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‘Mittens’ Romney, Poster Boy for The New Gilded Age
July 3, 2012
Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
Wow, it's like Robert Reich was reading my mind! Mitt Romney, Bain Capital, and The New Gilded Age:
The election of 2012 raises two perplexing questions. The first is how the GOP could put up someone for president who so brazenly epitomizes the excesses of casino capitalism that have nearly destroyed the economy and overwhelmed our democracy. The second is why the Democrats have failed to point this out.
Well, Bob, I am doing my best. It's those corporatist Democrats who want that corporate/lobbyist campaign cash whom you have a beef with.
But the real issue here isn’t Bain’s betting record. It’s that Romney’s Bain is part of the same system as Jamie Dimon’s JPMorgan Chase, Jon Corzine’s MF Global and Lloyd Blankfein’s Goldman Sachs—a system that has turned much of the economy into a betting parlor that nearly imploded in 2008, destroying millions of jobs and devastating household incomes. The winners in this system are top Wall Street executives and traders, private-equity managers and hedge-fund moguls, and the losers are most of the rest of us. The system is largely responsible for the greatest concentration of the nation’s income and wealth at the very top since the Gilded Age of the nineteenth century, with the richest 400 Americans owning as much as the bottom 150 million put together. And these multimillionaires and billionaires are now actively buying the 2012 election—and with it, American democracy.
The biggest players in this system have, like Romney, made their profits placing big bets with other people’s money. If the bets go well, the players make out like bandits. If they go badly, the burden lands on average workers and taxpayers. The 750 people at GS Technologies who lost their jobs thanks to a bad deal engineered by Romney’s Bain were a small foreshadowing of the 15 million who lost jobs after the cumulative dealmaking of the entire financial sector pushed the whole economy off a cliff. And relative to the cost to taxpayers of bailing out Wall Street, Solyndra is a rounding error.
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.
Jesse Kelly Lands the Part
July 3, 2012
By Michael Bryan Jesse Kelly: so cool he wears a black wool suit in the desert… Now, I certainly expressed the expectation that, if elected, Jesse Kelly would soon resign from Congress and just get a job as a highly-paid petroleum industry lobbyist. But now Jim Nintzel at the Tucson Weekly is reporting that Jesse … Read more
City of Tucson should hold slumlord millionaires responsible for code violations
July 3, 2012
by Pamela Powers Hannley
I live in one of midtown Tucson's many mixed use, multi-generational, multi-income neighborhoods. Cute, old adobes from the 1930s are mixed together with urban in-fill duplexes from the 1950s and newer.
Many of the brightly colored abodes have been restored and are every bit as unique and architecturally important as those in the better known historic neighborhoods. Unfortunately, the homes in my neighborhood are worth much less than comparable homes in Sam Hughes or West University because of the seedy rentals owned by slumlord millionaires, who don't care about anything except making money.
Much to her credit, my neighborhood president is ever-vigilant when it comes to code violations– particularly junk furniture in the easement and high weeds/grass. Although she and others work tirelessly to keep the neighborhood clean and safe, it's an uphill battle because there are many repeat offenders– absentee slumlords who allow weeds to grow uncontrolled and pile up couches, mattresses, and junk in the curb lawn (as pictured here) until the city– at the request of the neighbors– gets after them.
The drill is…
- Citizen makes a formal complaint to the Code Enforcement Department.
- Eventually they send someone out to verify there is indeed a couch in the right of way.
- The city sends the property owner a letter saying they have 30 days to get rid of the couch. (This letter may go out anywhere from a week to a month after the initial citizen complaint.)
- Two months or more after the complaint– or the next bulky pick-up– the couch disappears– often because the city comes and picks it up.
The City of Tucson should stop babying these business owners and start holding them accountable for the state of their property. The rental in the top picture is on East Pima Street. When my intrepid neighborhood president wrote to Cynthia Gandy from Tierra Antigua Realty, this was the response.
Those properties have been vacant for many months My client purchased it as a foresclose and there was no furniture left behind He actually paid to have surrounding area cleaned Im sorry that someone is using it as a dumping area but it has nothing to do with us We don not even have a renter yet as my client has decided to do adt improvements prior to renting
Cynthia Gandy
Tierra Antigua Realty
520 544-2335 cell 520 870-9844
In others words, buzz off. Slumlords should be fined for these violations; I think $1000 would be a good starting point. Every time the city has to remove old furniture or junk (when it's not bulky pick-up time), the property owner should be billed– and jailed if they don't pay the fine. Renting property is a business. Maintenance of the property is a legitimate business expense. Landlords routinely charge tenants a cleaning fee. There is no excuse for landlords to allow crap to pile up and leave it for the city to remove. Furthermore, I know for a fact that some Tucson slumlords hire undocumented workers to clean out, paint, and repair rentals. What a creative business model: charge tenants a cleaning fee, pay undocumented works sh*t wages to clean up the mess and drag the old furniture to the curb, and let the city carry away the trash for free. Hmmm…
It's time to hold slumlords accountable for the blight they have created.
Slumlord names after the jump.
Where Mitt’s money lives – the Cayman Islands
July 3, 2012
Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
Just in time for the 4th of July. How patriotic is it for a presidential nominee to secrete his millions in off-shore tax havens for the purpose of tax avoidance?
Vanity Fair, following up on reporting from earlier this year, visits Mitt''s money in the Cayman Islands in this must-read bombshell report by Nicholas Shaxson. Investigation: Mitt Romney’s Offshore Accounts, Tax Loopholes, and Mysterious I.R.A. | Vanity Fair (excerpts, reordered for clarity):
Come August, Mitt Romney, with an estimated net worth as high as $250 million (he won’t reveal the exact amount), will be one of the richest people ever to be nominated for president. Given his reticence to discuss his wealth, it’s only natural to wonder how he got it, how he invests it, and if he pays all his taxes on it.
Ironically, it was Mitt’s father, George Romney, who released 12 years of tax returns, in November 1967, just ahead of his presidential campaign, thereby setting a precedent that nearly every presidential candidate since has either willingly or unwillingly been subject to. George, then the governor of Michigan, explained why he was releasing so many years’ worth, saying, “One year could be a fluke, perhaps done for show.”
But his son declined to release any returns through one unsuccessful race for the U.S. Senate, in 1994, one successful run for Massachusetts governor, in 2002, and an aborted bid for the Republican Party presidential nomination, in 2008. Just before the Iowa caucus last December, Mitt told MSNBC, “I don’t intend to release the tax returns. I don’t,” but finally, on January 24, 2012—after intense goading by fellow Republican candidates Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry—he released his 2010 tax return and an estimate for 2011.
These, plus the mandatory financial disclosures filed with the Office of Government Ethics and released last August, raise many questions. A full 55 pages in his 2010 return are devoted to reporting his transactions with foreign entities.
Imagine School finances: the numbers don’t add up
July 2, 2012
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by David Safier
NOTE: This is the seventh in a series of recent posts examining Imagine Schools. (Here are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6.) If you have ideas or information to add, please leave comments at the end of the post or email me at safier@schooltales.net. I keep all email correspondence confidential.
Most of my posts about Imagine Schools have focused on Imagine Prep at Superstition because that's the school that made the news for losing 11 of its 14 teachers at the end of this school year, either because they were fired or because they quit. Today, though, I'm going to look at Imagine Middle at Surprise as an example of the convoluted and unsustainable financial arrangements that are typical of many Imagine schools. [Both Imagine Prep at Superstition and Imagine Prep at Surprise were for-profit schools until recently, so I don't have access to their tax returns which non profits are required to make public. Imagine Middle at Surprise was always a nonprofit, so I have 5 years worth of 990 tax returns to look at, which makes for a more complete analysis.]
Here's the short story about the financial situation at Imagine Middle at Surprise. Its building costs are higher than the total state allotment that goes to the school, meaning it's in hock before it hires its first teacher or buys its first ream of paper. Imagine Schools loans the school enough to cover the rest of its expenses, then "forgives" part of the debt each year, while piling up more debt for the current year. It's hard to see how the school will ever dig itself out of this cycle of loans and "debt forgiveness."
Let's look at the finances for the 2010-2011 school year. The school had about 165 students and received about $1,150,000 from the state. That's about $7,000 per student, a typical state allotment for Arizona's charter schools. Yet it spent $1,302,000 on "Operation and Maintenance of Plant," meaning it spent 113% of its state funding just paying for building rent and maintenance.
Obviously there had to be some outside funding. It came in the form of $1,340,000 in what the school labels "Supplemental, Contracted Labor." Basically, it's a loan to the school from Imagine Schools, something that happens at their schools around the country when they can't make expenses, which is often the case.
The GOP Death Panels – ‘Let them Die!’
July 2, 2012
Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
Let's take a trip in Mr. Peabody's WABAC machine (or the hot tub time machine for those of you not old enough to remember Mr. Peabody), all the way back to 2010. Remember when Tea-Publicans ran for Congress saying they wanted to "repeal and replace Obamacare"?
The Tea-Publican House proposed and passed "Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act" (H.R.2) in 2011, which promptly died in the Senate. Tea-Publicans have scheduled another symbolic vote to repeal "Obamacare" on July 11 when Congress returns from its 4th of July recess, which will also promptly die in the Senate.
What Tea-Publicans have not done is propose any alternative healthcare plan (that may be because "Obamacare" is their plan, until they attached Obama's name to it and disavowed it). Tea-Publicans and Willard "Mittens" Romney have been loathe to divulge any details of a "replacement" healthcare plan.
That is because the "replace" part of "repeal and replace Obamacare" was always a lie. They never had any intentions of replacing it with anything. They are happy with the status quo of our broken healthcare system.
The GOP and Mittens do, however, have the Tea Party healthcare plan: "Let them Die!" Remember during the "Survivor – GOP Presidential Primary" debate when Wolf Blitzer asked Ron Paul about how "society should respond if a healthy 30-year-old man who decided against buying health insurance suddenly goes into a coma and requires intensive care for six months — are you saying that society should just let him die?" To which the Tea-Publican audience responded with an enthusiastic "YEAH!" followed by laughter. Audience at tea party debate cheers leaving uninsured to die | Yahoo! News.
This is the replacement healthcare plan from the GOP and Mittens, folks — "Let them Die!" Remember all that crazy talk fom the Tea Party and their Queen, the Quitta from Wasilla Sarah Palin, about "death panels"? Well they are the "death panels" (a bit of psychological projection on their part).
“Blue Dog” bashing?
July 2, 2012
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by David Safier The comments section on my posts about Barber's votes have become more interesting than my posts. I want to bring part of one comment by Arizona Bobcat to the front, because I think it will lead to further valuable discussion about how big the Democratic tent is, or should be. What is … Read more
Barber’s June 19 Media Release on his “Border Security” bill vote
July 2, 2012
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by David Safier
After reading comments on my Dear Representative Barber post stating incorrectly that Barber hadn't explained his civil contempt vote against Attorney General Holder, I posted his Media Release explaining his vote. I've also received comments saying Barber hasn't explained his vote for letting the Border Patrol skirt some environmental laws. In fact, Barber put out a Media Release about that vote June 19, which you can read below the fold. So far as I know, he has not published any other comments on the bill, though he has been meeting with constituents around the area discussing his recent votes.
