“Invisible And Untaxed”: How Mitt Romney Made A Fortune Off The Auto Bailout
Faced with the hard facts that “bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive,” as Vice President Biden always says, Mitt Romney has resorted to claiming that Obama followed his lead on the auto industry bailout. “I know [Obama] keeps saying, you wanted to take Detroit bankrupt,” he said during this week’s debate at Hofstra University. “Well, the president took Detroit bankrupt.” Romney’s right, in a way — both his plan and Obama’s plan envisioned the auto companies going through a period of bankruptcy restructuring. But there’s a key difference: Obama’s approach was to use government dollars to prop up the auto companies until they could stand on their own again — something that Romney, like other Republicans in the Tea Party’s anti-spending thrall, adamantly opposed as dangerous government intervention in private industry.
But it turns out that Romney should know firsthand that this kind of intervention can be successful, as a new report shows that he and his wife made at least $15.3 million courtesy of Obama’s auto bailout. According to a Greg Palast, who followed the paper trail for the Nation, Romney and his wife made the money via an investment in a hedge fund that saw astronomical returns on its investments in an auto parts maker that would have gone under absent the president’s rescue operation.
Delphi, the auto parts company, was once part of General Motors but was spun off in 1999. It foundered on its own and declared bankruptcy in 2005, at which point hedge funds came in and bought up the company’s old debt. Among them was Elliott Management, a giant in the industry run by GOP mega-donor Paul Singer. Romney was an investor. Elliott and the other hedge funds were able to buy Delphi’s toxic debt for a fraction of their face value, around 20 cents on the dollar. In 2009, as bailout negotiations were underway, Elliott used their bonds to buy large shares in the company, again for pennies (this time for about 67 cents per share). Not only would Delphi have gone out of business along with its largest customer, GM, but the parts maker got at least $2.8 billion directly from the taxpayer-funded Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP). In 2011, Elliott and the other hedge funds took Delphi public at $22 a share, making a whopping 3,000 percent return on their investment of less than 70 cents a share.
So how much did Romney make? His personal financial disclosure forms say he and Ann Romney had at least $1 million invested, but the disclosure rules are so vague that it could be far more. Palast sketches out the possible windfall:
It is reasonable to assume that Singer treated the Romneys the same as his other investors, with a third of their portfolio invested in Delphi by the time of the 2011 initial public offering. This means that with an investment of at least $1 million, their smallest possible gain when Delphi went public would have been $10.2 million, plus another $10.2 million for each million handed to Singer — all gains made possible by the auto bailout.
But that’s just the beginning. Since the November 2011 IPO, Delphi’s stock has roared upward, boosting the Romneys’ Delphi windfall from $10.2 million to $15.3 million for each million they invested with Singer… The Romneys’ exact gain, however, remains nearly invisible—and untaxed—because Singer cashed out only a fragment of the windfall in 2011.
By: Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon, October 19, 2012
“Too Many Mitt’s”: Shameless And Shape Shifting; To Know Him Is To Mistrust Him
It will have zero effect on a certain Romney landslide in Utah, but the particular wording and reasoning of the Salt Lake Tribune‘s editorial endorsing Barack Obama will resonate far and wide. The “Trib” chose to write its repudiation of semi-favorite-son Mitt with the tone of someone familiar with a pol who’s sold his birthright for a mess of pottage:
Nowhere has Mitt Romney’s pursuit of the presidency been more warmly welcomed or closely followed than here in Utah. The Republican nominee’s political and religious pedigrees, his adeptly bipartisan governorship of a Democratic state, and his head for business and the bottom line all inspire admiration and hope in our largely Mormon, Republican, business-friendly state.
But it was Romney’s singular role in rescuing Utah’s organization of the 2002 Olympics from a cesspool of scandal, and his oversight of the most successful Winter Games on record, that make him the Beehive State’s favorite adopted son. After all, Romney managed to save the state from ignominy, turning the extravaganza into a showcase for the matchless landscapes, volunteerism and efficiency that told the world what is best and most beautiful about Utah and its people.
Sounds like the buildup to an endorsement, eh? Not hardly.
In short, this is the Mitt Romney we knew, or thought we knew, as one of us.
Sadly, it is not the only Romney, as his campaign for the White House has made abundantly clear, first in his servile courtship of the tea party in order to win the nomination, and now as the party’s shape-shifting nominee. From his embrace of the party’s radical right wing, to subsequent portrayals of himself as a moderate champion of the middle class, Romney has raised the most frequently asked question of the campaign: “Who is this guy, really, and what in the world does he truly believe?”
The evidence suggests no clear answer, or at least one that would survive Romney’s next speech or sound bite. Politicians routinely tailor their words to suit an audience. Romney, though, is shameless, lavishing vastly diverse audiences with words, any words, they would trade their votes to hear.
The editorial eventually gets around to some measured positive comments about Barack Obama, but it’s clear from the headline–“Too Many Mitts”–that its main thrust is aimed at showing not everybody in Utah is buying this particular snowstorm.
The president is entertaining audiences today by referring to his opponent with his vast number of serpentine manuevers as someone suffering from “Romnesia.” The Salt Lake Tribune begs to differ: Mitt hasn’t forgotten a thing; he’s just doing whatever the political markets call for, and hoping voters suffer from Romnesia.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, October 19, 2012
“Lying For Jesus”: Is Romney Now Lying When He Admits His 47% Comments Were A Lie?
Mitt Romney has stood by and defended his infamous comments, that he believes 47% of Americans “are dependent upon government,” and “believe that they are victims.” The viral video’s release last month by Mother Jones was a game-changing moment for an already-rocked campaign that was fraught with internal turmoil. But now, after lying during the presidential debate 27 times — and not even being forced to defend his “47 percent” comments, Mitt Romney is claiming that those comments just “didn’t come out right,” and were “completely wrong.”
“Well, clearly in a campaign, with hundreds if not thousands of speeches and question-and-answer sessions, now and then you’re going to say something that doesn’t come out right,” Romney last night told Tea party conservative Fox News talk show host Sean Hannity. “In this case, I said something that’s just completely wrong. And I absolutely believe, however, that my life has shown that I care about the 100 percent and that’s been demonstrated throughout my life. And this whole campaign is about the 100 percent.”
In the leaked video from a May $50,000 a plate fundraiser, Romney had told supporters:
“There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. There are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it.”
“Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax,” Romney had added, and it was his role “to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”
Last month, when the video surfaced, Romney did not for one minute deny he made those comments, and he and his campaign stood by and defended them:
“I am talking about a political process of drawing people in my campaign… My campaign is about helping people take more responsibility,” Romney said, and infamously added, merely that his comments were “not elegantly stated.. I am sure I can state it more clearly and effectively than I did in a setting like that.” (An exceptionally elegant setting, mind you.)
Joh Aravosis at AmericaBlog put together this compelling report:
So Romney lied to his top donors. Why? Why did he lie to them? Has he lied to other top donors? Is he lying to us now?
Why didn’t Romney realize his comments were completely wrong a month ago? Why did he defend them if he knew they were “completely wrong”? So you mean, Romney lied to the American people for the past month when he said his comments were accurate (albeit inelegant)?
And what happened to cause Romney to only now realize that his comments are wrong?
I’ll tell you what happened. Romney’s son Tagg is busy “reinventing” his dad for the 100th time, and one of the things he told poppy is that he has to come clean on the 47% remarks.
This man is incredibly disingenuous. He will say anything to anyone to get elected President. He used to claim that he was better on gay rights than Ted Kennedy. Now he panders to the farthest of the gay-hating far-right, while his wife campaigns at conferences sponsored by officially-designated hate groups. Ted Kennedy, he ain’t.
But then what is Mitt Romney? What does he actually believe on anything? He’s flip-flopped on gay rights. He flip-flopped on health care reform again and again and again and again and again and again. He’s flipped onimmigration a few times, on gay adoption, the auto bailout, on guns, on his own college, on SuperPACs, on Solyndra, on carbon pollution, on stem cells, on abortion, on contraception, on Iraq, on climate change, on taxes, on the recession a lot.
He flip-flopped on catfish.
He even flip-flopped on flip-flopping.
That’s why fellow Republican, fellow Mormon, John Huntsman called Romney “a perfectly lubricated weathervane on the important issues of the day.”
That’s a nice way of saying that Mitt Romney is a congenital liar.
Indeed.
By: David Badash, The New Civil Rights Movement, October 5, 2012
“Purveyors Of Garbage”: Right Wingers Hitting Rock Bottom, Then Crawling Beneath The Rock
I have, at times, marveled at some of the more ridiculous efforts to smear President Obama and his family. Dinesh D’Souza, for example, wrote a strange book attacking Obama for trying to carry out an “anti-colonial” agenda he inherited from his Kenyan father. It’s a thesis as silly as it is ugly, based on bizarre assertions about the president having the mindset of an African “Luo tribesman.”
The Weekly Standard criticized it for “misstatements of fact, leaps in logic, and pointlessly elaborate argumentation.” When D’Souza’s thesis first appeared as a piece in Forbes, one of the magazine’s own columnists blasted D’Souza’s “intellectual goofiness,” “factual problems,” and “unsubstantiated ideological accusations.” The Columbia Journalism Review called D’Souza’s piece “a fact-twisting, error-laden piece of paranoia” and a “singularly disgusting work.”
By the time the disgusting attack was turned into a movie, it was tempting to think the deranged attitudes of Obama’s most over-the-top detractors couldn’t get any worse. Michelle Goldberg’s latest report proves otherwise — now they’re launching nauseating attacks against the president’s mother (thanks to my colleague Vanessa Silverton-Peel for the heads-up).
For a while now, pictures purporting to show Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, modeling in 1950s bondage and fetish porn have been floating around the darker corners of the Internet. Now, though, they’ve made their way into a pseudo-documentary, Joel Gilbert’s Dreams From My Real Father, which is being mailed to voters in swing states, promoted by several Tea Party groups and by at least one high-level Republican. At the same time, Dinesh D’Souza’s latest book, Obama’s America—the first of all his works to hit the top spot on The New York Times bestseller list—has a chapter essentially calling Dunham a fat slut. […]
What matters here is not that a lone crank made a vulgar conspiracy video, one that outdoes even birther propaganda in its lunacy and bad taste. It’s that the video is finding an audience on the right. Gilbert claims that more than a million copies of Dreams From My Real Father have been mailed to voters in Ohio, as well between 80,000 and 100,000 to voters in Nevada and 100,000 to voters in New Hampshire. “We’re putting plans in place, as of next week, to send out another 2 [million] or 3 million, just state by state,” he told me.
It may seem hard to believe that even the most gullible, wild-eyed fools would find such garbage credible, but there are those on the right who are actually embracing this. Goldberg added, “[T]he fact is, people are reporting receiving the disc in the mail. Tea Party groups and conservative churches are screening it. It was shown at a right-wing film festival in Tampa during the Republican National Convention, and by Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum Council in Missouri. Alabama GOP Chairman Bill Armistead recently recommended it during a speech.”
We’re well past the point at which these right-wing activists care about basic levels of decency, but if there’s any justice, this kind of attack will backfire, and make the purveyors of the garbage look far worse than their intended targets.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, September 28, 2012
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