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Tax Fairness High on the President’s List & a Video on Mitt’s Offshore Accounts

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Greg Sargent is reporting in his Morning Round-up on the Plum Line that President Obama will today reiterate his intention to end the Bush-era tax cuts on affluent people making more than $250,000 annually. To be precise, the reversion to higher rates, those that prevailed in the 90s when the economy did much better than in the 2000s, would actually apply only to that portion of their income above $250K, not on the amount below it. This fact won’t quell the outcry from the right-wing who are already claiming it’s a tax hike on small businesses, but that’s just rhetoric. As Sargent explains, the key point of tax fairness is one that the president will be campaigning on through the fall, offering potent contrast with Mitt Romney’s stated policies, and to Mitt’s own taxes. The Obama campaign will also use the issue to highlight the Republican candidate’s stunning lack of transparency about his finances, and the rate at which he pays taxes.

In this same vein, be sure to read Paul Krugman’s column today, Mitt’s Gray Areas, where as Sargent observes,

“Romney’s refusal to be transparent about his own finances suggests he doesn’t want to reveal the extent to which he would personally benefit from the policies he’s advocating, because so doing would be deeply damaging.”

Meantime, on my tumblr I’ve posted a new video from the Obama campaign, asking key questions about Mitt Romney’s offshore investments, including Sankaty High Yield Assets, the fund he transferred to his wife in 2003, the day before he was sworn in as MA governor. For convenience, the video is also right here. Share it around if you like, as Mitt’s offshore holdings bear a lot more scrutiny. Clearly, the Obama campaign is hoping that the media will continue reporting on Mitt’s opaque finances, with many unanswered questions about his investments and holdings.

 

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A Jet-Ski Vacation

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Fresh off revelations in Vanity Fair and on the AP wire that Ann Romney had become the sole owner of an opaque investment vehicle called Sankaty High Yield Assets the day before her husband was sworn in as governor of Massachusetts in 2003, the candidate’s wife gave a rather bizarre interview on CBS TV Thursday morning. Over at my Great Gray Bridge tumblr, I’ve posted commentary on this with the ridiculous photo of Ann and Mitt Romney jet-skiing around their lakefront vacation home earlier this week.

I should add that Ann Romney, though reputed to be an electoral asset for her husband, has hit a few bumps along the campaign trail:

  • There’s her lordly and expensive sport of dressage, which I posted about in 2011;
  • On that matter of Sankaty High Yield Assets, she was Mitt’s sole beneficiary for the fund which for unknown reasons he transferred to her under the wire before taking the governor’s office. He then failed for years afterward to report it on his federal elections filings, as he was required to do, according to those Vanity Fair and AP stories.

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More Questions about Mitt’s Money

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Update: The Obama Campaign jumped right on the AP story on Mitt’s finances that I blogged about yesterday. Above is the video they’ve made about the issues raised by the story. It includes numerous statements from voters on Mitt’s offshore money. In the statement accompanying the video campaign press secretary Ben LaBolt says,

“Yesterday’s Associated Press story raises serious questions about whether Mitt Romney established a Bermuda corporation to avoid U.S. taxes and attempted to hide it from the public. According to the report, Romney transferred the mysterious corporation to a blind trust in his wife’s name one day before taking office as Governor in order to avoid disclosure. In fact, he left this entity off of seven different personal financial disclosure statements he was required to file under state and federal law since 2001. We already know about Romney’s $3 million Swiss bank account and millions of dollars of investments in foreign tax havens like the Cayman Islands. Bermuda does not tax corporate income or capital gains. Until Romney releases additional years of tax returns, the American people will never know whether he created this shell corporation to intentionally avoid paying U.S. taxes. What is Mitt Romney trying to hide?”

For my part, I hope reporters keep asking questions about the registered-in-Bermuda Sankaty High Yield Asset Investors, Ltd. Though it’s a mouthful to say, I think this opaque Romney-owned investment vehicle could have a lot of resonance with voters.

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Mitt’s Most Secret Offshore Investment

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First in Vanity Fair by Nicholas Shaxson and now today via AP staff reporters, journos are digging into Mitt’s most secret offshore investment, Sankaty High Yield Asset Investors Ltd., registered in Bermuda. From the AP, we now know at a minimum that he failed to report Sankaty in required filings when he held office in Massaschusetts, and that he may still be making money from it. Romney’s finances are held in many opaque vehicles.

Sankaty was transferred to a trust owned by Romney’s wife, Ann, one day before he was sworn in as Massachusetts governor in 2003, according to Bermuda records obtained by The Associated Press. The Romneys’ ownership of the offshore firm did not appear on any state or federal financial reports during Romney’s two presidential campaigns. Only the Romneys’ 2010 tax records, released under political pressure earlier this year, confirmed their continuing control of the company. . . .
Romney’s 2010 tax returns show him and his wife as sole owners of Sankaty. . . .
The candidate’s 2010 tax returns listed at least 20 investment holdings besides Sankaty that had not been previously disclosed on federal reports. At least seven were foreign investments. Bain Capital Inc., the holding that posted the $1.9 million earning, was listed on Romney’s state ethics reports in 2001 and 2002, when he ran for governor, but was missing from any annual ethics report until Romney’s trust included it last month on his 2012 financial statement. Sankaty is the only offshore holding in the Romneys’ portfolio under their full control. On his 2010 taxes, Romney’s blind trust filed an IRS form identifying Sankaty as a “controlled foreign corporation.” That filing is required for any U.S. taxpayer who owns more than 50% of a foreign company. Romney’s 2010 tax returns indicate that he and his wife control all 12,000 shares. Several U.S. Securities and Exchange documents from the late 1990s and 2000s depicted Romney as Sankaty’s owner at the time, but when he ran for Massachusetts governor in 2001 and 2002, Romney did not list the company on annual disclosure forms required by the Massachusetts State Ethics Commission. The ethics commission would not comment on the omissions. Boston College law professor R. Michael Cassidy, who was a member of the commission at the time, said that if Romney “owned this business before he signed his ethics disclosure, then he was obliged to report it.”
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Publishing People for Obama Fundraiser, June 18

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I had a great week in Toronto, covering the North by Northeast festival (NXNE) for this blog, and working with my client Speakerfile, but when I booked the trip in late May, I deliberately scheduled my departure for mid-afternoon on the Monday, June 18, with a hoped-for return landing at LaGuardia before rush hour. This was designed to give me some time in Toronto that workday, while also allowing me to make it to the Publishing People for Obama reception and undraiser that was being held that evening from 6-8 in the Midtown Loft at Fifth Avenue and 29th Street. I lucked out last Monday. Though the day was extremely hot and hazy in Toronto and only a bit less so in NY, there were no thunderstorms messing up the northeast corridor and nothing delayed my departure and rapid return home to Manhattan.

Since I had not flown in a sportcoat and dress shirt, I wanted to change in to an outfit that would come close to business attire, or semi-business attire. How was I going to do this? In the back of a livery cab? I didn’t think so. I lucked out again and had a funny sort of sitcom moment when I found a “family restroom” at LaGuardia, with a door I could lock and then dig into my luggage for my toothbrush and a suitable change of clothes. So far as I know, I didn’t inconvenience any desperate parent with a baby in need of a diaper change–at least no one banged on the door begging entrance, nor did any airport guard see me go in and out of this inner sanctum of airport privacy.

With luggage in tow, I reached the loft space, showed my passport at the front table (since it was handy) and stowed my stuff in a nearby coat closet. (I’d wondered if a security detail would want to inspect my belongings, but luck prevailed again and no one did). Unencumbered at last, I began greeting publishing friends who had also donated to the president’s reelection campaign via our organizing committee and, like me, were eager to hear from our guest speaker, presidential advisor David Plouffe, and later Rosanne Cash, the evening’s entertainment. I saw the event co-hosts Barbara Lowenstein, Roger Cooper, Tom Dunne, and Bob Miller. Over the next few minutes I saw and spoke with Will Schwalbe, whose second book, The End of Life Book Club will be out this fall; Fauzia and John Burke, of the indie publicity firm FSB Associates, which set up the Facebook page for the event; Linda Johns and George Gibson, of Bloomsbury Publishing, as well as Peter Ginna, of Bloomsbury; Mike Shatzkin and Martha Moran, longtime book biz friends going back to my bookstore days; book packager and publishing consultant David Wilk, and his wife Laura, a watercolor artist;  Brian DeFiore, Irene Skolnick, Deborah Schneider, Scott Waxman, and Alice Fried Martell, all literary agents with their own agencies; Michael Coffey, co-editor of Publishers Weekly, and his wife Rebecca Smith, a sculptor; and Marc E. Jaffe, a publishing advisor whom I hadn’t seen in ages. It should also be said that many people from outside of New York donated, but didn’t attend the event. Thanks to them all too!

Many of these people I saw up on the rooftop, where we enjoyed a great view of the Manhattan skyline all around us, including the Empire State Building at 34th Street, which seemed close enough to touch. Soon, with the evening’s program approaching we were urged to head back downstairs to the main room, which by now had become very crowded. Pretty soon there were so many familiar faces I couldn’t keep track of who I was seeing. The space got full very fast.

Plouffe is slender and perhaps around 5′ 10″. He has thin hands and long fingers on a slight frame, with a rather bird-like profile. He spoke for about twenty minutes, and then took a half-dozen questions. He thanked us all for contributing to the campaign, and said he believes it’s going to be a close election, and tougher to win than in 2008. He referred to the possibility that Mitt Romney could win, though he also expressed confidence the president will be re-elected. He said only one president has ever been re-elected amid an economy overcoming a depression or recession as severe as the one we’ve endured. That was FDR, in 1936. Plouffe also talked about the veritable flood of Super Pac money flowing against the president and other Democrats, and observed that at times it feels as if their opponent isn’t Mitt Romney, but all the Super Pacs. He pledged that the campaign will do everything possible to remind the American people of how damaging the stated policies of Mitt Romney and the Republican congress would be for the country. He said there is still much that the American people has to learn about Romney–for instance, he said that barely 50% of the country even knows he served as a governor, or what his record was while in office. He promised the campaign will draw sharp contrasts between the president and Romney whenever possible. He asked for our help, and our time as volunteers, for instance by making calls to swing states, or visiting them if you’re able to do so. In 2008 I made calls to Ohio (the state I was born), Virginia, Colorado, and Pennsylvania and will do so again. // more . . . // Click through for entire post and all photos and captions.

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Mitt Romney–Prep School Bully

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Evening Update: In the most disturbing eyewitness report yet, a Mitt Romney classmate involved in the assault on John Lauber has told ABC,

“’It’s a haunting memory. I think it was for everybody that spoke up about it. . .because when you see somebody who is simply different taken down that way and is terrified and you see that look in their eye you never forget it. And that was what we all walked away with,’ said Phillip Maxwell, who is now an attorney and still considers Romney an old friend. ‘I saw it with my own eyes,’ said Maxwell, of the anecdote first reported by the Washington Post. Maxwell said Romney held the scissors helping to cut the hair of a student, John Lauber, who was presumed to be gay and who had long hair. ‘It was a hack job. . . clumps of hair taken off.’ Asked if he has any doubt that what Romney did could be considered bullying, Maxwell responded, ‘Oh my god, are you kidding?. . .  I castigated myself regularly for not having intervened. I would have felt a lot better about myself had I said ‘hey, enough.’ When I saw the look on his [Lauber’s] face, it was a look I’ll never forget,” said Maxwell. ‘When you see a victim, the sense of trust betrayed in this boy who was perfectly innocent for being different. This was bullying supreme,’ he said.”
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Afternoon Update: This situation has gotten murkier all day, with Romney’s spokesperson (in my initial post below) denying that the candidate had any recollection of such an incident, then Romney himself later saying he didn’t at the time think of the classmate as gay, but implying that he did indeed know and remember him. He continues to say he doesn’t recall this incident, though he adds he won’t “argue” with the report of it. And while the Romney campaign is reportedly trying to arrange for former classmates of his to vouch for him, the only one contacted so far is still deciding whether or not he’s going to speak on behalf of Mitt’s campaign. Then there is one former classmate, quoted here via ABC who the campaign will probably not be asking for a character reference:

“One former classmate and old friend of Romney’s–who refused to be identified by name–said there are ‘a lot of guys’ who went to Cranbrook who have ‘really negative memories’ of Romney’s behavior in the dorms, behavior this classmate describes as ‘evil’ and ‘like Lord of the Flies.’ The classmate believes Romney is lying when he claims to not remember [the hair-cutting incident]. ‘It makes these fellows [who have owned up to it] very remorseful. For [Romney] not to remember it? It doesn’t ring true. How could the fellow with the scissors forget it?’ the former classmate said.”

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“Mitt Romney returned from a three-week spring break in 1965 to resume his studies as a high school senior at the prestigious Cranbrook School. Back on the handsome campus, studded with Tudor brick buildings and manicured fields, he spotted something he thought did not belong at a school where the boys wore ties and carried briefcases. John Lauber, a soft-spoken new student one year behind Romney, was perpetually teased for his nonconformity and presumed homosexuality. Now he was walking around the all-boys school with bleached-blond hair that draped over one eye, and Romney wasn’t having it.
‘He can’t look like that. That’s wrong. Just look at him!’ an incensed Romney told Matthew Friedemann, his close friend in the Stevens Hall dorm, according to Friedemann’s recollection. Mitt, the teenaged son of Michigan Gov. George Romney, kept complaining about Lauber’s look, Friedemann recalled. A few days later, Friedemann entered Stevens Hall off the school’s collegiate quad to find Romney marching out of his own room ahead of a prep school posse shouting about their plan to cut Lauber’s hair. Friedemann followed them to a nearby room where they came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground. As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors. The incident was recalled similarly by five students, who gave their accounts independently of one another.”

That is the opening of a lengthy bombshell article by Jason Horowitz in today’s Washington Post about the abusive and appalling treatment he reports Mitt Romney led against classmate John Lauber in 1965.  Before going to press Horowitz asked Romney’s campaign for comment:

“His campaign spokeswoman said the former Massachusetts governor has no recollection of the incident. ‘Anyone who knows Mitt Romney knows that he doesn’t have a mean-spirited bone in his body,’ Andrea Saul said in a statement. ‘The stories of fifty years ago seem exaggerated and off base and Governor Romney has no memory of participating in these incidents.’”

The nearly 5500-word article seems to be meticulously sourced and carefully reported, though I’m sure Romney allies and rightwingers will attack the reporter and the Post. Still, with five classmates remembering the incident so vividly, all looking back on it with deep regret, I predict this denial will be assailed until the campaign–or even the candidate himself–is forced to come up with a more believable response. The image of Mitt Romney rallying a veritable ‘lynch mob’ to forcibly pin down their classmate and make him submit to a sadistic and weird kind of de-feminizing of his supposedly effeminate affectation–his hair that swooped over an eye–is sick and disgusting, especially when contrasted with President Obama’s endorsement of marriage equality yesterday.

Apart from the possible political repercussions from this story, it is also very sad. The effects of this incident in Lauber’s life echoed down through the years. While Romney suffered no discipline for his deeds at “the famously strict” Cranbrook, Lauber was expelled prior to graduation, for smoking a cigarette. He died in 2004. I suspect I’ll be updating this post and commenting again on the story as it develops. For now, I urge you to take the time to read the disturbing article.

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The Obama Campaign, Punching Early and Hard

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So much political news the past few days, much of it about the anniversary of the raid in which Osama Bin Laden was killed, and I’ve linked to some excellent pieces on that below*. Meantime, I really like how aggressively the #Obama2012 campaign is setting out to define Romney. While the Bin Laden dust-up is getting more coverage, yesterday there was this ad that ended with the line, It’s just what you expect from a guy who had a Swiss bank account, and now today it’s backed up with this infographic I saw on TPM showing Mitt’s foreign investment holdings. One hopes that at least some press people will be asking Romney’s people about these offshore accounts, and keep them on turf they’d rather not have to defend.

Mitt had such lousy opponents in the Republican primary that I detect he and his campaign are ill-prepared for what’s going to hit them in terms of coordinated opposition messages, one layered on top of another.  The copy below is straight from the Obama-Biden website, as is the graphic whose name on the jpeg is “Romney_World Map”. 

Mitt Romney has invested his money around the world, from the Cayman Islands to Ireland to Australia. We don’t know if he’s using these accounts to avoid paying his fair share in taxes, but we do know that in 2010, Romney’s tax rate was a startlingly low 13.9%. This means Romney pays a lower tax rate than many teachers, firefighters, police officers, and other middle-class Americans—even a lower rate than most other millionaires.
If elected, Romney’s proposed tax plan would cut tax rates for the wealthy even further—cutting his own taxes and protecting loopholes that he benefits from. At the same time, he opposes the President’s Buffett Rule, which would require millionaires and billionaires to pay their fair share. That’s not right.

Another salutary benefit of this early aggressiveness will be to energize the DEM base, which will be delighted to see the campaign’s determination to play rough–accurate and tough. For sure, there will be people in the press who decry this aggression, but as Josh Marshall has repeatedly pointed out with his bitch-slap theory of politics, if you can make your opponent look weak, or even, in old-fashioned gender terms, “un-man him,” you’re on the way to winning your race. I’m still worried about the enormous amount of Super-Pac spending that is going to be thrown against the president (and other DEMs) but there’s no question which candidate is running the better campaign at this point.

*See this collection of excellent journalism and commentary from the past couple days:

1) David Corn’s excellent tick-tock on the Bin Laden raid and the president’s decision to launch it. PBO is a cool customer. Read this and I think you’ll see what I mean.

2) Rick Ungar’s piece on forbes.com, about what he believes is the bad character revealed by Mitt’s cheap “Jimmy Carter” shot. What’s more, I would add, it undercut his supposed point. It was stupid politics, while revealing a bad heart, at least over this.

3) James Fallows up-close recollection of President Carter’s failed raid to free the American hostages in Iran, and why Romney got the point so wrong.

4) And two pieces, one by Jed Lewison in Daily Kos, and the other by Michael Hirsh in National Journal, about the real politicization of 9/11, including Mitt’s appearance today in lower Manhattan with Rudy Giuliani.

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The Romneys–Completely Clueless

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The Romneys are completely clueless about how most folks live. Politically, they are as stupid as any campaign I’ve ever seen. Their advisors must want to muzzle them. And that little laugh she gives out with–it just disgusts me.

Late Update: Now there’s a big pushback coming from the Romney camp where they claim “out of context, out of context” about this Ann Romney clip. Well, aside from the fact that they already ran an ad against Pres. Obama where they bragged about the fact that a McCain spokesman’s words were put in Barack’s mouth (talk about out of context), I listened to the whole .52 second clip of Ann Romney today and my reaction is that this is worse than the .12 second segment alone. She begins by talking about her illness, but as I wrote in a blog essay last December–good for her that she can afford equine therapy and expensive horses for her MS, but what about folks who can’t avail themselves of those things, and don’t have the health care and insurance she has. The policies of her husband and his party would make it that much harder for those less fortunate to ever be able to do so.

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