Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?: “Current Presidential Race Has Demonstrated That A Million Dollars Is Nothing”
Back in the late-1950s there was a TV show called “The Millionaire” about a mysterious rich man, named John Beresford Tipton, who would anonymously give checks for $1 million to total strangers.
Usually, the recipient was a poor schlub who was over the top with joy until it turned out that the money didn’t buy happiness. Clearly, we were all better off in our humble homes, clustered around our 14-inch TVs.
I am bringing this up because the current presidential race has demonstrated that a million dollars is nothing — nothing — these days. Nothing! A million dollars is what they give you for designing the best pantsuit on a reality TV show.
Now, if you want to impress people, you have to be a billionaire, for sure. There are about 400 billionaires in the United States, and, while some of them are famous, like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, many have profiles so low that their own families may not recognize them. Really, it could be the guy living down the block, if your block happened to contain a 30,000-square-foot Tudor with 10 bathrooms.
But even the humblest billionaire wants to be on the campaign trail this year. They’re everywhere. Rick Santorum has Foster Friess, a mutual fund manager who likes the fact that Santorum starts the day with 50 push-ups. (“That’s the kind of energy level that the Republican Party needs right now.”) Friess has vowed to give Santorum’s super-sized political action committee at least a million. Which certainly is the least he could do for all that exercise.
Newt Gingrich’s “super PAC” got $5 million from billionaire Sheldon Adelson, a casino owner, in what Adelson’s associates said was an act of friendship. I certainly hope so, since giving money to the Gingrich-for-president effort at this point is like betting that the New York Jets will win the Super Bowl. You would think that a casino owner would know what futile acts of desperation look like.
Jon Huntsman’s dad is a billionaire, which didn’t seem to help as much as you would think. (Once again: not buying happiness.) Mitt Romney is probably only a quarter-of-a-billionaire, which, in this company, is kind of the equivalent of playing the harmonica for lunch money on the street.
But it’s hard to be sure about Mitt’s wealth because he has refused to release his tax returns. This is something every major presidential candidate in recent history has done, but so what? If every major presidential candidate in recent history jumped off the roof, would you expect Mitt to do that? How many other major presidential candidates in recent history came from the business sector? How many drove to Canada with their family dog strapped to the roof of the car? So, really, stop with the sweeping generalizations.
Romney does appear to have more billionaire pals than anybody — 10 percent of all the billionaires in the country are already giving money to Mitt, including Sam Zell, Destroyer of Great Newspapers, and John Paulson, a hedge fund operator who made a killing in 2007 by betting against the housing market. Forbes, which put Paulson at No. 17 on its list of richest people in America in 2011, said he had made $4.9 billion in the preceding year.
People, how much TV time do you think a person like that could buy if he put his mind to it? Seriously, by September we could be seeing entire networks devoted to nothing but Mitt Romney. Every week, Mitt will solve crimes, save patients with extremely rare diseases, build a house for a deserving family, help Zooey Deschanel with her dating problems and win bids for abandoned storage lockers all around the country.
Not that President Obama won’t have enough money to buy a channel of his own, if he wants one. So far, the president is behind Mitt in the billionaire donor sweepstakes, but he is still doing fine, thank you very much. So well, in fact, that a spokesman for the re-election campaign has been forced to denounce the idea that Obama will raise $1 billion. There’s that number again.
All these billionaires would not be so worrisome if the Supreme Court had not totally unleashed their donation-making power in the Citizens United case. Gingrich, who loved that decision, was furious when Mitt’s rich friends chipped in to run anti-Newt ads in Iowa.
He declined to acknowledge that the two things had any connection whatsoever.
“In fact, this particular approach, I think, has nothing to do with the Citizens United case. It has to do with a bunch of millionaires getting together to run a negative campaign, and Governor Romney refusing to call them off and refusing to be honest about it,” he told MSNBC.
Except for the part where the law that the court overturned had to do with keeping a bunch of millionaires from getting together to run a negative campaign. But, really, if they’re only millionaires, how much harm could they do?
By: Gail Collins, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, January 13, 2012
Mitt Romney’s Lies: “It’s Almost As If He Can’t Control Himself”
As his briefly front-running campaign sunk in the polls under relentless punishment from Mitt Romney’s “super PAC” allies in the days before the Iowa caucuses, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich caused a brief stir by matter-of-factly telling a TV interviewer that Romney is a “liar.”
“Why are you saying he’s a liar?” his apparently shocked interlocutor pressed. The notion that Mitt Romney routinely makes statements lacking a factual basis should not come as a surprise to anyone who has followed the campaign. On the left, Paul Krugman has marveled that no other candidate has ever “lied so freely, with so little compunction.” On the right, The American Conservative‘s Daniel Larison wondered about why he lies, concluding that the former Massachusetts governor is “so contemptuous of the people he tells lies to that he never thinks he will be found out.”
With Romney sweeping Iowa and New Hampshire and leading in the polls in South Carolina, this is a good time to catalogue some of Romney’s greatest hits thus far.
“100,000 new jobs.” Romney has repeatedly claimed that during his tenure at Bain Capital, “net-net, we created over 100,000 jobs.” His campaign defends the figure by tallying the current employment totals of some companies Bain aided. That’s a stretch in and of itself, but it’s also not a net figure. It lacks the balancing context of how many jobs were destroyed by Bain. As the Los Angeles Times reported in December, while Bain helped some companies grow, “Romney and his team also maximized returns by firing workers, seeking government subsidies, and flipping companies quickly for large profits. Sometimes Bain investors gained even when companies slid into bankruptcy.”
Indeed, the Wall Street Journal looked closely at Bain’s record under Romney and found that 22 percent “either filed for bankruptcy or closed their doors by the end of the eighth year after Bain first invested, sometimes with substantial job losses.” Which is not really terribly surprising: Bain’s raison d’etre is not job creation but wealth creation for its investors. As Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler noted in an article Monday calling Romney’s “100,000 jobs” figure “untenable,” Romney and Bain “never could have raised money from investors if the prospectus seeking $1-million investments from the super wealthy had said it would focus on creating jobs.”
As a corollary, when Romney’s record has been criticized, he has dismissed criticisms as an attempt to “put free enterprise on trial.” It’s not an attack on free enterprise. It’s an attack on Romney’s strained attempt to spin his successful record of wealth-creation into one of job-creation. It’s also a recognition that while a net good, the free market has its destructive side—and it’s a fair question to ask, whether voters consider experience in that sort of vulture capitalism as a good qualification for the presidency. Do they want government to be run more like that kind of business?
Obama’s jobs record. By Romney’s own logic (touting jobs created but ignoring jobs lost), his attacks on President Obama’s economic record are nonsensical. He told Time that Obama “has not created any new jobs,” and he told Fox News last week that Obama has “lost” 2 million jobs as president. This is indeed a net figure, but also a misleading one. When Obama took office, the economy was shedding jobs at a rate of nearly 1 million jobs per month, losing roughly 3 million during the first four months of 2009. But presidential policies don’t take effect as soon as the incoming chief takes his oath. Once Obama’s policies started to take effect, the trend turned. The country had added 3.2 million private sector jobs over the course of 22 straight months of private sector growth. By Romney’s definition, the president has created more than 3 million jobs—not enough, but also not none.
In fact the biggest drag on job growth is the 600,000 public sector jobs that have disappeared under the auspices of budget austerity. As my colleague Danielle Kurtzleben reported in September, “government jobs are being shed by the tens of thousands almost every month, hindering an already weak recovery.”
“Entitlement society.” Romney has argued that Obama “is replacing our merit-based, opportunity society with an entitlement society,” where “everyone is handed the same rewards, regardless of education, effort, and willingness to take risk.” As New York‘s Jonathan Chait has observed, “This accusation is approximately as accurate as claiming that the Republican Party wants to pass laws forbidding poor people from making more money.” The idea that President Obama (or any Democrat) advocates for equality of outcomes simply lacks a basis in fact.
It’s an important fabrication, because it marks a turning point in Romney’s attacks on Obama. Previously the president was characterized as ineffectual, but not a socialist. Forced to battle to win the GOP primaries, Romney has adopted the Tea Party’s extremist rhetoric. It won’t play with swing voters, even delivered in his polished drone.
Defense cuts. In an October speech on national security, Romney promised to “reverse President Obama’s massive defense cuts.” One problem: Pentagon spending has gone up under Obama, from $594 billion in 2008 to $666 billion. The 2011 request was for $739 billion. As Rick Perry would say, “Oops.”
No apologies. Romney has said that Obama “went around the world and apologized for America.” This is part of the conservative, dog-whistle meme that Obama is un-American (and possibly even a foreigner!). While the notion of an international apology tour is a staple of the conservative case against Obama, it is also fictitious. The Washington Post’s fact-checker concluded that “the claim that Obama repeatedly has apologized for the United States is not borne out by the facts, especially if his full quotes are viewed in context.” Don’t hold your breath waiting for an apology from Romney on this one.
“Mitt.” It’s a small one, but might be my favorite. During a debate in November, when moderator Wolf Blitzer introduced himself by saying that “Wolf” is really his first name, Romney greeted the audience by saying, “I’m Mitt Romney, and yes, Wolf, that’s also my first name.” In fact, Willard is his first name. It’s a lie notable for being so mundane: Why would someone fudge their name? It’s almost as if he can’t control himself.
Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, January 12, 2012
Mitt Romney, Son Of “Citizen’s United”
First, a confession. If Mitt Romney becomes president I’m partly to blame.
Ten years ago I ran for the Democratic nomination for governor of Massachusetts — which would have given me the opportunity to whip Mitt Romney’s ass in the general election,
I blew it. In the final week of the primary I was neck and neck with the state treasurer, but then my money ran out, which meant my TV ads stopped. Declining the suggestion of my campaign manager to take out a second mortgage on my home, I frantically phoned anyone I could find who hadn’t yet contributed $500, the maximum state law allowed. I didn’t raise beans. In the end, the treasurer won the primary, Romney won the general election and became governor, and I went back to being a professor.
But my fantasy of beating Romney may be nothing more than a fantasy because Romney had — and still has — something I never did (and I’m not referring to his gleaming white teeth, carefully-coiffed hairline, or height). He has money, and he has connections to much more money.
Mitt Romney was then and still is the candidate of big money.
In the last weeks before the just-completed Iowa caucuses, Romney spent over $3 million relentlessly torpedoing Newt Gingrich with negative ads — cutting Gingrich’s support by half and hurtling him from first place to fourth. But Romney kept his fingerprints off the torpedo. Technically the money didn’t even come from his campaign.
It came from a Super PAC called “Restore Our Future,” which can sop up unlimited amounts from a few hugely wealthy donors without even disclosing their names. That’s because “Restore Our Future” is officially independent of the Romney campaign — although its chief fundraiser comes out of Romney’s finance team, its key political strategist was political director of Romney’s 2008 presidential campaign, its treasurer is Romney’s former chief counsel, and its media whiz had been part of Romney’s media team.
“Restore Our Future” is to Mitt Romney’s campaign as the dark side of the moon is to the moon. And it reveals the grotesque result of the Supreme Court’s decision a year ago in Citizen United vs the Federal Election Commission, which reversed more than a century of efforts to curb the influence of big money on politics.
If income and wealth in America were as widely shared as in the first three decades after World War II, we’d have less reason to worry. But now, with an almost unprecedented concentration of money at the very top, Citizens United invites the worst corruption our democracy has witnessed since the Gilded Age.
And Romney and Citizens United were made for each other. Other candidates have quietly set up Super PACs of their own, and President Obama has his Super PAC already busily tapping into whatever reservoirs of big money it can find. But Mitt’s unique ties to the biggest money pits enable him to take unique advantage of the Court’s scurrilous invitation.
The New York Times reports that New York hedge-fund managers and Boston financiers contributed almost $30 million to “Restore Our Future” before the Iowa caucuses. And “Restore Our Future“‘s faux independence has allowed Romney to publicly distance himself from them, their money, and the dirty work that their money has bought.
More than anyone else running for president, Mitt Romney personifies the top 1 percent in America — actually, the top one-tenth of one percent. It’s not just his four homes and estimated $200 million fortune, not just his wheeling and dealing in leveraged-buyouts and private equity, not even the jobless refugees of his financial maneuvers that makes him the Gordon Gekko of presidential aspirants.
It’s his connections to the epicenters of big money in America — especially to top executives and financiers in the habit of investing for handsome returns. And there are almost no better returns than those found in tax benefits, government subsidies, loan guarantees, bailouts, regulatory exemptions, federal contracts, and trade deals generating hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars a year.
Romney, in other words, is the candidate Citizens United created, the creature given life by Scalia, Roberts, Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito all playing Dr. Frankenstein.
Given what the Court has wrought, my conscience is less burdened. Had I whipped Romney’s ass ten years ago I might only have delayed his awakening. But I fear for the country.
By: Robert Reich, Robert Reich Blog, January 5, 2012
Campaign Financing: Small House In Tampa Ground Zero For Mega Millions In Campaign Donations
A little over a year ago, no-party gubernatorial candidate Bud Chiles stood outside an off-white single-story building with a carefully manicured lawn in suburban Tampa and said, “This building behind me is ground zero for what’s wrong with Florida politics.”
The building’s address: 610 South Blvd., a designation found on the financial disclosure forms of countless political committees in Florida and all over the country. The unassuming building nestled in an unassuming neighborhood is a veritable political action committee mill, churning out millions of dollars and influencing elections all over the country.
The kicker: What is happening at 610 South Blvd. is completely legal.
Chiles — who eventually dropped out of the race and endorsed Democratic candidate Alex Sink — was echoing the thoughts of millions of Americans who feel that too much money goes into our country’s political system, and we know way too little about where it comes from.
610 South Blvd. provides insight into a commonly overlooked aspect of campaign financing: Because so few people understand the nuances of campaign money, politicians and activists have a limited number of places to turn to when starting a committee. That leads to a high concentration of candidates and committees at a few select addresses, none more infamous in Florida political circles than 610 South Blvd.
Nancy and Robert Watkins together run Robert Watkins and Co., the accounting firm located at 610. Thirty-nine political committees are currently registered under the address with the Federal Election Commission (FEC). The committees registered there have conservative leanings and ties exclusively to Republican politicians.
The organizations range from leadership PACs, 501(c)4s and 527s to campaign committee PACs and even a handful of Super PACs — a new and controversial type of PAC that allows groups to raise unlimited funds from corporations, individuals and unions. And these groups tend to bring in big money. In 2010, one of the Super PACs at 610 raised more than $4 million.
Watkins and Co. also has 19 state PAC clients filed with the Florida Division of Elections.
Nancy Watkins says her firm’s impressive number of clients exists because she has been in the business for more than 25 years. According to her, 610 South Blvd. is an “official address” for many groups “for a lot of reasons.” Mostly, she says, the firm provides a reliable and “durable mailing address” for all her clients.
Meredith McGehee — the policy director for The Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that works in the area of campaign finance and elections — tells The Florida Independent there are no rules against multiple PACs sharing an address.
McGehee calls the FEC’s rules for what passes as coordination among these groups “ridiculous,” and says that even if groups follow FEC rules, their activities would probably not “pass a smell test for regular people.”
According to McGehee, as long as the groups do not coordinate with each other in a way that violates FEC laws, they can communicate, work together and share an address. She calls the FEC’s rules for what passes as coordination among these groups “ridiculous,” and says that even if groups follow FEC rules, their activities would probably not “pass a smell test for regular people.”
“The rules are so loose,” she says. “So there is a lot they can do. They can coordinate in common sense terms — just not legal terms.”
McGehee says these groups, for example, can share an office and “talk about general strategy” and still not violate FEC coordination rules.
Watkins says the fact that all her clients share her address “does not create a relationship between them.” She says everything done at her business is ethical, and that she does not talk to one client about another.
Federal policy-makers from all over the country turn to Watkins and Co. for their services. Former Sen. Mel Martinez and Reps. Katherine Harris, Rick Renzi and Pat Roberts are among those with ties to 610 South Blvd. In 2008, Mike Huckabee registered his Florida presidential campaign committee with the firm.
Most have created their own leadership PACs with the company. Leadership PACs are political action committees that “can be established by current and former members of Congress as well as other prominent political figures,” according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
The Center, a nonpartisan research group, explains that “leadership PACs are designed for two things: to make money and to make friends. In the rough and tumble political game, elected officials know that money and friends in high places are very important to winning elections and leadership positions.”
Watkins and Co., however, are not only providing leadership PAC services for folks in D.C. The firm also houses the paperwork for a number of state PACs, or committees of continuous existence, associated with GOP members of the Florida Legislature. Steve Precourt, Ellyn Bogdanoff, Jack Latvala, Miguel Diaz de la Portilla, Anitere Flores, Steve Crisafulli and Kevin Ambler, to name a few, all run campaign finance activity through 610 South Blvd.
Furthermore, these state PACs associated with Florida legislators have raked in a lot of money. In the year 2011 alone, these committees have brought in about $400,000. Latvala’s PAC has raised about $230,000 this year.
The office building also serves as the home for four Super PACs, controversial independent expenditure-only committees. Super PACs are a new kind of political action committee created in the wake of the federal court case SpeechNow.org v. Federal Election Commission, which loosened up previous campaign finance regulations.
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Super PACs “may raise unlimited sums of money from corporations, unions, associations and individuals, then spend unlimited sums to overtly advocate for or against political candidates.” Thanks to new rules, Super PACs can receive unlimited amounts of money from a corporation’s treasuries (i.e. profits), something that was previously illegal.
Super PACs do have to report their donors to the FEC on a monthly or quarterly basis; unlike traditional PACs, they cannot contribute money directly to political candidates.
As of Oct. 18, the Center for Responsive Politics reports that 156 committees are registered as Super PACs and have already “reported total expenditures of $2,596,787 in the 2012 cycle.”
The Super PACs listed under 610 South Blvd. include a conservative committee called the Coalition to Protect American Values; the Ending Spending Fund, a group that ran attack ads in Nevada against Harry Reid; the We Love USA PAC, a Super PAC famous for saying Obama is a “socialist” who “detests America”; and Dick Morris’ Super PAC for America.
The Super PACs listed under 610 South Blvd. include a conservative committee called the Coalition to Protect American Values; the Ending Spending Fund, a group that ran attack ads in Nevada against Harry Reid; the We Love USA PAC, a Super PAC famous for saying Obama is a “socialist” who “detests America”; and Dick Morris’ Super PAC for America.
The firm is also contracted by more traditional PACs, such as the American Issues Project. The group is known for spending $3 million on ads during the 2008 election tying the former founder of the Weather Underground Bill Ayers to Barack Obama. Most recently, the group focused on attacking the president’s stimulus legislation in 2010.
Also at 610: Florida Working Families, a PAC funded primarily by Big Sugar, notorious for its significant political reach in Florida and all over the country. Working Families launched negative ads against Jim Davis, attacking him for missing a vote in support of Israel, and successfully attacked Mary Barley, an environmental activist who ran in the Democratic primary for agricultural commissioner in 2002.
Watkins and Co. also provides services to a PAC funded by developers, lobbyists, builder’s groups and the Florida Chamber of Commerce called Floridians for Smarter Growth. The group was among the political forces opposing last election’s Amendment 4, known as the “Hometown Democracy” amendment. According to Ballotpedia, the amendment “proposed requiring a taxpayer-funded referendum for all changes to local government comprehensive land-use plans.” Floridians for Smarter Growth launched a successful attack against the amendment and coined (.pdf) the phrase the “Vote on Everything Amendment.”
In total, about 50 different PACs get their financial assistance and guidance from Watkins and Co.
According to the IRS’ records of tax-exempt groups, there are also four 527s using the address. 527s are advocacy groups that electioneer, and spend millions on a variety of positions and issues. While they may not explicitly tell voters to cast their ballots for a specific candidate, they clearly affect the way voters see a candidate or issue.
Watkins and Co. also handles the finances for a handful of tax-exempt nonprofits, including 501(c)4 organization. New rules now allow these types of groups to spend the money they raise anonymously, because their “primary activity” is lobbying.
McGehee says these sorts of details “reveal how the system really works” in elections.
Most people, she says, have little to no participation in this part of the political process. “About .08 percent of the population will spend more that $200 in an election cycle,” McGehee says.
Echoing Watkins, McGehee says that only a select few have the campaign finance expertise that Nancy and Robert Watkins provide, which contributes to the high number of clients 610 South Blvd. works with.
According to McGehee, there is also “a desire among these groups to know what everyone else is doing.” She says that is why the firm works exclusively with conservative groups and GOP policy-makers. ”It is rare that someone is serving both sides,” McGehee says. “It’s not accidental.”
The high concentration of key players in campaign financing — whether it is contributors or accountants — has led to a situation in which the political process is dominated by very few people. McGehee says that people have noticed, even though new rules have done nothing to correct the situation.
“There has always been this populist strain, whether its the tea party or Occupy Wall Street,” McGehee says, “that knows — and is angry about — our political system being dominated by monied interests.”
By: Ashley Lopez, Florida Independent, Published in The Washington Independent, October 24, 2011
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 