Romney Does the Bain Hustle

Robert Scheer's Columns

Do the Bain Hustle

Posted on May 23, 2012

AP/Jae C. Hong

Republican presidential candidate and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney walks past an arrow mark at a town hall-style meeting in Euclid, Ohio.

By Robert Scheer

Obviously Barack Obama was right in criticizing Mitt Romney’s stewardship of Bain Capital. How else to evaluate the business experience that Romney has made a central tenet of his campaign?

As Obama put it all too accurately: “My opponent, Governor Romney—his main calling card for why he thinks he should be president is his business experience. He’s not going out there touting his experience in Massachusetts. He’s saying: ‘I’m a business guy. I know how to fix it.’ ” 

And the fixing of the beleaguered companies acquired under Romney’s leadership at Bain Capital involved the very practices that have led to the loss of good American jobs to ensure the outrageous rewards that made Romney so wealthy.

Although Romney presents his activities as a form of venture capitalist investment, giving life to new enterprises, his practice has been quite the opposite. Ninety percent of Bain Capital’s deals by the end of his tenure involved dismembering once-thriving enterprises and selling off the parts, along with the jobs connected to them. “He made his money mainly through leveraged buyouts,” The New York Times reported five years ago in a detailed survey of Bain Capital’s practices under Romney, “mortgaging companies to take them over in the hope of reselling them at big profits in just a few years.”

Those immense profits were taxed at the capital gains rate of 15 percent instead of the 35 percent that income earners at that level were otherwise required to fork over. “The amounts of money are so vast that it is truly a matter of time before the taxation of private equity is front and center of the public agenda,” noted James E. Post, an expert on such matters at Boston University. He added, “Increasingly, this world of private equity looks like a world of robber barons, and Romney comes out of that world.”

Those comments were made back in 2007, when Romney was gearing up for an ultimately failed run at the Republican presidential nomination. But the expected outrage over the pirate practices of the hedge fund hustlers never much materialized, and the Romneys of the world have sailed through the subsequent years of economic implosion free of any serious accountability. The money they are able to dispense to politicians is that good.

Take the case of Newark Mayor Cory Booker, whose comments about being nauseated by Obama’s Bain Capital remarks were quickly exploited in Republican ads. What is truly nauseating is that Booker did not reveal that his own rise to power was floated by contributions from Bain and other leading financial hustlers. 

As Josh Israel wrote on Think Progress, an “examination of New Jersey finance records for Booker’s first run for mayor—back in 2002—suggests a possible reason for his unease with attacks on Bain Capital and venture capital. They were among his earliest and most generous backers.”

Indeed, what is surprising is not that Democrats like Booker are on the take from the hedge funds, as Obama himself has been, but rather that the president has dared to criticize those who have been so supportive of his campaigns. 

Although Obama is to be applauded for questioning Romney’s legacy, his motives seem to be as opportunistic as those of Romney’s opponents in the Republican primaries who took the same tack. After all, Obama has had three years to regulate the unbridled power of private equity funds and he has done nothing in that regard. The president chose as his key economic adviser Lawrence Summers, who was paid $4.5 million as a consultant to the D.E. Shaw hedge fund while counseling then-candidate Obama. 

Then there’s Rahm Emanuel, who was appointed Obama’s chief of staff despite the fact that his rise to power as an Illinois congressman was financed by Magnetar Capital, a hedge fund that had trafficked in subprime mortgage-backed securities. Emanuel’s replacement as chief of staff was no improvement. William M. Daley was paid $5 million a year by JPMorgan Chase—not a hedge fund, but a financial institution that has proved to be no less reckless and exploitative in its banking practices.

The point is not that the Democrats are virtuous— they are not. The power of finance capital has corrupted both parties ever since Bill Clinton collaborated with the Republicans in Congress to reverse the New Deal of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the last truly great president of either party. The difference is that the Democrats must still respond to the demands of the party’s base for a modicum of economic justice for those who are hurting most. With the selection of hedge fund grifter Romney, the Republicans are now irredeemably defined as the party of the rapacious plutocrats.

Mitt Romney's Neocon War Cabinet

Mitt Romney's Neocon War Cabinet 

Ari Berman

May 2, 2012   |    This article appeared in the May 21, 2012 edition of The Nation. 

 

 

 

 It’s safe to say that foreign policy was not the strong suit of this year’s contenders for the GOP presidential nomination. Rick Perry labeled the Turkish government “Islamic terrorists.” Newt Gingrich referred to Palestinians as “invented” people. Herman Cain called Uzbekistan “Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan” and memorably blanked when asked what he thought of NATO’s incursion into Libya. Michele Bachmann pledged to close the US embassy in Iran, which hasn’t existed since 1980. Rick Santorum gave a major foreign policy speech at a Jelly Belly factory in California.

 

Yet though the candidates and their views were often hard to take seriously, their statements on foreign policy reflected a more disturbing trend in the GOP. Despite facing a war-weary public, the candidates—with the exception of Ron Paul, an antiwar libertarian, and Jon Huntsman, a moderate internationalist—positioned themselves as unapologetic war hawks. That included Mitt Romney, marginally more polished than his rivals but hardly an expert. Given Romney’s well-established penchant for flip-flopping and opportunism, it’s difficult to know what he really believes on any issue, including foreign affairs (the campaign did not respond to a request for comment). But a comprehensive review of his statements during the primary and his choice of advisers suggests a return to the hawkish, unilateral interventionism of the George W. Bush administration should he win the White House in November.

Romney is loath to mention Bush on the campaign trail, for obvious reasons, but today they sound like ideological soul mates on foreign policy. Listening to Romney, you’d never know that Bush left office bogged down by two unpopular wars that cost America dearly in blood and treasure. Of Romney’s forty identified foreign policy advisers, more than 70 percent worked for Bush. Many hail from the neoconservative wing of the party, were enthusiastic backers of the Iraq War and are proponents of a US or Israeli attack on Iran. Christopher Preble, a foreign policy expert at the Cato Institute, says, “Romney’s likely to be in the mold of George W. Bush when it comes to foreign policy if he were elected.” On some key issues, like Iran, Romney and his team are to the right of Bush. Romney’s embrace of the neoconservative cause—even if done cynically to woo the right—could turn into a policy nightmare if he becomes president.
 

If we take the candidate at his word, a Romney presidency would move toward war against Iran; closely align Washington with the Israeli right; leave troops in Afghanistan at least until 2014 and refuse to negotiate with the Taliban; reset the Obama administration’s “reset” with Russia; and pursue a Reagan-like military buildup at home. The Washington Monthly dubbed Romney’s foreign policy vision the “more enemies, fewer friends” doctrine, which is chillingly reminiscent of the world Obama inherited from Bush.

In March the Rev. Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention told the Romney campaign it could win over “recalcitrant conservatives,” reported the Washington Post, by “previewing a few Cabinet selections: Santorum as attorney general, Gingrich as ambassador to the United Nations and John Bolton as secretary of state.” That suggestion, which might seem ludicrous, not to mention terrifying, is more plausible than one might think.

In December Gingrich pledged at a forum sponsored by the Republican Jewish Coalition that he would appoint Bolton to run Foggy Bottom. But the mustachioed über-hawk, who was a controversial under secretary of state for arms control and UN ambassador in the Bush administration, endorsed Romney instead. Bolton has since campaigned energetically for him, serving as a key surrogate on national security issues. “Many conservatives hope that [will] include accepting a senior national security post in a Romney administration,” wrote Jennifer Rubin, a neoconservative blogger for the Post.

Few advisers personify the pugnacity of Romney’s foreign policy team better than Bolton. He has been a steadfast opponent of international organizations and treaties and seems never to have met a war he didn’t like. Shortly before the invasion of Iraq, he told Israeli officials that Syria, Iran and North Korea would be the next US targets. Over the past few years Bolton has been an outspoken proponent of an Israeli attack on Iran. “Mitt Romney will restore our military, repair relations with our closest allies and ensure that no adversary—including Iran—ever questions American resolve,” Bolton said when endorsing Romney. “John’s wisdom, clarity and courage are qualities that should typify our foreign policy,” Romney responded.
* * *
Romney knew little about foreign policy when he ran for president in 2008. An internal dossier of John McCain’s presidential campaign said at the time that “Romney’s foreign affairs resume is extremely thin, leading to credibility problems.” After being branded as too liberal by conservative GOP activists four years ago, Romney aligned himself with Bolton and other neocons in 2012 to protect his right flank. Today there’s little daylight between the candidate and his most militant advisers. “When you read the op-eds and listen to the speeches, it sounds like Romney’s listening to the John Bolton types more than anyone else,” says Brian Katulis, a senior fellow for national security at the Center for American Progress. (The Romney campaign’s openly gay foreign policy spokesman, Richard Grenell, who had been an indefatigable defender of Bolton as the latter’s PR flack in the Bush years, was forced to resign after harsh attacks by anti-gay conservatives.)

Bolton is one of eight Romney advisers who signed letters drafted by the Project for a New American Century, an influential neoconservative advocacy group founded in the 1990s, urging the Clinton and Bush administrations to attack Iraq. PNAC founding member Paula Dobriansky, leading advocate of Bush’s ill-fated “freedom agenda” as an official in the State Department, recently joined the Romney campaign full time. Another PNAC founder, Eliot Cohen, counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice from 2007 to 2009, wrote the foreword to the Romney campaign’s foreign policy white paper, which was titled, perhaps not coincidentally, “An American Century.” Cohen was a tutor to Bush administration neocons. Following 9/11, he dubbed the war on terror “World War IV,” arguing that Iraq, being an “obvious candidate, having not only helped Al Qaeda, but…developed weapons of mass destruction,” should be its center. In 2009 Cohen urged the Obama administration to “actively seek the overthrow” of Iran’s government.

The Romney campaign released the white paper and its initial roster of foreign policy advisers in October, to coincide with a major address at The Citadel. The cornerstone of Romney’s speech was a gauzy defense of American exceptionalism, a theme the candidate adopted from another PNAC founder and Romney adviser, Robert Kagan. The speech and white paper were long on distortions—claiming that Obama believed “there is nothing unique about the United States” and “issued apologies for America” abroad—and short on policy proposals. The few substantive ideas were costly and bellicose: increasing the number of warships the Navy builds per year from nine to fifteen (five more than the service requested in its 2012 budget), boosting the size of the military by 100,000 troops, placing a missile defense system in Europe and stationing two aircraft carriers near Iran. “What he articulated in the Citadel speech was one of the most inchoate, disorganized, cliché-filled foreign policy speeches that any serious candidate has ever given,” says Steve Clemons, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation.

Romney’s team is notable for including Bush aides tarnished by the Iraq fiasco: Robert Joseph, the National Security Council official who inserted the infamous “sixteen words” in Bush’s 2003 State of the Union message claiming that Iraq had tried to buy enriched uranium from Niger; Dan Senor, former spokesman for the hapless Coalition Provisional Authority under Paul Bremer in Iraq; and Eric Edelman, a top official at the Pentagon under Bush. “I can’t name a single Romney foreign policy adviser who believes the Iraq War was a mistake,” says Cato’s Preble. “Two-thirds of the American people do believe the Iraq War was a mistake. So he has willingly chosen to align himself with that one-third of the population right out of the gate.”

Shortly after McCain’s 2008 defeat, Kagan, Edelman, Senor and Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol launched the Foreign Policy Initiative, a neocon successor to PNAC. FPI’s mission has been to keep the Bush doctrine alive in the Obama era—supporting a troop increase in Afghanistan and opposing a 2014 withdrawal; advocating a 20,000-troop residual force in Iraq; backing a military strike and/or regime change in Iran; promoting military intervention in Syria; urging a more confrontational posture toward Russia; and opposing cuts in military spending. Three of FPI’s four board members are advising Romney.
Edelman, having worked for Dick Cheney in both Bush administrations, is Romney’s link to Cheneyworld. (Edelman suggested to Cheney’s chief of staff, Scooter Libby, the idea of leaking the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame to undermine former ambassador Joe Wilson for his New York Times op-ed detailing the Bush administration’s falsified Iraq-Niger connection.) As ambassador to Turkey in 2003, Edelman failed to persuade Ankara to support the Iraq War. Turkish columnist Ibrahim Karagul called him “probably the least-liked and trusted American ambassador in Turkish history.” Edelman later moved to the Defense Department, where in 2007 he became infamous for scolding Hillary Clinton when she asked how the Pentagon was planning its withdrawal from Iraq. He’s one of nearly a dozen of Romney advisers who have urged that the United States consider an attack Iran.

Senor is best known for his disastrous stint in Iraq under Bremer, when the United States disbanded the Iraqi Army and tried to privatize the economy. In his book on Iraq, Rajiv Chandrasekaran of the Washington Post wrote of Senor, “His efforts to spin failures into successes sometimes reached the point of absurdity.” Senor is particularly close to the Israeli right, co-writing the 2009 book Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle, which reads like an extended investment brochure. He now serves as a conduit between Romney and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “Mitt-Bibi will be the new Reagan-Thatcher,” Senor tweeted after the New York Times ran a story about the close friendship of the two men, which dates to the late 1970s.

A mixture of domestic politics (trying to make Obama appear weak and courting conservative elements of the Jewish vote) and neocon ideology has led Romney to call for everything short of war on Iran. “Either the ayatollahs will get the message, or they will learn some very painful lessons about the meaning of American resolve,” he wrote in a March 5 Washington Post op-ed.

Romney has been similarly hawkish on military spending, another neocon priority. His plan to spend a minimum of 4 percent of GDP on the Pentagon would increase its budget by more than $200 billion in 2016, a 38 percent hike over Obama’s budget, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “Romney’s proposal to embark on a second straight decade of escalating military spending would be the first time in American history that war preparation and defense spending had increased as a share of overall economic activity for such an extended period,” wrote Merrill Goozner in the Fiscal Times. “When coupled with the 20 percent cut in taxes he promises, it would require shrinking domestic spending to levels not seen since the Great Depression—before programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid began.” Such cuts, Goozner noted, “would likely throw the U.S. economy back into recession.”
Since the 2010 election, military spending has been a topic of great debate on the right. Fiscal conservatives like Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform and the Cato Institute have urged Congress to consider serious Pentagon cuts. “Department of Defense spending, in particular, has been provided protected status that has isolated it from serious scrutiny and allowed the Pentagon to waste billions in taxpayer money,” twenty-three conservative leaders, led by Norquist, wrote to Congressional Republicans in November 2010. “Simply advocating more ships, more troops and more weapons isn’t a viable path forward,” Huntsman echoed during the primary campaign. That view met a furious pushback from the Defending Defense coalition, a joint project of FPI, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Heritage Foundation, which mirrored Romney’s plan to increase military spending drastically. “When the Soviet Union disappeared, a lot of people on the right failed to notice,” Norquist said on Capitol Hill last year [see Robert Dreyfuss, “GOP Fires at the Pentagon,” February 14, 2011].

Romney hasn’t said what he’d do with a bigger military or how he’d pay for it. But it’s safe to assume the money will go toward preserving or enlarging the national security state. Romney’s counterterrorism adviser since 2007 has been former CIA operative Cofer Black, another controversial figure from the Bush era. The Daily Beast calls Black “Romney’s trusted envoy to the dark side” and “the campaign’s in-house intelligence officer.” In 2007 Romney sourced Black in refusing to classify waterboarding as torture (and also said he wanted to “double Guantánamo”). As head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center following 9/11, Black supervised the agency’s “extraordinary rendition” program, which illegally transported alleged terrorists to secret detention centers abroad, where they were tortured. “After 9/11 the gloves come off,” Black infamously testified before Congress. He joined the private security firm Blackwater in 2005, specializing in intelligence gathering for governments and business. More recently, the Daily Beast reported, Romney has relied on Black for security assessments of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Egypt and Iran, including Iran’s nuclear program.

The hardliners on Romney’s team have sidelined moderates like Mitchell Reiss, the candidate’s principal foreign policy adviser in 2008 and former director of policy planning at the State Department under Colin Powell. In December Romney disavowed Reiss’s call to negotiate with the Taliban, pledging to defeat the insurgency militarily (which few foreign policy experts believe is realistic) and criticizing the Obama administration’s plan to begin withdrawing troops next year. Romney also sided with the likes of Senor over Reiss by backing the Bush surge in Iraq and Obama’s escalation in Afghanistan. This black-and-white worldview is dangerously myopic, obsessed with military power and evil foes while ignoring complex challenges like Europe’s economic crisis and the Arab Spring. Romney and his chief advisers “see the world through a cold war prism that is totally out of touch with the realities of the twenty-first century,” Vice President Joe Biden said recently in a major foreign policy speech.

Romney’s case for election rests on his credentials as a competent businessman who can restructure the economy and government. Yet his choice of foreign policy advisers undercuts that sales pitch by elevating radical ideologues who want to spend profligately on unnecessary weapons and wars. If Romney wants to run a fiscally prudent and well-managed country, his GOP model should be Eisenhower, not Bush. But someone like Ike would never make it through a Republican primary today.

* * *

This year’s GOP primary was supposed to showcase a long-simmering party debate on foreign policy. “The hawkish consensus on national security that has dominated Republican foreign policy for the last decade is giving way to a more nuanced view,” the Times reported last June. What was left of the moderate wing of the party was particularly excited about the campaign of Huntsman, Obama’s former ambassador to China, who opposed the war in Afghanistan and advocated “a more judicious approach toward foreign entanglements.”
Huntsman advisers included realist Republicans like former George H.W. Bush national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and Council on Foreign Relations chair Richard Haass.
Yet Huntsman withered under blistering attacks from the neocons and other GOP standard-bearers, including Senators John McCain and Lindsay Graham. “I don’t think you saw a whole lot of appetite in the party for his views on foreign policy,” said Jamie Fly, executive director of the Foreign Policy Initiative. And Ron Paul’s isolationist views didn’t help him in the primaries, either. Indeed, Romney veered right in response to Bachmann, Cain, Gingrich, Perry and Santorum rather than left to appeal to Huntsman or Paul voters.

After the twin disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan, you’d think Republicans would be more skeptical of interventionism and the neocons more humbled. Yet the party’s major neoconservative institutions, like FPI, AEI and Heritage, have pushed aggressively for US intervention in Libya, Iran and Syria. “How do you get out of this state of interminable war?” asks Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Powell. “My party has not a clue. In fact, they want to deepen it, widen it and go further, on Chinese and Japanese dollars.” Wilkerson says he was “astonished by how much the neocons seem to still have influence,” and that he was “scared to death” about the prospect that people like McCain and Graham would have sway over foreign policy. I asked Cato’s Preble why the neocons haven’t lost more clout in GOP circles after the failures of the Bush years. ”They’ve crafted this narrative around the surge, claiming Iraq was, in fact, a success,” Preble says. “They’ve ridden that ever since.”

Today there’s a striking disconnect between the neocon establishment in Washington and the beliefs of GOP voters. Fifty-two percent of Republicans believe the war in Afghanistan is not worth fighting, an all-time high. Seventy-one percent of self-identified conservative voters are worried about the war’s costs, and 57 percent agree that “the United States can dramatically lower the number of troops in Afghanistan without putting America at risk.”

“Where is this grassroots movement for open-ended US interventionism abroad?” asks Preble. “It doesn’t exist. In fact, public sentiment is in the opposite direction.” Yet only two GOP senators, Mike Lee and Rand Paul, voted in March to support an expedited timeline for withdrawal from Afghanistan. The likes of McCain and Graham, who advocate a longer US commitment there and elsewhere, continue to speak for the party establishment. (Another top Romney foreign policy adviser, Richard Williamson, who served as Bush’s special envoy to Sudan, advised the McCain campaign in 2008.)

With the party base focused on other issues—only 1 percent of Republicans named Afghanistan as their top issue in the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll—the neocons have filled the vacuum. “There are more neoconservative think tanks than there are neoconservatives,” jokes Preble, whose boss at Cato, Ed Crane, calls them “a head without a body.” They have clearly overwhelmed the libertarians and realists. “The neoconservatives, I’ll concede, have a very good ground game,” says Preble. “They have a network of institutions in Washington that are very effective and vocal. They have a friendly audience in many of the editorial pages of the major newspapers and magazines. That gives them a significant leg up in terms of making these arguments.”

Elder statesmen from the George H.W. Bush administration like Powell and Scowcroft are much closer to Obama than to Romney. “The foreign policy experts who represent old-school, small-c conservatism and internationalism have been pushed out of the party,” says Heather Hurlburt, executive director of the center-left National Security Network. “Who in the Republican Party still listens to Brent Scowcroft?” Wilkerson says the likes of Powell and Scowcroft are “very worried about their ability to restore moderation and sobriety to the party’s foreign and domestic policies.” In 2012 Obama is running as Bush 41 and Romney as Bush 43.

Romney would like to make the 2012 election a replay of 1980, when Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter. Romney has attacked Obama’s “breathtaking weakness” and called him “America’s most feckless president since Carter.” Yet so far, Romney hasn’t been able to make this argument stick. Obama has been more hawkish than many liberals and conservatives would like to admit, and his main foreign policy triumph—the killing of Osama bin Laden—is easy to communicate. As a result, Obama has a seventeen-point advantage over Romney on foreign affairs and a seven-point advantage on terrorism. The public is also more supportive of Obama’s overall foreign policy worldview. A Pew poll last year found that Americans prefer peace through diplomacy over peace through military strength by 58 percent to 31 percent. A similar percentage believes the United States should compromise in order to work with allies rather than go it alone.

Some top Republicans are worried about Romney’s belligerent statements. “In foreign affairs the Republican candidates staked out dangerous ground,” conservative columnist Peggy Noonan wrote in the Wall Street Journal after the primaries unofficially ended. “They are allowing the GOP to be painted as the war party. They are ceding all non-war ground to the president, who can come forward as the sober, constrained, non-bellicose contender. Do they want that? Are they under the impression America is hungry for another war? Really? After the past 11 years?” Recent surveys of swing voters in Ohio and Florida by Third Way and Greenberg Quinlan Rosner confirm her fears. “Republicans strike many of these swing voters as too extreme; too aggressive; too quick to take dangerous actions without all the facts; and ‘too quick on the trigger,’” they reported.

Romney has already committed a string of foreign policy gaffes on the campaign trail. He was chided by House Speaker John Boehner for criticizing Obama while the president was abroad and widely panned for calling Russia “our No. 1 geopolitical foe” and demanding that Obama release the transcripts of his conversations with foreign leaders. Peter Feaver, an adviser to Bush at the National Security Council, urged Romney to “walk back from reckless campaign promises.”

Yet Romney inexplicably continues to get the benefit of the doubt from leading pundits. A Times news article recently praised his “impressive bench of foreign policy advisers,” and Times columnist Nicholas Kristof called them “credible, respected figures.” Aaron David Miller of the Woodrow Wilson Center similarly discounted Romney’s hawkish positions. “He’s articulating policies he wouldn’t follow,” Miller said. “Barring an extraordinary event like September 11, Romney will be much more moderate, much less reckless than George W. Bush.”
How can we be so sure? After the Bush administration, it’s best not to take anything for granted. Yes, Romney might not yet be a reliable neoconservative. The neocons, after all, have firm beliefs about the necessity of military interventionism, which they’re willing to defend even when unpopular. Romney, on the other hand, simply opposes whatever policy Obama pursues. Neoconservatism, for him, is an ideology of convenience. “I don’t think he has any North Star on foreign policy right now, other than whatever Obama is for, he’s on the other side of it,” says Clemons.

That said, Romney’s malleability is an advantage for his neocon advisers, giving them an opportunity to shape his worldview, as they did with Bush after 9/11. Four years after Bush left office in disgrace, Romney is their best shot to get back in power. If that happens, they’re likely to pursue the same aggressive policies they advocated under Bush. “I don’t think there’s been a deep rethink,” says Clemons. “I don’t think the neoconservatives feel chastened at all. As a movement, the true neoconservatives never, ever give up. They will be back.”

Ari Berman

May 2, 2012   |    This article appeared in the May 21, 2012 edition of The Nation.

Scrutiny of Mitt Romney’s Character Reveals Psychopathic Tendencies

Scrutiny of Mitt Romney’s Character Reveals Psychopathic Tendencies

By: Deborah FosterMay 19, 2012

 

People tend to associate the word psychopath with serial killers or other violent criminals. The word conjures up images of anti-social monsters who are unable to fit into everyday society. This makes sense since everything in our media teaches us that psychopaths are predatory murderers. Indeed, experts on psychopathy have estimated that up to 25% of prison populations include people who could be labeled as psychopaths. However, people with psychopathic personalities are not exclusively found among criminals. In reality, they are often described as “charming” and quite normal, even functioning in high profile professions. Recently, Sherree DeCovney made controversial headlines by making the assertion that as many as 1 in 10 financial services workers on Wall Street were psychopaths, which was probably an overestimation.  But, DeCovney was on to something. There are many highly successful people who can also be observed to have psychopathic tendencies, and recently, evidence has been piling up that one of them is none other than presidential wanna-be Mitt Romney.

There are three major patterns of qualities that characterize a psychopath: 1) interpersonal conduct such as dishonesty, narcissism, and arrogance, along with a marked lack of consideration for the rights and well-being of others 2) affective deficits such as lack of empathy or guilt, and 3) impulsiveness or risk-taking. Based on established criteria, psychologists estimate that approximately 1% of the population or 3 million people could be classified as having a psychopathic personality. However, these are people who meet the cutoffs for diagnostic criteria, which make it seem like people either have it or they don’t.  Psychopathy doesn’t work that way. It occurs on a continuum with some people having none at all and others having the range from a few tendencies to a full blown diagnosable personality disorder. James Silver, co-author of “Almost a Psychopath: Do I (or Does Someone I Know) Have a Problem with Manipulation and Lack of Empathy?” explains,

“Almost psychopaths differ from true psychopaths not in the types, but, rather, in the frequency and intensity of their remorseless and damaging behaviors.”

It would probably have been more accurate for DeCovney to have stated that Wall Street employees had a greater than average overall tendency toward psychopathy than to suggest that so many would fit the diagnostic criteria necessary to be labeled with the actual personality disorder.

James Silver and his co-author, Ronald Schouten, explain in their book  that people who could be described as “almost a psychopath” are quite plentiful. They estimate that up to 15% of the general population fits the profile of people who use manipulation to get what they want and who lack empathy or a capacity for guilt, all while displaying grandiosity, egotism and disregard for others.

Mitt Romney ran Bain Capital, a company that operated a business model nearly exclusively built on firing employees, canceling pensions, loading businesses with debt, taking millions in profit, and walking away. His claim is that he saved businesses but nearly a quarter of those Bain Capital touched went bankrupt; this occurred even with previously healthy companies. Countering the notion that Romney and Bain Capital were venture capitalists who developed new jobs, Aaron Goldenberg, wrote:

“Mitt Romney was NOT primarily a venture capitalist. A venture capitalist invests in early-stage businesses with the hope that they grow and prosper…By contrast, Mitt Romney was primarily what is affectionately known as a vulture investor. Bain Capital invested in failing companies with the intention of either restructuring their business or stripping the business and selling its assets.”

Goldenberg goes on to say that while what his company did may not have been evil or immoral (which is debatable), it was absolutely predicated on the belief that eliminating jobs was the best way to go even when bankrupting businesses could have taken other measures. It shows that Romney’s track record as a job-creating businessman is abysmal. It would take a  hardened heart to look in the mirror each day, knowing that your business was in the business of forcing people out of their livelihoods, regardless of the justification. But, in and of itself, this fact doesn’t prove that Romney is a psychopath. Instead, an alarming anecdote shared by Rachel Maddow on her show does point to Romney’s issues with lack of empathy or remorse.

On May 10^th, Maddow played an excerpt from an interview with Romney in which he relayed a story from his past along with many inappropriate chuckles:

Romney:  “I have a few connections with the State of Wisconsin. One of the most humorous I think relates to my father. You may remember, my father, George Romney, was the President of an automobile company called American Motors. And as the President of the company, he decided to close the factory in Michigan and move all the production to Wisconsin…they had a high school band that was leading each of the candidates, and his band did not know how to play the Michigan fight song. It only knew how to play the Wisconsin fight song. So every time they would start playing, “On Wisconsin, On Wisconsin,” my dad’s political people would jump up and down and try to get them to stop because they didn’t want people in Michigan to be reminded that my dad had moved production to Wisconsin.”

This was Mr. Romney’s idea of funny, people losing their jobs and getting upset when being reminded about it.

In the same segment, Maddow discussed two of Romney’s other psychopathic behaviors, the recent revelation that he forcibly held down another teen in high school and cut off his hair as he cried and screamed and the now famous story where Romney strapped his dog to the roof of his car in a kennel for hours in defiance of Massachusetts law as he drove 60 miles per hour. In both cases, she played Romney’s “apologies” for the incidents, in which he laughed inappropriately throughout each.

These incidents and the insincerity of the apologies that followed them provide some of the strongest evidence of his psychopathy. In the case of the attack with the scissors against his classmate, Romney claims to have no memory of an occasion that still haunts the eyewitnesses to the event. Nevertheless, despite not remembering it, he also claims he must not have done it because the boy was presumed gay, because no one talked about homosexuality in the 1960s, despite evidence to the contrary. It takes a remarkably callous and disturbed individual to forget causing another human being to scream out in terror, let alone to have instigated the incident at all. With regard to the abuse of his dog, the story takes a particularly disturbing twist when one learns that his dog appeared to have developed diarrhea as a result of stress and fear. In response, Romney simply hosed off his SUV and continued the trip with the dog still atop the roof.

There is abundant evidence that Romney doesn’t maintain any strong convictions, but rather forms opinions in service of his ultimate political goals. For example, where he once promised to be “better than Ted Kennedy on gay rights,” he now promises to be the most regressive Republican presidential candidate on gay rights in over a decade. The money he donated to Planned Parenthood has morphed into promises to shut them down. This sort of deceit is characteristic of a psychopath.

Showing that he also displays the impulsivity characteristic of psychopathy, there were recent revelations about his repeated issues with losing his temper, including to the point of two skirmishes with law enforcement. Here he repeatedly shows contempt for people in positions of authority, even getting himself arrested for directly defying the instructions of an officer. If he weren’t an incredibly wealthy man, one wonders how often his flaunting of laws the little people have to follow would have gotten him in trouble.

While Romney may not display the level of psychopathy necessary to be considered diagnosable as a psychopath, he does fit what Silver and Schouten call, “almost a psychopath.” He demonstrates a lack of empathy, no remorse or guilt for past assaults or mistreatment, a high degree of narcissism, and a capacity to ceaselessly lie and manipulate to get what he wants. If there was any doubt, his inability to stop laughing while recalling these events, when others have been harmed, proves this is a man with a  highly questionable character.

 

Dropping a Word Bomb of Truth On Mitt Romney’s Olympic Leadership

Dropping a Word Bomb of Truth On Mitt Romney’s Olympic Leadership

By: Dennis SMay 13, 2012

In a recent Politicus contribution I smudged up Mitt Romney’s “shut down the business and save the girl” legend ever so slightly in debunking the popular lore that Mitt was almost solely responsible for snatching a Bain partner’s 14-year-old daughter, who had horrible judgment and inattentive parents, from the jaws of destruction after a bad Randall’s Island ‘Rave’ XTC trip.

While Mitt did indeed hand out some flyers and traipse through some seedy drug dens, the girl was found in her boyfriend’s house in Montville Township, New Jersey after he called 911 to inquire about a reward and hung up. The police traced the call and located the girl. Romney’s version is ‘WE’ were able to trace that call; there’s yet another version, it was a TV hotline that was called.
Romney’s name is not mentioned in the Montville police report of the incident.
Now I’m going to word-bomb Romney again as an opportunist and hypocrite as head of the Salt Lake City Winter Olympic in 2002.

You might wonder why the Romney people haven’t made more of a public cause celebre out of his stewardship of this highly successful event featuring 2,400 athletes from 77 countries. I think they’re probably waiting for the London Summer Olympics scheduled to open July 27 and close August 12^th. You’ll probably see a bunch of 2002 hyperbole, again characterizing Mitt as an indispensable leader made of stern presidential stuff.

Besides the 2002 Winter games, Mitt also headed the summer companion competition, the Paralympic Games; another 416 athletes from 36 countries. Let’s first take a quick look at the Paralympic games and Mitt so you’ll get an idea of where I’m going here. Paralympic athletes can have any number of physical ‘disabilities’, including cerebral palsy, blindness, amputation, degrees of intellectual impairment and ironically multiple sclerosis, a condition that Mitt’s wife Ann was diagnosed with 14 years ago. It’s currently in remission.
There are 20 sports in the Summer Paralypic games virtually all of them the same ones all athletes play, while 5 events are featured in the Winter Paralympic games. Did I tell you Mitt is a huge fan of Paul Ryan? He slobbers all over Ryan’s budget. Romney loves the guy and his policies so much that Ryan is among a handful being seriously considered as Mitt’s running mate. Oh, and Mitt knows that millions of the disabled would lose their Medicaid coverage in the Ryan budget. Exploit the disabled by enthusiastically heading the 2002 Paralympic Games when you’re running for governor. When running for president favor a budget that would devastate these same people when you think that plays well with the Tea Party crowd.

Back to the main event; the Salt Lake Winter games had commanded international headlines long before 2002. Tracking back to the late ‘90’s, guys from the Salt Lake Bid Committee with names like Johnson and Welch headed the effort to bring the games to Salt Lake City. To curry favor from the Intenational Olympic Committee, vested with the final decision-making powers, the committee papered numerous IOC members with money, jobs, even plastic surgery. Once caught, the Salt Lake City leadership was banished and Mitt Romney brought in to head the now-disgraced Salt Lake Olympic Committee (SLOC). Romney signed on in February of 1999.

It was quite an undertaking. The committee was some $379 million shy of revenue projections with 700 employees to pay and a Winter Olympics to mount. Man, where are you going to come up with $379 million? Romeny could open a barbershop franchise for gays or maybe sell star-maps to offshore tax avoidance havens…naw, not enough time. Then it came to him. He’d flood the halls of congress with lobbyists in search of scads of discretionary taxpayer-funded earmarks for the games. He came away with $382 million.

There were also additional fed funds for security in the wake of the horrific 9/11 attacks, but well over a billion went to the games, themselves. Fellow homophobe and chaser after the republican presidential nomination, Rick Santorum was livid. The flaming heterosexual told a Columbus, Ohio Tea Party crowd that “He (referring to Romney) heroically bailed out the Salt Lake City Olympics by heroically going to Congress and asking them for tens of millions (it was far more) to bail out the Salt Lake City Olympic games, in an earmark.” “Does the word hypocrisy come to mind?”

Before it was all over the 2002 Romney-run Salt Lake City Winter Olympics had sucked up roughly $1.3 BILLION in fed dollars according to the General Accounting Office. More than the government had awarded to all previous U.S. Olympic venues combined.  That included some highly questionable expenditures for the owner of Sinclair Oil, Earl Holding. Holding also owned Snowbasin ski resort. Earl sat on the SLOC committee that Romney headed. The committee awarded him $14 million for hosting 3 men’s and 3 women’s ski races. The old boy was worth in the billions at the time and roughly $3.1 billion as of last year. But we’re just getting started. Congress approved a deal that added 1,300 acres of pristine national forest land to his resort. AND…Uncle Sam built him a neat old road from the resort to the Salt Lake City airport. There were other rich-guy raids on the fed money as well, a private little piggy-bank as it were. Did Mitt partake? Almost impossible to tell with his secret accounts around the world.
Many media claimed the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics were fraught with so many sleazy deals that, had all been properly investigated it would have made the original bribery scandal look like a 5-year-old breaking into a cookie jar.
And what did the fabulous leadership of Romney accomplish for Salt Lake City? According to a study by the University of Utah, very little once Michelle Kwan had landed her last triple axel. Sure there were jobs and money pouring in for the duration of the competition and a trust fund has been set aside to preserve some venues. But after that the study was hard pressed to find any positive consequences on a Macroeconomic scale and even during the halcyon days of the competition, the games constituted but a tiny fraction of the state’s economic gains.

Let the record show, however, that Romney was elected governor of Massachusetts in 2002 and took office despite some residency challenges. All that out-state Olympic campaigning can pay dividends.

New Wall Street Scandal Threatens Romney

TPM

TPMDC

New Wall Street Scandal Threatens Romney

Brian Beutler May 11, 2012, 12:11 PM 18724

 

A surprising development on Wall Street Thursday could magnify a little-discussed but key difference between President Obama and Mitt Romney — one with enormous consequences for public policy.

On a conference call with analysts, JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon announced that his firm had lost $2 billion investing in the same species of derivative that exacerbated the 2008 financial crisis.

Dimon claims the company is prepared to absorb the loss, but it puts the reputation of one of the only big firms to weather the 2008 financial crisis directly on the line.

This is exactly the type of major loss of depositor money that the Obama administration sought to ban with one of the major planks of its 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law — the Volcker Rule, named after former Fed chairman Paul Volcker. And that’s bad news for Romney, who wants to repeal the whole law, Volcker Rule and all.

Neither the Obama administration nor the Obama campaign would comment on the record about the JPM loss, or its policy implications, but an administration official did allow that it underscores the importance of fully implementing Dodd-Frank.

The Volcker Rule is still being developed by regulators, won’t be implemented until late July at the earliest. It’s intended to ban banks from gambling with depositor funds in what are known as proprietary trades. Dimon claims that the investment in question wouldn’t have violated the rule had it been in effect — he says the bets JPM made were meant to hedge against potential losses in other investments. But finance experts have cast doubt on that claim, and Dimon himself admitted that the incident will provide ammunition for the Volcker Rule supporters.

If he’s right, it’s a concern for Romney and could cement Romney’s reputation for coziness with Wall Street. His campaign isn’t backing away from Romney’s previous positions, but the needle it’s trying to thread is pretty clear.

“JP Morgan’s reported $2 billion trading loss demonstrates the importance of oversight and transparency in the derivatives market, something Gov. Romney has called for in the past,” says Romney spokesperson Andrea Saul. “JP Morgan’s investors, not taxpayers, will incur any losses from this hedging trade gone bad. As President, Gov. Romney will push for common-sense regulation that gives regulators tools to do their jobs, and that gives investors more clarity.”

Barack Obama, Financial Crisis, Financial Reform, Mitt Romney, Paul Volcker, Volcker Rule, Wall Street

Brian Beutler

Brian Beutler is TPM's senior congressional reporter. Since 2009, he's led coverage of health care reform, Wall Street reform, taxes, the GOP budget, the government shutdown fight, and the debt limit fight. He can be reached at brian@talkingpointsmemo.com.

Does Mitt Romney have a school bully inside?

Does Mitt Romney still have a high school bully inside?

David Horsey / Los Angeles Times (May 11, 2012)

• Also
•  
•  Obama champions gay marriage; the culture war is on
•  
•  
• Al Qaeda goes retro with exploding underwear
•  
•  
• Ron Paul continues to complicate Mitt Romney's coronation
•  

By David Horsey

 

May 10, 2012, 11:36 p.m.

Sure, you may know which man -- Mitt Romney or Barack Obama -- you want to see running the country, but which one would you have wanted to know in high school?
We learned four years ago that young Barack was a laid-back, not overly studious kid who loved basketball and occasionally smoked a little weed. The kids at Punahou, the prestigious Honolulu prep school Obama attended, never expected their amiable but seemingly unmotivated classmate to one day become the most powerful man on the planet.

At Cranbrook, the Michigan boarding school Romney attended, there could well have been those who thought young Mitt might amount to something someday. His dad, after all, was governor and was being touted as a candidate for president. But if you were a certain type of student at Cranbrook back in 1965, the idea of Mitt Romney getting any kind of power over people would have been frightening.

A story in the Washington Post based on interviews with several of Romney’s fellow students alleges that young Mitt was a bullying rich kid who had it in for boys who were too different.

One boy, in particular, caught Romney’s attention -- a shy, new kid at the school named John Lauber who had bleached blond bangs that dipped across one eye. According to those interviewed, young Mitt was bugged by Lauber's hair. "He can’t look like that," Romney reportedly told one of his friends. "That’s wrong. Just look at him!"

Romney pulled together a pack of boys and went to Lauber's room, where they tackled him and pinned him down. As Lauber, with tears streaming down his cheeks, screamed for help, Romney pulled out scissors and chopped away at the kid’s hair.

That was the worst, but not the only of Romney's bullying high school pranks, according to the Post. At least one person suggested young Romney had it in for boys he suspected of being gay.

After Romney’s campaign spokesperson initially denied the story, Romney went on Fox Radio to say he did not remember the incident but that he was sorry about it anyway. "I’m a very different person than I was in high school, of course, but I’m glad I learned as much as I did during those high school years," he said in the radio interview.

Well, I assume he is different, just as Obama is different from the kid he was. Still, Romney could not seem to suppress a nervous chuckle as he talked about the bullying episode, just as the same chuckle erupts when he talks about firing people. It makes a person wonder if the guy has empathy for people who are different from him, who have not lived the privileged life he has enjoyed.
The rap on Obama has been that he is a little too cool and aloof. The rap on Romney may be that he is just plain callous.

Mitt The Knife

Weekly Standard: Mitt The Knife?

by Geoffrey Norman

Enlarge Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

  Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney shakes hands with supporters during a campaign rally titled "A Better America Begins Tonight" April 24, 2012 in Manchester, N.H. Romney delivered remarks on the day voters in N.Y., Conn, Del, R.I., and Pa, cast ballots in their state primaries.

 

 

April 25, 2012

 

Geoffrey Norman writes for The Weekly Standard.

Until last week, Mitt Romney had trouble getting potential voters to care so much that they would crawl over ground glass to get to the polling station and vote for him. But now, the man and moment may have come together, thanks to employees of the General Services Administration and the Secret Service.
If these scandals prove anything, it would be that there are people in the government with way too much time on their hands and far too little regard for their mission. Plainly the sort of people that the enterprise could safely be shed

It is not quite so obvious, but still fairly plain, that these weren't sudden, spontaneous, and unique occurrences. Too much organization. Too many people involved. So there was almost certainly precedent and, at the very least, a cultural tolerance for this kind of stuff. People, including senior leadership, knew or suspected, anyway, and did not follow up on their suspicions.

And you have to wonder just how widespread this sort of thing is in Washington. How much do we not hear about because the people in charge don't know and don't want to know, or do know and don't care?

So why not investigate and find out? Use the scandals as an occasion to examine the government, root and branch, with an eye to finding out what departments and which civil servants are ripping off the taxpayers and derelict in their duties. The egregious offenders could then be let go in a government-wide downsizing. Sort of like a bloodless Hunger Games.

Washington can't do anything about the deficit or entitlements. The programs, it seems, are too big and the political risks too high.

Nor, it seems, is it possible to reform the tax system. You don't just start blithely closing loopholes it took fifty years, or more, of skillful lobbying and hard legislative work to put in place. Furthermore, the U.S. Senate is not capable of producing a budget. Hasn't done one for three years, now, so nothing new in that story. Just move along.

Meanwhile, though, it is flat broke, Washington cannot even do the little things, like putting an end to subsidies for sugar and solar power even if we can get all the sugar we need, dirt cheap, from overseas and the solar power companies keep going bankrupt.

Nothing, it seems, changes except that the Leviathan remorselessly grows in both bulk and appetite. But while a demoralized citizenry may have become more or less accustomed to the inertial and impersonal growth of government, one suspects that there is still plenty of capacity for outrage left when it comes to partying down on the public dime. Hard to imagine that there is a constituency for mind readers in Vegas and prostitutes in Colombia.

And right there, perhaps, is a reason to start downsizing, which is something that Romney could promise to do if he is elected. He's had practice at it, he could say, and he's good at it. While his opponent, on the other hand, plainly has no taste for it.

"Hire me," Romney could promise, "so I can fire them."

Imagine what might happen if he arrived in Washington and appointed people with that same set of skills to his cabinet and ordered them to get after it. Maybe even came up with some cash rewards for bureaucrats who had information on other high rolling public servants.

The money saved wouldn't amount to that much. Not enough, certainly, to staunch the entitlement bleeding. But the program would surely go over well with voters and, if Mitt the Knife actually managed to downsize the bureaucracy, voters might then trust him to take on bigger things.

You have to start somewhere.

Crazy -- Romney Advisor Says Spiraling Inequality Is Good for the Country

AlterNet.org

AlterNet / By Dean Baker

Crazy -- Romney Advisor Says Spiraling Inequality Is Good for the Country

Mitt Romney's former partner at Bain Capital has written a book that reveals much about how the super-rich think -- and it's not pretty.

May 3, 2012  |  

 

 

 

It's standard practice during the election campaign for presidential candidates to publish an autobiographical account of their rise to stardom or their philosophy of life and politics. However, in keeping with his commitment to innovative business practices, it seems that Mitt Romney has outsourced this task to Ed Conard, one of his former partners at Bain Capital.

In fairness, it is not clear to what extent Romney shares the views of his former partner, but Conard surely understands that his book [Unintended Consequences: Why Everything You’ve Been Told About the Economy Is Wrong] will get attention because of his proximity to the presumptive Republican nominee. And, on the off chance that Conard does think like the man who likes to be able to fire people, this book should be taken seriously.

There is much in this book to infuriate those who don't get their kicks from firing people. To start, Conard has a tale of the housing bubble and the ensuing crash that places all the blame on government efforts to promote homeownership.

Making this case requires serious abuse of the facts. In arguing that the banks did not know that they were passing along fraudulent mortgages, Conard asks why they would hold so many mortgages on their own books if they knew they were trash. The obvious answer is that they couldn't sell them. This was the whole point of the collaterized debt obligations and later the second generation collaterized debt obligations. The goal was to hide the garbage.

This was like a game of musical chairs. At some point the music stops and someone is left holding the trash. It wasn't by choice that Lehman, Citigroup, and the rest were still holding tens or hundreds of billions of dollars of junk mortgages in 2008. They just couldn't find enough suckers.

Conard is no more successful in trying to turn reality on its head and make Fannie and Freddie the main promulgators of junk mortgages in the peak years of the bubble. He cites data that show the exact opposite. The vast majority of the junk mortgages were securitized by Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and the other investment banks.

Conard is either being dishonest with his readers here or has some serious cognitive problems.

Another novel feature of Conard's book is his contention that there have been substantial gains in wages over the last three decades. The fact that wages for most workers have barely outpaced inflation has been well documented (see here and here for example). Conard does a neat two-step around this basic fact by showing substantial wage gains for African American men and women and white men and women.

There are some problems with his numbers, but the implication is that as our labor force gets less white and more female we should expect wages to fall. In other words, if the wage distribution was exactly the same, but we replaced all the white men with African American women, then Conard would be touting huge wage gains for the workforce. It's great to see groups that have been the victims of discrimination making progress (in reality, the gains have not been much), but this does not substitute for economy-wide wage growth.

But the real meat of Conard's piece is the glorification of those who have gotten incredibly rich, like him. Conard's celebration of the rich and his airbrushing of what they did to get there is sufficiently out of touch with reality to be scary.
Did Conard really miss the story of Fabrice Tourre (a.k.a. "Fabulous Fab") the Goldman Sachs mortgage trader who put together collaterized debt obligations that were designed to fail and then hawked them off on unsuspecting clients? Does he not know about the flash traders who make fortunes by designing sophisticated programs that allow them to front-run major trades? (This means that they can detect major trades and jump in ahead, thereby capturing some of the profit.)

How about the clever character who invented "dead peasant" insurance policies? These are insurance policies that corporations buy on their line workers, usually without their knowledge, making the company the beneficiary. The purpose is to allow the company to time its earnings and minimize its tax obligations.

The financial sector is chock full of people who have made great fortunes on gimmicks that have no obvious social value but allow their inventors to gain at the expense of others. And, the financial sector is not the only place where the big money often comes from economic rents rather than genuine innovations.
Does anyone who has ever used a Microsoft product think that Bill Gates became the world's richest person because of the quality of the software he produces? Microsoft gained its preeminence because of Bill Gates' sharp elbows. Clearly Gates is a highly motivated and intelligent person, but society did not benefit from his success at propelling his inferior software to market dominance.

How much has the pharmaceutical industry profited from using its political power to get Congress to give it ever longer and stronger patent monopolies? We now spend almost $300 billion a year on prescription drugs that would cost us around $30 billion in a free market. The $270 billion a year difference is about five times the size of the Bush tax cuts to wealthy.

There is no problem identifying other sectors of the economy where the big bucks are gained through rent-seeking and manipulation of the political process. (This is the topic of my free book, The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive.) In fact, Conard and Romney's own industry provides an excellent example of using political power to promote private wealth.

One of the major ways that private equity companies make money is by taking advantage of the tax deductibility of interest. Private equity companies typically load the firms they buy with as much debt as possible. This is because the interest payments on debt are tax deductible and they don't really care if the company ends up going bankrupt. They expect a substantial portion of their firms to go into bankruptcy.

The result is that much of the profits pocketed by Conard and Romney are simply the lower taxes due to the fact that interest payments are tax deductible for corporations, whereas dividend payments are not. But this is not their only gaming of the system.

Both Conard and Romney were in a position to pocket tens of millions of dollars from the hedge fund managers' subsidy, also known as the carried interest tax deduction. This tax break allows incredibly wealthy people like Conard and Romney to pay only the 15 percent capital gains tax on the bulk of their earnings. Essentially, the argument is that because they are paid on a commission, like realtors and shoe sales people, hedge and private equity fund managers should have their earnings treated as capital gains. This argument has no obvious logic, but the beneficiaries have enormous political power, which explains why the special treatment of carried interest survives.

In short, Conard portrays a fantasy world. We are not fighting over capitalism versus socialism. The battle is over the crony capitalism of which both he and Romney have been major beneficiaries. We'll leave it to his shrink to determine whether the problem is that Conard is deluded or dishonest, but the rest of us should view this book as a serious warning about the world view of his business partner.

Dean Baker is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and author of the new book, The End of Loser Liberalism?

Mitt Romney's Dangerous Foreign Policy Team: Nostalgic for Bush, Hellbent on War with Iran

AlterNet.org

WORLD  

AlterNet / By Alex Kane

Mitt Romney's Dangerous Foreign Policy Team: Nostalgic for Bush, Hellbent on War with Iran

The candidate's foreign policy team features the usual belligerence, mixed with some serious nostalgia for a thoroughly discredited foreign policy framework.

May 2, 2012  |  

 

 

 

It's hard to watch the Romney campaign with a straight face. Their latest crackup has one Romney adviser, John Lehman, warning of the “Soviet threat," and another, Pierre Prosper, complaining that the administration hasn't done enough to stand with Czechoslovakia. And those comments were hardly the first time we've heard throwbacks to the Cold War in this campaign. But don't laugh too hard—it might distract from the dangerous and discredited worldview Romney's foreign policy team is pushing.


Despite Obama’s expansion of the war in Afghanistan and his ramping up of drone strikes in Yemen and Pakistan, Romney claims Obama is a president who does not want “America to be the strongest nation on earth,” as he told an audience at the Citadel military college in South Carolina.

Romney’s persistent knocks on Obama’s foreign policy make clear that, while the economy will be the number-one issue this year, foreign policy will be a close runner-up. Behind Romney’s statements on world affairs is a group of close advisers whose views harken back to the Bush administration’s belligerent neoconservative brand of US foreign policy--not the best idea, considering how discredited it has become.

“The most striking aspect of Romney's approach to foreign policy is its lack of creativity -- its brazen willingness to recycle Bush-era talking points, attitudes, and of course personnel,” said Peter Certo, a researcher at Right Web, a project of the Institute for Policy Studies. “A Romney administration would be a fresh canvas for the neocons to paint on.”

As the general election season heats up, the noise from the neoconservative wing of the Republican Party will only grow louder. So here’s a look at three of the top advisers shaping Romney’s view of the world.

1. Eliot Cohen. Currently a professor at John Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, Cohen was a founder of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) and is now a special adviser for the Romney campaign. The Washington, DC-based PNAC was an influential incubator of neoconservative policy ideas whose members later went on to successfully push for the invasion of Iraq. He was a member of the Defense Policy Board, a Department of Defense advisory committee, while Donald Rumsfeld ran the show, and served as counselor to Condoleezza Rice while she was Secretary of State.

Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, Cohen penned a Wall Street Journal op-ed in which he labeled the US “war on terror” as “World War IV,” and advocated for the overthrow of both the Iranian and Iraqi governments. Cohen’s focus on Iran has not relented: in 2009, another op-ed in the Journal again called for the overthrow of the Iranian regime—which could only be accomplished by a full-scale invasion and occupation.

In October 2011, the prominent neoconservative wrote the foreword to a "white paper" laying out Romney’s foreign policy vision. It reads, in the words of journalist Max Blumenthal, as “a concoction of post-9/11 unilateralism and unvarnished neo-imperialism.”

The paper calls for boosting the military budget, and the assertion of US dominance in Asia against a “rising China.” The document also warns that the Arab Spring might become an “Arab winter” due to Iranian or Islamist influence, and criticizes the Obama administration’s plan on Iraq, which called for 3,000 troops to stay in the country after the expiration of the Status of Forces Agreement. The white paper called for 14,000-18,000 troops to stay on in the country. Today, only 150 American troops remain in Iraq.

On Iran, the country that Cohen and his neoconservative colleagues are currently targeting, the paper states: “U.S. policy toward Iran must begin with an understanding on Iran’s part that a military option to deal with their nuclear program remains on the table.” The paper also slams the “anti-American ‘Bolivarian’ movement across Latin America” and denounces the Obama administration’s alleged support for Manuel Zeyala, the Honduran president deposed in a coup in 2009.

All in all, the paper Cohen wrote the foreword to is an ode to US empire that pines for the Bush administration’s approach to international affairs. Having an official like Cohen figure so prominently in the campaign “represents a general refusal to repudiate the Bush administration's approach to intelligence gathering, its sunny view of the Iraq war, and its dismissive attitude toward the world community,” Right Web's Certo said. “It's a heavy nod to the ancien regime in an issue area that gets little attention from the public.”

2. Dan Senor. Well known for his past role as chief spokesperson for the Coalition Provisional Authority in American-occupied Iraq, Senor is closely linked to neoconservative policy circles. He is also currently a “special adviser” to Romney, and was a senior adviser for Romney’s 2008 presidential campaign. Senor is a co-founder of the Foreign Policy Initiative, a PNAC-linked group that advocates for US pressure on Iran and a military solution to the crisis in Syria.
Senor has acted as one of Romney’s go-to men on Israel, a country Senor has close ties with. Senor is a former intern for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and still has ties to the lobby group. His sister, Wendy Singer, runs AIPAC's operations in Israel.

“He'll essentially be a Netanyahu guy inside the White House. He's going to be the AIPAC enforcer,” MJ Rosenberg, a prolific critic of AIPAC who used to work for the lobby, told AlterNet. Rosenberg also worked as chief of staff for Congressman Edward Feighan, D-Ohio while Senor was an intern there in the early 1990s. “You can't be an American and be closer to the right-wing part of Israel than Dan Senor is.”

Senor is the co-author of Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle, which lauds Israel’s economic progress while skirting mention of the Israeli occupation--an omission that, as the Jewish Daily Forward noted, aligned “nicely with recent public relations efforts by Israel to shift attention away from its problems and toward its achievements.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called Senor and co-author Saul Singer (Wendy Singer's husband) “perceptive writers,” and quipped at a 2009 speech to the Jewish Federations of North America that Israel “is the start-up nation.” And when Netanyahu wanted to get a message across to Romney fast--that Netanyahu had played “no role” in billionaire Sheldon Adelson’s decision to bankroll Newt Gingrich--he relayed a message to Senor, according to the New York Times.
Senor is a contributor to various media outlets. In July 2010, before scheduled talks between Obama and Netanyahu, Senor took to the Daily Beast to argue that Obama “must reassure Netanyahu” in order to head off a “train wreck” for Mideast diplomacy. The argument dovetails with the view pushed by the Israel lobby that there should be no “daylight” between the US and Israel, and that disagreements on policy should be aired in private.

In September 2011, Senor wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the president had “launched” an “offensive” against Israel after a March 2010 announcement of new settlements in Jerusalem. In the same op-ed, he lambasted the State Department for considering Jerusalem, a city under occupation, separate from Israel proper.

Clearly, Senor’s position is that the US should never put pressure on Israel, which is exactly the position Romney professes. At a December 2011 debate in Iowa, Romney stated: “If we disagree with [Israel], like this president has time and time again, we don't do it in public like he's done it, we do it in private. And we let the Israeli leadership describe what they believe the right course is going forward.”

3. Cofer Black. A former vice-chairman for the private security company Blackwater USA, Black has been involved with the Romney campaign since 2007, when he came on as a senior adviser on counterterrorism and national security.

Writing in the Daily Beast, the right-leaning national security reporter Eli Lake explained that Black was Romney’s “trusted envoy to the murky world of the U.S. intelligence community who is also treated like a close political aide.” According to Lake’s reporting, Black sets up intelligence briefings for Romney from former CIA officers, and used his contacts in the Egyptian and Israeli intelligence worlds to debrief Romney on events in the region.

As Lake notes, Black’s claim to fame as a CIA officer is that he did “much of the street work” that led to the apprehension of Carlos the Jackal. He was part of the CIA team that tracked bin Laden in the 1990s. Black, a 28-year CIA veteran who directed the agency’s counter-terror center from 1999-2002, also served during the Bush administration as State Department coordinator for counterterrorism, and resigned shortly after Bush’s 2004 reelection.

According to Jeremy Scahill’s book Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, Black played “an essential role in crafting and implementing the Bush administration’s counter-terror policies.” Specifically, Black played an integral part in the use of “extraordinary renditions,” the euphemism for the Bush administration’s program of kidnapping alleged terrorists and spiriting them off to secret CIA prisons around the world to be tortured.

In 2005, Black joined the Blackwater USA team, the well-connected private security company that has been derided as a “mercenary” group, as vice chairman. He stayed on until 2008, a year after Blackwater agents committed the Nisour Square massacre in Baghdad, an event that resulted in the deaths of 17 Iraqi civilians.

Black's influence on Romney's views on torture is clear. In a 2007 debate, Romney was asked whether water-boarding was torture. His response was noncommittal, but noted that he gets advice on those questions “from Cofer Black, who is a person who was responsible for counter-terrorism in the CIA for some 35 years.” In November 2011, Romney advisers made clear that the candidate does not believe that water-boarding is torture.

Alex Kane is AlterNet's New York-based World editor, and a staff reporter for Mondoweiss. Follow him on Twitter @alexbkane.