Where did Romney get all his wealth? It can't be from honorable means if he refuses to show more than 2 years of taxes... especially when he was bragging about how much money he could get from Washington in 2002.
PLUS, He Won't Even Prove What KIND Of Money He Made From Bain Capital i.e. how much and when... doing what?
NOT ONE OF MITT ROMNEY'S CLAIMS CAN BE PROVEN. HE HAS THE TRACK RECORD OF A PAIR OF FLIP FLOPS AND HE WANT'S PEOPLE TO VOTE FOR HIM JUST FOR THAT... and he tells us not to investigate him or ask him about his taxes or where he got his money from... we are electing a president NOT A KING!
(A president in a DEMOCRACY REQUIRES DISCLOSURE.)
While CEO of Bain Capital, Mitt Romney bought and resold a telephone directory company for 25 times as much, earning the enmity of Italian shareholders...
Mitt says he will be a better "job creator" because of his business experience but he can't prove he actually created ANY jobs while being at Bain!
Moment of Zen: Mitt Romney can't even prove the measly 100,000 "net jobs" he claims to have added over the years...
"Mitt Romney says he created 100,000 jobs while at Bain Capital. Anderson Cooper is Keeping Them Honest."
BUT... the BREAKING NEWS is that Mitt Romney HAS BEEN CAUGHT in potential fraud! (again!... and it's being covered up with a 'you people don't need to know about that'... AGAIN!)
Satire: Mitt Romney uses an age-old ruse to explain how his time at Bain Capital wasn't a conflict of interest, and selectively releases his tax returns as required by law...
Moving forward to today, Mitt Romney denies he knows what his OWN "blind trust" was doing, when he is asked why his company Bain Capital is involved in so many immoral activities (see list below)!
*********
Background:
What we do know about Bain Capital (Mitt Romney's company) so far...
And these documents challenge Romney's claim that he left Bain Capital in early 1999.
Earlier this year, Mitt Romney nearly landed in a politically perilous controversy when the Huffington Post reported that in 1999 the GOP presidential candidate had been part of an investment group that invested $75 million in Stericycle, a medical-waste disposal firm that has been attacked by anti-abortion groups for disposing aborted fetuses collected from family planning clinics. Coming during the heat of the GOP primaries, as Romney tried to sell South Carolina Republicans on his pro-life bona fides, the revelation had the potential to damage the candidate's reputation among values voters already suspicious of his shifting position on abortion.But Bain Capital, the private equity firm Romney founded, tamped down the controversy. The company said Romney left the firm in February 1999 to run the troubled 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City and likely had nothing to with the deal. The matter never became a campaign issue. But documents filed by Bain and Stericycle with the Securities and Exchange Commission—and obtained by Mother Jones—list Romney as an active participant in the investment. And this deal helped Stericycle, a company with a poor safety record, grow, while yielding tens of millions of dollars in profits for Romney and his partners. The documents—one of which was signed by Romney—also contradict the official account of Romney's exit from Bain.
The Stericycle deal—the abortion connection aside—is relevant because of questions regarding the timing of Romney's departure from the private equity firm he founded. Responding to a recent Washington Post story reporting that Bain-acquired companies outsourced jobs, the Romney campaign insisted that Romney exited Bain in February 1999, a month or more before Bain took over two of the companies named in the Post's article. The SEC documents undercut that defense, indicating that Romney still played a role in Bain investments until at least the end of 1999.
Here's what happened with Stericycle. In November 1999, Bain Capital and Madison Dearborn Partners, a Chicago-based private equity firm, filed with the SEC a Schedule 13D, which lists owners of publicly traded companies, noting that they had jointly purchased $75 million worth of shares in Stericycle, a fast-growing player in the medical-waste industry. (That April, Stericycle had announced plans to buy the medical-waste businesses of Browning Ferris Industries and Allied Waste Industries.) The SEC filing lists assorted Bain-related entities that were part of the deal, including Bain Capital (BCI), Bain Capital Partners VI (BCP VI), Sankaty High Yield Asset Investors (a Bermuda-based Bain affiliate), and Brookside Capital Investors (a Bain offshoot). And it notes that Romney was the "sole shareholder, Chairman, Chief Executive Officer and President of BCI, BCP VI Inc., Brookside Inc. and Sankaty Ltd."
The document also states that Romney "may be deemed to share voting and dispositive power with respect to" 2,116,588 shares of common stock in Stericycle "in his capacity as sole shareholder" of the Bain entities that invested in the company. That was about 11 percent of the outstanding shares of common stock. (The whole $75 million investment won Bain, Romney, and their partners 22.64 percent of the firm's stock—the largest bloc among the firm's owners.) The original copy of the filing was signed by Romney.
Another SEC document filed November 30, 1999, by Stericycle also names Romney as an individual who holds "voting and dispositive power" with respect to the stock owned by Bain. If Romney had fully retired from the private equity firm he founded, why would he be the only Bain executive named as the person in control of this large amount of Stericycle stock?
tericycle was a lucrative investment for Romney and Bain. The company had entered the medical-waste business a decade earlier, when it took over a food irradiation plant in Arkansas and began zapping medical waste, rather than strawberries, with radiation. The company subsequently replaced irradiation with a technology that used low-frequency radio waves to sterilize medical waste—gowns, masks, gloves, and other medical equipment—before it was transported to an incinerator. By mid-1997, Stericycle was the second-largest medical-waste disposal business in the nation. Two years later, it was the largest. With 240,000 customers, its operations spanned the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico. Fortune ranked it No. 10 on its list of the 100 fastest growing companies in the nation.
But the company had its woes, accumulating a troubling safety record along the way. In 1991, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration cited its Arkansas operation for 11 workplace safety violations. The facility had not provided employees with sufficient protective gear, and it had kept body parts, fetuses, and dead experimental animals in unmarked storage containers, placing workers at risk. In 1995, Stericycle was fined $3.3 million—later decreased to $800,000—by Rhode Island for knowingly exposing workers to life-threatening diseases at its medical-waste treatment facility in Woonsocket. Two years later, workers at another of its medical-waste processing plants in Morton, Washington, were exposed to tuberculosis. In 2002 and 2003—after Bain and its partners had bought their major interest in the firm—Stericycle reached settlements with the attorneys general in Arizona and Utah after it was accused of violating antitrust laws. It paid Arizona $320,000 in civil penalties and lawyers' fees, and paid Utah $580,000.
Despite the firm's regulatory run-ins, the deal worked out well for Bain. In 2001, the Bain-Madison Dearborn partnership that had invested in the company sold 40 percent of its holdings in Stericycle for about $88 million—marking a hefty profit on its original investment of $75 million. The Bain-related group sold the rest of its holdings by 2004. By that point it had earned $49.5 million. It was not until six years later that anti-abortion activists would target Stericycle for collecting medical waste at abortion clinics. This campaign has compared Stericycle to German firms that provided assistance to the Nazis during the Holocaust. A Stericycle official told Huffington Post that its abortion clinics business constitutes a "small" portion of its total operations. (Stericycle declined a request for comment from Mother Jones.)
In response to questions from Mother Jones, a spokeswoman for Bain maintained that Romney was not involved in the Stericycle deal in 1999, saying that he had "resigned" months before the stock purchase was negotiated. The spokeswoman noted that following his resignation Romney remained only "a signatory on certain documents," until his separation agreement with Bain was finalized in 2002. And Bain issued this statement: "Mitt Romney retired from Bain Capital in February 1999. He has had no involvement in the management or investment activities of Bain Capital, or with any of its portfolio companies since that time." (The Romney presidential campaign did not respond to requests for comment.)
But the document Romney signed related to the Stericycle deal did identify him as a participant in that particular deal and the person in charge of several Bain entities. (Did Bain and Romney file a document with the SEC that was not accurate?) Moreover, in 1999, Bain and Romney both described his departure from Bain not as a resignation and far from absolute. On February 12, 1999, the Boston Herald reported, "Romney said he will stay on as a part-timer with Bain, providing input on investment and key personnel decisions." And a Bain press release issued on July 19, 1999, noted that Romney was "currently on a part-time leave of absence"—and quoted Romney speaking for Bain Capital. In 2001 and 2002, Romney filed Massachusetts state disclosure forms noting he was the 100 percent owner of Bain Capital NY, Inc.—a Bain outfit that was incorporated in Delaware on April 13, 1999—two months after Romney's supposed retirement from the firm. A May 2001 filing with the SEC identified Romney as "a member of the Management Committee" of two Bain entities. And in 2007, the Washington Post reported that R. Bradford Malt, a Bain lawyer, said Romney took a "leave of absence" when he assumed the Olympics post and retained sole ownership of the firm for two more years.
All of this undermines Bain's contention that Romney, though he maintained an ownership interest in the firm and its funds, had nothing to do with the firm's activities after February 1999. The Stericycle deal may raise red flags for anti-abortion activists. But it also raises questions about the true timing of Romney's departure from Bain and casts doubt on claims by the company and the Romney campaign that he had nothing to do with Bain business after February 1999.
The GOP candidate decries China poaching US jobs. But at Bain he held a large stake in a Chinese company that did just that.
Last month, Mitt Romney's campaign got into a dustup with the Washington Post after the newspaper reported that Bain Capital, the private equity firm the GOP presidential candidate founded, invested in several US companies that outsourced jobs to China and India. The campaign indignantly demanded a retraction, claiming that these businesses did not send jobs overseas while Romney was running Bain, and the Post stood by its investigation. Yet there is another aspect to the Romney-as-outsourcer controversy. According to government documents reviewed by Mother Jones, Romney, when he was in charge of Bain, invested heavily in a Chinese manufacturing company that depended on US outsourcing for its profits—and that explicitly stated that such outsourcing was crucial to its success.This previously unreported deal runs counter to Romney's tough talk on the campaign trail regarding China. "We will not let China continue to steal jobs from the United States of America," Romney declared in February. But with this investment, Romney sought to make money off a foreign company that banked on American firms outsourcing manufacturing overseas.
On April 17, 1998, Brookside Capital Partners Fund, a Bain Capital affiliate, filed a report with the Securities and Exchange Commission noting that it had acquired 6.13 percent of Hong Kong-based Global-Tech Appliances, which manufactured household appliances in a production facility in the industrial city of Dongguan, China. That August, according to another SEC filing, Brookside upped its interest in Global-Tech to 10.3 percent. Both SEC filings identified Romney as the person in control of this investment: "Mr. W. Mitt Romney is the sole shareholder, sole director, President and Chief Executive Officer of Brookside Inc. and thus is the controlling person of Brookside Inc." Each of these documents was signed by Domenic Ferrante, a managing director of Brookside and Bain.
The SEC filings do not reveal how much Romney initially invested in Global-Tech (which is now known as Global-Tech Advanced Innovations). But Brookside first acquired 748,000 shares at a time when Global-Tech was mounting an IPO at $19 a share. If that was the purchase price Brookside paid, then Romney's firm originally invested $14.2 million in the company.
At the time Romney was acquiring shares in Global-Tech, the firm publicly acknowledged that its strategy was to profit from prominent US companies outsourcing production abroad. On September 4, 1998, Global-Tech issued a press release announcing it was postponing completion of a $30 million expansion of its Dongguan facility because Sunbeam, a prominent American consumer products company and a major client of Global-Tech, was cutting back on outsourcing as part of an overall consolidation. But John C.K. Sham, Global-Tech's president and CEO, said, "Although it appears that customers such as Sunbeam are not outsourcing their manufacturing as quickly as we had anticipated, we still believe that the long-term trend toward outsourcing will continue." Global-Tech, which in mid-1998 announced fiscal year sales of $118.3 million (an increase of 89 percent over the previous year), also manufactured household appliances for Hamilton Beach, Mr. Coffee, Proctor-Silex, Revlon, and Vidal Sassoon, and its chief exec was hoping for more outsourcing from these and other American firms.
The Romney campaign and Bain Capital have insisted that Romney departed Bain in February 1999 to head the troubled 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City and had no involvement in the private equity firm's deals after that point—a contention that has been challenged by the Obama campaign. But the Global-Tech Appliances transactions occurred long before Romney jetted off to Utah.
Brookside downsized its Global-Tech holdings later in 1998. An SEC filing submitted on December 21, 1998, reported that the Bain affiliate now controlled only 4.63 percent of the company's shares. But Brookside was sharing its stake in Global-Tech with Sankaty High Yield Asset Investors LTD—a Bermuda-based corporation of which Romney was the "the sole shareholder, a director, and President." That is, Romney had split his Global-Tech holdings between two of his various business entities. (The SEC filing doesn't indicate why he did that.)
Sankaty is a story in itself. It was recently the focus of an Associated Press investigation that reported that Sankaty "is among several Romney holdings that have not been fully disclosed" and that there is a "mystery surrounding" Sankaty. Reporting on this Romney entity, Vanity Fair noted that "investments in tax havens such as Bermuda raise many questions, because they are in 'jurisdictions where there is virtually no tax and virtually no compliance,' as one Miami-based offshore lawyer put it." With Sankaty, Romney was using a mysterious Bermuda-based entity to invest in a Chinese firm that thrived on US outsourcing.
In early 1999, Romney's investment in Global-Tech expanded again. An SEC report filed on March 25, 1999, stated that Brookside and Sankaty at this stage owned 9.11 percent of the firm's stock. Romney was still listed as the sole shareholder and president of both Brookside and Sankaty.
By this point, according to the open-to-question account offered by Bain and the Romney campaign, Romney no longer had any involvement in Bain deals. But the series of SEC filings show active Brookside and Sankaty trading in Global-Tech Appliances while Romney fully controlled these firms. The two Romney companies repeatedly changed their ownership stake in this Chinese firm, which was not shy about its dependence on outsourcing. In its 2001 annual report, Global-Tech noted that US outsourcing was essential to its prospects: "Household appliance companies are focusing on their primary strengths of marketing and distribution, while increasingly outsourcing product development and manufacturing…Our ability and commitment to develop new and innovative, high quality products at a low cost has allowed us to benefit from the increased outsourcing of product development and manufacturing by our customers."
In August 2000, Brookside and Sankaty sold their interest in Global-Tech, according to the SEC documents. With these filings disclosing minimum details about Romney's investment in Global-Tech, there is no telling how much money he made—or lost—on the deal.
A spokeswoman for Bain says that the company will not comment on the Global-Tech investment or provide any additional details about this deal. A Romney campaign official would not address the issue of Global-Tech profiting from US outsourcing, but this Romney aide maintains that this deal was nothing other than a routine investment in a foreign company: "[I]t's my understanding that while Brookside is a part of Bain Capital, it is not a private equity vehicle. Brookside makes passive investments in public stock. They don't control or manage the companies they invest in. Brookside had a small ownership stake (9.11%) in Global-Tech…while Romney was there. If owning shares in a foreign company is somehow wrong, President Obama is guilty as well." (The Romney campaign points out that Obama's personal holdings include an investment in a Vanguard 500 Index retirement fund that contains shares in a handful of foreign companies.)
In recent weeks, Romney's involvement in outsourcing has become a contentious campaign issue. Late last month, the Obama campaign launched ads that accused Romney of being a "corporate raider" who "shipped jobs to China and Mexico" and slammed him as an "outsourcer in chief." The Romneyites cried foul, pointing to neutral fact-checkers who criticized the ads, and asserted that Obama was trying to distract from bad economic news. And the Romney campaign, pushing back on the Post story, maintained that the newspaper missed the difference between outsourcing and offshoring. This week, Romney declared that Obama was the real "outsourcer-in-chief," insisting that the president funded "energy companies, solar and wind energy companies that end up making their products outside the United States." (The New York Times immediately debunked much of Romney's attack, and the Washington Post's "Fact Checker" column awarded four Pinocchios to an Americans for Prosperity ad that in April made a similar claim about Obama and green-jobs outsourcing.)
Romney's Global-Tech deal adds a new dimension to the debate over Romney and outsourcing. Whether or not he was at the helm when Bain invested in US firms that did or did not ship jobs overseas, Romney was in command when a company he owned and controlled bought a large stake in a Chinese venture that counted on American companies sending manufacturing—and that means jobs—to China. These days, Romney rails against China for swiping American jobs and proclaims, "For me, it's all about good jobs for the American people." But when there was money to be made by acquiring a chunk of a Chinese company that aimed to displace American manufacturers (and American workers), Romney's patriotism did not interfere with the potential for profit.
From MotherJones: "Yet evidence has emerged that undermines this claim and that suggests Romney may have made a false statement on this disclosure form (which would be a potential felony punishable by a $50,000 fine and up to a year in jail). Now there's another indication that Romney's break with Bain wasn't so clean—and this is according to Romney himself. Last week, the Huffington Post reported that Romney, in sworn testimony during a 2002 Massachusetts hearing to determine if he met the residency requirement to run for governor, declared that he had remained on the board of a company in which Bain was an investor."
From Maddow Blog
Mitt Romney's campaign is still wrestling with when he left Bain Capital. Over the weekend, they tried saying he "actually retired retroactively."
Romney's Account of His Departure From Bain Undercut by...Romney Testimony
In a previously unreported remark, Romney indicated he went through a "transition" at Bain after heading to Utah in February 1999.
Mitt Romney, his campaign, and Bain Capital, the private equity firm he founded, keep insisting that Romney departed the company in February 1999 and had nothing to do with its operations and deals once he headed to Salt Lake City to take over the troubled Winter Olympics. Romney even signed a federal financial disclosure form, under the penalty of perjury, declaring that he had not been involved "in any way" with Bain after he left for Utah. Yet evidence has emerged that undermines this claim and that suggests Romney may have made a false statement on this disclosure form (which would be a potential felony punishable by a $50,000 fine and up to a year in jail). Now there's another indication that Romney's break with Bain wasn't so clean—and this is according to Romney himself.
Last week, the Huffington Post reported that Romney, in sworn testimony during a 2002 Massachusetts hearing to determine if he met the residency requirement to run for governor, declared that he had remained on the board of a company in which Bain was an investor. This scoop received much attention. Still, the Romney camp did not directly respond to it, and in interviews with the major television networks on Friday, Romney insisted, as he told ABC News' Jonathan Karl, that he had "no role with regards to Bain Capital after February 1999." He maintained that all the questions regarding his stint at Bain were merely part of the Obama campaign's "kill Romney" strategy.
Yet during that 2002 hearing—in a remark that has not been previously reported—Romney said that after he departed Bain in February 1999 he went through a transition period regarding his work in Boston.
When a lawyer challenging his eligibility asked Romney, "Did you remain more or less continuously in Salt Lake City from February '99 to the end of the year," Romney answered:
Actually, there was some transition away from my work in Boston for the first few months and then I pretty much stayed there after.Trying to clarify this, the lawyer, after referring to this "transition," asked, "So from February through the end of the year you were pretty much full-time out in Utah, right?"
Romney replied: "Well again, the beginning of the year was a good deal of time back and forth, but towards the last half of the year it was pretty much exclusively in Utah."
With these statements, it seems Romney was saying that because he remained involved in Bain matters during a transition period, he traveled to and from Massachusetts for several months. The problem for Romney is, he's now insisting—and he signed a federal form declaring—he had no participation in Bain (besides owning the company and its various entities) once he headed to Utah. During this current controversy over his role at Bain, he has not said anything about a transition period.
Asked to comment on this portion of Romney's 2002 testimony, his campaign forwarded a statement it had previously released: "After extensive hearings the bipartisan [Massachusetts] Ballot Law Commission came to the same conclusion as numerous independent fact checkers in finding that Mitt Romney ended his active employment with Bain Capital in 1999." But the Ballot Commission was not tasked with investigating the matter of Romney's separation from Bain; it was not a major part of the hearing. A Romney campaign aide speaking on background notes, "Think about the 2002 Ballot Law Commission testimony that you're citing. Mitt Romney was trying to prove his residency in Massachusetts. If he were running Bain Capital while he was in Salt Lake City running the Olympics, wouldn't it have been easier for him to say so and thus easily prove his residency?" But the issue is not whether he was running Bain after February 1999, but whether he participated at all in any of its activities and transactions.
Romney's mention of a "transition" period for his "work in Boston" is another contradiction for him to explain. Did he testify inaccurately during that hearing—after swearing to tell the truth? Or is he now trying to create a bright line—to distance himself from Bain-related layoffs and outsourcing—that didn't exist? Any transition time for Romney at Bain would undermine his central claim about his last days at the firm.
There may be an easy way for Romney to prove that his current account of his Bain exit is the correct one. During the 2002 hearing, when asked by the lawyer about the amount of time in 1999 he spent in Utah and Massachusetts, he said, "I actually could probably look day by day, if necessary, on calendars."
Calendars? Might these records indicate whether Romney had any meetings or calls with Bain executives about deals or operations at the firm? An examination of such material might resolve the issue definitively. So perhaps those politicos and pundits who have called on Romney to release previous tax returns—a bipartisan group swelling in numbers—can add another set of records to the list of material the public ought to see: Romney's calendars from 1999, a year that was a crucial turning point in his career and that has become a significant issue in this presidential campaign.
Asked to comment on this portion of Romney's 2002 testimony, his campaign forwarded a statement it had previously released: "After extensive hearings the bipartisan [Massachusetts] Ballot Law Commission came to the same conclusion as numerous independent fact checkers in finding that Mitt Romney ended his active employment with Bain Capital in 1999." But the Ballot Commission was not tasked with investigating the matter of Romney's separation from Bain; it was not a major part of the hearing. A Romney campaign aide speaking on background notes, "Think about the 2002 Ballot Law Commission testimony that you're citing. Mitt Romney was trying to prove his residency in Massachusetts. If he were running Bain Capital while he was in Salt Lake City running the Olympics, wouldn't it have been easier for him to say so and thus easily prove his residency?" But the issue is not whether he was running Bain after February 1999, but whether he participated at all in any of its activities and transactions.
Romney's mention of a "transition" period for his "work in Boston" is another contradiction for him to explain. Did he testify inaccurately during that hearing—after swearing to tell the truth? Or is he now trying to create a bright line—to distance himself from Bain-related layoffs and outsourcing—that didn't exist? Any transition time for Romney at Bain would undermine his central claim about his last days at the firm.
There may be an easy way for Romney to prove that his current account of his Bain exit is the correct one. During the 2002 hearing, when asked by the lawyer about the amount of time in 1999 he spent in Utah and Massachusetts, he said, "I actually could probably look day by day, if necessary, on calendars."
Calendars? Might these records indicate whether Romney had any meetings or calls with Bain executives about deals or operations at the firm? An examination of such material might resolve the issue definitively. So perhaps those politicos and pundits who have called on Romney to release previous tax returns—a bipartisan group swelling in numbers—can add another set of records to the list of material the public ought to see: Romney's calendars from 1999, a year that was a crucial turning point in his career and that has become a significant issue in this presidential campaign.
Mitt Romney's long history of misremembering his past.
Mitt Romney has a history problem.It's not only that past events and stances—say, his implementation of an Obamacare-like reform in Massachusetts, or his 1994 call for "full equality" for gay and lesbians—undermine his current efforts by calling into question his political integrity. Romney often distorts—or is detached from—significant realities of his personal past.
Voters and the media world received a glimpse of this last month when the Washington Post disclosed that Romney, while attending an elite prep school, once led a posse of schoolmates to assault a fellow student who was thought to be gay. Though the newspaper cited five sources, including several participants in the brutal episode, Romney, through a spokeswoman, claimed he had "no memory" of the matter. After the story appeared, Romney, still insisting not to recall the event, apologized for pranks that "might have gone too far." Yet his lack of recollection was tough to believe, especially given the searing memories the attack had left within others. More important, Romney's blank-out was in keeping with a pattern of selective and manipulative presentations of his past. He's not merely a flip-flopper; he's a self-revisionist.
I. The Father
Romney has a wonderfully colorful and much-storied family past. His great-great grandfather Miles Archibald Romney, an English carpenter, was one of the first Brits to convert to Mormonism. Following the call, Miles immigrated to Illinois. Three generations later—after plenty of family drama intertwined with the rise of the Mormon Church—the Romney family would yield George, Mitt's father. He would become an innovative auto executive, a well-regarded governor of Michigan (who in 1964 walked out of the Republican National Convention to protest nominee Barry Goldwater's opposition to civil rights legislation), and a presidential candidate.
On the campaign trail, Romney, attempting to establish some 99-percent cred, has emphasized his gritty and hardscrabble family roots, citing his father. In a campaign appearance in February, Romney repeated a familiar refrain:
My father never graduated from college. He apprenticed as a lath and plaster carpenter. And he [was] pretty good at it. He actually could take a handful of nails, stick them in his mouth and then, you know, spit them out, pointy end forward. On his honeymoon, he put aluminum paint in the trunk of the car and sold it along the way to pay for the gas in the hotels.Mitt's father, in this account, was one helluva tough guy with quite a pair of bootstraps, a working-class hero. But that's not quite what happened. George attended George Washington University in Washington, DC, and while he was a student, according to Michael Kranish and Scott Helman's fine biography, The Real Romney, George Romney became a typist and then a policy aide for Sen. David Walsh (D-Mass.). He then used his Capitol Hill connections to obtain a job as a salesman for the Aluminum Company of America. He only dropped out of school to chase after Lenore, his sweetheart (and future wife), who had headed to Hollywood to become an actress.
George Romney may have been a good nail-spitter. But he was also a fellow who benefited from inside influence. He parlayed that Senate job into the salesman position, and a few years later, after he had persuaded Lenore to marry him in 1931, George returned to Washington—to become a lobbyist for the Aluminum Company of America. He would later leave that perch and go to work for the Automobile Manufacturers Association.
A carpenter who sold paint, or a well-connected lobbyist? George's lathing and plastering had little to do with his future success. He had been a Washington insider. But that crucial part of the Romney family biography is excised from Romney's public memories. (Romney has distorted the past regarding his father in another way, claiming in a 1978 interview, "My father and I marched with Martin Luther King Jr. through the streets of Detroit." When later news accounts questioned whether this had occurred, Romney said he had meant it as "figure of speech.")
II. The War
Mitt Romney, who was born in 1947, was eligible for the Vietnam War draft. But he did not serve in the military. In 2007, he told the Boston Globe that he "longed in many respects to actually be in Vietnam and be representing our country there, and in some ways it was frustrating not to feel like I was there as part of the troops that were fighting in Vietnam." Romney could have acted on that supposed longing by merely signing up—or by not taking steps to avoid the draft. But he chose to duck the war.
In 1994, when Romney was running for the Senate against Ted Kennedy, he told the Boston Herald that he did not "take any actions to remove myself from the pool of young men who were eligible for the draft." But that's exactly what he had done.
As the Associated Press recently reported, Romney, while at Stanford in 1965, sought a deferment as a college student. Then for two-and-half years, as he served as a Mormon missionary in France, he maintained a deferment "as a minister of religion or divinity student." After that deferment expired, Romney again received another academic studies deferment.
That final deferment ran out in 1970, and Romney became eligible for the draft as US troops in Vietnam were decreasing. But his draft number was high, and he was never called.
So his story—he yearned to be fighting for the United States in Vietnam and did nothing to keep himself out of the reach of Uncle Sam—is false. And he has not acknowledged in public a particularly interesting wrinkle. At Stanford, Romney led a protest against demonstrators who mounted an anti-war sit-in at the university. He held a sign that proclaimed, "SPEAK OUT, DON'T SIT IN." Yet five years later, in 1970, after George Romney had turned against the war, Romney told the Boston Globe, "If it wasn't a political blunder to move into Vietnam, I don't know what is."
Romney wished he could have gone to war, but he didn't enlist. He took no steps to prevent himself being drafted, but he did. He supported the war, then he didn't. As a politically-minded son of privilege and politics, Vietnam was a confusing matter for Romney, and he has not addressed that publicly.
III. The Businessman
Why should Mitt Romney be president? He says it is because of his experience as a free-enterprise-loving businessman who has had whopping success in the private sector. On the stump, Romney praises risk-taking entrepreneurial behavior. "What makes America's economy go is individuals with dreams who take risks, borrow money from their family, max out their credit cards, maybe get an outside investor," he declared this month. He claims that President Obama doesn't understand this basic dynamic of the US economy, and Romney suggests that he himself possesses a fundamental appreciation, due to his own biography. At a Republican debate last fall, when Herman Cain challenged Romney's business record, Romney countered that he had been the CEO of a "start-up."
Announcing his presidential bid in June 2011, Romney more fully described his role as a private-sector free spirit:
Twenty seven years ago, I left a steady job to join with some friends to start a business. Like many of you, it had been a dream of mine to try and build a business from the ground up. We started in a small office a couple of hours from here and over the years, we were able to grow from ten employees to hundreds.He was, by his own account, the embodiment of the American spirit: a risk-taking, rugged, go-for-it entrepreneur, willing to sacrifice his "steady job" for a shot at his dream.
Not really. After graduating from Harvard University's business and law schools—not one, but two citadels of the elite!—Romney rose through the ranks of Bain & Company, a consulting firm. He so impressed Bill Bain, the head of the firm, that Bain asked Romney to oversee the creation of a private equity off-shoot, Bain Capital, which would look to buy up troubled companies, put them in order, and resell them for a profit.
And Romney said no. As recounted in The Real Romney (an essential read for anyone looking to understand the GOP candidate), Romney "saw the opportunity, of course, but he also saw risks." With five kids at home, he already had a comfortable set-up: great job at Bain & Company, money in the bank. He'd have to kick in some of the start-up funds, and he didn't want to put his present salary and financial resources on the line. That is, he didn't leap at the chance to follow his supposed dream of building "a business from the ground up." His first instinct was to play it safe and not be a daring entrepreneur.
Bill Bain made it safe for Romney. He told the young biz-wiz that if Bain Capital flopped, Romney could have his old job back—and all the salary increases he might have missed. But this wasn't enough insurance for Romney, who worried his reputation might be tainted should he fail to deliver at the new enterprise. Bain promised that if Romney had to come back to Bain & Company, he'd tell people that was because the consulting firm needed Romney desperately. "So," Bain later said to Kranish and Helman, "there was no professional or financial risk" for Romney.
Romney was given a golden elevator. And he made the most of it. But his path to becoming a quarter-billionaire is hardly a classic tale of risk-defying entrepreneurship.
Romney's serial denials of past positions have partly shaped his public political persona. He was for gun control measures, now he's not. He favored climate change action, now he doesn't. He was a fan of individual health care mandates, now he decries Obamacare. His craven flexibility was perhaps best epitomized when he tried to explain to Kranish and Helman why during the 1994 Senate campaign he had written a letter to the Log Cabin Republicans, a pro-gay rights group, asserting a desire "to establish full equality for America's gay and lesbian citizens." He told the reporters, "well, okay, let's look at that in the context of who it's being written to." Romney, in this moment of candor, was inadvertently admitting he was an unapologetic panderer.
That was an exception. Romney tends to reject charges of flip-flopping, as he did in his unsuccessful interview last November with Fox News' Bret Baier. And this is to be expected. To be a credible candidate, Romney cannot acknowledge his long list of 180s. (Nor can he dwell on his years as governor of Massachusetts, where his signature accomplishment was health care reform that was the basis for Obama's initiative.) But his refutation of the past extends beyond the politician's traditional refusal to acknowledge previous positions that have since become inconvenient. He has adopted an overly flexible attitude toward his personal history, showing that he is an unreliable source of information about himself. If he cannot tell his own tale accurately, can he be trusted to tell the nation's?
The Romney campaign asks Rick Scott to downplay Florida's job gains since they only help Obama...
"Bad economic news is great news for Mitt Romney, so conservatives must drag everyone down in the dumps to get America back on track."
i.e. Romney's test of truth telling = "If it ain't broke, insist that it is..."Note: This one of of Mitt Romney's friends in the GOP...
Peter King supported the IRA's bombing of civilians (white people in England)... now he's in charge of Homeland Security... "Colbert Report: Peter King's links to terrorism"
Peter King: force behind Muslim hearings was an IRA supporter
Republican senator dismisses critics' attempts to draw a parallel with al-Qaida, arguing the IRA never attacked on US soil
Mystery Finance Theater 2012: Mitt Romney refuses to release his tax returns, citing the Obama administration's desire to hound him with frivolous transparency demands...
Notes from this video...
1. Notice how Republicans are giving Mitt Romney the option of only releasing 6-10 years of taxes... yet Mitt Romney has been in political office since the 1990's. It's sad that Sean Hannity wants to see Obama's college transcripts, which was probably from 30 years ago, but won't ask Romney basic questions that should have been covered earlier in this primary. Mitt Romney won't release his taxes from the begining of his political career! ... even though we know Congress has been making laws to help them make money through Delaware - Has Mitt Romney used his political influence to make money through robbing someone legally? There is only one way to find out, i.e. complete transparency of financial records.
***********
Mitt Romney refuses to release his taxes, his record at Bain Capital, his record of Job Creation, Job Creation under him at Bain Capital, (i.e. anything about him).
What does he have? .... no proof of competence, no proof that he has accomplished anything and no proof of where he got all his money while being a "businessman".
**********
No comments:
Post a Comment