The Offshore Candidate - Vanity Fair

THE OFFSHORE CANDIDATE
Secret Accounts, Tax Loopholes, Mysterious I.R.A....
Check, Check And Check

Where the Money Lives

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.

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/2012 ... e-accounts

Long...But interesting.

Hmmmm. Sure are a lot of things in not-so-blind trusts that they don't want to talk about. Sure is a lot of detail on how they took over companies, leveraged them up to the hilt, pocketed the money...($92million AVERAGE extraction)...then screwed the employees, screwed the companies, put them into bankruptcy, left the carcass to rot.

Yep, sure sounds like someone I'd vote for.........................Not.

Who cares that he has offshore assets he would rather keep private? I don't.

Who cares that Bain capital occasionally had to layoff people to turn companies around, I don't.

What America needs is a President who is capable and Barack Obama isn't.

Who cares? A LOT of voters, obviously...Since BOTH campaigns are acknowledging that the "Bain Capital" narrative isn't working, and the ads pointing out the vulture-capitalism ARE working. The fact that you and the rest of the Kool-Aid drinkers DON'T care is really irrelevant. You'll vote for "Not-Obama" anyway, no matter what.

And you STILL don't have any answers other than "He's not Obama"....I wonder if Gov "I'm Not Obama" realizes that running on "I'm not Obama" is not going to be enough...since apparently he doesn't have a single idea that isn't recycled George W. Bush drivel that's been proven not to work?





I realize it's so hard to come up with pro-Gov Etch-a-Sketch talking points, when they change hourly, depending on who he is talking to.

I have to agree with LJ on this one. Romney's wealth is going to hurt him with some voters, mostly independents and undecideds. it's up to Romney how well he explains it and makes his case for his economic policies. That's just reality, there are plenty of people who despise wealth and success, and class warfare is in high gear in this country.

Voters are not going to give two sh*t's about who has what money where. All the members of congress and the executive branch have money, investments and financial portfolio's that anyone of us could only dream of having. The only people who don't have a lot of money is Obama's campaign. Obama may want to consider going offshore for a few donations.

I love to see LJ spin around like a top. Spin, spin, spin...

LOL wrote: I have to agree with LJ on this one. Romney's wealth is going to hurt him with some voters, mostly independents and undecideds. it's up to Romney how well he explains it and makes his case for his economic policies. That's just reality, there are plenty of people who despise wealth and success, and class warfare is in high gear in this country.

And it's the independents and undecideds that matter. Partisans on both sides are not going to switch their votes. It's only "class warfare" when the lower classes fight back.

Since I know you didn't bother to actually read the article, here are a couple of interesting excerpts:

Mitt’s and Ann’s I.R.A.’s have also been receiving profit interest from (mostly Cayman Island–based) Bain Capital funds that were set up long after he had left the company, in 1999. For example, the 2010 return reveals a profits interest in a Cayman-based fund called Bain Capital Partners (AM) X LP, which was transferred to the Ann D. Romney trust in October 2010. An attachment to the return says the Ann D. Romney trust is “performing services” to the partnership, which is boilerplate language for these kinds of filings. Her blind trust could receive lightly taxed income from Bain Capital for years to come, well into the presidential term her husband hopes to win.

But administrative guidance says you can do this kind of thing only if the compensation is in recognition of past services you have provided. “This should not mean retired from the mother ship 10 years out and getting profits you had nothing to do with,” Sheppard says, adding that Romney can get away with it because of excessive “administrative indulgences” that have allowed a “perversion of the law in favor of a small class of overcompensated investment managers.”

Then brutal cost cutting began. Bain cut R&D spending to an average of 8 percent of sales, a little more than half what its competitors were doing. Cindy Hewitt, Dade’s human-resources manager, remembers how the firm closed a Puerto Rico plant in 1998, a year after harvesting $7.1 million in local tax breaks aimed at job creation, and relocated some staff to Miami, then the company’s most profitable plant. Based on re­a­ssur­ances she had received from her superiors, she told those uprooting themselves from Puerto Rico that their jobs in Miami were safe for now—but then Bain closed the Miami plant. “Whether you want to call it misled, or lied, or manipulated, I do not believe they provided full information about what discussions were under way,” she says. “I would never want to be part of even unintentionally treating people so poorly.”

Bain engaged in startling penny-pinching with the laid-off employees. Their contracts stipulated that if they left early they would have to pay back the costs of relocating to Miami—but in spite of all that Dade had done to them, it refused to release the employees from this clause. “They said they would go after them for that money if they left before Bain was finished with them,” Hewitt recalls. Not only that, but the company declined to give workers their severance pay in lump sums to help them fund their return home.

In 1999, generous pensions were converted into less generous benefits, wages were cut, and more staff members were laid off. Some employees contacted Norman Stein, then the director of the pension-counseling clinic at the University of Alabama law school, with a view to challenging the conversions. Stein says the employees were “extraordinarily nervous,” so fearful, in fact, that they refused to let lawyers even make copies of pension documents. “I have been dealing with pensions issues for over 25 years and I never saw anything like this,” recalls Stein. The spooked employees did not go to court. Stein says that, while breaking pension contracts like this was not unheard of, the practice at that time was “questionable,” adding that Dade may have saved $10 to $40 million from converting its pensions.

Yessireebob, just your average "experience in business" vulture capitalist, screwing the employees for fun and profit.

And some of you think this will play well with average voters... Good luck with that...

Democracy4Sale wrote:

LOL wrote: I have to agree with LJ on this one. Romney's wealth is going to hurt him with some voters, mostly independents and undecideds. it's up to Romney how well he explains it and makes his case for his economic policies. That's just reality, there are plenty of people who despise wealth and success, and class warfare is in high gear in this country.

And it's the independents and undecideds that matter. Partisans on both sides are not going to switch their votes. It's only "class warfare" when the lower classes fight back.

For the first two years of his presidency, Obama had a fully Democratic Congress at his disposal. Americans decided they didn’t like that state of play, and elected Republicans into the House in droves in 2010 for precisely the purpose of frustrating President Obama’s awful plans. That’s the way the system works — kindly get over it, and please stop acting like the lack of bipartisanship in Congress right now is some sort of travesty of justice.

Sorry, ButtUglyTwinWhore...Can't hear a word you're saying...

Let Obama burn all the Bain capital crap and mysterious wealth now, along with too many campaign funds. By October, the people will be tired of hearing it. And his coffers will be empty. Axelrod is playing a dangerous game betting they can replace those funds when too many of his supporters are already tapped out, or not willing to spend money on a second term to Barack.
Advantage: Colorado citizens who won't have to see anti-Romney ads in September & October.