Mitt Romney--The Sociopath

Read the excerpts from Truth-out.com's excellent article detailing Romney's business past. Read the full story here.

A recent Vanity Fair story further shows how Romney used foreign bank accounts to raise the initial money for a fledgling Bain Capital:

One cannot properly understand Wall Street's size and power without appreciating the central role of offshore tax havens. There is absolutely no evidence that Bain has done anything illegal, but private equity is one channel for this secrecy-shrouded foreign money to enter the United States and a filing for Mitt Romney's first $37 million Bain Capital Fund, of 1984, provides a rare window into this. One foreign investor, of $2 million, was the newspaper tycoon, tax evader and fraudster Robert Maxwell, who fell from his yacht and drowned, off of the Canary Islands in 1991 in strange circumstances, after looting his company's pension fund. The Bain filing also names Eduardo Poma, a member of one of the "14 families" oligarchy that has controlled most of El Salvador's wealth for decades; oddly, Poma is listed as sharing a Miami address with two anonymous companies that invested $1.5 million between them. The filings also show a Geneva-based trustee overseeing a trust that invested $2.5 million, a Bahamas corporation that put in $3 million and three corporations in the tax haven of Panama, historically a favored destination for Latin-American dirty money - "one of the filthiest money-laundering sinks in the world," as a US Customs official once put it. 

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Malt [Brad Malt who ran Romney's trust] said he had repeatedly increased Romney's stake in the Cayman fund since 2003. He said he was unaware of the specific figures, but added that he knew he "wrote a lot of checks," and that it paid a return of 20% to 30% a year.


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With all this secrecy in his life, could he pass a security clearance check or a Congressional confirmation hearing? No Congress would pass him for a presidential appointment or give him a special access security clearance with this much secrecy and especially with all these hints of undisclosed foreign money.
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Romney is asking us, as in a job interview, to hire him and trust him with our most important secrets, but he is not willing to trust the public with his.

For example, here's what Romney did not say when he was confronted with questions about a "criminal scheme to defraud Medicare in 1993" by Damon Corp., whose board he was a member of, according to an October 11, 2002, report in The Boston Globe. Romney claimed, at a news conference in 2002, he and other board members uncovered the crimes and took "corrective action," instead of reporting it to the federal government, which he was required to do. The Globe, however, determined, "Romney's comments are contradicted by federal court records and Damon's [Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)] filings."

"Other court records, including Damon's blood testing records, show that the practice that was found to be criminal continued until August 1993, many months after Romney said he and the board put an end to it," the Globe reported. "Romney also said the reporting of the billing problems was made public to the SEC in letters sent by Damon to its shareholders in July 1993, urging them to accept an offer by Corning to buy the firm. But the letters, which [Romney's campaign] provided the Globe, state only that federal authorities were engaged in an investigation of potentially fraudulent billing practices at a number of clinical laboratories and make no mention of any particular problems at Damon."

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....a year after Bain took over a controlling interest in Ampad, the firm laid off one-fifth of the Indiana plant's employees, scrapped the retirement plan and gutted health benefits and wages.


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When he was being called upon to release his tax returns in the 2002 gubernatorial election in Massachusetts, Romney and his running mate refused. "Mitt Romney and Kerry Murphy Healey will complete all the financial disclosure forms required by law of candidates for public office," said Eric (Etch a Sketch) Fehrnstrom, Romney's deputy campaign manager for communications, in April 2002. "They do not plan to release their actual tax returns. It's not required and they both value their privacy."

Questions about transparency in Romney's tax returns have been going on for years. There were questions about whether Romney could legitimately run for governor of Massachusetts. In 1999 and 2000, Romney declared himself a resident of Utah and received a $54,000 tax break on his $3.8 million Park City home because he listed his residence there as his primary one. He had insisted for weeks that he had filed Massachusetts tax returns for 1999 and 2000.

Romney said he first learned of the tax break he received when he read about it in the Boston Globe on June 7, 2002, according to a report in the paper. He then called a news conference in an attempt to explain the discrepencies in his previous public statements. Here's the lede from the Globe story:

Republican gubernatorial hopeful Mitt Romney contradicted his previous public statements yesterday and said for the first time that he did not file Massachusetts income tax returns for 1999 and 2000 as a resident of the state.

Romney told reporters at a news conference that he filed as a "part-year resident for 1999 and a non-resident for 2000. He amended those returns, claiming Massachusetts resident status, on April 2 [2002], a week after he announced he was running for governor of Massachusetts and four days before the state Republican convention that endorsed his candidacy."

A week later, Phillip W. Johnston, Massachusetts Democratic Party chairman, said Romney told a "bald-faced lie" when he "originally told reporters he filed income tax returns as a resident of Massachusetts when living in Utah," the Globe reported.

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Here is a Romney quote: 

I'm not familiar precisely with what I said, but I'll stand by what I said, whatever it was.


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Now, can someone argue that Mitt Romney is NOT a sociopath?


(http://eye-on-washington.blogspot.com)

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Mitt Romney Is A Member Of The Super Elite!

From http://www.Washingtonsblog.com--

"Using data from the BIS, IMF, World Bank, and governments, former Chief Economist at McKinsey, James Henry, reports the 1% have deposited $21 trillion to $32 trillion in tax havens to evade taxes. Related, the Federal Reserve reports the US top seven banks have over $10 trillion in assets recorded in over 14,000 created “subsidiaries” to avoid taxes.

The 1% hide more than total annual economic output of the US and Japan combined."

What we have witnessed is that Mitt Romney, as expressed through his wife, Ann, that the common person, the American people don't deserve to know any more about their finances, and tax returns than what they have exposed.

In addition, it has been reported in the Boston Globe that many of Mitt Romney's letters written while administrating the U.S. Winter Olympics have been hidden. 

Romney is a hider. He is secretive. He is a concealer. He might become the Hider and Concealer-in-Chief. He appears to NOT believe in transparency. 

Why would he want to hide his tax returns, and letters of correspondences unless there is damaging information that average Americans would be disgusted by. He might not have done anything illegal, but just at the very least, immoral, or unethical.

Does he NOT want YOU to know that he paid no taxes, or less of a tax rate than YOU did?

We have found out recently that Dade Behring was wrung out to dry once Bain Capital and Mitt Romney got their hands on it.

This is from the Tampa Bay Times: "

In advance of Mitt Romney's fundraising swing through Florida tomorrow Democrats are highlighting one of the business ventures of Bain Capital while Romney was in charge: Dade Behring, which, saddled with debt, wound up shuttering two medical technologies facilities in Miami. Some 850 jobs were lost, while Bain walked away with $242-million - an 800 percent return on its investment

The Dade Behring case has been well-documented, but here's a new wrinkle: The company under Bain's leadership sought and received millions of dollars in tax breaks for creating jobs in Puerto Rico - shortly before closing it's facilities, costing nearly 300 jobs.

The company in 1997 received a $3-million federal tax break aimed to promoting job creation in Puerto Rico. It also received a $4.1-million tax exemption from Puerto Rick in 1997 in the name of job creation. Dade ceased its operations in Puerto Rico in the first quarter of 1998."

The company was profitable, but once Bain got their Mitts on them, they were squeezed dry sending jobs overseas, and their domestic workers on the unemployment lines.

What we learn nearly everyday is that Bain's Mitts were dirty and predatory. They were money sucking vultures. 

Anyone who can wake up every morning and believe they are doing honorable and good work by destroying jobs and businesses, and sucking all the operating capital from them while receive tax breaks as they are being drained dry must be a perverted sociopath.

That makes Mitt Romney a perverted sociopath sanctioned by the Mormon Church.

(http://eye-on-washington.blogspot.com)

Romney--The New Herbert Hoover!!

Romney, Bush, Hoover and Harding

The GOP Dream Team:

Why The Mega Banks and Multinational Corporations Are Destroying America

From Washingtonsblog.com

The following excellent pieces explain and give links to why these corporations don't pay taxes and are destroying our country.

Why You Pay Too Much In Taxes: Because Everyone from the Ultra-Rich to Illegal Immigrants Pay Nothing … Or Get Tax Refunds

Posted on July 23, 2012 by WashingtonsBlog

Illegal Aliens Scam Tax Refunds

For years, American taxpayers have been shelling out $4.2 billion dollars per year to pay for a scam.

A report by the Inspector General found that some 2 million illegal immigrants have been receiving large tax refunds by pretending that numerous dependents live with them … when, in fact, most of the dependents live in Mexico and have never lived in the United States.

Once whistleblowers called attention to this problem, their IRS bosses told them to ignore the fraud and look the other way.

WND notes:

The problem was not a revelation to the Northern California IRS field-office worker who viewed the report: “The fraud has been going on for years,” he told WND. “Business as usual.”

“As the video indicates the Service does nothing,” he said, asking WND not use his name to avoid reprisal.

(The Federal Reserve has been bailing out foreign banks for years; but we assume that this is not a backdoor bailout for foreign nationals.)

Giant Corporations Scam Tax Refunds

Pulitzer prize winning reporter David Cay Johnston reports that – in 16 states – giant companies pocket your “state income taxes”.

This includes foreign corporations.

Workers are never informed that their “state income taxes” are being pocketed.   And states often refuse to make this information public, claiming that it is “proprietary information”.

In addition, big companies use a variety of international scams to avoid taxes:

The Washington Post notes:

About two-thirds of corporations operating in the United States did not pay taxes annually from 1998 to 2005, according to a new report scheduled to be made public today from the U.S. Government Accountability Office…

In 2005, about 28 percent of large corporations paid no taxes…

Dorgan and Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) requested the report out of concern that some corporations were using “transfer pricing” to reduce their tax bills. The practice allows multi-national companies to transfer goods and assets between internal divisions so they can record income in a jurisdiction with low tax rates…

[Senator] Levin said: “This report makes clear that too many corporations are using tax trickery to send their profits overseas and avoid paying their fair share in the United States.”

Indeed, as … Johnston documents, American multinationals pay much less in taxes than they should because they use a widespread variety of tax-avoidance scams and schemes, including:

• Selling valuable assets of the American companies to foreign subsidiaries based in tax havens for next to nothing, so that those valuable assets can be taxed at much lower foreign rates

• Pretending that costs were spent in the United States, so that the companies can count them as costs or deductions in the U.S. and pay less taxes to the American government

• Booking profits as if they occurred in the subsidiary’s tax haven countries, so that taxes paid on profits are at the much lower safe haven rate

• Working out sweetheart deals with certain foreign governments, so that the companies can pretend they paid more in foreign taxes than they actually did, to obtain higher U.S. tax credits than are warranted

• Pretending they are headquartered in tax havens like Bermuda, the Cayman Islands or Panama, so that they can enjoy all of the benefits of actually being based in America (including the use of American law and the court system, listing on the Dow, etc.), with the tax benefits associated with having a principal address in a sunny tax haven.

• And myriad other scams

Indeed, some of the world’s biggest companies not only dodge all taxes, they actually enjoy a negative tax rate … where they are paid money by the U.S. government, just like the illegal immigrants discussed above.

The World’s Richest Hide $31 Trillion Dollars to Avoid Taxes

A new report from the former chief economist at the prestigious McKinsey firm – an expert on tax havens – concludes that

The Guardian notes:

A global super-rich elite has exploited gaps in cross-border tax rules to hide an extraordinary £13 trillion ($21tn) of wealth offshore – as much as the American and Japanese GDPs put together ….

James Henry, former chief economist at consultancy McKinsey and an expert on tax havens, has compiled the most detailed estimates yet of the size of the offshore economy in a new report, The Price of Offshore Revisited, released exclusively to the Observer.

He shows that at least £13tn – perhaps up to £20tn [i.e. $31 trillion dollars] – has leaked out of scores of countries into secretive jurisdictions such as Switzerland and the Cayman Islands with the help of private banks, which vie to attract the assets of so-called high net-worth individuals. Their wealth is, as Henry puts it, “protected by a highly paid, industrious bevy of professional enablers in the private banking, legal, accounting and investment industries taking advantage of the increasingly borderless, frictionless global economy”.

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The detailed analysis in the report, compiled using data from a range of sources, including the Bank of International Settlements and the International Monetary Fund, suggests that for many developing countries the cumulative value of the capital that has flowed out of their economies since the 1970s would be more than enough to pay off their debts to the rest of the world.

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“The problem here is that the assets of these countries are held by a small number of wealthy individuals while the debts are shouldered by the ordinary people of these countries through their governments,” the report says.

The sheer size of the cash pile sitting out of reach of tax authorities is so great that it suggests standard measures of inequality radically underestimate the true gap between rich and poor. According to Henry’s calculations, £6.3tn of assets is owned by only 92,000 people, or 0.001% of the world’s population – a tiny class of the mega-rich who have more in common with each other than those at the bottom of the income scale in their own societies.

“These estimates reveal a staggering failure: inequality is much, much worse than official statistics show, but politicians are still relying on trickle-down to transfer wealth to poorer people,” said John Christensen of the Tax Justice Network. “People on the street have no illusions about how unfair the situation has become.” [Remember that rampant inequality destroys economies.  And conservatives or liberals are both offended by it.]

Al Jazeera reports:

Rich individuals and their families have as much as $32 trillion of hidden financial assets in offshore tax havens, representing up to $280bn in lost income tax revenues, according to research published on Sunday.

The study estimating the extent of global private financial wealth held in offshore accounts – excluding non-financial assets such as real estate, gold, yachts and racehorses – puts the sum at between $21 and $32 trillion.

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John Christensen of the Tax Justice Network told Al Jazeera that he was shocked by “the sheer scale of the figures”.

“What’s shocking is that some of the world’s biggest banks are up to their eyeballs in helping their clients evade taxes and shift their wealth offshore,” said Christensen.

“We’re talking about very big, well-known brands – HSBC, Citigroup, Bank of America, UBS, Credit Suisse – some of the world’s biggest banks are involved… and they do it knowing fully well that their clients, more often than not, are evading and avoiding taxes.”

Much of this activity, Christensen added, was illegal.

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The research estimates that since the 1970s, the richest citizens of these 139 countries had amassed $7.3 to $9.3 trillion of “unrecorded offshore wealth” by 2010.

Private wealth held offshore represents “a huge black hole in the world economy,” Henry said in a statement.

Either Eliminate Taxes – Or Tax Fairly – But Don’t Allow Fraud to Rob the Middle Class Blind

Some say that we could eliminate all taxes if we take away from the big banks the monopoly power to create credit, so that the government doesn’t have to pay trillions on interest for that credit.

Some say that income taxes are illegal, because they were never ratified by the states.

Some say that – since more than half of all government discretionary spending goes to imperial wars of adventure and most of the rest is thrown at the big banks so they can keep ripping us off – paying taxes is just propping up a destructive system.

Others – including some leading conservatives – say that the problem is that the wealthiest haven’t been forced to pay their fair share of taxes.

We’re not weighing in one way or the other.  But one thing is for sure: either no one should pay taxes, or we should all – illegal immigrants, giant corporations and the super-rich – be subject to the same rules and pay our fair share.

Soaking the middle class is unfair, unjust … and unAmerican.   Indeed, while the Boston Tea Party was a revolt against taxation without representation, it largely centered on the British government’s disproportionate tax breaks – towards the East India Company, the giant company which dominated the tea market and hurt small American business.

(http://eye-on-washington.blogspot.com)