If, as Romney claims, he did no work for Bain Capital between February 1999 and 2003 then he received roughly $400,000 for work he didn’t do. The alternative is that he committed a felony, which even his defenders at FactCheck.org acknowledge. The $400,000 is significant because it was salary or compensation for work, and not interest payments or dividends or some other capital gain. But that doesn’t mean that Romney didn’t make a fortune on the roughly 6,000 jobs (at a minimum) his company destroyed in the four years in question.
Let’s be clear about this. Whether or not Mitt Romney was actually making day-to-day decisions for Bain Capital in the 1999-2003 time period, he was the CEO, chairman of the board, lone stockholder, and 100% owner of the firm. Even if he wasn’t doing any work, he was being paid for work. Even if he didn’t even look at the deals that cost at least 6,000 Americans their jobs, he profited from those transactions.
That’s what makes it strange that he would use his absentee ownership as an excuse. If his partners had made bad deals and lost Bain Capital all its money, does anyone think Romney wouldn’t have been upset? If his delegates were doing things he thought were unethical and wrong, does anyone believe he wouldn’t have either told them to stop or sold them the company and disassociated himself from their activities?
As a legal matter, I am curious how it could not be a crime for Romney to have certified he did no work if he was compensated for work. Does a prosecutor have to prove that he made a phone call or consulted on a deal, or do they just have to point to his pay stub and say, “Yup, you worked there”? Because when people ask me to prove I worked somewhere, I show them my pay stub. That’s normally considered proof that you were employed there. They paid you, so you must have done some work.
Who gets paid nearly a half a million dollars to do nothing?
Yet, amazingly, it could be true. Mitt Romney could have pulled in a six-figure salary for four consecutive years of doing absolutely nothing. That’s what he wants you and me to believe, anyway, because the alternative is that he’s a felon who is responsible for the destruction of 6,000 jobs.
Except, he’s responsible for that job loss either way. If a couple of mobsters shake down a local business owner and then give their Godfather a piece of the action, you don’t absolve the Godfather because he didn’t authorize the shakedown. That’s just his business model. Others suffer; he gets rich.
It’s beyond me how Romney can try to use his absence as any kind of excuse. With this guy, the buck never stops with him.
He could end up singing, I fought the law and the law won.
Who gets paid nearly a half a million dollars to do nothing?
rich people, that’s who!!
If a couple of mobsters shake down a local business owner and then give their Godfather a piece of the action, you don’t absolve the Godfather because he didn’t authorize the shakedown. That’s just his business model.
Exactly. It’s one of those unwritten rules.
Did you just now learn that executive compensation exists in its own separate universe?
He can’t. He’s going to have to cop to profiting off of the various acquisitions and moves from ’99-01. He was the legal head of the company, Olympic dilettante or not. He’s dead to rights on taking the blame for the outsourcing and job loss allegations.
I’ll break with my usual policy of not warching the national news this evening and see if there’s any coverage. A quick look at my news links online gives me little hope that this will be discussed more than a sentence’s worth in national news.
CNN frames the findings as “Claims of lies and counter-lies dominate campaign rhetoric” and NYT says “Report on Romney’s Bain tenure seized on by Obama camp”. LATimes, nothin’. And Google’s News says, “President Obama’s campaign calls Mitt Romney a liar”.
So instead of a factual headline like “Romney under scrutiny by SEC for fraud” we get a load of “oh, nevermind, it’s all he said, he said”.
If the story does in fact have legs, it’s going to have to withstand the competition of the Penn State story and be able to last through the weekend. Right now, it’s just a buzz on the blogs.
I predict Penn State will crowd it out. Sex always sells and illicit sex even more so. On ABC this morning I heard the flat out statement that they covered up Sandusky’s rape of an underage boy. The word “rape” is an exact quote. That will definitely crowd a story about a politician lying. It might even be intended to. Does anyone here know who controls ABC news?
Mickey Mouse.
I take it you mean Disney. Walt was always conservative and I suppose his successors are too.
and why is ABC being singled out here?
Because that’s where I heard it. I listen to ABC News during breakfast every morning. What else should I watch at 4:30AM? Fox?
will overshadow yet another Mitt Bain related scandal.
Ha! you lose. MSNBC is raging with the story and Penn St is backup. CNN goin for it and of course CURRENT is all over it. The Boston Globe co-author as well as Benjay from TPM and David Corn are all making the rounds. Lawrence O’donnell and Rachel will likely be smokin on the story.
I think the $100K compensation looks bad, but is probably innocuous. I say this because if Romney owned 100% of the company, then he is paying himself out of his own assets. It’s like moving $100K from one pocket of his trousers to another one.
If Romney did commit a felony, I doubt it would have any impact of the election. Because, we already know that Romney committed a felony, and it made no difference to his poll numbers. As an 18-year-old, and therefore a legally responsible adult, Romney committed felony assault against another young man.
Voters seem not to mind voting for a Presidential candidate who has committed a felony. How many do we think George W. Bush committed? There are at least two, drunk driving and falsifying military service records. That didn’t stop him from getting more votes than John Kerry in 2004.
Maybe this will be different, though. It’s always hard to know what is going to matter to the voters. The compensation for nothing, plus the outsourcing, plus the squirreling away of funds in the Caribbean, plus the false or at best misleading filings with the SEC — it all could be enough to sink the guy. If it’s obvious that he is sinking before the convention, will he even be the GOP candidate in November?
He was unethical but I think it would be a huge stretch to say felonious simply because the SEC rules are not stringent on what defines an executive especially in a business where names often draw in business. There are plenty of law firms where founding partners who are no longer active are given a trumped up title so that the cache of their name can still be used to draw in business.
Now that is not to say if it had all gone pear shaped that he wouldn’t have been back in Boston post haste to straighten it out. He would have and that is how he can say he “worked.” His name had some cache that brought in business and he was kept informed of the business and would have been sprung into action should things go wrong.
I think by trying to focus on this as a felony we lose sight of the bigger picture – that yet again Mitt tries to have it both ways. He is a slimy jerk and the more we force him to explain the worse he looks.
well he still needs to explain how is had nothing to do with the company and yet he was still getting $100,000 a year…for doing nothing? tea parties and independents sure don’t seem to like that
Perjury is a felony. When I had a company my annual reports to the State of Illinois were made under penalty of perjury for knowingly making false statements. While I don’t know if this applies to SEC filings, I’d be very surprised (and shocked) if it didn’t.
Can we all just stop to marvel at how Romney’s Bain experience was supposed to be one of the primary reasons for his candidacy (if not THE primary reason), and he is now arguing furiously that he should not be credited with any of its “accomplishments” for a three- to four-year period, when he was on the masthead and the payroll?
And this is EXACTLY why I have always been of the opinion that Romney is the best opponent. There is SO MUCH SHIT buried at Bain, and so many ways to demonize him, that it is a well that is infinitely deep.
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Cross-posted from my diary – Romney Can’t Help It – His Faith and Social Darwinism .
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Left radio is speculating that Santorum or Gingrich might try to capitalize on this and try to kill Romney’s campaign before or at the Convention. A responsible politician would not do this, too much blowback, but we are talking about Santorum and Gingrich.
If he wasn’t the “decider” can he tell us who was?
I Romney took all that money and did no work, how is it considered a salary? Doesn’t that make it a gift?
If he DID do work for the compensation, what was it?
And how did he claim that money on his taxes? As income? Income for doing what?
Jeebus, FactCheck is doubling down
I learned something new today on the Willard story watching Lawrence O’Donnell’s show tonight.
We need to stop saying that Willard earned $100,000 in those years after he supposedly left. That is not the case. He got AT LEAST $100,000.
AT LEAST is way different than $100,000.
The actual amount is ….you guessed it….IN THE TAX RETURNS.
Yeah, that was a really good point and as the show pointed out it could have been $5 million, the filings didn’t require a specific amount, only his returns can give us that.
I also liked the point that Romney’s listed positions and ownership meant that he wouldn’t have been a very dutiful CEO if he had let the big investment decisions unreviewed.
Why do I have the feeling David Corn is just getting started?
All fact check organizations get inundated with hatred from right wing dupes so I’m not surprised that they flinch every now and then. When I typed “factcheck” into Google the auto-fill text suggested items like “factcheck liberal” and “factcheck liberal bias” indicating these are frequently searched terms. Remember how Politifact caved early this year and declared the statement that the GOP voted to end medicare the “lie of the year”.
We’ve seen this over the past 15 years or so and it’s incredibly depressing. One political wing is impervious to actual data – all the while believing that they are fact-based thinkers.
I don’t know the solution. However, whatever the solution is the first step will be to recognize that every human population has a segment of about 25% that is whacko right wing. Call them what you will – Right Wing Authoritarians – movement conservatives – John Birchers – white separatists – wingnuts – fascists – Nazis – throughout human history it’s really just the same group again and again with the same patterns of thinking. Aligning themselves with the ultra-rich in concert against the “other” – whether it be other race, other religion, other ethnicity.
So, recognize that you have such a group and stop trying to win them over. You can’t. The best you can do is to monitor them and try to prevent too many Oklahoma City and Krystalnacht events.
Any solution will instead have to focus on the people who are “near wingnuts” . Those who tend to believe a lot of the wingnut propoganda if carefully disguised but if confronted with the horrible reality of wingnuttia will join the fight against it. We saw this happen when the video of the southern marches was broadcast throughout the nation in the early 1960s.
Romney, regardless of what he personally believes (if anything), is representing an extremely hate-filled, racist tea party. They – and he- need to be exposed for what they are.
I think it’s important to not be sloppy and let “$100,000” become standard as the figure Romney was paid. According to yesterday’s Lawrence O’Donnell show, the disclosure says he was paid “more than $100,000”, and that could in principle mean any amount more.