The Bain Files: an illustration of why America is going broke?

“So, what’s the worst aspect of Romney’s character? What does he know he has to run away from, even though he continually fails to do so? Simple: the perception that he’s a rich asshat who thinks he’s too good for the little people he deigns to rule. That he thinks so little of us that he demands the right to be our leader without giving anything in return.” — Pandagon’s Amanda Marcotte, on why a Gawker document dump, showing Mitt Romney as a serial tax dodger, matters • via: quickhits

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Maybe some people will finally see that the result of all these perfectly legal financial shenanigans, in all Romney’s / Bain Capital’s various schemes and loopholes and shelters and business practices, that THIS is why the United States is going broke, not because it would be nice to extend Social Security and Medicare for the next generation or provide health care for people.

The GOP has been rigging the system for the wealthy for decades. Mitt Romney is the chicken that’s come home to roost for the non-wealthy, evangelical voting base. These conservative social-issue rubes support the Republican candidate automatically, like zombies or Manchurian candidates, trusting these establishment politicians when they claim to actually care about stopping marriage equality (they can’t stop it!) or overturning Roe v. Wade (they won’t ever overturn it — have they EVER been close?). The Republicans don’t care about those things! They’re patronizing you. They just want more money, more deregulation, more income redistribution from the bottom to the top.

You want a thriving middle class in American again? STOP VOTING REPUBLICAN. Also: Stop watching Fox News. Stop listening to Rush Limbaugh.

Snap out of it.

Like Mitt Romney, the world’s super rich are hiding at least $21 trillion offshore

CBS News: “With about 55,000 inhabitants, the Cayman Islands should not be a well-known name in the rest of the world, but the tiny Caribbean territory has become famous as a tax haven for the world’s super rich. According to a new report, the Caymans – along with the other dozen or so international havens for wealth like Switzerland and Bermuda – are the holders of so much of the world’s capital, entire regional economies could be moved on it. The Tax Justice Network has just released a report estimating that the world’s tax havens house anywhere from $21 trillion to $32 trillion of money that governments cannot tax.”

It has been revealed that Mitt Romney keeps part of his fortune in all three tax havens mentioned above: the Caymans, Switzerland, and Bermuda. And he wants to be president.

More undisclosed offshore money: Romney’s even wealthier than previously reported

You don’t get to know how much Mitt Romney is worth — or where he keeps his money. Via Political Wire: “Mitt Romney’s investment portfolio “has included an offshore company that remained invisible to voters as his political star rose,” the AP reports.”

“Based in Bermuda, Sankaty High Yield Asset Investors Ltd. was not listed on any of Romney’s state or federal financial reports. The company is among several Romney holdings that have not been fully disclosed, including one that recently posted a $1.9 million earning — suggesting he could be wealthier than the nearly $250 million estimated by his campaign.”

“The omissions were permitted by state and federal authorities overseeing Romney’s ethics filings… But Romney’s limited disclosures deprive the public of an accurate depiction of his wealth and a clear understanding of how his assets are handled and taxed.”

original image via: christopherstreet

This is how the wealthiest become even wealthier: earn money in America, offshore it to other countries to avoid taxes. THAT’S HOW AMERICA WORKS!

Investigation: Mitt Romney’s Offshore Accounts, Tax Loopholes, and Mysterious I.R.A. | Vanity Fair – “For all Mitt Romney’s touting of his business record, when it comes to his own money the Republican nominee is remarkably shy about disclosing numbers and investments. Nicholas Shaxson delves into the murky world of offshore finance, revealing loopholes that allow the very wealthy to skirt tax laws, and investigating just how much of Romney’s fortune (with $30 million in Bain Capital funds in the Cayman Islands alone?) looks pretty strange for a presidential candidate.”

Citizens United and transparency: it really is your choice

What are the Democrats working on, with regard to donor transparency and the ridiculous idea that “corporations are people too” Citizens United ruling?

The Raw Story reports that Nancy Pelosi wants to fix the SCOTUS’ Citizens United ruling: “In a conference call, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) told reporters, “We must amend the constitutional to fix Citizens United.” Her latest call to action was spurred by Monday’s Supreme Court decision to overturn Montana’s 1912 law limiting corporate spending in political campaigns based on its 2010 Citizens United ruling. The court’s decision led Montana’s governor Brian Schweitzer (D) and Lt. Gov. John Bohlinger (R) to call for a constitutional amendment to overturn the decision.”

Great! What are the Republicans working on? Read more…

Worst. President. Ever. (Let’s do it again with Mitt Romney)

Political Wire: “An excerpt of Where They Stand:The American Presidents in the Eyes of Voters and Historians by Robert W. Merry in Salon suggests George W. Bush will be ranked near the bottom of all presidents: ”Based on the contemporaneous voter assessments, the objective record, and what we know of history, it’s difficult to see him even in middle-ground territory. History likely will view Bush largely as the voters did after eight years of his stewardship. And so it’s probably just as well that he doesn’t care much about the verdict of history.“

Consider that Mitt Romney, in actions if not in words, is creating a campaign that seems to be an exact duplicate of the Bush Years, from extending tax cuts for the one percent — who’ve already surpassed all other earners in the country with net income advantages, and who’ve hoarded their wealth gains to the detriment of our entire economy — to a neocon foreign policy platform that’s becoming more “Cheneyfied” by the day. What could go wrong?

Ari Berman: “Of Romney’s forty identified foreign policy advisers, more than 70 percent worked for Bush. Many hail from the neoconservative wing of the party, were enthusiastic backers of the Iraq War and are proponents of a US or Israeli attack on Iran. […] Romney’s malleability is an advantage for his neocon advisers, giving them an opportunity to shape his worldview, as they did with Bush after 9/11. Four years after Bush left office in disgrace, Romney is their best shot to get back in power. If that happens, they’re likely to pursue the same aggressive policies they advocated under Bush. “I don’t think there’s been a deep rethink,” says Clemons. “I don’t think the neoconservatives feel chastened at all. As a movement, the true neoconservatives never, ever give up. They will be back.””

Andrew Sullivan: “When you check reality, rather than the alternate universe constantly created by Fox News and an amnesiac press, you find that Bush had a chance to pay off all our national debt before we hit the financial crisis – giving the US enormous flexibility in intervening to ameliorate the recession. Instead, we had to find money for a stimulus in a cupboard stripped bare – its contents largely given away, by an act of choice. I’m tired of being told we cannot blame Bush for our current predicament. We can and should blame him for most of it – and remind people that Romney’s policies: more tax cuts, more defense spending are identical. With one difference: Bush pledged never “to balance the budget on the backs of the poor.””

Mitt Romney: A person should “get as much education as they can afford”

“I want to make sure that we keep America a place of opportunity, where everyone has a fair shot. They get as much education as they can afford…” —Mitt Romney on Wednesday, advocating for a class-based society of higher education, based on the wealth a person was born into as opposed to an individual’s talent and intelligence.

New America: The math genius who’s poor shouldn’t go to college, but should spend his/her life shining the shoes of people like Romney’s sons (or Mitt and Marie Antoinette themselves) who are born with trust funds and inheritances. Because, let’s be honest, who among us couldn’t “afford college” without financial help from programs or services like student loans, scholarships, and grants? Not all of us can borrow money for college from our parents.

And what a great way to enslave entire generations into a minimum wage existence — to the great advantage of corporations and the one percent.

In 30 years CEO pay grew 127 times faster than worker pay: do Americans want MORE inequality?

ThinkProgress: According to an analysis by the pay research group Equilar, compensation for top bank CEOs grew by nearly 12 percent last year. The Financial Times noted that these increases occurred “despite widespread falls in profits and share prices“ […] According to a different estimate by Bloomberg News, Wall Street CEO pay grew by 20 percent last year. At the same time, worker wages grew by only 2.1 percent. And inflation adjusted wages actually declined by 0.6 percent between March 2011 and March 2012. […] Over the last 30 years, CEO pay has increased 127 times faster than worker pay.

That time frame for unequal growth in CEO / worker pay coincides with the time period that Mitt Romney and Bain Capital (and companies like theirs) began their siege on outsourcing (offshoring!) American jobs. That’s quite a coincidence, isn’t it?

What’s sad about these facts is that low-information voters are completely missing the point: according to a Pew poll, Americans currently give Romney an 8-point lead over Obama on who they trust to handle the economy better. Seriously.

Profit for a few at the expense of many — do these people understand they’re saying that’s exactly the kind of economy they approve of with Mitt Romney?

Our current system is creating a country of a few million overlords and 300 million serfs

Henry Blodget at Business Insider reports that corporate profits are at an all time high, while wages are now at an all time low:

1) Corporate profit margins just hit an all-time high. Companies are making more per dollar of sales than they ever have before. (And some people are still saying that companies are suffering from “too much regulation” and “too many taxes.” Maybe little companies are, but big ones certainly aren’t)

2) Fewer Americans are working than at any time in the past three decades. One reason corporations are so profitable is that they don’t employ as many Americans as they used to.

3) Wages as a percent of the economy are at an all-time low. This is both cause and effect. One reason companies are so profitable is that they’re paying employees less than they ever have as a share of GDP. And that, in turn, is one reason the economy is so weak: Those “wages” are other companies’ revenue.

Blodget bottomlines it for us in a series of related charts: “Companies need to start sharing more of their revenue with their employees. Wages as a percent of the economy simply have to go up. Yes, this means corporate profit margins will drop. But they can drop a long, long way and still be “above average.” And this is our country we’re talking about. If corporations really are people, it’s time for them to start acting like people–and sharing their wealth.”

Not to mention all the unions that have been busted up by Republicans for the past 30-40 years. What Blodget says makes sense, of course, yet Tea Street, USA has been conditioned to think sharing downward isn’t fair, it’s Socialism (or one of those -isms), and Rush Limbaugh and Jesus wouldn’t approve. Psychologically it has something to do with supposedly “punishing” the successful (the wealthy will say) plus gay marriage and race wars… it’s all way too murky and complex to get into here.

It is safe to say that the only “sharing” that the GOP and the one percent are interested in is bottom-up sharing: legislating more tax cuts to profitable corporations and the wealthiest citizens and paying for those tax cuts (and decreased government revenue) with austerity — by cutting programs and services that the rest of us use. Just look at the Ryan plan or the Romney budget.

You really don’t think that the Koch Brothers, Foster Friess, Sheldon Adelson and all the other rich guys who were in Park City, Utah with Mitt last weekend are donating hundreds of millions of dollars to Romney Super PACs, just so they can turn around and ‘share’ profits with their workers, do you? Their political donations are a business investmentwhich they hope to recoup, with interest. They want even more, not less.

questionall: Tom Toles on Mitt Romney

The steadily shrinking white electorate, Voter ID laws, and the far-right’s “race wars”

Because, as Jim Galloway at the AJC observes, white voter registration is steadily moving downward: “In May of 2008, African-Americans made up 28 percent of active registered voters in Georgia while whites made up 65 percent and “other” race… In May of 2012, African-Americans made up 29.4 percent of active registered voters, whites made up 60.2 percent, and “other” race made up 10.4 percent. So the downward trend in the white share of voters in Georgia has continued.”

So while GOP lawmakers will try to disenfranchise the voters who they assume wouldn’t vote Republican anyway (i.e. non-whites), the rightwing media are working overtime to whip up enough FEAR and ANGER to get the whites who have voted Republican before into the voting booths again — despite how they feel about Mitt Romney. How? By victimizing whites, by insinuating there’s a race-war, by reminding their audience that everyone thinks they’re the “R” word (racist), and by evoking the usual tribal reaction from their base. McKay Coppins at Buzzfeed outlined some of the main players on the far-right last month in his article, “In Conservative Media, A “Race War” Rages“:

Bill O’Reilly, Fox “News” — With the Norfolk, VA story, using the narrative: Black-on-white violence is spiking — and the mainstream media is trying to cover it up.
Drudge Report – ”Miami ‘war zone’ during urban weekend;” “Rib fest at Rochester beach turns rowdy;” and “Unruly urban crowd shuts down Nashville water park.”
Tucker Carlson, Daily Caller – ”I was struck by the immediate, uncloaked assumption by the media that Trayvon Martin was innocent.”
Rush Limbaugh – ”In Obama’s America, the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering.”
Dan Riehl, Riehl World News, Breitbart News – ”There are special interest groups on the left that exploit reports of white-on-black crime for political gain.”

But as Coppins fairly reports: “Indeed, the irony of the race war narrative’s latest flare-up is that it comes at a time when national crime rates have reached historic lows — including reported hate crimes against whites… What’s more, hate crimes against blacks have continued to outstrip those against whites by about four-to-one: In 2010 alone, there were 2,201 reported. Violent crimes across the spectrum reached a four-decade low in 2010.”

Jobs? Health care reform? Tax cuts for the one percent? Austerity for the rest of us? None of that really matters to low-information voters. Reality and facts, once again, are not part of the narrative that’s written and produced by the American conservative media and performed for the American conservative voter’s entertainment. What gets these people to the voting booth is fear and anger: do you want to be attacked by mobs of ‘rib-eating’ ‘urban’ youths? No? Then you’d better vote for Mitt Romney.

image: Buzzfeed

Email from President Obama today — something to think about

“I will be the first president in modern history to be outspent in his re-election campaign.”— email sent by President Obama today

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Related:

Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign may be the greatest business decision the one percent ever made – the “First National Romney Victory Leadership Retreat”
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Billionaires buying the White House

Bill Clinton gives a speech at the Cannes Lions international advertising festival in France on Thursday. (Lionel Cironneau / AP Photo)

Bill Clinton warns of dire consequences if SCOTUS invalidates the individual mandate

The Daily Beast: Clinton says that if the Supreme Court decides to invalidate the individual mandate in the Affordable Care Act there will be consequences which aren’t being reported:

Changing the health-care delivery system has already produced two years in a row of 4 percent inflation in health-care costs. This is the first time in 50 years that health-care costs have gone up so little. Killing the Affordable Care Act would let inflation loose again.

Some 2.6 million people ages 21 to 26, who now have insurance coverage for the first time because they can be carried under their parents’ policy, would lose it.

$1.3 billion dollars in insurance refunds have already been paid to businesses and individuals because now the law says 85 percent of your premium has to go to health care and not to profits and promotion. (California hasn’t reported yet, but will likely increase that figure to more than $1.5 billion.) Refunds would shrink.

If Republicans succeed in persuading the Supreme Court to repeal the individual mandate, somewhere between 12 million and 16 million Americans will be unable to get health insurance because of preexisting conditions.

“Clinton predicted that if the law is declared unconstitutional, Republicans will suffer a backlash when millions of Americans calculate what they have lost. Before the Affordable Care Act passed, two thirds of all the applications for bankruptcy were because of health-care emergencies, a consequence likely to return if health care inflation again rises precipitously.”

Postal Workers begin four-day hunger strike, say Congress is killing the postal service

“Not the Internet, not the recession, not private competition, Congress is killing the postal service,” Community and Postal Workers United wrote in a statement, NPR reports.

Federal Eye reports: ”But the biggest target is Congress, which has not passed legislation to reform the cash-strapped agency. The Senate approved a bill in April that would rebalance postal finances by giving billions of dollars to offer buyouts and early retirement incentives to employees. Several bills are pending in the House.”

Romney adviser compares sending American jobs overseas to Obama ‘outsourcing’ to OMAHA

Romney senior adviser Ed Gillespie engaged in a game of semantics, during an appearance on CNN yesterday. He compared Bain Capital sending jobs overseas while Mitt Romney was the CEO to President Barack Obama’s campaign “outsourcing” telemarketing to places like Omaha, Nebraska.

“The reporter confused the notion of outsourcing — now a lot of American companies outsource,” Gillespie explained. “They outsource domestically as well. For example, the Obama for America campaign outsources from its own campaign telemarketing services.”

“To Omaha or wherever it is,” CNN host Candy Crowley pointed out. “But we’re talking about foreign jobs here.”

Pat Garofalo and Igor Volsky at Think Progress acknowledge there is a difference between “outsourcing” and “offshoring” but:

[…] “This simply doesn’t change the fact that Bain, under Romney, invested in companies whose sole purpose was to move jobs to other countries, directly countering the narrative that Romney has been trying to set.”

…work that could have been done here. American jobs lost forever, for the financial gain of a few.

When Romney’s Bain Capital created jobs outside the U.S. that could have been done here

Caroline Bankoff at Daily Intel discusses the recent Washington Post article about how Romney’s Bain Capital invested in companies that moved American jobs overseas: [The Romney] campaign has responded with a statement criticizing the article as “fundamentally flawed”:

[The] story that does not differentiate between domestic outsourcing versus offshoring nor versus work done overseas to support U.S. exports. Mitt Romney spent 25 years in the real world economy so he understands why jobs come and they go.

However, as Politico notes, the statement does not address one of the article’s main points, which is that Bain was directly involved with companies that created jobs outside the United States that could have been done here. Meanwhile, the New York Times has a piece (also based on Securities and Exchange Commission filings) detailing a number of instances in which Bain made a profit off of taking over companies that eventually went bankrupt. While some of the companies profiled may have simply been “too troubled to rescue” (or brought down by larger economic or industry trends), there are examples like steel manufacturer GS Industries… Continue reading »

Steel – YouTube – Kansas City’s GST Steel had been making steel rods for 105 years when Romney and his partners took control in 1993. They cut corners and extracted profit from the business at every turn, placing it deeply in debt. When the company eventually declared bankruptcy, workers not only lost their jobs but were denied their full pensions and health insurance, and the government was forced to step in and provide a bailout. Watch:

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Romney economics (why jobs come and why they go): creating wealth for a few at the expense of many.

Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign may be the greatest business decision the one percent ever made

The super secret, exclusive shindig for Mitt Romney’s biggest donors in Park City, Utah, dubbed the “First National Romney Victory Leadership Retreat,” over the weekend has some interesting details. If you don’t find this information at least a little bit alarming, I suggest you check yourself for a pulse.

Politico describes the setting — “Eight hundred top donors gathered in the ballroom of a resort here to watch the presentation: the Romney campaign for president is organized, efficient and run like a business. In other words, their money is being wisely invested. The price tag for entry to the exclusive donor retreat was $50,000 and included access to some of the GOP’s biggest names — Jeb Bush, Karl Rove, Condoleezza Rice, as well as a briefing from top Romney officials on how they planned to beat President Barack Obama in November. It was a way of saying “thank you” to the hundreds of bundlers — fundraisers who tap their network of friends, family and associates to raise far more than the $2,500 they are allowed to individually contribute to a campaign. While Obama discloses his bundler list, Romney shrouds his in secrecy and the goings-on this weekend were held strictly behind closed doors.”

And who are the lucky folks who scored exclusive invitations? No idea.

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Steve Benen comments – ”All of this, apparently, is “a way to reward top-performing bundlers, who make their own donations and then raise many times that from their networks of friends and associates.” To be sure, this is quite a treat for these bundlers, who will reportedly be “briefed on campaign strategy” during the posh affair (the agenda for Saturday evening includes “dessert and dancing”). […] Unlike George W. Bush, John McCain, and Barack Obama, each of whom voluntarily disclosed the names of their bundlers, Romney refuses to share this information, preferring to maintain a veil of secrecy over his fundraising operation. These bundlers are poised to get extraordinary access to Republican leaders and the man who may be president next year, but we aren’t allowed to know who they are.”

The NYTimes describes the complete access to power for the wealthiest — “Everybody was completely accessible,” said Anthony Scaramucci, a New York financier and Romney fund-raiser who said the candidate took the time to warmly greet and thank him by his nickname, Mooch, at a dinner on the first night of the retreat. […] Donors were unabashed about their desire to have face time with those who might constitute the brain trust in a Romney White House. David A. Wish, a Florida doctor and Romney fund-raiser, said that in order to sell the candidate to potential contributors, “we need one-on-one time with the people who make decisions.” […] On Thursday night, Mr. Rove held court on a hotel balcony with about a half-dozen financial executives, who peppered him with questions about Mr. Romney’s chances… After Mr. Rove walked away, the gaggle of men excitedly recounted the conversation, reveling in their access. “That’s the price of admission right there,” one donor said to another. “Your six minutes with Rove.”

And, according to Buzzfeed, Bain was there — “Flight records passed along by a Democratic source show that the Bain Capital Jet company jet flew from Bedford, Massachusetts to airfield near Romney’s Utah donor retreat on Friday.”

Think Progress notes that Karl Rove’s participation at this event demonstrates Romney’s poor judgement and hypocrisy – A Saturday panel on “media insight” will feature American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS co-founder Karl Rove. The Crossroads reportedly plan to spend a stunning $300 million to help Romney defeat President Barack Obama this November, but they are legally prohibited from coordinating this effort with Romney’s campaign. […] in December, Romney decried the rise of Super PACs like Rove’s American Crossroads, saying they have been a “disaster” for the political system. He said at the time: Super PACs have to be entirely separate from a campaign and a candidate. I’m not allowed to communicate with a super PAC in any way, shape or form… If we coordinate in any way whatsoever, we go to the big house.