UAW, CREW File Ethics Charges Against Romney for Hiding Auto Bailout Profits

Posted: November 1, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, Mitt Romney, open thread, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | 39 Comments

United Auto Workers (UAW) President Bob King and the Center for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington (CREW) will hold a press conference at 2PM today to announce that they are filing formal ethics charges against Mitt Romney with the US Office of Government Ethics for

improperly hid[ing] a profit of $15.3 million to $115.0 million in Ann Romney’s so-called “blind” trust.

The union chief says, “The American people have a right to know about Gov. Romney’s potential conflicts of interest, such as the profits his family made from the auto rescue,” “It’s time for Gov. Romney to disclose or divest.”

The ethics complaint is based on investigative research by Greg Palast, published in The Nation on October 17. Briefly:

The Romneys’ gigantic windfall was hidden inside an offshore corporation inside a limited partnership inside a trust which both concealed the gain and reduces taxes on it.

According to ethics law expert Dan Curry who drafted the ethics complaint, Ann Romney does not have a federally-approved blind trust. An approved “blind” trust may not be used to hide a major investment which could be affected by Romney if he were to be elected President. Other groups joining the UAW and CREW include Public Citizen, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Public Campaign, People for the American Way and The Social Equity Group….

In 2009, Ann Romney partnered with her husband’s key donor, billionaire Paul Singer, who secretly bought a controlling interest in Delphi Auto, the former GM auto parts division. Singer’s hedge fund, Elliott Management, threatened to cut off GM’s supply of steering columns unless GM and the government’s TARP auto bailout fund provided Delphi with huge payments. While the US treasury complained this was “extortion,” the hedge funds received, ultimately, $12.9 billion in taxpayer subsidies.

Singer’s fund ended up making $1.27 billion, after which he moved all Dephi production to Mexico along with 25,000 UAW jobs. The goal of the ethics complaint is to force the Romneys to reveal how much profit the made off this sleazy deal.

Feel free to use this as an open thread.

Billionaire Who Cleaned Up on Subprime Mortgage Foreclosures Hosts Secret Romney Fund Raiser

Posted: April 28, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, Surreality, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics, Voter Ignorance | Tags: , , , , , , | 42 Comments

I just came across this in The Daily Beast and had to share.

Mitt Romney held a high-dollar fundraiser Thursday night at the home of John Paulson, the controversial hedge-fund billionaire who made a fortune shorting the housing market and subprime mortgages in 2007.

New York grocery billionaire John Catsimatidis told The Daily Beast the fundraiser, at Paulson’s posh townhouse at 9 East 86th Street on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, was a “big-dollar event” for wealthy donors like himself “fighting for the soul of America.” The Romney campaign did not return requests for information about the fundraiser—which was not listed on the candidate’s public schedule. Paulson’s publicist, Armel Leslie, also did not return calls seeking comment.

A neighbor who witnessed the event from across the street described it to The Daily Beast as a large crowd of “older white people, mostly men,” who started showing up around 7:30 p.m. Thursday. Around 8 p.m., sirens started blaring as more and more people started to show. There was security at the door as well as a police car on the street.

Then things became quiet until the sirens started up at 9:30 p.m. An SUV tried to block 86th Street, but New York drivers characteristically went around it. Then, as the security stood in the street, Romney emerged from the townhouse, “looking tall and neat.” He took off his suit jacket and climbed into the SUV.

The Daily Beast says this is a departure for Romney, since Paulson is one of the people who caused the economic crisis and who made obscene profits from it–Paulson made 3.7 billion on foreclosures. But I googled and found that Paulson also hosted a ritzy fundraiser for Romney at his (Paulson’s) Southhampton home last summer.

Interestingly, Paulson and fellow hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer (another big Romney donor) also made big bucks from the auto industry bailout, according to a February article by Greg Palast.

Gov. Romney…asserted that the Obama Administration’s support for General Motors was a, “payoff for the auto workers union.” However, union workers in GM’s former auto parts division, Delphi, the unit taken over by Romney’s funders, did not fare so well. The speculators eliminated every single union job from the parts factories once manned by 25,200 UAW members.

The two hedge fund operators turned a breathtaking three-thousand percent profit on a relatively negligible investment by using hardball tactics against the US Treasury and their own employees.

Under the control of the speculators, Delphi, which had 45 plants in the US and Canada, is now reduced to just four factories with only 1,500 hourly workers, none of them UAW members, despite the union agreeing to cut contract wages by two thirds.

It wasn’t supposed to be quite so bad. The Obama Administration and GM had arranged for a private equity investor to provide half a billion dollars in new capital for Delphi, but that would have cut the pay-out to Singer and Paulson. The speculators blocked the Obama-GM plan, taking the entire government bail-out hostage. Even the Wall Street Journal’s Dealmaker column was outraged, accusing Paul Singer of treating the auto company, “like a third world country.”

Romney and Paulson both graduated from Harvard Business School and each went to work for The Boston Consulting Group soon after. I don’t know if they were at Harvard and BCG at the same time, but it seems possible. Wikipedia has a list of famous people who came out of BCG, including Jeffrey Immelt and Benjamin Netanyahu. These are truly Romney’s people.

As I’ve written a number of times, Barack Obama was Wall Street’s candidate in 2008, but Mitt Romney IS Wall Street. Just reading about these guys scares the sh%t out of me!