By Bob Cesca: The formerly hilarious comedian and satirist Dennis Miller endorsed and stumped for Mitt Romney at a rally in Virginia yesterday. I have to say, even though Miller flipped to the dark side long ago and, as such, ceased to be funny, the guy can still put together an English sentence. Granted, nearly all of what he says is horseshit these days, but it’s definitely well-constructed horseshit. Still, I couldn’t help but to feel sorry for Miller as he walked onto that rally platform to the tune of a random they-all-sound-alike yickadoo country song, tasked with fluffing Romney before of a crowd of sweaty yokels. How far the once mighty have fallen.

Anyway, a couple of things jumped out at me about Miller’s remarks. First, he noted Romney’s quote from the debate in which Romney lauded his ability to work with an 87 percent “Democrat” legislature in Massachusetts. Miller went on to pitch how great it was to hear that — we can put aside partisan rancor, Miller said, and work together. The audience applauded with the full knowledge that the congressional Republicans have vowed to block everything the president proposes and are currently responsible for the highest rate of filibusters in American history. That, Dennis, is rancor.

Second, he described in effusive detail how Mitt Romney is a “good and decent man.”

Yes really. And no that wasn’t an unfunny Miller joke.

We know that Romney’s a pathological liar and will say anything he needs to say in order to make it safely through the news cycle. But what else flies in the face of being a “good and decent man?”

Whenever the chips are down, Romney leans on dog-whistles.

During Tuesday night’s debate, Romney used the deliberately truncated “Democrat Party” monicker — specifically, “Democrat Senate” and “Democrat House.” The party is called the “Democratic Party,” and the shortened “Democrat” title is only used to describe one or multiple members of the party. When discussing the House and Senate between 2009 and 2011, the proper term is “Democratic House,” and so forth.

The reason Romney used this phrase was to appeal to the extremist far-right of the party who use the epithetic and incorrect party title as a means of stripping the party of any association with democracy or democratic values, and also to childishly emphasize the “rat” syllable at the end. So yes, this allegedly good and decent man used a grade-school-recess name-calling trick that’s better reserved for Freeper comment threads than a presidential debate stage with an audience of 60 million people. Let’s put this another way, can anyone imagine a self-respecting Democratic leader like, say, President Obama using the monicker “Rethuglican Party?” I should hope not.

Later, Romney crowbarred the word “foreign” into a response about his tax plan, “We have — we have a president talking about someone’s plan in a way that’s completely foreign to what my real plan is.” He even emphasized “foreign” to make sure the Trump/Limbaugh/Taitz Birthers heard it. And as we all know, this would never be an issue if the president wasn’t African American with an immigrant birth-father from Kenya. So when Romney mentions “foreign,” he’s appealing to and participating in the same race-baiting Southern Strategy politics that’ve been the purview of malevolent, bigoted fire-eaters going back to the pre-Civil War era. By the way, there’s no better way to appeal to immigrant voters than to use “foreign” as a shameful insult. Nice one, Mr. Romney.

And do I need to get into how this good and decent man tortured his dog or assaulted a gay classmate? Those things, too.

But the lies, jerky behavior, animal abuse and racial dog-whistles are just the beginning.

This good and decent man has made his fortune by successfully disengaging whichever subroutine in his neural net that operates his capacity to act with morality and a conscience. Corporate CEOs either learn how to temporarily shut off their conscience, or they’re simply born with a sociopathic glitch that allows them to do whatever’s in the best interest of the corporation without a second thought about whether it might impact actual people and the actual environment.

CEOs and other corporate types have access to shockingly cold calculations to determine how to proceed when real lives are on the line. Take, for example, the infamous Ford Pinto Memo. When it was discovered that the Pinto’s gas tank would explode if the vehicle was rear-ended, Ford executives devised a formula for determining whether to recall the car. If the cost of the recall was more than the projected cost of a lawsuit, there wouldn’t be a recall. Good people.

Not every corporate CEO or board is faced with this brand of deadly calculus, but most of them will base their decisions on the bottom line, while utterly ignoring the human cost. In the case of Mitt Romney, it’s off-shoring American jobs and “busting out” American businesses.

Romney, in the “47 Percent” video, discussed how he “went to China to buy a factory there.” The factory was located in Dongguan and it manufactured “small appliances,” according to Romney. He went on to describe how the factory, “employed about 20,000 people. And they were almost all young women between the ages of about 18 and 22 or 23. They were saving for potentially becoming married.” Romney continued, “And uh, as we were walking through this facility, seeing them work, the number of hours they worked per day, the pittance they earned, living in dormitories with uh, with little bathrooms at the end of maybe 10, 10 room, rooms. And the rooms they have 12 girls per room. Three bunk beds on top of each other.”

CEOs have no trouble whatsoever in eliminating good-paying factory jobs in America and sending them overseas — oh, and then writing off the expenses for a solid tax deduction. While it’s important for America to pursue policies that will help developing nations, trimming our workforce in lieu of exploiting cheap labor isn’t the way to do it.

As I’ve noted on the Bubble Genius Bob & Chez Show podast, Mitt Romney and Bain Capital amassed a fortune using the Mafia-style “bust out” — the raiding and ultimate destruction of numerous companies under the guise of attempting the help them.

For example, during Romney’s days as CEO, Bain purchased a company called Dade International, an in-vitro fertilization medical company (paying attention, pro-lifers?), and then proceeded to triple the company’s debt to $900 million. According to Bloomberg’s Anthony Luzzatto Gardner, some of this debt was spent on buying back Bain’s share of the company for $242 million, while more of Dade’s credit was spent by Bain to finance other investments. Bain’s initial investment in Dade was around $30 million, and when Dade handed Romney and his co-conspirators $242 million, Bain collected an 800 percent profit. Then, when Dade could no longer afford to make payments on its debt, it filed for bankruptcy. After Bain paid back their own creditors for the initial purchase of Dade, it walked away with net $216 million. Again, an 800 percent profit. 1,700 American workers lost their jobs.

This is a good and decent man?

It continues to confound reason how half of this nation is planning to vote for a well-known vulture capitalist to run our national economy — to make critical decisions that impact American jobs and the stability of the free world in the wake of a disastrous recession that was precipitated in part by similarly nefarious investments. This is a man whose most frequently used business model was to buy a company, rack up massive debt in its name to buy other companies, bankrupt it, fire its workers and then walk away with significant personal profit. That’s literally the “bust out” Henry Hill describes in Goodfellas.

Whenever I hear low-information voters derp their way through a word salad about how Romney’s business experience makes him qualified to be president, I want to ask them, “What part of his business experience exactly?” Dennis Miller said that Romney’s skill set makes him an expert at fixing things. He didn’t fix anything at Dade and only used the company to finance other acquisitions and to enrich his personal array of offshore tax shelters.

My advice to anyone who’s thinking about voting for Romney to be the steward of our economy is very simply this: don’t walk away, run. Mitt Romney is an awful and immoral man whose record proves he wouldn’t lose a wink of sleep while doing whatever he needs to, no matter how twisted, to help one person: Mitt Romney.

I’ve been receiving mail and comments in regards to our piece on Romney’s dishonesty regarding his personal fortune, some of which was critical of the headline we put up. “Mitt Romney is being fundamentally dishonest about how much money he has” was apparently misleading according to several readers because we didn’t provide conclusive evidence that Mitt Romney is hiding hundreds of millions of dollars in bank accounts and investments around the world. Wrote one reader:

The charge in your headline is definitive. Nothing in the story is, and you have no empirical data with which to base that claim.

We thought long and hard about the title of the piece, weighing up just how accusatory we wanted it to sound. Given there is no way of knowing exactly how much Romney is worth – because he won’t disclose it – we couldn’t flat out accuse him of hiding money. However, given the unprecedented measures he has taken to protect that status of his wealth (as outlined in the piece) the one thing we know for sure is that Romney is being completely dishonest about how much money he has. Otherwise he would, like every other Presidential candidate for the past 40 years, have released his tax returns over the past decade. George W. Bush released 13 years worth of tax returns in 2004, and John McCain 23 years in 2008. Romney has released just two. Romney would have also disclosed where he keeps his money (he hasn’t), and his continued investing relationship with Bain (he didn’t).

Asserting that Romney is being fundamentally dishonest about how much money he has, is quite frankly, stating the obvious.

Looking at all the evidence, it seems highly unlikely that Romney is worth the $250 million his campaign is claiming he is, and we were not afraid to point that out. At no point did we directly state that Romney is far richer than he is claiming – we stated that it is extremely likely that he is given the other theories don’t add up. There is a difference. From the piece:

The end result of going through the numbers, comparing Romney to his former peers and looking at what is publicly available on how he has set up the management of his money leads to one conclusion: Mitt Romney is most definitely hiding something.

We don’t know exactly what Romney is hiding, but we do know for a fact he is hiding something, which actually makes our headline rather tame.

 

 

By Ben Cohen: Two weeks ago, we broke a story on The Daily Banter about the potential of Mitt Romney having a lot more money than he is claiming. I had received a tip off from a source inside the banking industry that Romney is in fact a billionaire, not a millionaire, and after going through the numbers there seemed to be significant evidence that would indicate it to be true.

The distinction between millionaire and billionaire is academic to 95% of the population, but Romney’s finances are about more than just the numbers. If he is worth significantly more than his campaign is officially claiming, it goes to the heart of a troubling theme that has defined his run at the presidency — and that is one of extreme dishonesty and outright lying.

Last week, former investment banker and Bloomberg columnist William Cohan penned a piece for the Washington Post outlining pretty much the same thing. In an article titled ‘Mitt Romney is worth $250 million. Why so little?’ Cohan explored the murky nature of Romney’s investments, his lack of transparency and the glaring fact that all of Romney’s competitors  are billionaires, and he isn’t.

Cohan wrote:

We know that the other people who founded private-equity firms around the same time that Romney and his partners started Bain, and who had to make do with a lower fee structure, are far richer than Romney. These men — Henry Kravis and his cousin George Roberts, the founders of KKR & Co.; the late Teddy Forstmann, the founder of Forstmann Little; David Bonderman and Jim Coulter, the founders of TPG Capital; Leon Black, the founder of Apollo Global Management; Steve Schwarzman and Pete Peterson, the founders of the Blackstone Group; David Rubenstein, the founder of the Carlyle Group; and Jonathan Nelson, the founder of Providence Equity Partners — each have a net worth measured in the billions. Schwarzman, with a fortune greater than $5 billion, is the wealthiest buyout mogul, according to the latest Forbes 400 list.

The glaring disparity in wealth between Romney and his peers should have raised some eyebrows in the media, but apparently it hasn’t leaving a few solitary journalists to try and find out exactly why Romney did so badly compared to his competitors. Cohan takes a good stab at it going through the numbers (with greater rigor than we did — after all he spent 17 years on Wall Street as a mergers and acquisitions banker), concluding in his piece that the sums really don’t add up. There are of course many different plausible explanations as to why Romney didn’t make as much money as his peers — Cohan discusses the possibility that Romney gave larger equity stakes to his partners than would have been the norm, or that Bain wasn’t as well capitalized as other firms when Romney was there for example — but given Romney won’t release his tax returns pre-2010, they are just theories.

I got in touch with Cohan to discuss his piece, discovering that he was surprised anyone else in the media had picked up on the story. “I was pretty savaged for attempting to make the same suggestion that you did,” Cohan told me.

Apparently Washington Post readers are a little more conservative than ours as we received mainly positive feedback about the piece, as opposed to the venom Cohan was subjected to. “The WaPo should be ashamed, but they gave that up long ago when it became a largely DNC talking point replication machine,” wrote one commenter. And that was one of the nicer ones.

Despite the savaging, Cohan still maintained that the public numbers available on Romney’s fortune are completely inexplicable — and he believes his background on Wall Street makes him qualified to judge accurately.

“I noticed that no one was really picking up on it and I wanted to write that,” said Cohan of his piece. “But first of all, you either have to have worked with private equity firms, or worked on Wall St sufficiently to wonder about it yourself. Last time I checked there really weren’t that many journalists who also worked on Wall Street for a long time let alone cover private equity firms.”

And given the political persuasion of most people actually in private equity, speaking out about Romney’s shady finances isn’t exactly the done thing.

“I don’t think anyone in private equity land would be interested in raising this issue because a) they don’t want to raise the whole issue of their own wealth in the media, and b) they basically support the guy, so why would they do anything that might impinge on that support?” said Cohan.

“I talked to a number of private equity people, and no surprise, they are by-in-large completely supporting Romney,” he continued. “So I sensed a certain amount of reluctance on their part to broach this topic. You know, I think the consensus was that they thought he was worth considerably more than he said.”

When doing the research for the piece we broke on The Daily Banter, I too spoke to people in private equity, none of whom would go on the record, and all of whom believed Romney was worth considerably more than he was claiming by virtue of how much money Bain was raking in when Romney was there.

To put it in perspective, under Romney’s leadership Bain charged its investors fees an average of 50 percent higher than those of its competitors. Typically, standard industry fees were two percent of the money under management and 20 percent of the profits on individual deals. In contrast, Romney managed to get a three percent fee and 30 percent of profits, solely for the privilege of investing with Bain.

“They were making so much money that they were allowed to do three and 30 as opposed to two and 20,” says Cohan. “So it’s just completely illogical that he’s not worth much more money… Even his own colleague is worth more than he is and he’s been there less time? It just makes no sense. Of course with all of his peers being worth billions…the whole thing is just ridiculous.”

The exact nature of Romney’s invested fortune and his continued relationship with Bain is highly secretive, but we do know that Romney still has the right to make passive investments in Bain through his blind trust (which isn’t exactly blind given his personal lawyer controls it),  and that Bain is now worth an astonishing amount of money. Bloomberg News reported the following:

With Bain Capital valued at about $11 billion, Romney’s stake would be worth about $1.32 billion, the data show. Bain’s estimated value is based on the assets under management valuation ratio of KKR and TPG, two similarly sized private-equity firms with comparable businesses, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Those figures don’t take into account some profits derived from successful investments.

Charlyn Lusk, a spokeswoman for Bain Capital who works at Stanton Public Relations & Marketing, declined to comment.

When Romney retired as CEO, he entered into an agreement with the Boston-based firm to retain the right to make passive investments in certain Bain Capital entities until 2009, according to financial disclosures he has filed. The exact terms of how Romney in those years participated as a passive investor and former partner aren’t clear, said Dartmouth’s Blaydon. In the decade after he left, Bain Capital’s assets under management increased more than 16 times to its current $65 billion.

The end result of going through the numbers, comparing Romney to his former peers and looking at what is publicly available on how he has set up the management of his money leads to one conclusion: Mitt Romney is most definitely hiding something.

“Romney already said that he paid taxes during those years [pre 2010] although he wouldn’t release them because the claim had been made by the majority leader [Harry Reid] that he hadn’t,” says Cohan. “The only explanation that I’m left with is that it will show his net worth is worth considerably more than he said. And I’m sure that would be highly embarrassing and would make him out to be yet again, a liar.”

“If you just do the math like I did based on his income tax that you know about, the dividends and interest income, the underlying portfolio has to be bigger than the 250 itself on that fact alone,” he continued. “You add all these things up and he just has to be – you give him credit for charity, even if you give him credit for 10%, which is what they say he does, you know 10% for charity, $100 million in a trust for his kids, it still doesn’t make sense.”

For Cohan, the matter is more than academic as it plays into a wider pattern of deception and dishonesty that we have seen from Romney — a man who wants to hold the highest office of the land.

“Its like why aren’t the American people entitled to know this?” he asked. “I mean he still has investments in Bain, he still has investments in Goldman hedge funds, he still has investments in other hedge funds, aren’t we entitled to know where his potential conflicts of interests may lie? Aren’t we entitled to know  whether he’s been lying to us about his net worth?”

Finally, I asked Cohan whether he believed the alternative theories held much weight — the notion that Romney missed out on the glory years at Bain, or was so generous with his money that he chose sharing over gigantic profits for himself. The response was pretty blunt.

“As I said, he’s either lying, or he was not that good at private equity and maybe we should all rethink whether he knows anything about the economy.”

 

By Theodoric Meyer: With the documents Mitt Romney released recently, we know a bit more about his taxes.

We know, for instance, that Romney paid a rate of 14.1 percent on $13.7 million in income on his 2011 tax return, which he achieved by purposely overpaying. Though he was entitled to deduct $4 million in charitable contributions, Romney deducted only $2.25 million to keep his tax rate above 13 percent.

(Romney, it has been pointed out, could file an amended return to claim the full deduction after the election. We’ve contacted the Romney campaign, and Michele Davis, a spokeswoman, assured us he would not do so.)

We know, according to a letter from his accountants at PricewaterhouseCoopers, that Romney has paid state and federal income taxes each year since at least 1990, which would seem to disprove Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s claim in July that Romney had not paid any taxes for a decade.

And we know that Romney’s tax rate since 1990 never dipped below 13.66 percent, according to his accountants. Romney paid an average effective tax rate between 1990 and 2009 of 20.2 percent.

But there’s still a lot we don’t know. “I think most of the major questions we had before [last Friday] are still out there,” said Brian Galle, a tax law professor at Boston College. Here are a few:

How much did Romney make before 2010?

While Romney has disclosed his average effective tax rate for the last two decades, he hasn’t said how much he earned in those years or how much — the dollar amount — he paid in taxes.

That’s an important distinction, said Daniel Shaviro, a tax law professor at New York University. Various tax-planning strategies may have enabled Romney to reduce his adjusted gross income in some years.

In 2008, for instance, investors everywhere lost money when the stock market tanked. Romney may have carried those losses forward, Shaviro said, and used them to reduce his adjusted gross income in 2009. While we know Romney paid at least 13.66 percent of the income he recorded on his taxes in a given year, we don’t know what percentage he paid of the money actually took home that year.

Why is Romney’s IRA worth so much?

Much of Romney’s wealth sits in his IRA, which is worth as much as $101.6 million. It’s a remarkable number, in part because Romney would have been able to contribute a maximum of $30,000 a year to his IRA while he was at Bain, from 1984 to 1999.

Galle, the Boston College tax law professor, said the most likely explanation for the outsized IRA is that Romney put in shares in Bain investments that swelled in value. According to the Wall Street Journal, Bain allowed employees to buy a special class of shares in the firm’s investments. The shares didn’t cost very much, but they could be extremely lucrative. In one deal, the Journal reported, “some Bain employees saw a 583-fold increase” in the value of their shares — an astronomical return. Because the shares were in IRAs, the profits could be plowed into new Bain deals without subtracting taxes.

Romney also may have beefed up his IRA by contributing “carried interest” — a share of the profits in funds managed by Bain. As Reuters reported earlier this year, any potential carried interest would “not be disclosed in his personal financial summary or on a federal income tax return.” In other words, even if Romney released all his tax returns, we still might not know exactly how he accumulated his huge IRA.

What about Romney’s investments offshore?

We know many of Romney’s IRA investments are based in foreign countries but it’s hard to know how much. He valued one account in the Cayman Islands at anywhere between $5 million and $25 million.

One thing we do know is that Romney pays a far lower tax rate overseas than he does here. According to Quartz, Romney paid only 2.4 percent in foreign taxes in 2011 on the $3.5 million he earned abroad.

We also know where Romney’s current overseas investments are held —Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, Switzerland, Luxembourg — and many of the firms he has invested in, including a state-owned Chinese oil company and a Chinese bank that Romney’s family trusts sold their stake in last year. But we don’t have a lot of other important documentation, including forms would show whether Romney had, as the New York Times has reported, “over the years declared all of his foreign income to the IRS in a timely manner.”

The Wall Street Journal has reported that Romney’s offshore IRA investments likely helped him avoid a little-known tax called the unrelated business income tax. The tax, “meant to discourage tax-exempt entities such as an IRA or college endowment fund from unfairly competing with for-profit, taxpaying entities by operating a business without paying taxes on it,” could have hit Romney at up to 35 percent.

The Romney campaign seems unlikely to release any more information about his finances, but that hasn’t kept reporters from digging it up. Bloomberg, for instance, analyzed securities filings to report last Thursday that Romney has set up a type of trust known as an “I Dig It” trust — a legal way for Romney to avoid estate and gift taxes and pass some of his fortune onto future generations.

(Originally posted at ProPublica)

By Ben Cohen: If you want to understand the type of country a politician wants to build, it is often a good idea to take a look into the life they built for themselves before stepping onto the national stage. Obviously it’s not the only indicator, but someone who has dedicated their life to public service would be more likely to have a more socially minded vision for the country as opposed to a businessman who has spent a lifetime dedicated to profit making.

Let’s take the two Presidential candidates this year. One of them, Barack Obama was a community organizer and a law professor, while the other, Mitt Romney worked exclusively in private equity and asset management.

During his tenure as President, Obama has to a degree reflected the life he led before coming into office. The President has fought to maintain the social safety net and provide support for the poorest people in America. His record on civil rights is not fantastic, but his commitment to using what is left of government to do good from an economic standpoint is fairly clear. He passed the stimulus package, reformed health care and extended unemployment, all in the face of an opposition that did everything in its power to stop him.

Mitt Romney on the other hand has spent most of his adult life making extraordinary amounts of money through private equity, and a short spell in government passing tax cuts for the wealthy.

The picture is obviously more complicated than this – Obama’s record on standing up to Wall St is pretty desultory and his policy is certainly not reflective of his social background or rhetoric, and Romney passed a widely praised health care plan in Massachusetts that did benefit the economically disadvantaged.

But as a whole, the difference is pretty clear – at least for office in 2012. The community organizer from a disadvantaged background is running on a platform to help the poor and middle classes, while the private equity rich kid is running on a platform to almost exclusively cater to the rich at the expense of everyone else.

If you look more closely at Mitt Romney’s professional background, a very disturbing picture emerges. Matt Taibbi’s excellent piece in Rolling Stone takes a good stab at trying to understand Romney’s pre-political life and his world view, and it’s a pretty frightening account of his life as a modern capitalist titan. Writes Taibbi:

Romney was a prime mover in the radical social and political transformation that was cooked up by Wall Street beginning in the 1980s. In fact, you can trace the whole history of the modern age of financialization just by following the highly specific corner of the economic universe inhabited by the leveraged buyout business, where Mitt Romney thrived. If you look at the number of leveraged buyouts dating back two or three decades, you see a clear pattern: Takeovers rose sharply with each of Wall Street’s great easy-money schemes, then plummeted just as sharply after each of those scams crashed and burned, leaving the rest of us with the bill.

In the Eighties, when Romney and Bain were cutting their teeth in the LBO business, the primary magic trick involved the junk bonds pioneered by convicted felon Mike Milken, which allowed firms like Bain to find easy financing for takeovers by using wildly overpriced distressed corporate bonds as collateral. Junk bonds gave the Gordon Gekkos of the world sudden primacy over old-school industrial titans like the Fords and the Rockefellers: For the first time, the ability to make deals became more valuable than the ability to make stuff, and the ability to instantly engineer billions in illusory financing trumped the comparatively slow process of making and selling products for gradual returns.

Romney basically helped pioneer a horrific form of vulture capitalism that saw financial trickery and leverage as legitimate ways of creating inordinate amounts of wealth through massive amounts of debt. The trick at Bain was to buy companies with other people’s money, load them with debt, then get out before the house burnt down with a massive pay off for themselves. It worked brilliantly – at least for Romney and his fellow finance pals – but not so much for the companies that were often left crippled by the deals they made. As Jesse Eisinger at ProPublicanotes:

The Wall Street Journal found that many of the businesses Bain bought went bust, even when Bain reaped big financial wins. The paper analyzed 77 businesses Bain invested in while Mr. Romney led the firm from its 1984 start until early 1999, finding that 22 percent either filed for bankruptcy reorganization or closed their doors by the end of the eighth year after Bain first invested. An additional 8 percent ran into so much trouble that all of the money Bain invested was lost. .

It is stunning that a candidate running almost exclusively on reducing the deficit spent a lifetime accumulating debt for other people then walking away as they crumbled underneath it. But no matter for Romney who has always emerged unscathed from the looting his company engaged in. He’s a multi millionaire, and proof at least in his own head that anyone can make it in America.

Mitt Romney is running on a platform to codify this type of vulture capitalism, and astonishingly, he picked a running mate even more extreme than him. Writes Ezra Klein:

In picking Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney has doubled down on his own campaign promise to give big tax breaks to the wealthy, uniting himself with a candidate who goes even further to do so: While Romney would bring taxes for top incomes down to 28 percent, Ryan has proposed bringing the top rate down even lower, to 25 percent. Meanwhile, Ryan’s plan would actually increase the effective tax rate on the very poorest Americans by getting rid of tax breaks that benefit low earners.

So this is the world envisioned by Romney and his side kick Ryan – a bleak, cutthroat society where the poor are left to fend for themselves and the rich given more power and control over everyone’s lives with the explicit protection of the federal government. Says Taibbi:

Obama ran on “change” in 2008, but Mitt Romney represents a far more real and seismic shift in the American landscape. Romney is the frontman and apostle of an economic revolution, in which transactions are manufactured instead of products, wealth is generated without accompanying prosperity, and Cayman Islands partnerships are lovingly erected and nurtured while American communities fall apart. The entire purpose of the business model that Romney helped pioneer is to move money into the archipelago from the places outside it, using massive amounts of taxpayer-subsidized debt to enrich a handful of billionaires. It’s a vision of society that’s crazy, vicious and almost unbelievably selfish, yet it’s running for president, and it has a chance of winning. Perhaps that change is coming whether we like it or not. Perhaps Mitt Romney is the best man to manage the transition. But it seems a little early to vote for that kind of wholesale surrender.

Matt Taibbi has a good point when it comes to attacking Romney for apparently not paying any taxes (a fact yet to be proved):

What they [the Democrats] should be doing instead is hammering Romney on the missing returns, yes, but focusing even more on the returns he did release. We’ve known for seven months now, for instance, that Romney paid $3 million in federal taxes in 2010 on $21.7 million in taxable revenue, an effective tax rate of 13.9 percent. Which, as most people know, is less than half the rate most people pay on their income tax.

When Romney released these numbers, he said they were “entirely legal and fair,” and added, “I’m proud of the fact that I pay a lot of taxes.”

The Romney tax returns are a prime example of our increasingly two-tiered bureaucratic system, in which there is one set of rules for poor and middle-class people, and another set of rules for people like Mitt Romney.

And sadly, Taibbi is probably right about why Obama isn’t:

Barack Obama is one of the few politicians with the communication skills to explain this to middle America, but he’s refusing to go there, probably because he’s still hoping for a post-election rapprochement with Wall Street. He wants to go after Bain Capital, but not private equity in general; he wants to go after Mitt Romney’s missing tax returns, but not the tax returns of all people like Mitt Romney.

I posted about this earlier today where I argued we’re unlikely to see the Democrats make much real movement on the tax code or financial regulation, because in reality, it’s politically suicidal. No Wall St or rich people backing, no Presidency.

Harry Reid’s accusation that Mitt Romney paid no federal taxes in 10 years took a new twist as the Senate Majority leader took the issue to the Senate floor. From the LA Times:

Reid’s allegations, which he has refused to substantiate, are taking the issue to a new level.

The Democrat, in remarks to the Senate this morning, said that “the word’s out that he [Romney] hasn’t paid any taxes for 10 years.”

Of course, that “word” has come from none other than Reid himself.  Since last month, when he alleged in a Senate floor speech that Romney “basically paid no taxes in the prior twelve years,” the Nevada Democrat has continued to hammer away at the topic.

Reid has said he learned about Romney’s taxes earlier this summer from an investor in Bain Capital who, he said, called his office to pass along the information.  The senator has refused to identify the investor and has acknowledged that he can’t be certain about the veracity of the charges he’s been spreading.

In a conference call with Nevada reporters on Wednesday, he broadened what he said were his sources for the contention that Romney was able to avoid federal taxes.

“I have had a number of people tell me that,” said Reid, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal , while refusing to elaborate. “I don’t think the burden should be on me,” Reid told home-state reporters. “The burden should be on him. He’s the one I’ve alleged has not paid any taxes. Why didn’t he release his tax returns?”

I’m all for going after Romney on his extremely dubious record at Bain Capital, but having ‘a number of people’ telling Reid off the record that Romney paid no taxes whatsoever doesn’t cut it. The burden is not on Romney to prove every single accusation hurled at him, particularly when they are completely unsubstantiated. It is extremely important that Romney release all his taxes for the last 10 years for the public to see, but not because Harry Reid claims that he hasn’t paid any. If Reid has some evidence, he has a responsibility to produce if he is going to continue making the accusations in public.

This week on The Daily Banter, we looked at Mitt Romney’s deceptive use of racist language, and broke down why the ongoing Bain Capital story is so important. We looked at the ‘Money Honey’ Maria Bartiromo’s consistent disregard for the facts on Wall St scandals, and Chez asked whether Aaron Sorkin’s ‘The Newsroom’ could actually make a difference to America’s news media. We analyzed ego maniac Anthony Weiner’s proposed comeback to politics. Bob ran an important series on the new voter ID laws that could hinder 5 million people from voting, and compared them to the Jim Crow laws.

Have a great weekend!

Ben, Editor.

I know, I know, the people responsible for running Barack Obama’s media campaign are the same people who sell you Pepsi, but the new campaign video is actually pretty good (and accurate):

I’ve been wondering about this whole ‘retro actively’ retired business for a couple of days and have been trying to figure out exactly what it means. And I think the video hits the nail on the head – it means Romney figured out that Bain Capital did a lot of heinous stuff while he was there, so he decided to tell everyone that he left the company before he actually did.  Clever, right? Except it’s hilariously easy to disprove.

Chief neo-con propagandist Charles Krauthammer has been doing the rounds defending Romney’s time at Bain Capital. Here he is lying about Romney’s record:

Obama starts with the attack on the [Romney] outsourcing. It’s shown to be false. If there was any, it happened after Romney left Bain. So then the Obama people return with a second falsehood that Romney was running Bain until 2002. All the evidence is he was not.

Krauthammer is simply making this up, as admitted by Romney himself, and Bain’s public record (from Boston.com):

Romney’s team has not wavered from its position that he had no involvement with Bain Capital after Feb. 11, 1999. The firm has backed him, despite submitting Securities and Exchange Commission filings that name Romney as “sole stockholder, chairman of the board, chief executive officer, and president” long after that date.

Krauthammer is continuing the neo con tradition of inventing reality to fit its ideology, no matter how blatant the truth is. Writes Andrew Sullivan:

What’s striking here is the lack of any relationship to reality. “All the evidence?” Is it simply impossible for neocons to admit they have made a mistake? Or do they have to keep on lying for ever?

Yes, they do. An aid to the Bush White House (later suspected to be Karl Rove) once told a reporter about the neo conservative version of reality:

We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

Neo cons are convinced that if they keep lying, at some point, the lie becomes reality no matter how absurd. Want to create a capitalist utopia in Iraq despite mass opposition and civil war? Just say its working and it is! Want Mitt Romney not to be involved with Bain when he clearly was? Just say so, and magically, he wasn’t! Krauthammer has discovered a very neat debating trick that allows him to pedal his gibberish without fear of being wrong. Even if you prove he is, it doesn’t matter, because Krauthammer will just say otherwise.