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.
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