Leaked Bain Documents: More Romney Sleaze

“Romney Sleaze” — excuse the redundancy.

Some leaked documents are providing a glimpse into the methods used by super-wealthy tax dodgers.  950 pages of audits and financial statements from twenty-one funds — most of them affiliated with Bain Capital — have revealed that Mitt Romney is even sleazier than we thought.

There’s no smoking gun; nothing illegal.  He’s just slippery.  Very slippery.

As we already know, most of Romney’s fortune is tucked away in the Cayman Islands, Bermuda and Switzerland.  A writer from Gawker said:

“The documents reveal the mind-numbing, maze-like, and deeply opaque complexity with which Romney has handled his wealth, the exotic tax-avoidance schemes available only to the preposterously wealthy.”

Some of these funds make use of “blocker entities.”  This isn’t exactly a household name unless you’re a multimillionaire frantically trying to hide your money so you can weasel out of paying taxes.

Other funds have financial statements saying the fund “intends to conduct its operations so it will … not be subject to United States federal income or withholding tax …”

So this is the “successful” career Romney is touting.  Take over a company, lay off most of the workers and then sell the company at a huge profit.  Rinse and repeat.  And then squirrel away your ill-gotten fortune in offshore accounts so you don’t have to pay any taxes; don’t have to help contribute to the infrastructure that made your success possible.

Whatever anybody thought of the corporate takeover barons of the 1980s and ‘90s — Carl Icahn, T. Boone Pickens, Charles Hurwitz, etc. — did ANYBODY seriously think one of these people should be President of the United States?!?!?!?

Retroactive Changes I’ve Made

Some people are calling Mitt Romney a slimy little sleazebucket for retroactively retiring from Bain Capital three years before he actually retired.  I personally am going to put this in a positive light and see the glass as half full.

If a White House candidate can retroactively retire from his vulture capital firm three years before that company’s job-destroying binge started getting really hot and heavy — think of what this means!  Obviously there is “some kind of loophole in the space-time continuum” (taken from the linked article), and Mitt Romney is simply the first one to discover it.  Now that we all know about it, the possibilities are endless.

To whom it may concern:  that lame-ass cliché I uttered in court — “he was dead when I got there” — has now been changed to “I wasn’t there.”

Like most people, I’ve held a bunch of low-level dead-end booorring jobs during my checkered career.  But no more.  Retroactively, I was the CEO and general manager of several telemarketing firms, the president of a tiny huge non-profit political organization, and a highly-paid insurance executive with perks up the yinyang.

And I have never, ever, used any expletives or done any name-calling on this blog.  If anyone should find an older post that appears to use profanity, uhh, it was taken out of context.  Or something.

And best of all:  I can finally take that tacky “My Other Car is a Mercedes” bumper sticker off my old rusty sputtering Ford.  My car IS a Mercedes.