BIRTH CHART FOR MIT ROMNEY: AN ARCHETYPAL STUDY IN DUPLICITY

[Rad]

Romney Race-Baits after NAACP Speech

By Amanda Marcotte
Thursday, July 12, 2012 8:40 EDT

Since Mitt Romney certainly isn’t going to pick up many—if any—black voters by making a speech for the NAACP, his choice to go there and make a big media stink about it had to be about something else. There’s a couple of interpretations of his behavior. Jamelle Bouie offered the best I’ve seen:

    The point of this address to the NAACP was to send a signal to right-leaning, suburban white voters—that Mitt Romney is tolerant, and won’t represent the bigots in his party. But there’s a sense in which Romney had it both ways: Not only did he reassure hesitant whites, but by pledging to repeal Obamacare—and being booed by the audience—he likely increased his standing with those who do resent African Americans. By going to an audience of black professionals and sticking with his stump speech, there’s a sense in which Romney might receive credit for refusing to “pander.”

My sense of this was that it was actually far more about shoring up the racist narrative than signaling tolerance to right-leaning, suburban white voters, mainly because I’ve never noticed these voters giving a moment’s pause to the idea of switching candidates merely because they fear being associated with outspoken racists.

My suspicion was that it’s more about the latter benefit Jamelle spells out: shoring up support with a racist base. That the narrative Romney is trying to establish is, “Gosh, I tried to reach out to Those People and talk some sense into them, but they’re just too lazy and greedy to listen.” It feeds into larger narratives about how Obama is just trying to steal money from the white man and give it to black people, which in turn satisfies the constant conservative hunger to be assured that they can’t be racists, because they’re the real victims here.

Any doubt that this is what was going on was neatly wiped away last night with this report:

What makes it especially grating that Romney is playing the black-people-just-want-to-take-your-stuff-instead-of-earn-their-own-living card is that all this is in response to the Affordable Care Act, which mostly expands insurance coverage by getting people onto private plans. Oh, and if they don’t do that? They have to pay a tax penalty. Remember that? The thing Republicans were so mad about last week? Unless Romney wants to claim there’s a race-based exception to the law, the “free stuff” whine doesn’t make a lot of sense. Plus, calling health care “free stuff” is just plain offensive. It equates getting cancer treatment and vaccinations with getting a shiny new TV set. Only moral monsters make that kind of equation, or people who’ve been turned into them by listening to too much Rush Limbaugh.

Clearly, signaling “tolerance” isn’t part of the Romney campaign. Which makes sense. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of appetite beyond liberal circles in addressing the problem of racism by actually striving for more diversity and equality. Outside of liberal circles, the main way racism is dealt with is by angry denials that one is a racist whenever it’s even slightly suggested that perhaps your political beliefs might be less than ideal when it comes to the goal of eradicating racial disparities between white people and everyone else. Since Romney’s not going to get the liberals, he’s focusing on everyone else, the “nuh-uh!” population, which encompasses both conservatives and swing voters. Thus, this repulsive race-baiting strategy.

I definitely see why the NAACP graciously offers the chance for Republican candidates to make a pitch before their members, but I’m beginning to wonder if the larger concerns in play are going to make them question whether or not to do this in the future.

[Rad]

In Tracing Romney’s Role at Bain, a Convoluted Timeline

By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE and MICHAEL D. SHEAR
Published: July 15, 2012
NY Times

When Mitt Romney was running for governor of Massachusetts a decade ago, Democrats went before a state commission to demand that he be struck from the ballot. Their argument: After taking over the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, he had ceased to live and work in Massachusetts, the state where he had built Bain Capital into one of the leading private equity firms in the world.

Mr. Romney’s team was just as insistent in arguing the opposite. For 30 years, his lawyer argued, “the center of his social, civic and business life has been in this commonwealth.”

Now, amid the heat of the presidential campaign and unrelenting attacks from Democrats over Mr. Romney’s tenure at Bain, the three-year sojourn in Utah has again become the source of controversy — but with the positions reversed.

President Obama and the Democrats are questioning whether Mr. Romney really left Bain in February 1999, when he took over the Olympics. And Mr. Romney and the Republicans are insisting that he ended his day-to-day management role at Bain after taking the Olympics job.

At stake is whether Democrats can hold Mr. Romney responsible for a series of now-controversial investments Bain made during the period in question, including in companies that specialized in outsourcing, laid off some of their workers or declared bankruptcy.

Mr. Romney faced a barrage of attacks over the issue on Sunday, as well as new demands, even from Republicans, that he release more tax returns. Democrats have seized on Mr. Romney’s Bain ties as a test of his credibility, suggesting that he is evading responsibility for his leadership of Bain.

The attacks have thrust Mr. Romney’s three-year leave to the center of the presidential campaign, questioning a central component of Mr. Romney’s case for election — that his business experience gives him the experience to steer the economy on the right course — while putting his campaign on the defensive when it could be attacking Mr. Obama’s job record.

On Sunday, Ed Gillespie, a senior adviser to Mr. Romney, told CNN that the candidate had “retired retroactively” from Bain more than two years after leaving in 1999, an example of how the complexity of Mr. Romney’s business has proved difficult to explain in the simple terms favored by political campaigns.

The complications arise in part from the ways in which Bain was organized. When Bain Capital was originally created, Mr. Romney was given full control of the private equity firm’s new management company, Bain Capital Inc. When Mr. Romney went on leave in 1999, he retained ownership of that entity — and with it, in theory at least, the power to control Bain Capital’s funds.

At the time, Mr. Romney appeared to be leaving open the possibility that he would return to Bain. His leave was originally characterized as part time, and he told The Boston Herald in 1999 that he would be providing input on investment and personnel decisions in his absence.

Campaign and company officials now say that the Olympics job quickly became all-consuming and that Mr. Romney delegated his management powers to the active partners, most of them longtime friends and colleagues. And in recent years, Mr. Romney has been far more definitive in characterizing his departure.

“Since Feb. 11, 1999, Mr. Romney has not had any active role with any Bain Capital entity and has not been involved in the operations of any Bain Capital entity in any way,” reads a footnote to Mr. Romney’s most recent federal financial disclosures.

Yet because he retained technical control of Bain Capital’s management and because his wealth remained heavily tied up with the firm, Mr. Romney’s name or signature appears on dozens of documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission between February 1999 and August 2001, when he finalized a retirement deal with the active Bain partners and transferred to them his shares of Bain’s management entity.

“Mitt’s name were on the documents as the chief executive and sole owner of the company,” Edward W. Conard, a Bain partner at the time, said during an appearance on MSNBC on Sunday. “And it took several years for us to sort out how to put the management team in place.”

All told, Mr. Romney’s name appears on at least 142 such forms, some of which have been the subject of news coverage in recent days, fueling questions about whether Mr. Romney ever really left. One such form, posted last week by Talking Points Memo, lists Mr. Romney’s “principal occupation” as “managing director” of Bain Capital Investors VI Inc., a private equity fund.
   
Some of the filings reflect the complex nature of private equity funds: each Bain fund was run by a separate general partnership — one that included all of Bain’s executives — that in turn was legally controlled by Mr. Romney through his management entity.

“It’s a disconnect between the ownership interest and managerial functions,” said Harvey L. Pitt, who served as S.E.C. chairman under President George W. Bush. “When Bain takes positions in public companies, they’re required to show anyone who has an ownership interest that could be the effective equivalent of control. So Romney has to be shown on those filings. If they didn’t show them on those filings, they would have broken the law. But it has nothing to do with who’s actually running Bain Capital.”

Indeed, no evidence has yet emerged that Mr. Romney exercised his powers at Bain after February 1999 or directed the funds’ investments after he left, although his campaign has declined to say if he attended any meetings or had any other contact with Bain during the period. And financial disclosures filed with the Massachusetts ethics commission show that he drew at least $100,000 in 2001 from Bain Capital Inc. — effectively his own till — as a “former executive” and from other Bain entities as a passive general partner.

An offering memorandum to investors in Bain’s seventh private equity fund that was circulated in June 2000 also suggests that Mr. Romney was no longer actively involved in managing firm investments at the time. The memorandum, first published by Fortune, provides background on the “senior private equity investment professionals of Bain Capital.” Eighteen managers are listed; Mr. Romney is not among them.

On another filing with Massachusetts officials, Bain Capital listed all of Bain’s directors and officers for 2001. The form lists Michael F. Goss as “president, managing director and chief financial officer,” along with seventeen other managing directors. Mr. Romney is not among them, suggesting that while he still owned Bain’s management company, he was not an officer of the company.

By August 2001, Mr. Romney had announced that he would not return to Bain Capital. Talk was already swirling about a bid for Massachusetts governor; behind the scenes, Mr. Romney was negotiating his final departure from Bain. Mr. Romney’s partners agreed to pay him a declining portion of the firm’s profits in buyout deals and other businesses for 10 years. The deal, signed in 2002, incorporated a payout formula reflecting his passive role in the firm from February 1999 forward, officials said.

*********************

Editorial: NY Times

Mitt Romney’s Complaints

Published: July 15, 2012

After three days of Mitt Romney complaining about attacks on his record at Bain Capital, it’s clear that President Obama has nothing to apologize for. If Mr. Romney doesn’t want to provide real answers to the questions about his career, he had better develop a thicker skin.
Related

    In Tracing Romney’s Role at Bain, a Convoluted Timeline (July 16, 2012)

Related in Opinion

    Op-Ed Columnist: Policy and the Personal (July 16, 2012)
    More on United States Elections »

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Mr. Romney’s descriptions of when he left Bain have been erratic and self-serving. In 2002, when he needed to show he was still a Massachusetts resident, he denied he had quit in 1999, saying he had taken a leave of absence to run the Olympics committee. A series of documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Committee show that Bain certainly didn’t describe him as absent after 1999.

A former Bain managing director, Edward Conard, said on MSNBC Sunday that Mr. Romney remained C.E.O. “legally” so he could negotiate his generous exit deal.

But now that Bain has been accused of helping other companies outsource jobs overseas, laying off steel company employees and wiping out their pensions, Mr. Romney says he had no management role after 1999. A Kansas City steel plant that Bain bought in 1993 under Mr. Romney’s control, for example, went bankrupt in 2001, costing 750 workers their jobs and pensions. After the Obama campaign made an ad featuring several of the angry workers, the Romney campaign said he couldn’t be blamed because he left Bain in 1999.

On Thursday, a Boston Globe article demonstrated Mr. Romney’s continuing ties to Bain through 2002, and Mr. Obama said it raised questions for his opponent. “I think most Americans figure if you are the chairman, C.E.O. and president of a company,” he said, “you are responsible for what that company does.”

Mr. Obama’s campaign aides did go too far, perhaps, in suggesting Mr. Romney may have legal problems over this issue. But Mr. Obama’s criticism is fair. Mr. Romney has persistently refused to tell voters about his finances. Even now it is not clear how much money he has made from Bain in the 13 (or 10) years since he left the company.

The right way to respond to Mr. Obama is to release his tax returns from that period, or open up Bain documents. But Mr. Romney told CNN he would not release more than the one year’s return he has already released and the one for 2011 when it is finished. “That’s all that’s necessary for people to understand something about my finances,” he said. It’s not even close.

*****************

There was no escaping politics even at Comic-Con this year: RobotRomney

WSJ:

    Heroes In Action, a toy company that produces monster figurines based on presidents and other politicians, used its booth at the conference to unveil a prototype of its latest action figure: Romney the Robot.

    Mocking the Republican presidential candidate’s stiff demeanor and wealth, the figurine features Romney’s head atop a body encased in a gold robot suit. An ATM machine inset on the torso bears the legend “For Deposit Only.” A gold dollar sign protrudes from either side of its helmet.

    Mark Huckabone, president of Heroes In Action, said the finished model will likely bear two bumper stickers on its back: “I Brake for Mormons” and “I [Heart] Money.” But, Huckabone added, “I don’t know how far I want to push it.”

You'll have to dig a little deeper into your wallet to purchase Romney the Robot, however. While Heroes In Action usually charges $24.99 for their toys, because of Romney's large ATM, the price will be $30.00. The company anticipates having the toys ready for sale to the public by October.

[Rad]

Romney’s Bain Yielded Private Gains, Socialized Losses

By Anthony Luzzatto Gardner 2012-07-15T22:30:01Z

Mitt Romney touts his business acumen and job-creation record as a key qualification for being the next U.S. president.

What’s clear from a review of the public record during his management of the private-equity firm Bain Capital from 1985 to 1999 is that Romney was fabulously successful in generating high returns for its investors. He did so, in large part, through heavy use of tax-deductible debt, usually to finance outsized dividends for the firm’s partners and investors. When some of the investments went bad, workers and creditors felt most of the pain. Romney privatized the gains and socialized the losses.

What’s less clear is how his skills are relevant to the job of overseeing the U.S. economy, strengthening competitiveness and looking out for the welfare of the general public, especially the middle class.

Thanks to leverage, 10 of roughly 67 major deals by Bain Capital during Romney’s watch produced about 70 percent of the firm’s profits. Four of those 10 deals, as well as others, later wound up in bankruptcy. It’s worth examining some of them to understand Romney’s investment style at Bain Capital.

In 1986, in one of its earliest deals, Bain Capital acquired Accuride Corp., a manufacturer of aluminum truck wheels. The purchase was 97.5 percent financed by debt, a high level of leverage under any circumstances. It was especially burdensome for a company that was exposed to aluminum-price volatility and cyclical automotive production.

Casino Capitalism

Forty-to-one leverage is casino capitalism that hugely magnifies gains and losses. Bain Capital wisely chose to flip the company fast: After 18 months, it sold Accuride, converting its $2.6 million sliver of equity into a $61 million capital gain. That deal, which yielded a 1,123 percent annualized return, was critical to Bain Capital’s early success and led the firm to keep maximizing the use of leverage.

In 1992, Bain Capital bought American Pad & Paper by financing 87 percent of the purchase price. In the next three years, Ampad borrowed to make acquisitions, repay existing debt and pay Bain Capital and its investors $60 million in dividends.

As a result, the company’s debt swelled from $11 million in 1993 to $444 million by 1995. The $14 million in annual interest expense on this debt dwarfed the company’s $4.7 million operating cash flow. The proceeds of an initial public offering in July 1996 were used to pay Bain Capital $48 million for part of its stake and to reduce the company’s debt to $270 million.

From 1993 to 1999, Bain Capital charged Ampad about $18 million in various fees. By 1999, the company’s debt was back up to $400 million. Unable to pay the interest costs and drained of cash paid to Bain Capital in fees and dividends, Ampad filed for bankruptcy the following year. Senior secured lenders got less than 50 cents on the dollar, unsecured lenders received two- tenths of a cent on the dollar, and several hundred jobs were lost. Bain Capital had reaped capital gains of $107 million on its $5.1 million investment.

Bain Capital’s acquisition in 1994 of Dade International, a supplier of in-vitro diagnostic products, was 81 percent financed by debt. Of the $85 million in equity, about $27 million came from Bain with the rest coming from a group of investors that included Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

From 1995 to 1999, Bain Capital tripled Dade’s debt from about $300 million to $902 million. Some of the debt was used to pay for acquisitions of DuPont Co.’s in-vitro diagnostics division in May 1996 and Behring Diagnostics, a German medical- testing company, in 1997. But some was used to finance a repurchase of half of Bain Capital’s equity for $242 million -- more than eight times its investment -- and to pay its investors almost $100 million in fees.
Bankruptcy Filing

Dade was left in a weakened financial condition and couldn’t withstand the shocks of increased debt payments when interest rates rose and revenue from Europe fell because of a decline in the value of the euro. The company filed for bankruptcy in August 2002, because of its inability to service a $1.5 billion debt load. About 1,700 people lost their jobs while Bain Capital claimed capital gains (net of its losses in the bankruptcy) of roughly $216 million, an eightfold return.

There are many other examples of this debt-fueled strategy. In the two years following the acquisition in 1993 of GS Industries, a steel mill, for $8 million, Bain Capital increased the company’s debt to $378 million on operating income of less than a 10th of that amount. Some of this was used to pay Bain Capital a $36 million dividend in 1994. That degree of leverage was excessive in light of the cyclicality and capital-intensive nature of the steel industry.

By the time the company went bankrupt in 2001, it owed $554 million in debt against assets valued at $395 million. Many creditors lost money, and 750 workers lost their jobs. The U.S. Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., which insures company retirement plans, determined in 2002 that GS had underfunded its pension by $44 million and had to step in to cover the shortfall.

Bain Capital’s acquisition of Stage Stores, a department- store chain, in 1988 was 96 percent financed by debt (mostly in junk bonds) -- an extreme level for a cyclical and very competitive low-margin business. Bain sold a large part of its stake in 1997 for a $184 million gain, three years before the company filed for bankruptcy because of its inability to service its $600 million debt.

Success, entrepreneurship, risk taking and wealth creation deserve to be celebrated when they are the result of fair play and hard work. President Barack Obama is correct in distinguishing the patient creation of value for the benefit of investors through genuine operational improvements and growth -- the true mission of private equity -- from the form of rigged capitalism that was practiced by some in the industry in the past when debt was cheap and plentiful.

While Bain Capital wasn’t alone in using financial engineering to turbo-charge its returns, it was among the most aggressive under Romney’s leadership. Enriching investors by taking leveraged bets isn’t a qualification for a job requiring long-term vision and concern for public welfare. It is appropriate to point that out to voters.

(Anthony Luzzatto Gardner works at Palamon Capital Partners, a private equity fund based in London, and was director of European affairs in the U.S. National Security Council in 1994-95. The opinions expressed are his own.)

Read more opinion online from Bloomberg View. Subscribe to receive a daily e-mail highlighting new View editorials, columns and op-ed articles.

Today’s highlights: the editors on good news from Guantanamo, why Jamie Dimon’s bonus should be clawed back and how to put more electric cars on the road; William D. Cohan on Romney’s magical IRA; Albert R. Hunt on the candidates’ need to spell out debt-cutting plans; Stephen Marche explains why Canadians are now richer than Americans.

To contact the writer of this article: Anthony Luzzatto Gardner at gardner@palamon.com

To contact the editor responsible for this article: James Greiff at jgreiff@bloomberg.net

[Rad]

Mother Jones

Romney Invested in Medical-Waste Firm That Disposed of Aborted Fetuses, Government Documents Show And these documents challenge Romney's claim that he left Bain Capital in early 1999.

By David Corn | Mon Jul. 2, 2012 3:00 AM PDT

Earlier this year, Mitt Romney nearly landed in a politically perilous controversy when the Huffington Post reported [1] 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 [9] 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 [10], 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 [11] 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?

The documents—one of which was signed by Romney—also call into question the account of Romney's exit from Bain that the company and the Romney campaign have provided.

Stericycle 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 [12].

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 [13]. 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 [14] in civil penalties and lawyers' fees, and paid Utah $580,000 [15].

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 [1]. It was not until six years later that anti-abortion activists would target Stericycle for collecting medical waste at abortion clinics. This campaign [16] 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 1995, Stericycle was fined by Rhode Island for knowingly exposing workers to life-threatening diseases at its medical-waste treatment facility.

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 [17], "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 [18] 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 [19] 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.

[Rad]

July 16, 2012 08:00 AM

Mitt Romney Will Never Tell The Truth About Bain...Or Anything Else

By karoli

Mitt Romney cannot tell the truth. It isn't that he won't. It is that he cannot. He cannot because he is afraid of what it might mean and the damage it might do.

One of the most revealing passages in The Real Romney is the author's description of how young Mitt Romney took the demise of his father's campaign for President after George Romney claimed he had been "brainwashed" by the generals and diplomats into believing war in Vietnam was justified.

    Mitt did not view the "brainwash" footage that caused his father such trouble until it was shown to him thirty-nine years later. But his sister Jane said the episode had a lasting impact on her brother. "The brainwash thing -- has that affected us? You bet. Mitt is naturally a diplomat, but I think that made him more so. He's not going to put himself out on a limb. He's more cautious, more scripted."

Mitt Romney took the wrong lesson from his father's disastrous campaign. He assumed George Romney's honesty is what cost him a shot at the White House. But it wasn't the elder Romney's honesty at all. People did not take kindly to the idea that the future leader of the free world, fraught as it was with Commies in the corners, was weak enough to let himself be brainwashed. Rick Perlstein's brilliant Rolling Stone article in January is required reading on this. Just a tease for you here:

    When people call his son the "Rombot," think about that: Mitt learned at an impressionable age that in politics, authenticity kills. Heeding the lesson of his father's fall, he became a virtual parody of an inauthentic politician. In 1994 he ran for senate to Ted Kennedy's left on gay rights; as governor, of course, he installed the dreaded individual mandate into Massachusetts' healthcare system. Then he raced to the right to run for president.

    He's still inauthentic – but with, I think, an exception. Every time he opens his mouth on the subject of capitalism, he says what he sincerely believes, which happens to fit neatly with present-day Republican ideology: that rich people deserve every penny they have, and if people complain about anything rich people do, it's only because they're envious.

2002 Olympics

In the video at the top there's another example of how Romney reacts to situations, especially when he's put on the spot. Raw Story reports:

    The former Massachusetts also recently suggested during a Republican presidential debate that he had not taken any more money from the federal government for the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympic Games than previous games.

    Again, the 2002 video recorded by Democratic operatives tells a different story.

    “We actually received over $410 million from the federal government for the Olympic games,” Romney boasted. “That is a huge increase over anything ever done before and we did that by going after every agency of government.”

    At one point, he even explained how one of his colleagues managed to get Olympic funding from the Department of Education.

So here we have an outright lie in 2011, but it's been justified in Mr. Romney's mind by the need in 2002. We can't have the country embarrassed by corruption inside the US Olympic committee, especially when there are profits to be made. So Mitt Romney did what he had already done at Bain Capital: He put together corporate investors, sold the deal, mixed in some federal funds and made it work. And it did work. It was a dirty process along the way, sparking condemnation from Senator John McCain and other Republicans who weren't thrilled with Romney's use of earmarks -- something he now adamantly opposes -- as funding for the 2002 games.

But rather than actually stand and defend his fundraising efforts, he denied them when confronted because they appeared to go against current hard-line conservative values, and Mitt Romney had no intention of letting the truth get in the way of his belief that he, and he alone, possessed the skills and values to win the Republican nomination and ultimately, the White House.

A lie was more convenient. No one would remember how the 2002 Olympics were funded all these years later, right?

Romney internalized the wrong lesson from his father's failure and as a result, he absolutely cannot tell the truth no matter what because he fears the truth will cause him to fail, and failure is not an acceptable outcome. This is why, by the way, he has no problem using the politics of destruction on his rivals. It's always better to destroy them than to be accountable for one's own decisions. This is a character flaw and it's a big one.

The Bain Capital Years

In the world of "private equity", Romney was steering the boat and had full control of the reins with the blessing of his billionaires. Romney had to raise the first round of capital for his first venture on his own, with little help from the existing Bain & Co. group. It was the combination of capital investment combined with Romney's top-down business takeovers that launched Bain Capital's enormous success. But first he had to court the billionaires and convince them to take a risk on him. Those billionaires made their investments because Romney's work and reputation had built Bain Capital into a formidable merger and acquisition business. If their truth is strictly defined by profits on a balance sheet, their balance sheets looked terrific when Romney worked his magic with Bain deals. So terrific, in fact, that the Koch brothers jumped into bed with Bain, buying Bain's 2002 stake in Georgia-Pacific's international distribution subsidiary in order to take it private in 2006 (post-Romney, or perhaps not).

No billionaire really cared, for example, that a big chunk of his first round of capital came from El Salvadoran billionaire Eduardo Poma back in 1984. 1984 was the year of the beginning of some progress toward a peaceful resolution of El Salvador's civil war. As Duarte progressed toward basic reforms like reasonable tax reform, the right-wing party (ARENA) opposed them strongly. Eduardo's brother Ricardo had been kidnapped and killed by the People's Revolutionary Army (ERP) in 1977, an act which did not endear the oligarchs to any kind of populist realignment, even a moderate one. It goes without saying that Mitt Romney's offer of a safe stash of big money in United States' investments had to be a safe harbor for the Poma family, and the payoff proved their confidence was well-placed. The first Bain Capital investors got a piece of the Accuride, Staples, Key Airlines and Medivision deals. Accuride alone returned $121 million on an investment of $5 million.

Romney's success with those investments led to a line of billionaires wanting a piece of the action. According to The Real Romney, they had to turn away investors for their second fund.

    Bain Capital had become a hot property. So much money poured into Romney's second investment fund that the firm had to turn away investors. Romney set out to raise $80 million and received offers totalling $150 million. The partners settled on $105 million, half of it from wealthy customers of a New York bank.

Mitt Romney can talk and talk about how he left Bain Capital in 1999 and not 2002, and how he turned away from Bain in order to "rescue" the 2002 Olympics, but here's a fact: Billionaires don't place money for investment unless they trust the investment advisor at the top of the letterhead. It's really that simple. You don't invest in Bain; you're investing with Mitt. And it's Mitt's deals you want to be in. It doesn't matter what was filed with the SEC and what wasn't. You know your money is safe with Mitt, that he's got the right eye on the right businesses, and so you let him have at your millions so you can be a bigger billionaire.

This works really well in the financial halls of fame but not so much in the political arena, which is where Mitt Romney is right now. The problem is, he doesn't see it. He can't see it. A TPM reader explains:

    I’ve had enough contact with the PE guys to know they particularly see themselves in a heroic light — as the saviors of capitalism from the quasi-socialist clutches of entrenched management, the unions, outside pressure groups, and the other “stakeholders” of the big public corporations (the PE guys really detest that concept).

    What’s more, they’re usually insulated enough from normal human reality that they can assume all “reasonable” people see things the same way. And when you’ve got as much money to spend on campaign contributions, endowed chairs, wingnut welfare, etc. as they do, an awful lot of people are going to see things your way, or at least tell you that they do.

    Point is, Mitt is not only congenitally blind to the optics of all this, he also appears — to quote Sonny from the Godfather — to be taking it very, very personally. That’s the only way I can explain his incredibly bizarre decision to spend the entire afternoon on TV talking about it, which is about the best way imaginable to keep the feeding frenzy going.

Because Mitt is used to being trusted by his billionaires, you see. Mitt is used to being a hero. To criticize him for heroism, even when the pathway to success wasn't particularly pure is simply wrong, at least in Mitt's view. Again, from The Real Romney, a glimpse at Mitt's world view from 2008:

    "Everything could always be tweaked, reshaped, fixed, addressed," said one former aide, describing Romney's outlook. "It was foreign to him on policy issues that core principles mattered -- that somebody would go back and say, 'Well, three years ago you said this.'" The perception of expedience, along with lingering bigotry against Mormonism, helped bury his hopes.

And this, written to his father after the collapse of George Romney's campaign, sums it all up quite well:

    The rest of our system I know pretty well -- only one thing I can't understand: how can the American public like such muttonheads?

This is the key to why he will not tell the truth and why he cannot tell the truth. He doesn't see it as particularly relevant because in his view, the only thing that matters is that he succeeded at turning handsome profits for his investors, can declare himself a success and expects everyone else to view him through that lens. If they don't see it that way, well, they're just "muttonheads." If policy currents shift, well, it can be tweaked, fixed, reshaped, Etch-a-Sketched. He cannot understand how we, the ordinary people who sign the back of our paychecks, can object to the inevitable "creative destruction" which he and his billionaires believe must take place in order to create a more prosperous nation for his next round of investment opportunities. Make no mistake about it. The only truth he told in that 2002 video is this: "The money is in Washington." Muttonheads be damned.

It is beyond his ability to comprehend, because the only thing he comprehends is his "rightness." We're the muttonheads; he's the guy who has the answers. This, combined with his internalization of the absolute wrong message of his father's campaign, leaves a weak, flailing candidate who does not measure up to the standard of leadership necessary to be President.

I can almost hear Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich giggling in the hallway.

[ari moshe]

Hi Rad, I want to check some geodetic and historical correlations regarding this soul.

If i wanted to pull up a Mars cosmogram, his Mars being in Pisces - is it accurate to look at the Virgo subage of Pisces from 980 ad an onwards? Thank you.

[Rad]

Hi Rad, I want to check some geodetic and historical correlations regarding this soul.

If i wanted to pull up a Mars cosmogram, his Mars being in Pisces - is it accurate to look at the Virgo subage of Pisces from 980 ad an onwards? Thank you.

Hi Ari,

No, not from just the Mars in Pisces as the lead point in the cosmogram. For the time frame you are asking about look into his 6th House with the Moon, Jupiter, and Chiron in it. That isn't for cosmogram that is linked to that time frame however.

God Bless, Rad

[ari moshe]

Hi Rad, will you please restate that last sentence? I'm not sure what you meant to indicate... thanks.
Love, am

[Rad]

No, not from just the Mars in Pisces as the lead point in the cosmogram. For the time frame you are asking about look into his 6th House with the Moon, Jupiter, and Chiron in it. That isn't for cosmogram that is linked to that time frame however.

God Bless, Rad
   

Hi Rad, will you please restate that last sentence? I'm not sure what you meant to indicate... thanks.
Love, am

**********

I meant that the time frame that you asked about does not have a cosmogram to go with it. But with Mr.Duplicity have his Moon/Jupiter/Chiron in the 6th that this would in fact correlate to that time.

God Bless, Rad

[Rad]

Report: Romney stayed on at Bain to negotiate severance pay

By Stephen C. Webster
Friday, July 20, 2012 16:05 EDT

Though he did take a “part-time leave of absence,” presumptive Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romeny did not, as he’s claimed, fully relinquish control of the private equity firm Bain Capital in 1999 because he was using his position as sole shareholder and CEO to negotiate a lucrative severance package, the details of which are still unknown due to Romney’s refusal to release his tax returns.

That preliminary information comes by way of The Boston Globe, which in its second swing at Romney’s business record finds that the former Massachusetts Governor in fact wanted to have it both ways.

While Romney was organizing the Salt Lake City Olympics, he set up a management committee to run Bain for him, composed of five board members. Romney became head of that management committee. From this allegedly estranged post, he spent two years negotiating a lofty sum while Bain’s lawyers and accountants unwound Romney’s involvement in the company.

But during that time, Mitt Romney even referred to himself in public as CEO of Bain. Globe reporters Beth Healy and Michael Kranish found a press release issued by Bain alums Geoffrey S. Rehnert and Marc B.Wolpow (PDF), in which Romney was quoted as “Bain Capital CEO W. Mitt Romney, currently on a part-time leave of absence.”

The Globe also noted that to this day nobody has replaced Romney atop Bain, which is still run by the management committee he established.

The Globe‘s first shot across Romney’s bow was the discovery of Securities and Exchange Commission documents which showed Romney retained the status of CEO and sole stock holder until 2002, even though he persistently claimed to have separated from the company in 1999.

In the years that followed, the company undertook several highly controversial projects that saw it outsource American jobs overseas and dismantle companies for profit and fire all the workers. The Obama campaign warned that if Romney was misrepresenting his role in the firm to government regulators or investors, he could face “severe consequences” for having committed a criminal offense.
——

[Sunyata]

This is John McCains opp file on Mitt Romney from 2008.......

http://www.scribd.com/doc/78582788/McCain-2008-Oppo-File

[Rad]

From the American Magazine Perspectives

Romney Will Put Walmart in the White House

Even at a time of record income inequality, the lowest federal tax burden in 60 years and plummeting effective tax rates for the top one percent of earners, it is often difficult to put a face on the yawning chasm between the super-rich and everyone else. But now we have six. New data from the Federal Reserve reveal that the heirs of Walmart founders Sam and James "Bud" Walton now possess total wealth equivalent to 49 million American families, 42 percent of the total. As it turns out, that shocking number will grow much larger if Mitt Romney wins in November. After all, would-be President Romney not only wants to deliver another massive tax cut windfall for the wealthy, but wants to eliminate the estate tax altogether, a move that on paper would divert over $30 billion from the U.S. Treasury into the vaults of the Walton family.

Back in the fall of 2007, Walmart chief financial officer Tom Schoewe told Wall Street analysts, "Tough times are actually a good time for Walmart." Now we know just how good.

As labor economist Sylvia Allegretto of the University of California and Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute documented this week, the Fed's Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) showed that the crippling recession which began five years ago has been a bonanza for the Walton Six. Between 2007 and 2010, the wealth of the Walton family members jumped from $73.3 billion to $89.5 billion even as median family wealth fell by 38.8 percent. The result?

    In 2007, it was reported that the Walton family wealth was as large as the bottom 35 million families in the wealth distribution combined, or 30.5 percent of all American families.

    And in 2010, as the Walton's wealth has risen and most other Americans' wealth declined, it is now the case that the Walton family wealth is as large as the bottom 48.8 million families in the wealth distribution (constituting 41.5 percent of all American families) combined.

Apparently, that's not enough for the Waltons. Which is why they along with dozens of other billionaires are backing Mitt Romney, big time.

As you'll recall, Mitt Romney doesn't merely want to make the Bush tax cuts permanent: he wants to end the AMT and enact another 20 percent across the board tax cut that could reduce his own future tax bills by half. But one Romney proposal above all others - the elimination of the estate tax - offers a staggering ROI for the richest families in America.

In 1999, that tax was 55% on an individual's estate valued at over $675.000. Thanks to President Obama's capitulation to Congressional Republicans in December 2010, the estate tax dropped to 35 percent starting at $5 million per person. (Despite the fact that only 0.25 percent of estates even had to pay the tax, Democrat Blanche Lincoln, also once known as the "Senator from Walmart," colluded with Arizona Republican Jon Kyl to force the lower rate.) Now, Mitt Romney wants to eliminate that levy altogether, one that brings Uncle Sam billions in revenue annually.

The result will be billions back for Romney's billionaire backers. On paper, Sheldon Adelson's heirs will keep $8.75 billion (35 percent of his estimated $25 billion fortune) currently destined for the U.S. Treasury. The beneficiaries of Richard and Bill Marriott, the hotel moguls worth an estimated $3.3 billion between them, would reap an extra $1.15 billion payday. Then there's Alice and Jim Walton, who are in a class by themselves. For their combined $400,000 contribution to Romney's Super PAC, their Walmart heirs could get back 81,750 times on Alice and Jim's original investment.

As Forbes first highlighted last year, between them the six Waltons combined have over $90 billion. As Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders explained in his famous filibuster of December 2010, the elimination of the estate tax could potentially save the Walton family $32.7 billion. As it turns out, President Romney's zeroing out of the estate tax would cap a years-long effort for the Waltons. USA Today summed it up in 2005:

    Led by Sam Walton's only daughter, Alice, the family spent $3.2 million on lobbying, conservative causes and candidates for last year's federal elections. That's more than double what it spent in the previous two elections combined, public documents show.

    The Waltons have joined a coterie of wealthy families trying to save fortunes through permanent repeal of the estate tax, government watchdogs say. The election of President Bush and more conservatives to Congress gave momentum to the long-fought effort. The Waltons add more.

A Republican victory this fall could bring Alice Walton's crusade to fruition. And if she succeeds, the gaping multi-billion hole left in the U.S. Treasury will have to be filled by all the other taxpayers in America. Or as the Waltons call them, Walmart customers.

[Rad]

Mitt Romney is Running for Bush's Third Term

By Jon Perr

In Las Vegas last week, Mitt Romney looked to his own biography in proposing a new requirement for anyone seeking the presidency:

    "In addition to the age of the president and the citizenship of the president and the birthplace of the president being set by the Constitution, I'd like it also to say that the president has to spend at least three years working in business before becoming president of the United States."

Of course, if Mitt Romney had his way, the President should also have an MBA from the prestigious Harvard Business School. He ought to have made millions in the private sector and earned notoriety for running a high-profile sports enterprise. A scion of a proud Republican family, the occupant of the White House should promise massive, Treasury-draining tax cuts which would deliver the lion's share of their benefits to the very richest Americans, himself and his family included. The President should also nevertheless pledge to balance the budget even while boosting defense spending. And in his ideal America, he would like to privatize Social Security and leave Americans to fend for themselves in the private health insurance marketplace.

If that profile sounds like Mitt Romney, that's because it is. Then again, the same description also applies to America's First MBA President*, George W. Bush. And we all know how well that worked out.

Big Tax Cuts and Bigger Debt

In April, the RNC's Alexandra Franceschi gave away the game when she explained that Romney's 2012 GOP economic platform would be the Bush program, "just updated." If anything, she understated the disturbing similarities between the two HBS grads.

Starting, for example, with taxes and debt. After Ronald Reagan tripled the national debt, George W. Bush doubled it again. During his tenure, the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 drained $2.5 trillion from the U.S. Treasury, accounting for half the deficits he produced. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found, over the next decade, the debt due to revenue lost to the Bush tax cuts, if made permanent, would exceed the price tag for TARP, the Obama stimulus, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan ... combined.

As it turns out, Mitt Romney's scheme to "Cut, Cap and Balance" the federal budget does nothing of the sort. As ThinkProgress explained:

    Romney's claim that his plan would promote job and economic growth while reducing the deficit is also likely false. The Bush tax cuts were promoted under the same guise, only to blow a $2.5-trillion hole in the federal budget that was accompanied by worst performance of any post-war expansion" for growth in investment, GDP, and job creation. Romney's tax cuts are even more expensive, clocking in at a cost of more than $10.7 trillion over the next decade and reducing revenue to a paltry 15 percent of GDP, according to Linden. Balancing the budget on those terms, as Romney claims he will do, would be next to impossible.

Romney's proposal for a 20 percent across-the-board tax cut on top of making Bush's tax cuts permanent, would produce a $600 billion shortfall in 2015 alone. As The Washington Post explained in its discussion of an analysis by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, "until the campaign offers a more specific plan, Budget Watch analysts said Romney's entire framework would add about $2.6 trillion to the debt by 2021." But as Romney admitted in March, he's too afraid to do that:

    "So I haven't laid out all of the details about how we're going to deal with each deduction, so I think it's kind of interesting for the groups to try and score it, because frankly it can't be scored, because those kinds of details will have to be worked out with Congress, and we have a wide array of options."

Windfall for the Wealthy

Of course Romney, like Bush before him, isn't afraid of dramatically expanding the income gap. At a time of record income inequality, the lowest federal tax burden in 60 years, Mitt would widen the chasm further. After the Bush tax cuts handed a third of their benefits to the wealthiest one percent of earners, Romney would give 60 percent of the benefits from his tax cuts to the same privileged few. As it turns out, Mitt wouldn't merely be cutting his own tax bill by an estimated $4 million a year. By following in Dubya's footsteps in seeking to eliminate the inheritance income tax, the $250 million Mitt would guarantee his heirs an $80 million windfall, courtesy of all other U.S. taxpayers.

Social Security Privatization

On Social Security, too, George Bush and Mitt Romney see eye to eye. Bush, as you'll recall, tried and utterly failed to partially privatize Social Security. (As President Bush explained to a January 2005 town hall meeting with an African-American audience, "Another interesting idea ... is a personal savings account ... which can't be used to bet on the lottery, or a dice game, or the track.")

For his part, Governor Romney has tried to run away from the wildly unpopular privatization scheme, repeatedly telling a New Hampshire crowd "I didn't mention that." But while Mitt now claims only "when it comes to Social Security, we will slowly raise the retirement age [and] we will slow the growth in benefits for higher-income retirees," in the past Romney was a fervent advocate of Bush's disgraced plan. As ThinkProgress has documented at length, for years Mitt Romney supported the very private accounts he now pretends to oppose.

In his 2010 book, No Apology, Governor Romney proclaimed, "I also like the fact the individual retirement accounts would encourage more Americans to invest in the private sector that powers our economy." During a 2008 GOP presidential debate, Romney explained that "the president said let's have private accounts and take that surplus money that's being gathered now in Social Security and put that into private accounts. That works." The year before, Mitt frequently repeated his preference for private accounts:

    June 2007: When a college student asked Romney how he, as president, planned to solidify Social Security's future, he endorsed private accounts: "One thing that the president proposed [on Social Security] that is a good idea is to take some of that money, or all of that surplus money and allow people to have a personal account. So they can invest in things that have a higher rate of return than just government debt. They can invest in things like our stock market or the world's stock market...so that they can get a better return, and maybe that would make up for some of the shortfall. That's a good idea."

Bush's Health Care Reform—On Steroids

As it turns out, Mitt Romney—or at least the 2012 edition of him—is largely recycling President Bush's disastrous prescription for health care. Despite the clear success of his popular Massachusetts program in reducing both the ranks of the insured and the rate of growth of costs, Romney has largely repackaged Bush's stillborn proposals. That litany includes selling insurance across state lines, enacting draconian curbs on malpractice awards, supporting tax-free health savings accounts (HSAs) and, most importantly, giving tax breaks to private insurance while ending them for businesses. And as the Los Angeles Times explained, Romney's $1 trillion Rx could prove catastrophic:

    Critics and independent analysts say the impact would probably leave a larger number of Americans without insurance...While offering consumers more choices, Romney's plan would give companies strong incentives to stop providing insurance to workers. It also would overhaul the 46-year-old Medicare and Medicaid programs for the elderly, poor and disabled.

Defense Spending and National Security

On national defense, the two offer the same tough talk. Both Bush and Romney pledged to increase defense spending, while caustically criticizing the current Democratic occupant of the White House for leaving America unprepared and at risk. Despite the fact that the Pentagon's budget has doubled since 2001 and increased during each year of the Obama presidency, Romney warned (wrongly, it turns out):

    "Our Navy is smaller than it's been since 1917. Our Air Force is smaller and older than any time since 1947. We are cutting our number of troops. We are not giving the veterans the care they deserve. We simply cannot continue to cut our Department of Defense budget if we are going to remain the hope of the Earth."

If that fear-mongering sounds familiar, it should. Then-candidate George W. Bush offered an even more dramatic, if similarly false, jeremiad at the 2000 Republican National Convention:

    "We have seen a steady erosion of American power and an unsteady exercise of American influence. Our military is low on parts, pay and morale. If called on by the commander-in-chief today, two entire divisions of the Army would have to report, 'Not ready for duty, sir.'"

(As it turns out, many of Romney's neoconservative advisers not only helped bring you the war in Iraq, but have for months been advocating an American attack on Iran "before it's too late.")

Of and For the Haves—and the Have Mores

When it comes to the aloofness that comes with great wealth, George W. Bush and Mitt Romney are mirror images of each other. That is, while in 2000 the former alcoholic Bush was the man voters wanted to have a beer with, the teetotaler Romney is clearly the choice Americans don't want to not have a beer with. Nevertheless, in moments of levity—both intended and not—each man showed the yawning chasm separating himself from the concerns of the American people he would serve.

Texas Governor Bush joked about truth to power at the October 2000 Al Smith Dinner:

    "This is an impressive crowd—the haves and the have-mores. Some people call you the elites; I call you my base."

(Some of them—the ones who own NFL and NASCAR teams—Mitt now calls friends. As for their fans—the people in polyester and plastic rain ponchos—not so much.)

But Bush's shockingly cavalier comments while pitching his Social Security privatization plan during a February 2005 town hall were no laughing matter:

    In Omaha on Friday, a divorced single mother named Mary Mornin tells the president, "I have one child, Robbie, who is mentally challenged, and I have two daughters."

    "Fantastic," the president exclaims, and he tells her she has "the hardest job in America, being a single mom."

    Later, the 57-year old Mornin tells Bush that she works three jobs, which the president deems "uniquely American" and "fantastic."

Fast forward seven years and Ann Romney is channeling the man her husband would replace as the next Republican President of the United States:

    "I love the fact that there are women out there who don't have a choice and they must go to work and they still have to raise the kids. Thank goodness that we value those people too. And sometimes life isn't easy for any of us."

Not even for the Romneys.

Mitt Romney, who explained that over the last decade "my income comes overwhelmingly from some investments made in the past," joked with jobless voters that "I'm also unemployed." The $250 million man similarly declared himself "part of the 80 to 90 percent of us" who are middle class, when just the "not very much" $374,000 he earned in speaking fees last year puts him in the top one percent of income earners. Whether or not he really enjoys firing people, Mitt Romney almost certainly never worried about "getting a pink slip" or pooped in a bucket during his time as a missionary at a toney Paris mansion. (Who else would lecture a child about his plans to divvy up his estate among his 16 grandchildren or endorse rooftop canine waterboarding?) And there's no doubt that the man who spent $12 million to buy his third home (none of which are located on "the real streets of America") didn't win any friends when he offered this prescription for the housing market crisis:

    "Don't try and stop the foreclosure process. Let it run its course and hit the bottom, allow investors to buy homes, put renters in them, fix the homes up and let it turn around and come back up."

Of course, he could have just been talking about the Bush recession and the policies that helped produce it. Mitt Romney may be much smarter and much more successful than Dubya. But the would-be Second MBA President is reading from the same script as the first. And Americans already know how that movie ends.

* NOTE: It is worth recalling that Bush ran on his business acumen in 2000. His followers touted him as the "First MBA President" and boasted "MBA President's Success Leaves Dems Out in Cold." They even produced books with titles like "The Leadership Genius of George W. Bush: 10 Commonsense Lessons from the Commander in Chief." But as these articles from US News and BusinessWeek show, President Bush did not receive high marks from his fellow business leaders. Now, Mitt Romney is touting his private sector business leadership and the claim that he knows "why jobs come and why jobs go." As leaders and managers, Mitt Romney and George W. Bush seem to have little in common. But in terms of public policy, they are eerily—and depressingly—similar.

[Rad]

‘On his own’ Romney ad star took over $1 million in government loans

By Stephen C. Webster
Tuesday, July 24, 2012 11:00 EDT

The up-by-his-bootstraps businessman who stars in an ad for Republican hopeful Mitt Romney seems to have built his business through government-sponsored loans, putting a dent in the campaign’s attack on President Barack Obama’s saying to business owners, “you didn’t get there on your own.”

“My father’s hands didn’t build this company? My hands didn’t build this company? My son’s hands aren’t building this company?” New Hampshire businessman Jack Gilchrist, president of Gilchrist Metal, asks in the ad that’s been making waves since last week.

Reporting by The New Hampshire Union Leader disputed this claim by looking into Gilchrist’s history, revealing that he took over $1 million in government loans since the 1980s, including $800,000 in tax-exempt bonds issued by the New Hampshire Business Finance Authority to build a new manufacturing plant and buy equipment. Gilchrist also admitted to the paper that he took a U.S. Small Business Administration loan of “somewhere south of” $500,000 in the 1980s, and said that to this day about 10 percent of his business comes from defense-related projects.

“Defense business is a good way to help the economy,” Gilchrist told the Leader. “But the President wants to cut the crap out of the defense budget. I’m not going to turn a blind eye because the money came from the government. As far as I’m concerned, I’m getting some of my tax money back. I’m not stupid, I’m not going to say ‘no.’ Shame on me if I didn’t use what’s available.”

In spite of the controversy, the Romney campaign said it’s standing by the ad. But apart from the obvious hypocrisy of the Gilchrist ad, the Romney also camp deceptively edited President Obama. And it’s no ordinary deceptive edit.

In the ad, Gilchrist’s obstinate response follows audio of President Obama saying in Roanoke, Virginia on July 13: “If you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”

What the president actually said is much longer and more nuanced. Romney’s ad team essentially picked three sentences out of a minute’s worth of audio — sentences that did not come in succession.

“If you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own,” the president actually said. “I’m always struck by people who think, ‘Wow, it must be because I was just so smart.’ There are a lot of smart people out there. ‘It must be because I worked harder than everybody else.’ Lemme tell you something: there are a lot of hard working people out there. If you are successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that’s allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that: somebody else made that happen. The Internet did not get invented on its own.”

The ad was apparently enough of a punch to get President Obama to respond directly. “In politics we all tolerate a certain amount of spin,” he said at a campaign stop in Oakland on Monday evening, according to The Los Angeles Times. “I understand these are the games that get played in political campaigns. But when folks omit entire sentences of what I said — they start splicing and dicing — you may have gone a little over the edge.”

And to drive that point home, the Obama campaign has highlighted a speech Romney made in 2002, during the opening ceremonies at the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, in which he too exclaimed that even the Olympians “didn’t get here solely on your own power.”

“For most of you, loving parents, sisters or brothers, encouraged your hopes, coaches guided, communities built venues in order to organize competitions,” he said. “All Olympians stand on the shoulders of those who lifted them. We’ve already cheered the Olympians, let’s also cheer the parents, coaches, and communities. All right!”

This video was published to YouTube by the Mitt Romney for President campaign on July 20, 2012.

[Rad]

Originally published Wednesday, July 25, 2012 at 5:20 AM

FACT CHECK: Romney met Bain partners after exit

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has said he had no active role in Bain Capital, the private equity firm he founded, after he exited in February 1999 to take over Salt Lake City's Winter Olympics bid. But according to Bain associates and others familiar with Romney's actions at the time, he stayed in regular contact with his partners over the following months, tending to his partnership interests and negotiating his separation from the company.

By STEPHEN BRAUN and JACK GILLUM
Associated Press

WASHINGTON —

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has said he had no active role in Bain Capital, the private equity firm he founded, after he exited in February 1999 to take over Salt Lake City's Winter Olympics bid. But according to Bain associates and others familiar with Romney's actions at the time, he stayed in regular contact with his partners over the following months, tending to his partnership interests and negotiating his separation from the company.

Those familiar with Romney's discussions with his Bain partners said the contacts included several meetings in Boston, the company's home base, but were limited to matters that did not affect the firm's investments or other management decisions. Yet Romney continued to oversee his partnership stakes even as he disengaged from the firm, personally signing or approving a series of corporate and legal documents through the spring of 2001, according to financial reports reviewed by The Associated Press.

The details of Romney's contacts with his Bain partners between his 1999 departure and his separation from the company in mid-2001 could show how involved he was - either as CEO or passive investor - in several multimillion-dollar investment deals, bankruptcies and a spate of layoffs and overseas job shifts at Bain-owned companies that reportedly occurred during that span. Romney's role became a campaign issue in recent weeks because corporate records from the time showed his interests in some of those deals - despite his insistence that he gave up any decision-making authority once he left Bain.

"When partners depart a private equity company and are no longer active, there are various ways that their interests may be affected," said Colin C. Blaydon, director of Dartmouth College's Center for Private Equity and Entrepreneurship. "In some cases it may not be affected at all, but they still own points in the funds and the carried interest that is paid as part of their partnership stake. It's entirely possible to step back from a previous management role, but that all depends on the arrangements they make and the management structure created to replace them."

A clear accounting of Romney's contacts with Bain has been hampered by his presidential campaign's reluctance to discuss the period in detail and complicated by conflicting accounts in some of Romney's comments and financial reports. Both the Romney campaign and Bain have declined to provide documentary materials that could shed light on Romney's role after 1999.

Romney's campaign says that once he agreed to head the Olympics bid, he was no longer "involved in the management of that business or the investment decisions that occurred." Campaign spokeswoman Andrea Saul added that "it took some time to transfer his ownership to the other partners, which is not surprising given the growth and success of the firm."

Romney testified during a 2002 Massachusetts court case that he flew back and forth between Boston and Salt Lake City frequently in the first half of 1999, returning at least four times to attend board meetings of office supply giant Staples Inc., which had named him a director. Romney said nothing about his dealings with Bain during that testimony, which came during a legal challenge to his Massachusetts residency that was aimed at thwarting his campaign for governor.

Several associates now say Romney made repeated trips between Salt Lake City and Boston, where he met at times with his former partners, mostly to discuss his severance from the firm. The Boston Globe reported last week that Romney also met with his Bain partners at a 15th anniversary celebration in Palm Beach, Fla., in early 1999.

"Some were group conversations. Some were one on one," said a legal expert familiar with Romney's discussions with his Bain partners. This person, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss confidential business dealings, said that Romney did not relinquish his Bain ownership after taking the Olympics role but that Romney took care to avoid the day-to-day role of a corporate manager.

This person said that when Romney left, a five-partner management committee was already in place. That account echoed a similar version given by Edward Conard, a former Bain partner who donated $1 million last year to a political committee supporting Romney's presidential run.

"There was a management committee running Bain to transition from Mitt to a new structure," Conard said last week during an interview on MSNBC. At the same time, Conard said, Romney's exit was complicated by the fact that "Mitt's names were on the documents as chief executive and sole owner of the company."

Those documents, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, contain dozens of references to Romney and his holdings. An AP analysis of thousands of SEC filings in that three-year period found at least 39 documents in which Romney was listed as sole shareholder, president or director of investment funds that controlled large stakes in Bain-related companies.

Some legal experts said those records show that Romney remained the "controlling person," as some filings described him, in the deals that Bain struck in that span. "From a corporate law point of view, it would not be kosher to hold him out as president when he had no role in the company," said George Washington University law professor Arthur E. Wilmarth Jr.

Other experts cautioned that while federal "beneficial ownership" rules require the listing of partners whose voting stakes exceed 5 percent of an investment in a public company, any partner with voting power in the same investment could also exercise authority. While Romney controlled the management entity running Bain, his partners controlled connected general partnerships that directed the investment funds. As a result, Romney was not the only Bain partner with lines of authority over the investments cited in the SEC filings.

"Anyone who has voting power over the shares could be the owner for reporting purposes," said Brian J. Lane, a partner at the Washington law firm of Gibson Dunn and former director of the SEC's Corporate Finance Division, which oversees corporate filings.

In addition to those SEC reports, other corporate documents obtained by the AP show Romney's personal signature at least 10 times on large stock transactions or ownership statements tied to Bain investment deals at the time. Those documents include Romney's signature on federal stock forms approving the sales of large stakes in circuit board manufacturer DDi Corp. The company went into bankruptcy in 2003.

SEC filings by Bain also showed that Romney's digital signature- a legal version of his personal script - appeared on at least 18 other stock ownership records between 1999 and 2001. The filings were part of Bain investments in Therma Wave, a heat testing company; Wesley Jessen Visioncare; and Staples Inc.

Romney's defenders argue that such signings reflected his limited role as a Bain partner and investor, but not as the firm's manager. One former senior Bain partner said that once Romney had accepted the Olympics position, he would "make suggestions but not decisions." The former partner added that Romney's extensive partnership stakes required him to respond to - and at times approve - a succession of ownership documents stemming from the company's continuing investment deals.

Documents reviewed by the AP also showed that Romney signed several power-of-attorney statements that were used repeatedly during the transition, allowing other senior Bain partners and several lawyers for Bain to represent his interests in the investment deals the company struck between 1999 and 2001.

Blaydon said such moves are common in private equity deals and also could have provided Romney with legal flexibility as he moved to disengage from Bain. "If he wanted to dial in by phone, he could have," Blaydon said. "There's no doubt he could have played a bigger role if he wanted, but if he wanted to have minimal involvement, he had that flexibility."

Other private equity experts questioned whether Romney's continuing financial stakes could be so easily separated from his longtime CEO role. Victor Fleischer, a University of Colorado law professor and private equity expert who urged corporate tax code reforms during congressional testimony last year, said Romney could not simply waive his duties as Bain's CEO and major shareholder.

Many of Bain's investment funds and several of Romney's own managing partnership entities were based in Delaware. Fleischer said the state's corporate code required that the fund manager "perform whatever partnership duties they have with the greatest attention. He was still president, CEO and sole shareholder of some of the management companies for some of these funds, and under Delaware law, owed fiduciary duties to his investors. If you can't fulfill your fiduciary duties as owner, you have to waive your partnerships."

Charles M. Elson, a University of Delaware finance professor and an authority on the state's corporate laws, countered that Delaware law "is flexible enough to give (Bain) leeway in their decision-making. The partnership law is enabling. They could make decisions without him."

Even Romney's explanation of his role at Bain after 1999 appears to have shifted in recent years, as shown in notes that his financial trustee provided in successive presidential candidate financial reports submitted in 2007 and in 2011 to the U.S. Office of Government Ethics. The lawyer administering Romney's finances, R. Bradford Malt, said in 2007 that Romney did not have "any active role with any Bain Capital entity" after 1999. In 2011, that explanation broadened, saying Romney had also "not been involved in the operations of any Bain Capital entity in any way."

Both explanations appear at odds with statements attributed to Romney in a corporate news release from July 1999, five months after he left to take over the Olympic bid. The news release, recently posted on the Daily Kos website, announced the departure that year from Bain of two of Romney's founding partners. The release also stated that Romney remained Bain's CEO while on a "part-time leave of absence" to head the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.

D'Jamila Salem, a former Boston public relations executive who wrote the release, recalled recently that Bain officials provided the quotes and information about Romney at the time.

Salem was listed on the release as a press contact along with Joshua Bekenstein, a founding Bain partner. Bekenstein also substituted at times for Romney on SEC filings under power of attorney during that period. Bekenstein, still a Bain managing director, was one of several company executives who did not respond to calls from AP for comment.

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Associated Press writers Charles Babington and Andrew Miga in Washington and Steve LeBlanc in Boston contributed to this report.