the bill

Mitt Romney illustration
Illustration by Robert Grossman
The great criticism of Mitt Romney, from both sides of the aisle, has always been that he doesn't stand for anything. He's a flip-flopper, they say, a lightweight, a cardboard opportunist who'll say anything to get elected.
The critics couldn't be more wrong. Mitt Romney is no tissue-paper man. He's closer to being a revolutionary, a backward-world version of Che or Trotsky, with tweezed nostrils instead of a beard, a half-Windsor instead of a leather jerkin. His legendary flip-flops aren't the lies of a bumbling opportunist – they're the confident prevarications of a man untroubled by misleading the nonbeliever in pursuit of a single, all-consuming goal. Romney has a vision, and he's trying for something big: We've just been too slow to sort out what it is, just as we've been slow to grasp the roots of the radical economic changes that have swept the country in the last generation.
The incredible untold story of the 2012 election so far is that Romney's run has been a shimmering pearl of perfect political hypocrisy, which he's somehow managed to keep hidden, even with thousands of cameras following his every move. And the drama of this rhetorical high-wire act was ratcheted up even further when Romney chose his running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin – like himself, a self-righteously anal, thin-lipped, Whitest Kids U Know penny pincher who'd be honored to tell Oliver Twist there's no more soup left. By selecting Ryan, Romney, the hard-charging, chameleonic champion of a disgraced-yet-defiant Wall Street, officially succeeded in moving the battle lines in the 2012 presidential race.
Like John McCain four years before, Romney desperately needed a vice-presidential pick that would change the game. But where McCain bet on a combustive mix of clueless novelty and suburban sexual tension named Sarah Palin, Romney bet on an idea. He said as much when he unveiled his choice of Ryan, the author of a hair-raising budget-cutting plan best known for its willingness to slash the sacred cows of Medicare and Medicaid. "Paul Ryan has become an intellectual leader of the Republican Party," Romney told frenzied Republican supporters in Norfolk, Virginia, standing before the reliably jingoistic backdrop of a floating warship. "He understands the fiscal challenges facing America: our exploding deficits and crushing debt."
Debt, debt, debt. If the Republican Party had a James Carville, this is what he would have said to win Mitt over, in whatever late-night war room session led to the Ryan pick: "It's the debt, stupid." This is the way to defeat Barack Obama: to recast the race as a jeremiad against debt, something just about everybody who's ever gotten a bill in the mail hates on a primal level.
Last May, in a much-touted speech in Iowa, Romney used language that was literally inflammatory to describe America's federal borrowing. "A prairie fire of debt is sweeping across Iowa and our nation," he declared. "Every day we fail to act, that fire gets closer to the homes and children we love." Our collective debt is no ordinary problem: According to Mitt, it's going to burn our children alive.
And this is where we get to the hypocrisy at the heart of Mitt Romney. Everyone knows that he is fantastically rich, having scored great success, the legend goes, as a "turnaround specialist," a shrewd financial operator who revived moribund companies as a high-priced consultant for a storied Wall Street private equity firm. But what most voters don't know is the way Mitt Romney actually made his fortune: by borrowing vast sums of money that other people were forced to pay back. This is the plain, stark reality that has somehow eluded America's top political journalists for two consecutive presidential campaigns: Mitt Romney is one of the greatest and most irresponsible debt creators of all time. In the past few decades, in fact, Romney has piled more debt onto more unsuspecting companies, written more gigantic checks that other people have to cover, than perhaps all but a handful of people on planet Earth.
By making debt the centerpiece of his campaign, Romney was making a calculated bluff of historic dimensions – placing a massive all-in bet on the rank incompetence of the American press corps. The result has been a brilliant comedy: A man makes a $250 million fortune loading up companies with debt and then extracting million-dollar fees from those same companies, in exchange for the generous service of telling them who needs to be fired in order to finance the debt payments he saddled them with in the first place. That same man then runs for president riding an image of children roasting on flames of debt, choosing as his running mate perhaps the only politician in America more pompous and self-righteous on the subject of the evils of borrowed money than the candidate himself. If Romney pulls off this whopper, you'll have to tip your hat to him: No one in history has ever successfully run for president riding this big of a lie. It's almost enough to make you think he really is qualified for the White House.
The unlikeliness of Romney's gambit isn't simply a reflection of his own artlessly unapologetic mindset – it stands as an emblem for the resiliency of the entire sociopathic Wall Street set he represents. Four years ago, the Mitt Romneys of the world nearly destroyed the global economy with their greed, shortsightedness and – most notably – wildly irresponsible use of debt in pursuit of personal profit. The sight was so disgusting that people everywhere were ready to drop an H-bomb on Lower Manhattan and bayonet the survivors. But today that same insane greed ethos, that same belief in the lunatic pursuit of instant borrowed millions – it's dusted itself off, it's had a shave and a shoeshine, and it's back out there running for president.
Mitt Romney, it turns out, is the perfect frontman for Wall Street's greed revolution. He's not a two-bit, shifty-eyed huckster like Lloyd Blankfein. He's not a sighing, eye-rolling, arrogant jerkwad like Jamie Dimon. But Mitt believes the same things those guys believe: He's been right with them on the front lines of the financialization revolution, a decades-long campaign in which the old, simple, let's-make-stuff-and-sell-it manufacturing economy was replaced with a new, highly complex, let's-take-stuff-and-trash-it financial economy. Instead of cars and airplanes, we built swaps, CDOs and other toxic financial products. Instead of building new companies from the ground up, we took out massive bank loans and used them to acquire existing firms, liquidating every asset in sight and leaving the target companies holding the note. The new borrow-and-conquer economy was morally sanctified by an almost religious faith in the grossly euphemistic concept of "creative destruction," and amounted to a total abdication of collective responsibility by America's rich, whose new thing was making assloads of money in ever-shorter campaigns of economic conquest, sending the proceeds offshore, and shrugging as the great towns and factories their parents and grandparents built were shuttered and boarded up, crushed by a true prairie fire of debt.
Mitt Romney – a man whose own father built cars and nurtured communities, and was one of the old-school industrial anachronisms pushed aside by the new generation's wealth grab – has emerged now to sell this make-nothing, take-everything, screw-everyone ethos to the world. He's Gordon Gekko, but a new and improved version, with better PR – and a bigger goal. A takeover artist all his life, Romney is now trying to take over America itself. And if his own history is any guide, we'll all end up paying for the acquisition.
Willard "Mitt" Romney's background in many ways suggests a man who was born to be president – disgustingly rich from birth, raised in prep schools, no early exposure to minorities outside of maids, a powerful daddy to clean up his missteps, and timely exemptions from military service. In Romney's bio there are some eerie early-life similarities to other recent presidential figures. (Is America really ready for another Republican president who was a prep-school cheerleader?) And like other great presidential double-talkers such as Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, Romney has shown particular aptitude in the area of telling multiple factual versions of his own life story.
"I longed in many respects to actually be in Vietnam and be representing our country there," he claimed years after the war. To a different audience, he said, "I was not planning on signing up for the military. It was not my desire to go off and serve in Vietnam."
Like John F. Kennedy and George W. Bush, men whose way into power was smoothed by celebrity fathers but who rebelled against their parental legacy as mature politicians, Mitt Romney's career has been both a tribute to and a repudiation of his famous father. George Romney in the 1950s became CEO of American Motors Corp., made a modest fortune betting on energy efficiency in an age of gas guzzlers and ended up serving as governor of the state of Michigan only two generations removed from the Romney clan's tradition of polygamy. For Mitt, who grew up worshipping his tall, craggily handsome, politically moderate father, life was less rocky: Cranbrook prep school in suburban Detroit, followed by Stanford in the Sixties, a missionary term in which he spent two and a half years trying (as he said) to persuade the French to "give up your wine," and Harvard Business School in the Seventies. Then, faced with making a career choice, Mitt chose an odd one: Already married and a father of two, he left Harvard and eschewed both politics and the law to enter the at-the-time unsexy world of financial consulting.
"When you get out of a place like Harvard, you can do anything – at least in the old days you could," says a prominent corporate lawyer on Wall Street who is familiar with Romney's career. "But he comes out, he not only has a Harvard Business School degree, he's got a national pedigree with his name. He could have done anything – but what does he do? He says, 'I'm going to spend my life loading up distressed companies with debt.' "
Romney started off at the Boston Consulting Group, where he showed an aptitude for crunching numbers and glad-handing clients. Then, in 1977, he joined a young entrepreneur named Bill Bain at a firm called Bain & Company, where he worked for six years before being handed the reins of a new firm-within-a-firm called Bain Capital.
In Romney's version of the tale, Bain Capital – which evolved into what is today known as a private equity firm – specialized in turning around moribund companies (Romney even wrote a book called Turnaround that complements his other nauseatingly self-complimentary book, No Apology) and helped create the Staples office-supply chain. On the campaign trail, Romney relentlessly trades on his own self-perpetuated reputation as a kind of altruistic rescuer of failing enterprises, never missing an opportunity to use the word "help" or "helped" in his description of what he and Bain did for companies. He might, for instance, describe himself as having been "deeply involved in helping other businesses" or say he "helped create tens of thousands of jobs."
The reality is that toward the middle of his career at Bain, Romney made a fateful strategic decision: He moved away from creating companies like Staples through venture capital schemes, and toward a business model that involved borrowing huge sums of money to take over existing firms, then extracting value from them by force. He decided, as he later put it, that "there's a lot greater risk in a startup than there is in acquiring an existing company." In the Eighties, when Romney made this move, this form of financial piracy became known as a leveraged buyout, and it achieved iconic status thanks to Gordon Gekko in Wall Street. Gekko's business strategy was essentially identical to the Romney–Bain model, only Gekko called himself a "liberator" of companies instead of a "helper."
Here's how Romney would go about "liberating" a company: A private equity firm like Bain typically seeks out floundering businesses with good cash flows. It then puts down a relatively small amount of its own money and runs to a big bank like Goldman Sachs or Citigroup for the rest of the financing. (Most leveraged buyouts are financed with 60 to 90 percent borrowed cash.) The takeover firm then uses that borrowed money to buy a controlling stake in the target company, either with or without its consent. When an LBO is done without the consent of the target, it's called a hostile takeover; such thrilling acts of corporate piracy were made legend in the Eighties, most notably the 1988 attack by notorious corporate raiders Kohlberg Kravis Roberts against RJR Nabisco, a deal memorialized in the book Barbarians at the Gate.
Romney and Bain avoided the hostile approach, preferring to secure the cooperation of their takeover targets by buying off a company's management with lucrative bonuses. Once management is on board, the rest is just math. So if the target company is worth $500 million, Bain might put down $20 million of its own cash, then borrow $350 million from an investment bank to take over a controlling stake.
But here's the catch. When Bain borrows all of that money from the bank, it's the target company that ends up on the hook for all of the debt.
Now your troubled firm – let's say you make tricycles in Alabama – has been taken over by a bunch of slick Wall Street dudes who kicked in as little as five percent as a down payment. So in addition to whatever problems you had before, Tricycle Inc. now owes Goldman or Citigroup $350 million. With all that new debt service to pay, the company's bottom line is suddenly untenable: You almost have to start firing people immediately just to get your costs down to a manageable level.
"That interest," says Lynn Turner, former chief accountant of the Securities and Exchange Commission, "just sucks the profit out of the company."
Fortunately, the geniuses at Bain who now run the place are there to help tell you whom to fire. And for the service it performs cutting your company's costs to help you pay off the massive debt that it, Bain, saddled your company with in the first place, Bain naturally charges a management fee, typically millions of dollars a year. So Tricycle Inc. now has two gigantic new burdens it never had before Bain Capital stepped into the picture: tens of millions in annual debt service, and millions more in "management fees." Since the initial acquisition of Tricycle Inc. was probably greased by promising the company's upper management lucrative bonuses, all that pain inevitably comes out of just one place: the benefits and payroll of the hourly workforce.
Once all that debt is added, one of two things can happen. The company can fire workers and slash benefits to pay off all its new obligations to Goldman Sachs and Bain, leaving it ripe to be resold by Bain at a huge profit. Or it can go bankrupt – this happens after about seven percent of all private equity buyouts – leaving behind one or more shuttered factory towns. Either way, Bain wins. By power-sucking cash value from even the most rapidly dying firms, private equity raiders like Bain almost always get their cash out before a target goes belly up.
This business model wasn't really "helping," of course – and it wasn't new. Fans of mob movies will recognize what's known as the "bust-out," in which a gangster takes over a restaurant or sporting goods store and then monetizes his investment by running up giant debts on the company's credit line. (Think Paulie buying all those cases of Cutty Sark in Goodfellas.) When the note comes due, the mobster simply torches the restaurant and collects the insurance money. Reduced to their most basic level, the leveraged buyouts engineered by Romney followed exactly the same business model. "It's the bust-out," one Wall Street trader says with a laugh. "That's all it is."
Private equity firms aren't necessarily evil by definition. There are many stories of successful turnarounds fueled by private equity, often involving multiple floundering businesses that are rolled into a single entity, eliminating duplicative overhead. Experian, the giant credit-rating tyrant, was acquired by Bain in the Nineties and went on to become an industry leader.
But there's a key difference between private equity firms and the businesses that were America's original industrial cornerstones, like the elder Romney's AMC. Everyone had a stake in the success of those old businesses, which spread prosperity by putting people to work. But even private equity's most enthusiastic adherents have difficulty explaining its benefit to society. Marc Wolpow, a former Bain colleague of Romney's, told reporters during Mitt's first Senate run that Romney erred in trying to sell his business as good for everyone. "I believed he was making a mistake by framing himself as a job creator," said Wolpow. "That was not his or Bain's or the industry's primary objective. The objective of the LBO business is maximizing returns for investors." When it comes to private equity, American workers – not to mention their families and communities – simply don't enter into the equation.
Take a typical Bain transaction involving an Indiana-based company called American Pad and Paper. Bain bought Ampad in 1992 for just $5 million, financing the rest of the deal with borrowed cash. Within three years, Ampad was paying $60 million in annual debt payments, plus an additional $7 million in management fees. A year later, Bain led Ampad to go public, cashed out about $50 million in stock for itself and its investors, charged the firm $2 million for arranging the IPO and pocketed another $5 million in "management" fees. Ampad wound up going bankrupt, and hundreds of workers lost their jobs, but Bain and Romney weren't crying: They'd made more than $100 million on a $5 million investment.
To recap: Romney, who has compared the devilish federal debt to a "nightmare" home mortgage that is "adjustable, no-money down and assigned to our children," took over Ampad with essentially no money down, saddled the firm with a nightmare debt and assigned the crushing interest payments not to Bain but to the children of Ampad's workers, who would be left holding the note long after Romney fled the scene. The mortgage analogy is so obvious, in fact, that even Romney himself has made it. He once described Bain's debt-fueled strategy as "using the equivalent of a mortgage to leverage up our investment."
Romney has always kept his distance from the real-life consequences of his profiteering. At one point during Bain's looting of Ampad, a worker named Randy Johnson sent a handwritten letter to Romney, asking him to intervene to save an Ampad factory in Marion, Indiana. In a sterling demonstration of manliness and willingness to face a difficult conversation, Romney, who had just lost his race for the Senate in Massachusetts, wrote Johnson that he was "sorry," but his lawyers had advised him not to get involved. (So much for the candidate who insists that his way is always to "fight to save every job.")
This is typical Romney, who consistently adopts a public posture of having been above the fray, with no blood on his hands from any of the deals he personally engineered. "I never actually ran one of our investments," he says in Turnaround. "That was left to management."
In reality, though, Romney was unquestionably the decider at Bain. "I insisted on having almost dictatorial powers," he bragged years after the Ampad deal. Over the years, colleagues would anonymously whisper stories about Mitt the Boss to the press, describing him as cunning, manipulative and a little bit nuts, with "an ability to identify people's insecurities and exploit them for his own benefit." One former Bain employee said that Romney would screw around with bonuses in small amounts, just to mess with people: He would give $3 million to one, $3.1 million to another and $2.9 million to a third, just to keep those below him on edge.
The private equity business in the early Nineties was dominated by a handful of takeover firms, from the spooky and politically connected Carlyle Group (a favorite subject of conspiracy-theory lit, with its connections to right-wingers like Donald Rumsfeld and George H.W. Bush) to the equally spooky Democrat-leaning assholes at the Blackstone Group. But even among such a colorful cast of characters, Bain had a reputation on Wall Street for secrecy and extreme weirdness – "the KGB of consulting." Its employees, known for their Mormonish uniform of white shirts and red power ties, were dubbed "Bainies" by other Wall Streeters, a rip on the fanatical "Moonies." The firm earned the name thanks to its idiotically adolescent Spy Kids culture, in which these glorified slumlords used code names, didn't carry business cards and even sang "company songs" to boost morale.
The seemingly religious flavor of Bain's culture smacks of the generally cultish ethos on Wall Street, in which all sorts of ethically questionable behaviors are justified as being necessary in service of the church of making money. Romney belongs to a true-believer subset within that cult, with a revolutionary's faith in the wisdom of the pure free market, in which destroying companies and sucking the value out of them for personal gain is part of the greater good, and governments should "stand aside and allow the creative destruction inherent in the free economy."
That cultlike zeal helps explains why Romney takes such a curiously unapologetic approach to his own flip-flopping. His infamous changes of stance are not little wispy ideological alterations of a few degrees here or there – they are perfect and absolute mathematical reversals, as in "I believe that abortion should be safe and legal in this country" and "I am firmly pro-life." Yet unlike other politicians, who at least recognize that saying completely contradictory things presents a political problem, Romney seems genuinely puzzled by the public's insistence that he be consistent. "I'm not going to apologize for having changed my mind," he likes to say. It's an attitude that recalls the standard defense offered by Wall Street in the wake of some of its most recent and notorious crimes: Goldman Sachs excused its lying to clients, for example, by insisting that its customers are "sophisticated investors" who should expect to be lied to. "Last time I checked," former Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack sneered after the same scandal, "we were in business to be profitable."
Within the cult of Wall Street that forged Mitt Romney, making money justifies any behavior, no matter how venal. The look on Romney's face when he refuses to apologize says it all: Hey, I'm trying to win an election. We're all grown-ups here. After the Ampad deal, Romney expressed contempt for critics who lived in "fantasy land." "This is the real world," he said, "and in the real world there is nothing wrong with companies trying to compete, trying to stay alive, trying to make money."
In the old days, making money required sharing the wealth: with assembly-line workers, with middle management, with schools and communities, with investors. Even the Gilded Age robber barons, despite their unapologetic efforts to keep workers from getting any rights at all, built America in spite of themselves, erecting railroads and oil wells and telegraph wires. And from the time the monopolists were reined in with antitrust laws through the days when men like Mitt Romney's dad exited center stage in our economy, the American social contract was pretty consistent: The rich got to stay rich, often filthy rich, but they paid taxes and a living wage and everyone else rose at least a little bit along with them.
But under Romney's business model, leveraging other people's debt means you can carve out big profits for yourself and leave everyone else holding the bag. Despite what Romney claims, the rate of return he provided for Bain's investors over the years wasn't all that great. Romney biographer and Wall Street Journal reporter Brett Arends, who analyzed Bain's performance between 1984 and 1998, concludes that the firm's returns were likely less than 30 percent per year, which happened to track more or less with the stock market's average during that time. "That's how much money you could have made by issuing company bonds and then spending the money picking stocks out of the paper at random," Arends observes. So for all the destruction Romney wreaked on Middle America in the name of "trying to make money," investors could have just plunked their money into traditional stocks and gotten pretty much the same returns.
The only ones who profited in a big way from all the job-killing debt that Romney leveraged were Mitt and his buddies at Bain, along with Wall Street firms like Goldman and Citigroup. Barry Ritholtz, author of Bailout Nation, says the criticisms of Bain about layoffs and meanness miss a more important point, which is that the firm's profit-producing record is absurdly mediocre, especially when set against all the trouble and pain its business model causes. "Bain's fundamental flaw, at least according to the math," Ritholtz writes, "is that they took lots of risk, use immense leverage and charged enormous fees, for performance that was more or less the same as [stock] indexing."
'I'm not a Romney guy, because I'm not a Bain guy," says Lenny Patnode, in an Irish pub in the factory town of Pittsfield, Massachusetts. "But I'm not an Obama guy, either. Just so you know."
I feel bad even asking Patnode about Romney. Big and burly, with white hair and the thick forearms of a man who's stocked a shelf or two in his lifetime, he seems to belong to an era before things like leveraged debt even existed. For 38 years, Patnode worked for a company called KB Toys in Pittsfield. He was the longest-serving employee in the company's history, opening some of the firm's first mall stores, making some of its canniest product buys ("Tamagotchi pets," he says, beaming, "and Tech-Decks, too"), traveling all over the world to help build an empire that at its peak included 1,300 stores. "There were times when I worked seven days a week, 16 hours a day," he says. "I opened three stores in two months once."
Then in 2000, right before Romney gave up his ownership stake in Bain Capital, the firm targeted KB Toys. The debacle that followed serves as a prime example of the conflict between the old model of American business, built from the ground up with sweat and industry know-how, and the new globalist model, the Romney model, which uses leverage as a weapon of high-speed conquest.
In a typical private-equity fragging, Bain put up a mere $18 million to acquire KB Toys and got big banks to finance the remaining $302 million it needed. Less than a year and a half after the purchase, Bain decided to give itself a gift known as a "dividend recapitalization." The firm induced KB Toys to redeem $121 million in stock and take out more than $66 million in bank loans – $83 million of which went directly into the pockets of Bain's owners and investors, including Romney. "The dividend recap is like borrowing someone else's credit card to take out a cash advance, and then leaving them to pay it off," says Heather Slavkin Corzo, who monitors private equity takeovers as the senior legal policy adviser for the AFL-CIO.
Bain ended up earning a return of at least 370 percent on the deal, while KB Toys fell into bankruptcy, saddled with millions in debt. KB's former parent company, Big Lots, alleged in bankruptcy court that Bain's "unjustified" return on the dividend recap was actually "900 percent in a mere 16 months." Patnode, by contrast, was fired in December 2008, after almost four decades on the job. Like other employees, he didn't get a single day's severance.
I ask Slavkin Corzo what Bain's justification was for the giant dividend recapitalization in the KB Toys acquisition. The question throws her, as though she's surprised anyone would ask for a reason a company like Bain would loot a firm like KB Toys. "It wasn't like, 'Yay, we did a good job, we get a dividend,'" she says with a laugh. "It was like, 'We can do this, so we will.' "
At the time of the KB Toys deal, Romney was a Bain investor and owner, making him a mere beneficiary of the raping and pillaging, rather than its direct organizer. Moreover, KB's demise was hastened by a host of genuine market forces, including competition from video games and cellphones. But there's absolutely no way to look at what Bain did at KB and see anything but a cash grab – one that followed the business model laid out by Romney. Rather than cutting costs and tightening belts, Bain added $300 million in debt to the firm's bottom line while taking out more than $120 million in cash – an outright looting that creditors later described in a lawsuit as "breaking open the piggy bank." What's more, Bain smoothed the deal in typical fashion by giving huge bonuses to the company's top managers as the firm headed toward bankruptcy. CEO Michael Glazer got an incredible $18.4 million, while CFO Robert Feldman received $4.8 million and senior VP Thomas Alfonsi took home $3.3 million.
And what did Bain bring to the table in return for its massive, outsize payout? KB Toys had built a small empire by targeting middle-class buyers with value-priced products. It succeeded mainly because the firm's leaders had a great instinct for what they were making and selling. These were people who had been in the specialty toy business since 1922; collectively, they had millions of man-hours of knowledge about how the industry works and how toy customers behave. KB's president in the Eighties, the late Saul Rubenstein, used to carry around a giant computer printout of the company's inventory, and would fall asleep reading it on the weekends, the pages clasped to his chest. "He knew the name and number of all those toys," his widow, Shirley, says proudly. "He loved toys."
Bain's experience in the toy industry, by contrast, was precisely bupkus. They didn't know a damn thing about the business they had taken over – and they never cared to learn. The firm's entire contribution was $18 million in cash and a huge mound of borrowed money that gave it the power to pull the levers. "The people who came in after – they were never toy people," says Shirley Rubenstein. To make matters worse, former employees say, Bain deluged them with requests for paperwork and reports, forcing them to worry more about the whims of their new bosses than the demands of their customers. "We took our eye off the ball," Patnode says. "And if you take your eye off the ball, you strike out."
In the end, Bain never bothered to come up with a plan for how KB Toys could meet the 21st-century challenges of video games and cellphone gadgets that were the company's ostensible downfall. And that's where Romney's self-touted reputation as a turnaround specialist is a myth. In the Bain model, the actual turnaround isn't necessary. It's just a cover story. It's nice for the private equity firm if it happens, because it makes the acquired company more attractive for resale or an IPO. But it's mostly irrelevant to the success of the takeover model, where huge cash returns are extracted whether the captured firm thrives or not.
"The thing about it is, nobody gets hurt," says Patnode. "Except the people who worked here."
Romney was a prime mover in the radical social and political transformation that was cooked up by Wall Street beginning in the 1980s. In fact, you can trace the whole history of the modern age of financialization just by following the highly specific corner of the economic universe inhabited by the leveraged buyout business, where Mitt Romney thrived. If you look at the number of leveraged buyouts dating back two or three decades, you see a clear pattern: Takeovers rose sharply with each of Wall Street's great easy-money schemes, then plummeted just as sharply after each of those scams crashed and burned, leaving the rest of us with the bill.
In the Eighties, when Romney and Bain were cutting their teeth in the LBO business, the primary magic trick involved the junk bonds pioneered by convicted felon Mike Milken, which allowed firms like Bain to find easy financing for takeovers by using wildly overpriced distressed corporate bonds as collateral. Junk bonds gave the Gordon Gekkos of the world sudden primacy over old-school industrial titans like the Fords and the Rockefellers: For the first time, the ability to make deals became more valuable than the ability to make stuff, and the ability to instantly engineer billions in illusory financing trumped the comparatively slow process of making and selling products for gradual returns.
Romney was right in the middle of this radical change. In fact, according to The Boston Globe – whose in-depth reporting on Romney and Bain has spanned three decades – one of Romney's first LBO deals, and one of his most profitable, involved Mike Milken himself. Bain put down $10 million in cash, got $300 million in financing from Milken and bought a pair of department-store chains, Bealls Brothers and Palais Royal. In what should by now be a familiar outcome, the two chains – which Bain merged into a single outfit called Stage Stores – filed for bankruptcy protection in 2000 under the weight of more than $444 million in debt. As always, Bain took no responsibility for the company's demise. (If you search the public record, you will not find a single instance of Mitt Romney taking responsibility for a company's failure.) Instead, Bain blamed Stage's collapse on "operating problems" that took place three years after Bain cashed out, finishing with a $175 million return on its initial investment of $10 million.
But here's the interesting twist: Romney made the Bealls-Palais deal just as the federal government was launching charges of massive manipulation and insider trading against Milken and his firm, Drexel Burnham Lambert. After what must have been a lengthy and agonizing period of moral soul-searching, however, Romney decided not to kill the deal, despite its shady financing. "We did not say, 'Oh, my goodness, Drexel has been accused of something, not been found guilty,' " Romney told reporters years after the deal. "Should we basically stop the transaction and blow the whole thing up?"
In an even more incredible disregard for basic morality, Romney forged ahead with the deal even though Milken's case was being heard by a federal district judge named Milton Pollack, whose wife, Moselle, happened to be the chairwoman of none other than Palais Royal. In short, one of Romney's first takeover deals was financed by dirty money – and one of the corporate chiefs about to receive a big payout from Bain was married to the judge hearing the case. Although the SEC took no formal action, it issued a sharp criticism, complaining that Romney was allowing Milken's money to have a possible influence over "the administration of justice."
After Milken and his junk bond scheme crashed in the late Eighties, Romney and other takeover artists moved on to Wall Street's next get-rich-quick scheme: the tech-Internet stock bubble. By 1997 and 1998, there were nearly $400 billion in leveraged buyouts a year, as easy money once again gave these financial piracy firms the ammunition they needed to raid companies like KB Toys. Firms like Bain even have a colorful pirate name for the pools of takeover money they raise in advance from pension funds, university endowments and other institutional investors. "They call it dry powder," says Slavkin Corzo, the union adviser.
After the Internet bubble burst and private equity started cashing in on Wall Street's mortgage scam, LBO deals ballooned to almost $900 billion in 2006. Once again, storied companies with long histories and deep regional ties were descended upon by Bain and other pirates, saddled with hundreds of millions in debt, forced to pay huge management fees and "dividend recapitalizations," and ridden into bankruptcy amid waves of layoffs. Established firms like Del Monte, Hertz and Dollar General were all taken over in a "prairie fire of debt" – one even more destructive than the government borrowing that Romney is flogging on the campaign trial. When Hertz was conquered in 2005 by a trio of private equity firms, including the Carlyle Group, the interest payments on its debt soared by a monstrous 80 percent, forcing the company to eliminate a third of its 32,000 jobs.
In 2010, a year after the last round of Hertz layoffs, Carlyle teamed up with Bain to take $500 million out of another takeover target: the parent company of Dunkin' Donuts and Baskin-Robbins. Dunkin' had to take out a $1.25 billion loan to pay a dividend to its new private equity owners. So think of this the next time you go to Dunkin' Donuts for a cup of coffee: A small cup of joe costs about $1.69 in most outlets, which means that for years to come, Dunkin' Donuts will have to sell about 2,011,834 small coffees every month – about $3.4 million – just to meet the interest payments on the loan it took out to pay Bain and Carlyle their little one-time dividend. And that doesn't include the principal on the loan, or the additional millions in debt that Dunkin' has to pay every year to get out from under the $2.4 billion in debt it's now saddled with after having the privilege of being taken over – with borrowed money – by the firm that Romney built.
If you haven't heard much about how takeover deals like Dunkin' and KB Toys work, that's because Mitt Romney and his private equity brethren don't want you to. The new owners of American industry are the polar opposites of the Milton Hersheys and Andrew Carnegies who built this country, commercial titans who longed to leave visible legacies of their accomplishments, erecting hospitals and schools and libraries, sometimes leaving behind thriving towns that bore their names.
The men of the private equity generation want no such thing. "We try to hide religiously," explained Steven Feinberg, the CEO of a takeover firm called Cerberus Capital Management that recently drove one of its targets into bankruptcy after saddling it with $2.3 billion in debt. "If anyone at Cerberus has his picture in the paper and a picture of his apartment, we will do more than fire that person," Feinberg told shareholders in 2007. "We will kill him. The jail sentence will be worth it."
Which brings us to another aspect of Romney's business career that has largely been hidden from voters: His personal fortune would not have been possible without the direct assistance of the U.S. government. The taxpayer-funded subsidies that Romney has received go well beyond the humdrum, backdoor, welfare-sucking that all supposedly self-made free marketeers inevitably indulge in. Not that Romney hasn't done just fine at milking the government when it suits his purposes, the most obvious instance being the incredible $1.5 billion in aid he siphoned out of the U.S. Treasury as head of the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake – a sum greater than all federal spending for the previous seven U.S. Olympic games combined. Romney, the supposed fiscal conservative, blew through an average of $625,000 in taxpayer money per athlete – an astounding increase of 5,582 percent over the $11,000 average at the 1984 games in Los Angeles. In 1993, right as he was preparing to run for the Senate, Romney also engineered a government deal worth at least $10 million for Bain's consulting firm, when it was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. (See "The Federal Bailout That Saved Romney")
But the way Romney most directly owes his success to the government is through the structure of the tax code. The entire business of leveraged buyouts wouldn't be possible without a provision in the federal code that allows companies like Bain to deduct the interest on the debt they use to acquire and loot their targets. This is the same universally beloved tax deduction you can use to write off your mortgage interest payments, so tampering with it is considered political suicide – it's been called the "third rail of tax reform." So the Romney who routinely rails against the national debt as some kind of child-killing "mortgage" is the same man who spent decades exploiting a tax deduction specifically designed for mortgage holders in order to bilk every dollar he could out of U.S. businesses before burning them to the ground.
Because minus that tax break, Romney's debt-based takeovers would have been unsustainably expensive. Before Lynn Turner became chief accountant of the SEC, where he reviewed filings on takeover deals, he crunched the numbers on leveraged buyouts as an accountant at a Big Four auditing firm. "In the majority of these deals," Turner says, "the tax deduction has a big enough impact on the bottom line that the takeover wouldn't work without it."
Thanks to the tax deduction, in other words, the government actually incentivizes the kind of leverage-based takeovers that Romney built his fortune on. Romney the businessman built his career on two things that Romney the candidate decries: massive debt and dumb federal giveaways. "I don't know what Romney would be doing but for debt and its tax-advantaged position in the tax code," says a prominent Wall Street lawyer, "but he wouldn't be fabulously wealthy."
Adding to the hypocrisy, the money that Romney personally pocketed on Bain's takeover deals was usually taxed not as income, but either as capital gains or as "carried interest," both of which are capped at a maximum rate of 15 percent. In addition, reporters have uncovered plenty of evidence that Romney takes full advantage of offshore tax havens: He has an interest in at least 12 Bain funds, worth a total of $30 million, that are based in the Cayman Islands; he has reportedly used a squirrelly tax shelter known as a "blocker corporation" that cheats taxpayers out of some $100 million a year; and his wife, Ann, had a Swiss bank account worth $3 million. As a private equity pirate, Romney pays less than half the tax rate of most American executives – less, even, than teachers, firefighters, cops and nurses. Asked about the fact that he paid a tax rate of only 13.9 percent on income of $21.7 million in 2010, Romney responded testily that the massive windfall he enjoys from exploiting the tax code is "entirely legal and fair."
Essentially, Romney got rich in a business that couldn't exist without a perverse tax break, and he got to keep double his earnings because of another loophole – a pair of bureaucratic accidents that have not only teamed up to threaten us with a Mitt Romney presidency but that make future Romneys far more likely. "Those two tax rules distort the economics of private equity investments, making them much more lucrative than they should be," says Rebecca Wilkins, senior counsel at the Center for Tax Justice. "So we get more of that activity than the market would support on its own."
Listen to Mitt Romney speak, and see if you can notice what's missing. This is a man who grew up in Michigan, went to college in California, walked door to door through the streets of southern France as a missionary and was a governor of Massachusetts, the home of perhaps the most instantly recognizable, heavily accented English this side of Edinburgh. Yet not a trace of any of these places is detectable in Romney's diction. None of the people in any of those places bled in and left a mark on the man.
Romney is a man from nowhere. In his post-regional attitude, he shares something with his campaign opponent, Barack Obama, whose background is a similarly jumbled pastiche of regionally nonspecific non-identity. But in the way he bounced around the world as a half-orphaned child, Obama was more like an involuntary passenger in the demographic revolution reshaping the planet than one of its leaders.
Romney, on the other hand, is a perfect representative of one side of the ominous cultural divide that will define the next generation, not just here in America but all over the world. Forget about the Southern strategy, blue versus red, swing states and swing voters – all of those political clichés are quaint relics of a less threatening era that is now part of our past, or soon will be. The next conflict defining us all is much more unnerving.
That conflict will be between people who live somewhere, and people who live nowhere. It will be between people who consider themselves citizens of actual countries, to which they have patriotic allegiance, and people to whom nations are meaningless, who live in a stateless global archipelago of privilege – a collection of private schools, tax havens and gated residential communities with little or no connection to the outside world.
Mitt Romney isn't blue or red. He's an archipelago man. That's a big reason that voters have been slow to warm up to him. From LBJ to Bill Clinton to George W. Bush to Sarah Palin, Americans like their politicians to sound like they're from somewhere, to be human symbols of our love affair with small towns, the girl next door, the little pink houses of Mellencamp myth. Most of those mythical American towns grew up around factories – think chocolate bars from Hershey, baseball bats from Louisville, cereals from Battle Creek. Deep down, what scares voters in both parties the most is the thought that these unique and vital places are vanishing or eroding – overrun by immigrants or the forces of globalism or both, with giant Walmarts descending like spaceships to replace the corner grocer, the family barber and the local hardware store, and 1,000 cable channels replacing the school dance and the gossip at the local diner.
Obama ran on "change" in 2008, but Mitt Romney represents a far more real and seismic shift in the American landscape. Romney is the frontman and apostle of an economic revolution, in which transactions are manufactured instead of products, wealth is generated without accompanying prosperity, and Cayman Islands partnerships are lovingly erected and nurtured while American communities fall apart. The entire purpose of the business model that Romney helped pioneer is to move money into the archipelago from the places outside it, using massive amounts of taxpayer-subsidized debt to enrich a handful of billionaires. It's a vision of society that's crazy, vicious and almost unbelievably selfish, yet it's running for president, and it has a chance of winning. Perhaps that change is coming whether we like it or not. Perhaps Mitt Romney is the best man to manage the transition. But it seems a little early to vote for that kind of wholesale surrender.
This story is from the September 13, 2012 issue of Rolling Stone.
Related
Taibbi Responds: On Mitt Romeny, Bain Capital and Private Equity
Mitt Romney's Federal Bailout: The Documents
Right-Wing Billionaires Behind Mitt Romney
How the GOP Became the Party of the Rich

ABOUT THIS BLOG

Matt Taibbi
Matt Taibbi is a contributing editor for Rolling Stone. He’s the author of five books, most recently The Great Derangement and Griftopia, and a winner of the National Magazine Award for commentary.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/greed-and-debt-the-true-story-of-mitt-romney-and-bain-capital-20120829?print=true

Clint Eastwood Taxes: Film Director Benefited From Generous Credits 30AUG12

WHO know clint eastwood would be supporting the gop / tea-bagger ticket? It is a surprise, until you look deeper into his business dealings and discover his hypocrisy. Turns out this loud mouth didn't build his own film and directing career on his own, he did it with substantial tax breaks from governments in Detroit and Massachusetts  AND his big "patriotic" movie, Flags Of Our Fathers, was outsourced to Iceland. Check this out from HuffPost....

WASHINGTON -- Film director Clint Eastwood will be cheering on Mitt Romney and his party's "you didn't build that!" message during Thursday night's Republican National Convention festivities.
But there's one small problem: Clint Eastwood didn't build that.
Just like the small business owners who spoke on previous nights at the convention in Tampa, Fla., Eastwood, a hugely successful independent filmmaker, has benefited from generous tax credits to produce his movies all over the world -- the same kinds of film tax credits that Romney signed into law as governor.
Eastwood received a 42 percent tax credit in 2008 after shifting the setting of his movie "Gran Torino" from Minneapolis to Detroit, a city dubbed by The New York Times as "the home of 42 percent tax credits for films made there."
Eastwood also took advantage of a Massachusetts tax credit in 2003 for filming "Mystic River" in that state.
His reliance on government aid has extended beyond U.S. borders. The Hollywood Reporter wrote in 2009 that his movie "Invictus" received a tax incentive package from the South African government that knocked $5 million off the film's budget. Eastwood's 2010 film "Hereafter" qualified for a 20 percent rebate from the French government and a received a 25 percent tax credit from the British government after certain scenes were filmed in each of the countries.
Eastwood's "Flags Of Our Fathers" also benefited from a 20 percent incentive package for filming in Iceland. Along with an explainer on the country's tax credit for filmmakers, Iceland's Film Commission features a quote from Eastwood on its website touting the benefits of filming in the country:
"Flying in over the black sand beaches and lava fields, I could see that Iceland had the rugged and unusual look we needed for our film, 'Flags Of Our Fathers.' I soon learned that Iceland also has friendly, hard-working people with a refreshing can-do spirit. The open roads and undisturbed countryside remind me of the way America was fifty years ago. With such gorgeous scenery, delicious fish and even golf, Iceland made for a terrific filming location," Eastwood said.
Romney is familiar with the kinds of tax breaks being used by film directors like Eastwood. As Massachusetts governor, he signed legislation offering an array of tax breaks aimed at attracting major films to his state. The Patriot Ledger reported in December 2005 that, because of the new package, a single film production could receive up to $7 million in tax credits, making Massachusetts "among the five most generous states in the country" at the time.
The Massachusetts Department of Revenue later reported that $19.1 million in tax credits were generated in fiscal 2006 alone.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/30/clint-eastwood-taxes-credits_n_1845054.html?utm_hp_ref=mostpopular 

Director at Catholic Archdiocese of NY Defends Sandusky and Accuses Brutalized Children of Seducing Their Rapists 30AUG12

AS the write up states, THIS IS VILE. Shows the US Conference of Catholic Bishops still has a lot of work to do addressing the pedophilia problem with the male lead and dominated Church in America. They need to concentrate on removing the threat of, support of and continuing tolerance of pedophiles in the Church and leave the issues of family planning and birth control to the consciences and faith of Catholic women, the mainstay of the Church in America.

 

This is absolutely vile. The interview has since been taken down, but the good folks over at the Dish recorded it while it was still available. Below is the quote by Father Benedict Groeschel, the director of the Office for Spiritual Development for the Catholic Archdiocese of New York:
People have this picture in their minds of a person planning to — a psychopath. But that’s not the case. Suppose you have a man having a nervous breakdown, and a youngster comes after him. A lot of the cases, the youngster — 14, 16, 18 — is the seducer … It’s not so hard to see — a kid looking for a father and didn’t have his own — and they won’t be planning to get into heavy-duty sex, but almost romantic, embracing, kissing, perhaps sleeping but not having intercourse or anything like that.
It’s an understandable thing … there are the relatively rare cases where a priest is involved in a homosexual way with a minor. I think the statistic I read recently in a secular psychology review was about 2%. Would that be true of other clergy? Would it be true of doctors, lawyers, coaches?
Here’s this poor guy — [Penn State football coach Jerry] Sandusky — it went on for years. Interesting: Why didn’t anyone say anything? Apparently, a number of kids knew about it and didn’t break the ice. Well, you know, until recent years, people did not register in their minds that it was a crime. It was a moral failure, scandalous; but they didn’t think of it in terms of legal things.
http://dailyagenda.org/ 
 
  FROM THE DISH BY ANDREW SULLIVAN 30AUG12

Quote For The Day II

"People have this picture in their minds of a person planning to — a psychopath. But that's not the case. Suppose you have a man having a nervous breakdown, and a youngster comes after him. A lot of the cases, the youngster — 14, 16, 18 — is the seducer ... It's not so hard to see — a kid looking for a father and didn't have his own — and they won't be planning to get into heavy-duty sex, but almost romantic, embracing, kissing, perhaps sleeping but not having intercourse or anything like that.

It's an understandable thing ... there are the relatively rare cases where a priest is involved in a homosexual way with a minor. I think the statistic I read recently in a secular psychology review was about 2%. Would that be true of other clergy? Would it be true of doctors, lawyers, coaches?

Here's this poor guy — [Penn State football coach Jerry] Sandusky — it went on for years. Interesting: Why didn't anyone say anything? Apparently, a number of kids knew about it and didn't break the ice. Well, you know, until recent years, people did not register in their minds that it was a crime. It was a moral failure, scandalous; but they didn't think of it in terms of legal things," - Father Benedict Groeschel, the director of the Office for Spiritual Development for the Catholic Archdiocese of New York.
The remarks were first posted in the National Catholic Register. All links to the page seem to have been taken down since yesterday. It's a staggering insight into how the old hierarchy viewed child abuse: as essentially the child's fault and no big deal. "Poor Sandusky"? MoDo, call your office.
http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/08/how-youths-seduce-priests.html

30 August 2012

Voters to Personhood: Stick a Fork In It. You’re Done (UNLESS ROMNEY-RYAN ARE ELECTED) 30AUG12

THE repiglican's & tea-bagger's right wing social engineers won't have a personhood amendment on any state ballot on election day, the first time in a couple of years. Some think the threat is over, but if mitt romney is elected along with a repiglican / tea-bagger controlled House and Senate the threat comes roaring back and women's rights and their access to birth control and safe abortion when needed are all gone. Break out the burqas, christian sharia is on the way....
This year, voters have overwhelmingly rejected personhood initiatives sending  messages to personhood proponents, as in:  ‘over.’  ‘Finito.’  Not interested. The fat lady has sung and your idea is a loser.
You would have thought the writing was on the wall.  Last November, voters in Mississippi decisively defeated a personhood initiative which, if passed, would have amended the state Constitution to grant legal rights to fertilized eggs, and in the process ban many forms of hormonal contraception and in-vitro fertilization, not to mention all abortions – without exceptions.  Mississippians resoundingly rejected that proposal by a 16- point margin.  And that was in Mississippi, arguably the most conservative state in the nation.
Apparently, the message wasn’t clear enough.   Instead of realizing that this extreme proposal would not gain traction anywhere, personhood proponents announced their intention to get proposals on the ballot in not one, but one dozen states this year.  But as in Mississippi, voters weren’t buying what they were selling and they fell well short of their mark.  Voters across the country—in Oklahoma, Ohio, Oregon, Mississippi (again), Montana, Nevada, Arkansas, Florida and California—all declined to sign petitions in large enough numbers to even put the question on their ballots this fall. And that’s not including the states where politicians tried to pass personhood legislation—that too went nowhere (I’m looking at you Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Iowa, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Washington and Wisconsin).
Up until yesterday, it looked like fetal personhood would only be able to make it on the ballot this year in just one state: Colorado, the home of Personhood USA (the national organization behind these efforts); a state with, let’s be honest, one of the lowest thresholds in the country for petitioning measures onto the ballot.  Out of a population of over 5 million, they needed only 86,105 valid signatures -- or 1.7 percent of the public – to get the initiative on the ballot.  Indeed, Colorado is the only state where personhood proponents have succeeded twice in getting on the ballot in the past-- in 2008 and again in 2010.  Both times, voters rejected fetal personhood by a 2 to 1 margin. This year was different—they couldn’t even find 1.7 percent of the public willing to sign their petition, let alone vote on it.  Two percent of voters think Mitt Romney’s first name is “Mittens” for crying out loud.    If you can’t find 2 percent of voters who agree with you, it’s time to throw in the towel.  Time to pack your bags and go home.  The voters have spoken and they’re not interested.
Are you listening this time?
http://www.aclu.org/blog/reproductive-freedom/voters-personhood-stick-fork-it-youre-done