Tuesday Reads, Class Warfare Edition

Posted: July 10, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, Barack Obama, Democratic Politics, income inequality, morning reads, Political and Editorial Cartoons, Republican politics, Tea Party activists, The Bonus Class, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 59 Comments

Good Morning!!

As I wrote yesterday, President Obama’s campaign tactics are starting to get under Mitt Romney’s skin. Molly Ball of The Atlantic has also noticed this.

Mitt Romney has had enough. Fed up with President Obama’s attacks on his business record, he is — or at least his surrogates are — going to drop the Mr. Nice Guy act and start calling his opponent a liar, BuzzFeed’s McKay Coppins reports. Romney’s campaign had already gone there — an email Saturday from spokeswoman Andrea Saul was headlined “Obama’s Desperate Lies,” for example — but to turn the L-word, usually avoided in politics, into a surrogate talking point represents a new front.

Of course the Romney campaign has been trying to get Obama’s goat for months, and they’ve gotten exactly nowhere.

This is the same Romney campaign that sent bubble-blowing hecklers to David Axelrod’s press conference in Boston, deployed its campaign bus to circle and honk outside Obama events, and had a staffer confront Joe Biden personally at a restaurant in Ohio. In another move that seemed designed to get in Obama’s face, Romney himself staged a press conference in front of the failed solar-energy company Solyndra.

But the Obama campaign’s response to this, aside from a bit of huffiness about Romney’s failure to condemn such tactics, has largely been “meh.” Meanwhile, the president continues to conduct a gleefully negative campaign, complete with misleading attack ads and disingenuous character slams. (Romney, of course, has been guilty of the same types of distortions.) Romney prides himself on being thick-skinned — “I’ve got broad shoulders,” he’s fond of saying — but now he appears to have been driven to his limit.

This could be really fun to watch.

Of course Obama’s announcement  yesterday that he wants Congress to extend the Bush tax cuts for the 98% of Americans who earn less than $250,000 per year is likely to enrage Romney and the rest of the Republicans even more. And it’s all part of the Obama campaign’s strategy. Michael Shear of The New York Times reports:

President Obama’s push on Monday to extend tax cuts for the middle class — but not for the rich — is being joined by an all-out effort from his allies to portray Mitt Romney as a wealthy candidate who is out of touch with most Americans.

The president’s campaign and his surrogates are accusing the presumptive Republican nominee of hiding the sources of his multimillion-dollar fortune and of refusing to release multiple years of his tax returns. On Monday, they also mocked Mr. Romney’s weekend fund-raisers at glamorous estates in the Hamptons.

In an interview with a New Hampshire television station on Monday, Mr. Obama added his voice to the criticism of his rival, saying that Americans should “know who you are and what you’ve done and that you’re an open book. And that’s been true of every presidential candidate dating all the way back to Mitt Romney’s father.”

The White House also said yesterday that Obama will veto any effort to extend the Bush tax cuts for the top 2% of Americans.

Mitt Romney is a very rich man, but he’s not the richest man to ever run for President. John Kerry is at least as rich as Romney and probably slightly richer; and if Kerry’s wealth is combined with that of his wife Teresa Heinz Kerry, he is probably a billionaire.

When he ran in 2004, Kerry released 20 years of tax returns! Teresa Heinz Kerry resisted releasing her tax returns and that became an issue in the campaign. She eventually released some minimal information. But Kerry himself was exceedingly transparent:

His campaign released all of his military records after conservative critics questioned stories related to his time in service. He also released 15 years worth of meetings he had with more than 300 lobbyists while serving as a U.S. senator. As The New York Times reported on April 23, 2004:

The list, detailing meetings between 1989 and late last year that were often held over lunch, dinner or cocktails, identifies many participants who have contributed to his campaigns and, in some cases, become fund-raisers for his presidential run.

As far as I can tell, Kerry did not have millions stashed in secret offshore tax shelters. Another important difference between Kerry and Romney is that Kerry was not advocating tax policies that would help the wealthiest Americans and hurt the poorest Americans as Mitt Romney is.

Of course the most shocking thing about the tax information we do have about Romney is that he paid around 13 percent of his income in taxes–a lower proportion than is paid by people in the lowest tax bracket.  I think that is why these attacks on his as an out-of-touch rich guy are working.

I can’t see the Obama campaign letting this go until Romney either is more forthcoming or somehow explains why he is being so secretive about his money. As long as he refuses to be more open, we can only assume he has something to hide, as Paul Krugman wrote this morning.

In line with yesterday’s news about Mitt Romney’s fund raisers in the Hamptons and the clueless types who attended them, Mother Jones has a funny story about internecine class warfare among the Hamptons’ super-rich denizens. You’ll need to read it all, but here’s the introduction.

With twin 2,520-horsepower engines and up to 19 seats, the Sikorsky S-92 is among the world’s most powerful civilian helicopters. “Helibuses” typically service offshore oil platforms and the like, but two years ago billionaire industrialist Ira Rennert acquired a posh version to shuttle himself between Manhattan and Long Island’s exclusive Hamptons, where he owns a 63-acre, 110,000-square-foot villa complex. One of the first to notice the giant bird was Frank Dalene, founder and CEO of a successful luxury homebuilding company, who lives on a ridge along Rennert’s flight path. Its whumping rotor was like “a lightning bolt striking nearby,” says Dalene, a fast-talking 58-year-old with a long nose and narrow-set eyes. He blames the vibrations for “literally damaging my home.”

Dalene and his neighbors near the East Hampton Airport might have abided Rennert’s choppers—he owns two—had they been an anomaly. But the situation has become intolerable over the past few years, Dalene says, thanks to a whirlybird craze among the investment bankers and hedge fund gurus who weekend in Sagaponack and Southampton. On Friday afternoons the tiny airport is a beehive. Come summer, some CEOs commute daily between their beach chalets and Manhattan’s East 34th Street Heliport. “They don’t give a crap about nobody,” Dalene gripes.

Last year, he founded the Quiet Skies Coalition, an anti-helicopter group that has become one of the most potent political forces in the Hamptons. Its wealthy members north of the Montauk Highway launched what Dalene describes as a “knock-down, drag-out battle” against “ultra-wealthy” helicopter owners who largely live on the south side, accusing them of shattering the island’s tranquillity, contributing to climate change, and poisoning the air with leaded fuel. “I am beginning to think Mr. Rennert is practicing class warfare,” Dalene wrote Rennert’s Manhattan secretary in an email that likened the noise assaults to “throwing their garbage on the other side of the tracks for us poor folks to live with.”

Rennert, a multimillionaire lives on “the poor side of the tracks” in the rarified atmosphere of the Hamptons. He is a long-time Republican, but he’s so angry at the pro-helicopter Republicans that he plans to switch his registration to Independent.

At The Daily Beast Peter Beinert argues that Republicans are the ones who have traditionally engaged in class warfare.

Joseph McCarthy, the man whose specter terrified Democrats for a generation, was all about class warfare. “It has not been the less fortunate or members of minority groups who have been selling this nation out,” he told the Republican Women’s Club of Wheeling, West Virginia, in 1950, in the speech that catapulted him to stardom, “but rather those who have had all the benefits that the wealthiest nation on earth has had to offer—the finest homes, the finest college education, and the finest jobs in government we can give. This is glaringly true in the State Department. There the bright young men who are born with silver spoons in their mouths are the ones who have been worst.”

Richard Nixon seethed with class anger. “What starts the process really are laughs and slights and snubs when you are a kid,” he confided to a friend. “Sometimes it’s because you’re poor or Irish or Jewish or Catholic or ugly or simply that you are skinny. But if you are reasonably intelligent and if your anger is deep enough and strong enough, you learn that you can change those attitudes by excellence, personal gut performance, while those who have everything are sitting on their fat butts.”

Then there are the more recent examples. In 1988, George H.W. Bush accused Michael Dukakis of having learned his views in “Harvard Yard’s boutique,” a bastion of “liberalism and elitism.” (Bush’s campaign manager, Lee Atwater, later declared that had he been running Dukakis’ campaign, he would have shown ads featuring Bush on his private tennis court alongside images of his waterfront mansion in Kennebunkport, before having the narrator intone: “No wonder he wants to cut capital gains taxes on the wealthy.”)

Joseph McCarthy actually started out as a Democrat, but by the time he got the Senate he was a Republican. He once

denounced the entire Democratic Party as a group of traitors: “The issue between the Republicans and Democrats is clearly drawn. It has been deliberately drawn by those who have been in charge of twenty years of treason. The hard fact is — the hard fact is that those who wear the label, those who wear the label Democrat wear it with the stain of a historic betrayal.”

He would have fit right in with today’s Tea Party Republicans.

The right wing blogs are accusing President Obama of “class warfare” because he wants the top 2 percent of income earners to pay the same proportions of their incomes in taxes as they did during the Clinton administration. Princeton History Professor Julian Zelizer “Obama should ignore ‘class warfare’ gibes.”

During a meeting with historians in 2011, Politico reported, President Obama said: “What you could do for me is to help me find a way to discuss the issue of inequality in our society without being accused of class warfare.” For Obama, this is not an esoteric question. Rather, this is a challenge that will be integral to his campaign and, if he is re-elected, to his second term as president.

Many Democrats have argued that Obama should have tackled this issue from his first day in the White House. But this is an issue the president didn’t think he had the political capital to address. He has also continually feared that touching on inequality would open him up to Republican attacks of being left of center.

And being “left of center” is bad because….? {Sigh….} Zelizer then discusses FDR and LBJ, two presidents who weren’t afraid to address issues of inequality. He ends with this advice for Obama:

a vibrant national discussion about inequality, with the president taking the lead, is essential. The 2012 campaign offers Obama an opportunity to put this problem on the national agenda.
The challenge for Obama is that there really is no way around the inevitable attacks, and there is no way to talk about economic inequality other than talking about it. Rather than looking for rhetorical tricks, Obama should instead focus on having the best arguments in response to the conservative attacks.

This will require borrowing from Roosevelt a defense of how a vibrant middle class will be crucial to revitalizing America’s economic position in the world, and from Johnson an argument that the ethical obligation to help the poorest is incumbent on our democracy.

I wholeheartedly agree. It’s time for Obama to suck it up and deal with the attacks that come along with doing the right thing. It appears that he is getting a little more daring these days. Certainly calling for extending the middle-class tax cuts now instead of waiting till after the election was a good opening gambit. It also appears that Obama is pretty good at letting Romney’s foolish attacks roll off his back.

Class warfare has been a useful tactic for Republicans in the past, as Peter Beinart pointed out. This year Obama is running against the perfect representative of the monied classes in Mitt Romney. It’s perfectly appropriate to run on the issue of inequality in incomes and opportunities.

I sincerely hope the Obama campaign continues this strategy right up until November–along with coming up with specific policies to change the current trend toward greater distance between the super-rich and the rest of us.

Enough of my ranting, what are you reading and blogging about today?

Saturday Reads: Posh Fundraisers, Bizarre Cults, and More

Posted: July 7, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, Barack Obama, corporate greed, morning reads, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 42 Comments

Good Morning!!

I have some excellent reads to share with you today.

Tomorrow is a big day for Mitt Romney. He’ll be in the Hamptons attending a series of fund raisers hosted by members of the top 1% of the top 1%, and he’s expected to collect $3 million by the time it’s all over.

Mr. Romney is expected to pull in $3 million from an event at the Creeks, the estate of Ronald O. Perelman, the billionaire financier and Revlon chairman, where tickets range from $5,000 for lunch to $25,000 for a V.I.P. photo reception. Another will be held at the home of Clifford M. Sobel, an ambassador to Brazil under President George W. Bush, and a final dinner will take place at the Southampton estate of the billionaire industrialist David H. Koch, where the going rate for entry is $75,000 a couple and $50,000 a person….

At Mr. Koch’s estate, the guests will be treated to one-of-a-kind scenery as they wait for face time with a possible president. Tucked into the Southampton dunes, Mr. Koch’s home is valued at about $18 million by the real estate Web site Zillow, which reports that it has seven bedrooms and nine bathrooms. Its backyard is the sea.

But the jewel of the day is Mr. Perelman’s. With 9 fireplaces, 40 rooms and an expansive wine cellar, his estate makes the Koch spread look modest by comparison. Sitting on 57 acres, it was built for the painter Albert Herter in 1899, and when it last went up for sale in 1991 (for $25 million), The New York Times described it as “the largest and most spectacular estate in the Village of East Hampton, with more than a mile of frontage on Georgica Pond and a view of the Atlantic Ocean beyond.” That article also said that an American Conifer Society Bulletin — for tree enthusiasts — had called its grounds “the eighth wonder of the horticultural world” and “the most outstanding private conifer collection in the United States, a living work of art.”

I wonder how that will go over in Ohio? The article says that Obama is skipping the ostentatious Hamptons fund raisers this year, but it provides descriptions previous ones hosted by Democrats. The Dems definitely attract better musical artists. But Republicans say they don’t need entertainment–they’re already excited by the prospect of throwing Obama out of the White House.

Justin Rubin of MoveOn.org has a piece at HuffPo about the Koch fundraiser. Some “progressives” plan to crash the party.

Mitt Romney may want to hide his Koch problem with the help of his super PACs, but all the cash in the world won’t be enough to stop our people power from exposing the truth. More than 7 million MoveOn members will be working hard every day between now and November to pull back the curtain and expose Romney’s 1% habit.

This Sunday, we’re staging our latest intervention. As Romney’s limo pulls up in front of David Koch’s Hamptons estate — where each $50,000 ticket will cost more than most people make in a year — our members will be there to greet him. We’ll band together with organizers and allies from a diverse array of groups united by our concern about the pernicious effects Koch cash is inflicting on our democracy.

No intervention is complete without a banner, and MoveOn’s 99airlines plane will be at the Hamptons fundraiser too, flying a banner overhead that points out the simple truth: “Mitt Romney has a Koch problem.” As more Americans find out, Romney’s Koch problem will just get worse.

At the Atlantic, Derek Thompson explains How the Richest 400 People in America Got So Rich. As you might have guessed already, they didn’t do it by actually, you know, working hard.

The New York Daily News has learned that Romney is already practicing for the first presidential debate, which is still 13 weeks away.

Romney sources told the Daily News that during a three-day retreat he hosted late last month for big-time Republican contributors and party mandarins at Park City, Utah, the candidate also found time to squeeze in the first two rounds of what staffers call “debate prep.”

Romney convened six to eight campaign aides around a conference table at the elegant Chateaux at Silver Lake. They sorted through a variety of topics sure to come up in the three Presidential debates, like the state of the economy and the war in Afghanistan, and kicked around the best “test responses” to questions they expect Obama and debate moderators will toss at the ex-Massachusetts governor.

More such encounters are expected over the summer, but what one source called “podium practices” with an Obama surrogate won’t happen for awhile — mainly because Romney doesn’t care for them all that much.
“There will be some role-playing but not as much as other Presidential candidates,” a Romney adviser said. “The traditional model doesn’t fit his style.”

Why doesn’t he just keep repeating that same non-response he used yesterday? That way he wouldn’t have to take a stand on anything.

If you haven’t had a chance to read it yet, please go check out Joseph Cannon’s post on Romney’s ties to “Spooks and Death Squads.” I don’t know how else to express my reaction: I was gobsmacked by it!

If you’re fascinated by cults, as I am, you should read this lengthy article from the Hollywood Reporter on Katie Holmes’ breakup with Tom Cruise and her desire to keep her daughter away from Scientology. Here’s just a teensy taste:

Unlike [Nicole] Kidman, who kept quiet during her divorce from Cruise and has rarely commented publicly about it since, Holmes already has made a statement of sorts by filing her petition in New York and saying she wants full legal custody and primary residential custody of their Suri.

“Katie could blow Scientology wide open,” says [Marty] Rathbun, who was in the church for 22 years before leaving in late 2004. Rathbun, who calls himself an “independent Scientologist” and writes a candid blog popular with former members, was Cruise’s auditor and handled Cruise’s divorce from Kidman.

“If Tom’s smart, he won’t fight her on anything, even custody. He should just try to settle his way out of it,” says Rathbun. “She could press this sole-custody issue and litigate it, and that would be the biggest nightmare in the Church of Scientology’s history. It would be a circus they couldn’t survive.”

And speaking of cults, Alternet explains Mormon underwear–who isn’t curious about that?  Are Mormon Underwear Magic Between the Sheets?

It’s hard to get a balanced sample from active Mormons, because the Garments, as I said, are sacred, and catering to the curiosity of prurient outsiders would violate a covenant sworn during the same temple ceremony in which a Mormon gets authorized to wear the Garment. Unfortunately those who have been fantasizing about a romp in which layers of white cotton create the perfect sense of mystery (or bondage), exMormons offer few words of encouragement. Discomfort seems to be the predominant theme.

I was continuously battling wedgies–often in public; how the people would stare as I would try to wrestle crumpled material out of my crack. Lady DB

If you have ever worn the modern ones you should appreciate the distance these have come. When I first got married they came in a one piece get up with a wide neck so you could step into them. The back had a split crotch (not the kind in kinky panties) but this huge wide sloppy split that would separate under your clothes, leaving a draft in your nether region much of the time. The little panel they sew into the ladies special part was so poorly designed that it would roll and twist till you felt like you were skewered by a roll of old toilet paper. Insanad

Of all of the things about Mo-dom, the thing I miss the least is the underwear. Zapotec

Theologically, Mormon undergarments are said to be symbols of a covenant between God and the believer. Initiates pantomime their own death should they violate this sacred trust. The underwear have sacred symbols drawn from the Masonic Order into which Joseph Smith was initiated shortly before he proclaimed God’s desire that people wear the Garment. True believing Mormons avoid allowing Garments to touch the ground. They may cut off and burn the symbols when a Garment itself is worn out.

There’s much much more info at the link.

At Truthdig, Robert Scheer writes about the LIBOR scandal: The Crime of the Century.

Forget Bernie Madoff and Enron’s Ken Lay—they were mere amateurs in financial crime. The current Libor interest rate scandal, involving hundreds of trillions in international derivatives trade, shows how the really big boys play. And these guys will most likely not do the time because their kind rewrites the law before committing the crime.

Modern international bankers form a class of thieves the likes of which the world has never before seen. Or, indeed, imagined. The scandal over Libor—short for London interbank offered rate—has resulted in a huge fine for Barclays Bank and threatens to ensnare some of the world’s top financers. It reveals that behind the world’s financial edifice lies a reeking cesspool of unprecedented corruption. The modern-day robber barons pillage with a destructive abandon totally unfettered by law or conscience and on a scale that is almost impossible to comprehend.

How to explain a $450 million settlement for one bank whose defense, in a plea bargain worked out with regulators in London and Washington, is that every institution in their elite financial circle was doing it? Not just Barclays but JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and others are now being investigated on suspicion of manipulating the Libor rate, so critical to a $700 trillion derivatives market.

Read the rest at the Truthdig.

I hope you found something here that appeals to you. Now what are your reading recommendations?

Romney Campaign Solves Flip-Flop Problem — For Now

Posted: July 6, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Barack Obama, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | 36 Comments

It has been a difficult couple of weeks for Mitt Romney.

First, the Supreme Court struck down the Arizona immigration law that Romney had termed a model for the nation. Romney’s response:

“Today’s decision underscores the need for a President who will lead on this critical issue and work in a bipartisan fashion to pursue a national immigration strategy. President Obama has failed to provide any leadership on immigration. This represents yet another broken promise by this President. I believe that each state has the duty–and the right–to secure our borders and preserve the rule of law, particularly when the federal government has failed to meet its responsibilities. As Candidate Obama, he promised to present an immigration plan during his first year in office. But 4 years later, we are still waiting.”

Romney refused to say whether he agreed with the decision or provide specifics about how he would deal with undocumented immigrants if he were elected.

Next, his former favorite Supreme Court Justice, John Roberts, voted with the liberals on the court, agreeing that the Democrats’ Affordable Care Act, including the individual mandate is constitutional. Romney’s response to that one was strikingly terse and even more vague than his statement on immigration:

“What the court did not do on its last day in session, I will do on my first day,” he said. “I will act to repeal Obamacare.”

Still no specifics on how he would convince Congress to repeal the law or what he would replace it with. And then real disaster struck. Top Romney aide Eric Fehrnstrom told MSNBC that, despite Chief Justice Roberts’ calling the individual mandate a “tax,” Romney disagrees–he thinks it’s a “penalty.” Of course this contradicted the latest Republican meme–that the mandate is the biggest tax increase in human history. Ooops! And the next day (ironically it was Independence Day), Mitt changed his mind and said the mandate is a tax after all. Here’s a summary from Chuck Todd and colleagues:

Romney’s verbal gymnastics: When you think about it, Romney never had to truly deal with his fatal flaw on health care. Yes, he gave that health-care PowerPoint speech in Michigan in May 2011. And, yes, he was asked questions about the issue during the 20-odd GOP debates in which he participated. But he never REALLY had to reconcile his health-care law with President Obama’s — with a campaign team capable of going toe to toe with him — until last week’s Supreme Court decision. As for his explanation in calling the mandate a tax, his verbal gymnastics would have impressed even the Russian judges. First, he technically didn’t disagree with Fehrnstrom’s original take; he simply conceded that the Supreme Court called it a tax. “Well, the Supreme Court has the final word, and their final word is that Obamacare is a tax. So it’s a tax,” he said. And then he painfully tried to explain why the federal mandate is a tax, but Romney’s state mandate is a penalty. “Actually the chief justice in his opinion made it very clear that at the state level, states have the power to put in place mandates. They don’t need to require them to be called taxes in order for them to be constitutional.”

Recent polls show that the Obama campaign’s attacks on Romney’s record at Bain Capital are working–especially in the swing states. But Romney has let those attacks go largely unanswered as he struggled to develop a coherent response to the Obamacare decision.

Over the past few days, there have been stinging critiques of the Romney campaign from conservative media sources. Rupert Murdock tweeted that Romney’s campaign is too insular and they need to shake up the staff and add more experienced people. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board dressed down the candidate and his staff on the editorial page. On the tax/penalty flip flop, they wrote:

For conservative optimists who think Mr. Fehrnstrom misspoke or is merely dense, his tax absolution gift to Mr. Obama was confirmed by campaign spokeswoman Andrea Saul, who tried the same lame jujitsu spin. In any event, Mr. Fehrnstrom is part of the Boston coterie who are closest to Mr. Romney, and he wouldn’t say such a thing without the candidate’s approval.

In a stroke, the Romney campaign contradicted Republicans throughout the country who had used the Chief Justice’s opinion to declare accurately that Mr. Obama had raised taxes on the middle class. Three-quarters of those who will pay the mandate tax will make less than $120,000 a year, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The Romney high command has muddied the tax issue in a way that will help Mr. Obama’s claims that he is merely taxing rich folks like Mr. Romney. And it has made it that much harder for Republicans to again turn ObamaCare into the winning issue it was in 2010.

Why make such an unforced error? Because it fits with Mr. Romney’s fear of being labeled a flip-flopper, as if that is worse than confusing voters about the tax and health-care issues. Mr. Romney favored the individual mandate as part of his reform in Massachusetts, and as we’ve said from the beginning of his candidacy his failure to admit that mistake makes him less able to carry the anti-ObamaCare case to voters.

Bill Kristol assailed Romney as the successor to fellow Massachusetts pols Michael Dukakis and John Kerry:

Remember Michael Dukakis (1988) and John Kerry (2004)? It’s possible to lose a winnable presidential election to a vulnerable incumbent in the White House (or in the case of 1988, a sitting vice president). So, speaking of losing candidates from Massachusetts: Is it too much to ask Mitt Romney to get off autopilot and actually think about the race he’s running?

Adopting a prevent defense when it’s only the second quarter and you’re not even ahead is dubious enough as a strategy. But his campaign’s monomaniacal belief that it’s about the economy and only the economy, and that they need to keep telling us stupid voters that it’s only about the economy, has gone from being an annoying tick to a dangerous self-delusion.

As Frank Cannon and Jeff Bell, among others, have pointed out, the economy is not an automatic path to victory. It does provide a favorable backdrop for this year’s campaign. But what are voters to think when they hear the GOP nominee say, as he did yesterday to CBS’s Jan Crawford, “As long as I continue to speak about the economy, I’m going to win”? That they’re dopes who don’t know the economy’s bad, but as long as the Romney campaign keeps instructing them that it is bad, they’ll react correctly and vote the incumbent out of office?

Of course Romney punctuated this criticism by riding around Lake Winnipesaukee on a jet ski, which naturally reminded everyone of the iconic shot of Kerry windsurfing off Nantucket in 2004.

Now, in response the the Vanity Fair article on Romney stashing his money in multiple foreign tax shelters, his campaign has adopted a new strategy: simply repeat the same meaningless response word for word whenever there is a question about Romney’s finances. Twice in one day, two different Romney spokespersons released the exact same unresponsive response to questions from different news organizations. From ABC News The Note:

Here’s Romney spokeswoman Amanda Henneberg’s statement to the press earlier today about reports by the AP and Vanity Fair about Romney’s offshore accounts in Bermuda:

“President Obama’s attacks on Mitt Romney have been proven false time and again. As job growth slows, manufacturing activity stalls, and our economy continues to sputter, President Obama knows he can’t make a legitimate argument for another term in office, so instead he is trying to tear down his opponent. This is just the latest example of President Obama and his political machine saying or doing anything to distract from his abysmal record over the last four years.”

And here’s Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul responding to an interview that Obama strategist David Axelrod gave to ABC News, in which he said Romney is “the most secretive candidate” since Richard Nixon:

“President Obama’s attacks on Mitt Romney have been proven false time and again. As job growth slows, manufacturing activity stalls, and our economy continues to sputter, President Obama knows he can’t make a legitimate argument for another term in office, so instead he is trying to tear down his opponent. This is just the latest example of President Obama and his political machine saying or doing anything to distract from his abysmal record over the last four years.”

We asked the Romney campaign why they’re using the same statements and will update if they respond with another statement about their statements.

In what has to be one of the best pieces I’ve read today, Joshua Green of The Boston Globe addressed Romney’s obsession with avoiding risk.

This has become a familiar pattern: a ringing affirmation of some major policy difference with President Obama, followed by a lot of vagueness about what he would do instead.

Take deficit reduction. Romney has promised to extend the entire Bush tax cut, reduce marginal rates by an additional 20 percent, cut corporate rates, and still bring down the deficit. He’s said he’ll pay for this by closing loopholes and deductions but won’t identify which ones. His campaign initially indicated that it would clarify this once Romney had sewn up the nomination. Months later, the details are still not forthcoming. Yet he routinely gives speeches denouncing Obama over the deficit and promising — somehow — to bring it under control.

Green discusses Romney’s bizarre response to the SCOTUS ruling on Arizona’s immigration law.

His campaign’s greatest obfuscation was its response to the Supreme Court’s voiding much of Arizona’s Draconian immigration law. Romney’s statement was magnificently vague, leaving unclear whether he still supported the law, as he once had. Even more remarkable was the long, circular, and ultimately fruitless exchange between his spokesman Richard Gorka and reporters trying to nail down Romney’s position. Afterward, some fellow press secretaries took to Twitter to marvel at Gorka’s capacity to dissemble.

Romney has plainly calculated that he can win without explaining what he’d do as president, and seems intent on becoming the “generic Republican candidate” that pollsters include in surveys (and that often outperform real Republicans). He seems to be making two assumptions: The country is in such dire shape that simply being against Obama is enough, and his background at Bain Capital is a sufficient qualification to get him elected. His campaign is a sustained exercise in avoiding risk.

Green calls it “the Romney Fog Machine: a great outpouring of words intended to obscure, rather than clarify, the issue at hand.”

As Green points out, the problem with this tactic is that if you don’t give specific answers to questions others will fill in the blanks for you. That is what seems to be happening with Obama’s attacks on Romney’s Bain career. How long can the Romney campaign keep this up? Only time will tell.

Thursday Reads: Mitt Romney, Casino Capitalist, and Other News

Posted: July 5, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Barack Obama, Corporate Crime, medicine, Mental Health, Mitt Romney, morning reads, The Bonus Class, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 25 Comments

Good Morning!

I hope everyone had a nice, relaxing holiday. There wasn’t a whole lot of news breaking yesterday, but I read some good reactions to the Vanity Fair Story on the many overseas tax shelters that Mitt’s Romney uses to hide his money.

Mitt Romney, Casino Capitalist

At the Nation, Ben Adler worked up an excellent summary of the VF article, highlighting the main points. Here’s his summary of a particularly disturbing part–the possibility that Bain was laundering money money for some questionable people.

§ Did Bain serve as a tax haven for foreign criminals? As Shaxson explains, “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.”

Politico seemed disapproving of the Obama campaign calling attention to the VF piece. The headline seems to suggest that it is somehow unseemly to refer to an opponent’s tax evasion methods.

From Obama campaign spokseman Ben LaBolt, on a call with Ohio reporters:

“Today we’re learning more about Mitt Romney’s bets against America. Vanity Fair’s raising important questions about Romney’s offshore accounts in foreign tax havens, including his mysterious corporation in Bermuda, his funds in the Cayman Islands, and the Swiss bank account he opened. The question is, why? Was he avoiding paying his fair share of U.S. taxes? Was he hedging against the dollar? Until he releases his tax returns from that period, Americans will never know. This raises serious questions. If he has nothing to hide, why doesn’t he just release his tax returns?”

And from Bill Burton, at Priorities:

“Today’s Vanity Fair article confirms what the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal reported but the Romney campaign falsely denied. Unlike the vast majority of Americans who pay their fair share of taxes, Mitt Romney is avoiding taxes by stashing millions of dollars in the Cayman Islands. This matters in the presidential campaign because it is just these types of loopholes for the wealthy that Romney would protect, forcing more of the tax burden onto the middle class.

Those seem like pretty good questions to me.

RalphB posted this AP article in the comments yesterday: Mystery Bermuda-based company and other undisclosed Romney assets hint at larger wealth

For nearly 15 years, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s financial portfolio has included an offshore company that remained invisible to voters as his political star rose.

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, and he has never been cited for failing to disclose information about his money. 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, according to experts in private equity, tax and campaign finance law.

Romney reported this holding on his 2010 tax form, but he did not disclose it when he ran for governor in 2001-02, even though he was required to do so. Pretty sleazy. Unfortunately, the statute of limitations on this ethics violation has expired.

Paul Krugman blogged about Romney yesterday: Off And Out With Mitt Romney.

It appears that the Obama campaign has decided to ignore the queasiness of Democrats with Wall Street ties, and go after Mitt Romney’s record at Bain. And rightly so!

After all, what is Romney’s case – that is, why does he want us to think he should be president? It’s not about ideology: Romney offers nothing but warmed-over right-wing platitudes, with an extra helping of fraudulent arithmetic, and it’s fairly obvious that even he himself doesn’t believe anything he’s saying.

Instead, his thing is competence: supposedly, his record as a successful businessman should tell us that he knows how to create jobs….[but] even if Romney were a true captain of industry, a latter-day Andrew Carnegie, this wouldn’t be a strong qualification.

In any case, however, Romney wasn’t that kind of businessman. He didn’t build businesses, he bought and sold them – sometimes restructuring them in ways that added jobs, often in ways that preserved profits but destroyed jobs, and fairly often in ways that extracted money for Bain but killed the business in the process….

Or put it a different way: Romney wasn’t so much a captain of industry as a captain of deindustrialization, making big profits for his firm (and himself) by helping to dismantle the implicit social contract that used to make America a middle-class society.

I particularly want to recommend a brilliant essay in The Nation by Robert Reich: Mitt Romney and the New Gilded Age. Reich has really dedicated himself to standing up for the 99% this year, and this piece really brings it all together and holds Romney up as the perfect symbol of “casino capitalism.”

Connect the dots of casino capitalism, and you get Mitt Romney. The fortunes raked in by financial dealmakers depend on special goodies baked into the tax code such as “carried interest,” which allows Romney and other partners in private-equity firms (as well as in many venture-capital and hedge funds) to treat their incomes as capital gains taxed at a maximum of
15 percent. This is how Romney managed to pay an average of 14 percent on more than $42 million of combined income in 2010 and 2011. But the carried-interest loophole makes no economic sense. Conservatives try to justify the tax code’s generous preference for capital gains as a reward to risk-takers—but Romney and other private-equity partners risk little, if any, of their personal wealth. They mostly bet with other investors’ money, including the pension savings of average working people. You can check out easyslots.com.

Another goodie allows private-equity partners to sock away almost any amount of their earnings into a tax-deferred IRA, while the rest of us are limited to a few thousand dollars a year. The partners can merely low-ball the value of whatever portion of their investment partnership they put away—even valuing it at zero—because the tax code considers a partnership interest to have value only in the future. This explains how Romney’s IRA is worth as much as $101 million. The tax code further subsidizes private equity and much of the rest of the financial sector by making interest on debt tax-deductible, while taxing profits and dividends. This creates huge incentives for financiers to find ways of substituting debt for equity and is a major reason America’s biggest banks have leveraged America to the hilt. It’s also why Romney’s Bain and other private-equity partnerships have done the same to the companies they buy.

These maneuvers shift all the economic risk to debtors, who sometimes can’t repay what they owe. That’s rarely a problem for the financiers who engineer the deals; they’re sufficiently diversified to withstand some losses, or they’ve already taken their profits and moved on. But piles of debt play havoc with the lives of real people in the real economy when the companies they work for can’t meet their payments, or the banks they rely on stop lending money, or the contractors they depend on go broke—often with the result that they can’t meet their own debt payments and lose their homes, cars and savings.

Reich notes that if Romney were to win the White House, he would be very different from past wealthy presidents.

We’ve had wealthy presidents before, but they have been traitors to their class—Teddy Roosevelt storming against the “malefactors of great wealth” and busting up the trusts, Franklin Roosevelt railing against the “economic royalists” and raising their taxes, John F. Kennedy appealing to the conscience of the nation to conquer poverty. Romney is the opposite: he wants to do everything he can to make the superwealthy even wealthier and the poor even poorer, and he justifies it all with a thinly veiled social Darwinism.

Obama should be holding Romney up as the personification of all that brought the economy to its knees in 2008. Why aren’t the Democrats screaming from the rooftops about it?

Part of the answer, surely, is that elected Democrats are still almost as beholden to the wealthy for campaign funds as the Republicans, and don’t want to bite the hand that feeds them. Wall Street can give most of its largesse to Romney this year and still have enough left over to tame many influential Democrats (look at the outcry from some of them when the White House took on Bain Capital). But I suspect a deeper reason for their reticence is that if they connect the dots and reveal Romney for what he is—the epitome of what’s fundamentally wrong with our economy—they’ll be admitting how serious our economic problems really are. They would have to acknowledge that the economic catastrophe that continues to cause us so much suffering is, at its root, a product of the gross inequality of income, wealth and political power in America’s new Gilded Age, as well as the perverse incentives of casino capitalism if you bother to check out these no deposit mobile casinos and connect the dots.

Please go read the whole thing. You won’t regret it.

In other news,

The Sun has been very active lately.

(SPACE.com) The sun is unleashing some powerful solar flares today (July 4) in an impressive celestial fireworks display just in time for the U.S. Independence Day holiday.

The latest solar flare erupted at 5:47 a.m. EDT (0947 GMT) and hit its peak strength eight minutes later. The flare fired off from the active sunspot AR1515 and registered as a class M5.3 solar storm on the scale used by astronomers to measure space weather, according to the Space Weather Prediction Group operated by NOAA.

Class M solar flares are powerful, but still medium-strength, sun storms that can supercharge northern lights displays on Earth. The weakest of the sun’s strong solar flares are C-class storms.

NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory spacecraft currently watching the sun also captured another solar flare this morning that reached M2 on the sun storm scale.

“As the United States is observing Independence Day, active region 1515 unleashed another M2-class solar flare,” SDO scientists wrote in an announcement posted to the mission’s Facebook and YouTube sites. The flare peaked at 12:37 a.m. EDT (0437 GMT), they added.

Here’s a video of solar flares that took place on July 4, 2012.

Breathtaking!

TV doctor Drew Pinsky, AKA Dr. Drew, is being looked at by the Feds in the GlaxoSmithKline case.

One of Glaxo’s blockbuster drugs was Wellbutrin, which was approved by the FDA to treat depression. Starting in 1999, the Justice Department says, the company “engaged in a nationwide scheme” to promote the drug to treat other conditions including weight problems, addictions, and sexual dysfunction. Pinsky was one of the experts paid to tout Wellbutrin, according to the complaint filed against Glaxo by government prosecutors….

The federal complaint says Cooney Waters, a public-relations firm hired by Glaxo to promote Wellbutrin, “hired Dr. Drew Pinsky from MTV and Loveline as a spokesperson to deliver messages about WBSR [Wellbutrin] in settings where it did not appear that Dr. Pinsky was speaking for WBSR.”

Apparently Pinsky hasn’t specifically been accused of any crime.  He told The Daily Beast that he was paid $275,000 to discuss “intimacy and depression” in a number of settings and media. He claims that all of his “comments were consistent with my clinical experience.”

Here’s one example from the federal complaint:

Pinsky said one of the ingredients in Wellbutrin “could explain a woman suddenly having 60 orgasms in one night.” The complaint against Glaxo says “Dr. Pinsky explained that one of the things he advocates for people experiencing diminished libido or arousal” is Wellbutrin.

Stephen Hawking said that he had to pay off a $100 bet that the Higgs boson particle would never be discovered. He says Peter Higgs should get the Nobel Price for predicting it.

A sunken land bridge that once was home to “tens of thousands” of people has been discovered in the North Sea between Scotland and Denmark.

‘Britain’s Atlantis’ – a hidden underwater world swallowed by the North Sea – has been discovered by divers working with science teams from the University of St Andrews.
Doggerland, a huge area of dry land that stretched from Scotland to Denmark was slowly submerged by water between 18,000 BC and 5,500 BC.

Divers from oil companies have found remains of a ‘drowned world’ with a population of tens of thousands – which might once have been the ‘real heartland’ of Europe.

A team of climatologists, archaeologists and geophysicists has now mapped the area using new data from oil companies – and revealed the full extent of a ‘lost land’ once roamed by mammoths….

The area was once the ‘real heartland’ of Europe and was hit by ‘a devastating tsunami’, the researchers claim. The wave was part of a larger process that submerged the low-lying area over the course of thousands of years.

Those are my recommendations for today.  Now it’s your turn.  What are you reading and blogging about?

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