Tag Archives: Mitt Romney

Romney trusts receive more from govt for 2011 than Romney is paying in income tax

Posted on by
Reply

Romney trusts receive more from govt for 2011 than Romney is paying in income tax

What was that about receiving money from the government, again?

Mitt Romney

Friday p.m., September 21, Mitt Romney finally released his completed tax return for 2011.

The date on the filing is 9-17-2012. Thus it was finished right after–first business day after–public release by Mother Jones magazine of Romney’s videotaped remarks about people who don’t pay taxes and want government handouts.

Finished Monday, released Friday afternoon, in one of those document drops traditionally timed for the start of the weekend rather than for the start of the news cycle.

More on the Romneys’ return itself later. The short story is that, for all the complaining Romney’s wealthy supporters do about how much government helps the poor, our government helps the rich more, far more. But as said, later for that.

For now, just a quick note on the Romney trusts.

First, the W. Mitt Romney Blind Trust return for 2011 shows income for Romney’s blind trust of $664,045 from the U.S. government. Top line, after you get through the pages for extensions, etc., is

income from U.S. GOVERNMENT INTEREST: $652,018.

Shortly after that comes U.S. GOVERNMENT INTEREST REPORTED AS DIVIDENDS: $12,027.

Total as stated $664,045, in interest income alone in 2011, for Romney’s blind trust from our gummint.

The same story holds for the other Romney trusts.

The 2011 return for the Romney Family Trust shows

U.S. government interest income at $662,115;

U.S. government interest in dividend form at $90,461.

Total U.S. government interest income for the Romney family trust: $752,576.

The 2011 return for the Ann Romney Trust shows usgov interest income of $362,701. U.S. government  interest reported as dividends: $156,157. Total $518,858.

So total moneys received just as interest, from our U.S. government in 2011, by the Romney trusts, came to $1,935,479.

A snarky person might call that the exact amount contributed by Romney trusts to the ‘national debt’ our GOPers gripe about so much. Or anyway the exact amount so far as we know, for 2011.

 

A few qualifiers, here:

One, as written previously I support buying U.S. Treasury notes, bills, and savings bonds. With interest rates so low right now, it is a particularly patriotic thing to do, and that so many people and business entities around the globe are doing so is further evidence of the solidity of U.S. government reserves. Low-yielding savings bonds are a fiscally conservative form of investment and a safe place to park money.

(Romney’s tax returns do not indicate, so far as I can tell, when Romney or his trusts purchased the Treasury products producing this U.S. government interest income.)

Two, this interest income, handsome as it is, is dwarfed by the myriad tax write-offs allowed by our government to entities like Romney’s trusts, by the pages of paper losses and deductions Romney can legally use to reduce his taxes, and above all by the lower federal tax rate applied to income gotten by capital gains rather than by working.

But wait, there’s more.

Romney reports owing $1,935,708.00 in federal income tax for 2011. He reports paying $3,434,441. That’s an overpayment with refund due to Romney, according to his return, of $1,498,740. (He checked the box applying it to estimated tax for 2012.)

Thus,

to the government: $1,935,708.00

from the government: $1,935,479.00

Difference: $229.00

In short, by some uncanny coincidence Romney’s combined trusts received just very slightly less FROM Uncle Sam, for 2011, than citizen Romney is paying in income tax TO Uncle Sam.

 

Romney: “These are people who pay no income tax”

Posted on by
Reply

Romney: “These are people who pay no income tax”

Where did this Mitt Romney come from?

Let’s be clear, up top. Romney’s remarks at a Boca Raton fundraiser did not just link unworthy people, Obama voters, and the number ’47 percent’. Romney linked unworthy people, Obama voters, ’47 percent’, and “people who pay no income tax.”

 

Romney anti-tax button

Who spoke those words?

Why, Mitt Romney, the GOP nominee for the White House:

“There are 47% of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47% who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement … And they will vote for this president no matter what … These are people who pay no income tax … My job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”

Did Romney miss his entire campaign over the past two years? Since when did he of all people equate paying federal income tax with personal responsibility?

(Note: I do, to some extent. Not he.)

Watching the tape, I found the casual they-pay-no-income-tax comment more jaw-dropping than the rest. (Had Romney just learned that he had to write a check to the IRS for 2011?) The candidate’s unbecoming dismissal of half the population is hardly news–aside from its exposure–nor is his dismissal of peace in the Middle East. This is basically the corporate GOP mindset. These are the same people, after all, who have abortions in their own families if they so choose but who are perfectly willing to subscribe to party platforms illegalizing the procedure if it will help them consolidate policy on matters dearer to them. That those policies do not benefit the overwhelming majority of the population is a point about which most GOP officeholders, or future lobbyists, have repeatedly shown themselves to be indifferent.

But elevating paying your income tax to a moral standard?

Who is this man?

Bob Hope must be spinning in his grave.

Retreating to common sense–it is a truism that no one likes to pay taxes. That’s one reason why this country, with its ideal of widespread literacy, still relies so heavily on ‘hidden’ taxes that are destructively recessive, such as sales taxes and ‘user fees’, etc. No one likes to pay income tax, although some people are patriotically proud of how much they contribute. Anti-IRS jokes have been a staple of a certain kind of humor at least since Bob Hope. Hope’s delivery and diction tended to be mild-mannered, not Tabasco, but could not have been confused with pro-tax. Like Romney’s candidacy early on, they went over well with the white-shoes-white-belt crowd that are Romney’s traditional base.

 

bleahh

Romney himself has acknowledged a lack of fondness for taxes. To do him justice, Romney has said openly–even on the campaign trail–that he himself uses every available mechanism to reduce his taxes:

“ROMNEY: Let me also say categorically, I have paid taxes every year, and a lot of taxes.

My view is I have paid all the taxes required by law. I don’t pay more than are legally due.”

More broadly, the notion that paying taxes is bad is hardly a subtext in this year’s Republican campaign.

The evidence on this point, in fact, gives new meaning to the old phrase ’embarrassment of riches’. See among numerous examples romney’s public remarks on Aug 24:

“In calling for a broader, simplified tax code, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney said Friday that bigger businesses, in knowing how to utilize loopholes in the tax code, are “doing fine in many places” compared to small businesses.

“We’ve got to make it easier for small businesses,” Romney told a crowd of about 300 people at a high-dollar fundraiser in Minnesota. “Big business is doing fine in many place- -they get the loans they need, they can deal with all the regulation. They know how to find ways to get through the tax code, save money by putting various things in the places where there are low tax havens around the world for their businesses. But small business is getting crushed.””

One looks in vain for criticism in Romney’s comments about big businesses not pulling their weight, feeling entitled, etc., in connection with paying no income tax. It’s no wonder the biggest guns in the GOP, especially some rightwing media personalities, are jumping all over Romney for all of a sudden getting religion about paying your income tax. I don’t remember the last time George Will, Charles Krauthammer or Bill Kristol stepped forward to support same.

Then we have Romney’s choice of a running mate, Paul Ryan (who is also running for Congress in Wisconsin, and has a strong challenger, Rob Zerban).

The Zerbans, Wisconsin

The same day that Romney made his “big businesses are doing fine” comment, Ryan said much the same thing:

“By plugging loopholes, which are uniquely enjoyed by higher income individuals, you’re reducing their ability to shelter their income from taxation . . .”

Needless to say, the Romney-Ryan campaign has not included specifics on what ‘loopholes’ would be cut MORTGAGE INTEREST DEDUCTION.  The Romney-Ryan insistence on extending all Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest, eliminating even the remaining U.S. inheritance tax, and lowering the income tax for corporations does not suggest that the loopholes would be only those enjoyed by the wealthiest among us MORTGAGE INTEREST DEDUCTION.

 

To return to that “they pay no income tax” line–

The problem with Romney’s comments is not only that they were impolitic, inaccurate and mean-spirited. They were also confused. You cannot at one and the same time campaign against taxes, and elevate paying your fair share of taxes as a moral standard. You cannot openly acknowledge that the tax code already favors the wealthy and big businesses–as both Romney and Ryan have done–and then successfully claim that it’s the poorer citizens who are getting away with something.

Except when you’re talking privately to a cluster of wealthy individuals who already tell themselves that.

Orwell lives.

Speaking of impolitic remarks, there was a slideslip into accuracy in Romney’s “big businesses are doing fine” comments, which is one reason they were so widely quoted. Analyses, including this one by CNBC, have corroborated the finding that, indeed, the one percenters are doing fine using available tax breaks. The New York Times summarized some of the ways Aug. 10, the Journal Tribune Aug. 25. Plenty of further information is available.

Not that the one percenters are the only ones, of course. The question of who is not liable for federal income tax under the current tax code is now getting some clarification it has long deserved, thanks to Romney. Here among others is a good run-down by the Christian Science Monitor.

In fact, on why Romney’s conflating non-income-tax payers with 1) Obama voters and 2) unworthy people is as inaccurate as it is ugly, let’s take a leaf from Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and count the ways.

Non- federal income tax payers, by state percentages

Factor Number One: Region or State

The nonpartisan Tax Foundation published a report in 2010 showing that paying federal income tax varies widely by state. The ten states with the largest percentage of non-payers? They include nine states–Idaho, Texas, and southeastern states including Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia–likely to go for Romney. Of the ten, all but one–Florida–is conventionally designated a ‘red state’, and Florida has a Republican governor and legislature.

Factor Number Two: Age

Florida also has a sizable retired population. As this fuller breakdown by the Tax Policy Center reminds us, one cohort paying less federal income tax is the elderly. Senior citizens on Social Security benefit from tax expenditures that Romney and Ryan have claimed, on the campaign trail, to support. The oldest voters, be it noted, are the only age group of voters among whom Romney bests President Obama.

Factor Number Three: Low Income

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reports that the main reason people don’t pay federal income tax, when they don’t, is that their incomes are too low for them to be tax liable. Here Romney is on firmer ground, so to speak. True enough, many of the poorest households do not support him–except when they are also seniors, or Southern whites. A number of them, including households with elderly members or Southern whites, also receive Social Security Supplemental Security Income (SSI), disability aid, Medicaid, WIC, unemployment benefits or some other form of public assistance. So presumably a Romney-Ryan tax plan will try to catch more of the nation’s poorest households in a higher tax bracket. Those are the indications so far, both from Ryan himself and from the 2012 GOP platform.

Factor Number Four: Military Service

Federal income tax on compensation for serving in the military is offset in several ways. Compensation received for service in a combat zone, for example, is not subject to federal income tax. There are also state income-tax exclusions for military pay in various states. By the way, the states with the best exclusions are not necessarily red states. Cash-strapped red states are at least as likely as any other states to limit the income tax exclusions.

Factor Number Five: High-Net-Worth Individuals and Corporations

On not paying taxes at the upper end, you can find copious information in various glossy sources. A quick hint here, but really Romney and Ryan’s own comments–and the scant information so far released in Romney’s own tax returns–give the picture. If you want to have more fun, and enjoy scenic views of golden beaches and sun, you can read up on off-shore tax havens. And of course numerous top corporations make tax avoidance part of their ongoing strategy. They generally poor-mouth while doing it, too. Where are Romney and Ryan on these entities, perennially ready to portray themselves as victims?

Sad to say, some of the households and individuals characterized by Governor Romney as takers will vote for him anyway. Their local newspapers and television news channels may fail to clarify his remarks or to correct the tax arithmetic. Their willingness to believe it’s different when you accept government aid while simultaneously being white will undoubtedly be catered to by the campaign. That these are some of the same households hurt worst by Romney-Ryan policy won’t change their votes.

But the fact remains that the real one-way-streeters comprise those responsible for the mortgage-derivatives debacle, those who benefit financially from it, and those who oppose any process that would lead to retribution or reimbursement. Only racial politics could make the GOP imagine that any large proportion of the country can be made to forget who was responsible for our biggest crash since the Great Depression.

Where did Mitt Romney get his 43 percent figure?

Posted on by
Reply

Where did Mitt Romney get his 43 percent figure?

Move over, Goldilocks. Mitt Romney has fine-tooled your metrics.

As revealed yesterday by Mother Jones, Romney was videotaped at a May 17 fundraiser in Boca Raton giving affluent donors his assessment of the campaign with unbecoming clarity. He was particularly unbecoming about people who don’t vote for him. We’ll get to some of those candid remarks later.

 

Video capture of Boca Raton fundraiser for Romney

For now, it’s Romney’s take on the numbers that intrigues:

“There are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them,” Romney said in a hidden-camera video of his remarks at a private fundraiser earlier this year posted on Monday on the left-wing Mother Jones magazine’s website.

“My job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives. What I have to do is convince the 5 to 10 percent in the center that are independents,” he said in remarks convincing donors to write checks for his campaign.”

Most commentary so far has focused on Romney’s ’47 percent’ number, and rightly so; see later. But Romney’s horse-race assessment reveals as much as his version of sociology. Going on to that ‘center’=’independents’ comment that follows, you get more than the inflammatory dismissal of 47 percent of voters. Use Romney’s arithmetic: 47 percent ‘pay no income tax’ etc; 5 to 10 percent are ‘independents’; that leaves 43 percent. Subtracting 47 percent from 100, then 10 percent (of ‘independents’) from 53–thus Obama 47 percent; Romney 43 percent.

Romney clearly thinks he has 43 percent, and only 43 percent, in the bag. Why? Who are the 43 percent? Where did he get that number? –Recent polls? Tax brackets? Income brackets? White voters? GOP registration?

Looks like not.

Where did Romney get his figures? CBS News had put out a recent widely reported opinion poll on the presidential race as of May 17. But it gave Romney the lead, and almost reverses Romney’s numbers:

“According to the survey, conducted May 11-13, 46 percent of registered voters say they would vote for Romney, while 43 percent say they would opt for Mr. Obama. Romney’s slight advantage remains within the poll’s margin of error, which is plus or minus four percentage points.”

The CBS poll, furthermore, was in line with much or most election 2012 polling in the time frame. As this wiki overview of election tracking polls and opinion polls shows, Romney was running fairly often behind and in the forties–but so was Obama. The poll closest to Romney’s numbers came out late April to early May, an Investor’s Business Daily/Christian Science Monitor/TIPP poll giving Obama 46 percent to Romney’s 43–with a helpful breakdown of voter demographics that would tend to jibe with Romney’s sociology.

Only one poll around then has Romney’s exact numbers: an NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll dated May 16-20 gives Obama 47 percent, Romney 43.

The catch is that the NBC-WSJ poll was not out yet, or not publicly.

Republicans, be it noted, tend to emphasize We’re-ahead! slogans when asking donors for money. So if Romney’s buddies in the corporate media shared a foretaste of recent polling with him, Romney knew in Boca Raton that he had some numbers to get out in front of. (Dems tend to use scare tactics–We’re going to lose!–for the same purpose.)

 

Back to a somewhat larger perspective, it’s interesting how closely Romney’s breakdown of the electorate into 1) takers, 2) his own voters, and 3) ‘independents’=’center’ tracks with the punditry most often put out by the larger media outlets (and by Fox News).

Romney’s amateur punditry also tracks closely with the pros on the question of what, exactly, constitutes an ‘independent’:

“What I have to do is to convince the five to ten percent in the center that are independents, that are thoughtful, that look at voting one way or the other depending upon in some cases emotion, whether they like the guy or not.”

Independent=center. Thoughtful=emotion. Emotion=”whether they like the guy or not.” Orwell could not have said it better.

Eric Arthur Blair, pseud. George Orwell

Mr. Romney has been called many things, but he is truly typified by Aldous Huxley’s model of the affluent businessman who, when he opens up, turns out to be filled with comfortable hogwash.

more to come

Update Sep 20:

Speaking of the Wall Street Journal, Media Matters now has this piece on Romney campaigners who write op-eds for WSJ–without having their connection to the Romney campaign clarified.

Looks like a two-way street.

The Republican Party’s legitimate difficulties with Todd Akin, part 2

Posted on by
Reply

The Republican Party’s legitimate difficulties with Todd Akin, part 2

 

Akin with Jaco

What Todd Akin did, with his ill-timed comments, was to illuminate

1) the draconian hard-right stand against abortions. This is the no-exceptions position that would prevent terminating a pregnancy for an eleven-year-old girl sexually abused by her stepfather. (The medical case just referred to is not hypothetical. It occurred in Texas. It never became a dispute over abortion. )The no-exceptions position would compel a woman or girl to carry a fetus to term even if the fetus were anencephalic.

2) the superficiality of Republican establishment support of such positions.

 

Scott Brown, "pro-choice Republican"

Let’s put this simply: Most top GOPers do not support these positions. But while quietly opposing them, the top echelon of the Republican Party continues to entice the vote and the financial contributions of party faithful who hold them.

 

Carlson with dancing partner

I have written about the broader topic before, as in 2006 posts on Tucker Carlson of all people. Like Akin, whom he does not much otherwise resemble, Carlson came out with some inconveniently candid remarks at a particularly inopportune moment. Carlson, a Republican commentator who later appeared on Dancing with the Stars, voiced on television the key political fact that the Christian right tends to be used and abused by the power structure it keeps in office.

Things haven’t changed much, in that respect, since 2006. Look at the party establishment’s reaction to Akin.

As everyone not living under a rock knows, Rep. Todd Akin (R), challenging Sen. Claire McCaskill (D) in Missouri, gave a remarkable interview on August 19. Here is the video of the interview, on Fox.

Here is Akin, on abortion in cases of sexual assault:

“Well you know, people always want to try to make that as one of those things, well how do you, how do you slice this particularly tough sort of ethical question. First of all, from what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something. I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be on the rapist and not attacking the child.”

There are two prongs to the difficulty Akin’s statements have caused the GOP. One is the false science, the other is the genuine belief. As I previously wrote, the genuine belief is what is giving the Republican Party so much heartburn.

But the GOP also has its vulnerabilities on the false science.

Rick Santorum

Again, I do not question Akin’s sincerity. But it is incumbent on rational people to correct errors of fact when they arise, especially when they are widely disseminated and when they support disastrous public policy. Remember Iraqi WMD?

CIA corrects previous intelligence reports on WMD

The mystery is not how Akin, or anyone, could form such a notion in the first place, that is, the notion that a raped woman’s body wards off pregnancy. As with other wishful beliefs, the wishful belief that a sexually assaulted woman has innate defenses against pregnancy is underpinned by a few grains of truth. Stress and anxiety can deter pregnancy, even in women who want to conceive and who are trying to become pregnant. (Hence the lucrative explosion in the reproduction industry of fertility clinics and the like.) Injury can interfere with becoming pregnant and can cause miscarriage. Each subsection of this unhappy topic has generated extensive medical scholarship.

On a more cheerful note, studies have shown that most rapists suffer some form of sexual dysfunction. (This is one reason why ‘castration’ does not work as a tool of public policy against sexual assault.)

The more puzzling question is not how Akin formed a wrong notion about conception in the first place but how he, or any literate person 65 years old, could have retained such a notion. Actually, that’s easy to answer: Like any fellow human being who adopts a wrong belief, Akin just never checked his in any meaningful way. He opposes terminating a pregnancy even in cases of rape. His position is obviously painful even for him. So he just adopted the version of science that gave him most comfort. And he never course-corrected, intellectually speaking, even when news reports brought evidence of thousands of Albanian women pregnant after the attacks on Kosovo.

How long did it take Congressman Akin to correct his previous mistake, once it was emphatically brought to his attention?  –About two days.

Here is Akin’s own statement on the interview from his web site, posted August 19, the day of the interview. Note that he does not clarify or retract the false science in his morning comments:

“As a member of Congress, I believe that working to protect the most vulnerable in our society is one of my most important responsibilities, and that includes protecting both the unborn and victims of sexual assault.  In reviewing my off-the-cuff remarks, it’s clear that I misspoke in this interview and it does not reflect the deep empathy I hold for the thousands of women who are raped and abused every year.  Those who perpetrate these crimes are the lowest of the low in our society and their victims will have no stronger advocate in the Senate to help ensure they have the justice they deserve.

“I recognize that abortion, and particularly in the case of rape, is a very emotionally charged issue.  But I believe deeply in the protection of all life and I do not believe that harming another innocent victim is the right course of action. I also recognize that there are those who, like my opponent, support abortion and I understand I may not have their support in this election.”

 

Morgan puts up empty chair

A day later, Akin took a somewhat less firm line by failing to show up at CNN to be interviewed by host Piers Morgan. Morgan avenged himself by satirically positioning an empty chair on set, castigating Akin in absentia.

Eastwood talks to empty chair

By the way, Clint Eastwood may deserve everything he’s gotten in response to his bizarre performance at the Republican National Convention. No one seems to have noticed, however, that Eastwood’s empty-chair routine was surely Eastwood’s idea of a tit-for-tat on the Akin controversy. Now we know that Clint Eastwood, or someone in his household, watches Piers Morgan.

It’s a safe guess that Eastwood, like most top Republicans, was also chafing at hearing about Todd Akin.

Back to Akin–the following day, he issued his public apology on YouTube, including the statement, “The fact is, rape can lead to pregnancy.”

Full text:

“Rape is an evil act. I used the wrong words in the wrong way and for that I apologize. As the father of two daughters, I want tough justice for predators. I have a compassionate heart for the victims of sexual assault, and I pray for them. The fact is, rape can lead to pregnancy. The truth is, rape has many victims. The mistake I made was in the words I said, not in the heart I hold. I ask for your forgiveness.”

Akin has also rightly observed that “the entire [Republican] establishment” turned on him.

Certainly a number of prominent GOP politicians and commentators have condemned Akin’s version of medical science. They’re not out of the woods yet, though. For one thing, that kind of rational criticism tends to be a bit of an uphill climb for them.

The Republican Party, after all, is still the major party dug in about, opposing science on,

  • climate change
  • greenhouse gases
  • tobacco use as a cause for cancer
  • environmental factors as causes for cancer and other diseases
  • occupational safety as a factor in health, e.g. in mining
  • the relationship between highway speed and highway fatalities
  • the relationship between driver age and highway safety
  • the connection between ‘fracking’ and earthquakes

Additionally the GOP has shown itself, shall we say, reluctant to leave intact any kind of regulation that science indicates would boost the safety of the water we drink, the air we breathe and the soil in which we grow food. Congressional Republicans, always fighting from the rear on issues of public safety and public health, even tried unsuccessfully to prevent public disclosure of unsafe consumer products, a reform pushed by the Obama administration.

For related reasons, the same faction is also fighting to the political death to prevent public disclosure of  abuses in the financial sector.

On August 21, Akin told Sean Hannity that Mitt Romney was exploiting the “legitimate rape” issue. Akin had a point. Akin’s gaffe highlights the contrast between the hard-nosed, practical, get-it-done business type Romney wishes to be thought, and the views Romney panders to among non-one-percenters he induces to vote for him.

Republican Party’s legitimate difficulty over Todd Akin

Posted on by
1

Republican Party’s legitimate difficulty over Todd Akin: Re-cap and overview, part 1

 

Returning to the topic of Rep. Todd Akin’s senate race in Missouri, the real sticking point for Republican Party movers and shakers is not Akin’s mistaken science, his comforting notion that a woman’s body will ward off pregnancy in a sexual assault. The real sticking point, for top Republicans including presidential nominee Mitt Romney, is Akin’s genuine belief that abortion is wrong in all cases.

Todd Akin

(Certainly, Akin’s belief appears to be genuine, and short of proclaiming self a mind reader, it can be taken to be sincere.)

The fact that I do not agree with this view is beside the point. The point is that many voters and contributors on whom the upper levels of the GOP depend to keep office do agree with it. The official Republican Party platform adopted at the 2012 Republican National Convention–along with threatening to cut the mortgage interest deduction–holds with this view.

Those religiously conservative voters who hold this view are the people being stiffed by the national GOP, up to and including Romney.

So much for lip service. The Republican candidate for office who most strongly comes out with the anti-abortion party line in 2012–openly, candidly, unequivocally–happens, by some fluke, to be exactly the candidate that almost every well-placed Republican operative tries to exile beyond the pale. Akin’s remarks highlighted a view that many Republicans–especially those in Washington–do not hold. Worse yet, Akin’s remarks interfered with top Republicans’ ongoing strategy of keeping that view quiet.

Akin, Ryan

The adverse reaction to Akin’s remarks by wounded important people in the wounded top echelons of the GOP was swift, widespread and unequivocal.

Let no one be accused of exaggerating the reaction. Quick recap:

The day of Akin’s interview, then-presumptive nominee Mitt Romney promptly, if tersely, distanced himself from Akin’s comments.

The similarity between Akin’s no-exceptions position and that of Romney’s running mate, Paul Ryan, coming swiftly to light, the Romney campaign seems to have decided that just rejecting Akin’s views was not going to be enough. The next day, Romney came out to condemn Akin’s words as “inexcusable.”

The next day, he went farther yet, expressing a public hope that the Missouri congressman would leave the race.

Mitt Romney

Romney, be it noted, was not exactly going out on a limb here, separated from the rest of the party establishment. Other nominees suggesting that Akin should drop out include Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts, strongly challenged by Elizabeth Warren. (Brown faces the key difficulty that Warren would make a better senator.)

Elizabeth Warren

 

Reportedly joining in against Akin was incomprehensibly well-paid radio host Rush Limbaugh, though Limbaugh back-pedaled afterward. As the deadline for Akin to drop out without penalty approached its last hours, establishment pressure on Akin mounted.

The August 21 deadline, as we know, came and went with Akin remaining in the race on the eve of the RNC. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) joined the throng asking him not to. There aren’t many occasions when  Issa can chastise someone for ill-considered speech, but he stepped up to the plate this time. Must have been something of a shock to some of Issa’s supporters back home.

Coming to the convention, Romney seized air time in interviews to reiterate his opposition to Akin.

 

Matalin on air

Top GOP operative Mary Matalin went even farther. As previously written, Matalin said emphatically on air that the Republican Party will fund a write-in candidate against Akin in Missouri, if Akin stays in the race. As of last writing, Akin has not dropped out, though Matalin has not yet retracted her statement.

 

Rove at Republican National Convention 2012

Matalin’s king-of-the-hill moment didn’t last long. Funding a candidate to run against Akin was tumbled off by Karl Rove’s expressed desire to murder him. In a gathering for wealthy supporters and party strategists, Rove’s fancy turned to homicide. He later apologized to Akin. Rove was at the convention. Akin was not.

 

So much for pro-life.

It is fair to take Akin’s remarks to be sincere. It would be fair to accept Rove’s remarks as sincere.

And this, gentlemen and ladies, is what the Christian right gets from the national Republican party: It is okay for rightwing pro-lifers to show up and vote; it is okay for them to contribute money in small amounts; it is okay for them to keep Wall Streeters in power. Position to get money, money to get position, all fueled by some vague notion of status.

But when one politician gets so out of line as to state openly the party’s no-exceptions position on abortion–makes clear that yes, that’s what the party stands for–the full weight of the party comes down on him.

Akin, Ryan still in their respective races

Posted on by
Reply

On eve of GOP convention, Todd Akin, Paul Ryan still running for Congress

The long-awaited Republican National Convention has opened in Tampa in attenuated fashion, and not much is new. Missouri senate nominee Todd Akin is still in the race, dousing recently aroused hope that he would take himself out with some increasingly defiant pronouncements over the weekend.

Akin

Top GOP operative Mary Matalin has not yet retracted or back-pedaled on her equally firm announcement yesterday that Republicans will fund a write-in candidate against Akin–and, of course, against Sen. Claire McCaskill. As previously written, this kind of thing can change like the vectors of a tropical storm Isaac. For now, however, Rep. Akin’s senate race remains consigned to the GOP establishment dustbin, and according to Matalin, Ann Wagner is “going to be our candidate.”

 

Matalin

Also in recently unchanged news, Rick Warren’s presidential forum remains cancelled.

 

Ditto in ditto, the question whether Rep. Paul Ryan will run for re-election to the House remains unanswered. Communication with Ryan’s Capitol Hill office elicits the information that his press secretary is unavailable. Call-backs, not yet.

 

Ryan

Ryan, unlike Akin, faces at present no prospect of a fellow Republican entering his contest back home. Ryan was unopposed in his own primary.

 

Looking at broader information, staying in his House race might seem a smart move for Ryan. Trying to assess exactly how much damage Rep. Akin’s individual comments–i.e. Akin’s open and explicit statements, clearly aligned with the Republican party platform–have done may be beside the point. Predictions are obviously impossible at this point, but every poll-of-polls that takes the Electoral College into account puts President Obama ahead of Mitt Romney for 2012. Neither party likes this fact pointed out; Democrats are loath to give up fear tactics to generate fund-raising, and Republicans are equally loath to give up gloating about ‘winning’ for the same purpose.

Mary Matalin says GOP will fund a write-in against Todd Akin in Missouri

Posted on by
2

Election 2012: Mary Matalin says GOP will fund a write-in against Todd Akin in Missouri

Admittedly this is the kind of thing that could change in another hour. As of now, however, GOP top strategist Mary Matalin is saying something pretty crisp about Rep. Todd Akin’s senate race. After dismissing Akin’s chances of getting funding from the Republican party, Matalin went on to say, flatly, “Wagner’s going to be our candidate.”

 

Matalin and Carville

The reference is to Ann Wagner, the Missouri GOP chair now running for Akin’s House seat.

Wagner

 

Speaking in ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos panel discussion, Matalin went on to say “We have the money to do it”–i.e. fund a statewide write-in campaign for the U.S. Senate–and added that they’ve done it before. Presumably that last refers to Sen. Lisa Murkowski in Alaska. Matalin–New Orleans resident, wife of Dem strategist James Carville, and former diehard George W. Bush operative–is one of the nation’s most prominent pro-right discoursers on party politics and party policy.

The odds on a win for the hypothetical Wagner write-in in Missouri would be hard to calculate; in all likelihood the party would be counting on Akin to drop out, maybe at the last minute, in the face of a well-funded and serious write-in campaign from his own party.

 

Akin

The clear take-away from this Sunday morning’s talk shows confirms that the GOP establishment is indeed against Akin, as he says. Mitt Romney spent a few minutes of his lengthy one-on-one with Chris Wallace at Fox distancing himself from Akin, again, and calling attention to the fact that he is doing so. Former Florida Gov. Charlie Crist came out in favor of President Obama. Even Gov. Bob ‘vaginal probe’ McDonnell of Virginia mealy-mouthed around the rape-exception issue, saying, “The [national GOP] party didn’t make any judgment on that.”

With even fellow frothers like McDonnell bailing on him, Akin does indeed seem to face a tough rowing job. He is not completely alone, of course. Mike Huckabee is supporting him, front-pew, as are a number of Christian right organizations.

Outgoing Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, on CNN with Candy Crowley, broadened the discussion a bit. Hutchison said firmly–speaking about abortion–that “We shouldn’t put a party around an issue that’s so personal, and also religion-based.”

Hutchison, like all the GOP and pro-GOP voices on the air waves, went on to use the line that ‘the economy’–‘jobs’–should be the issue in the election.

Mitt Romney

You know the GOP is hurting in an election when it starts talking about jobs, the domestic economy, or hardships faced by ordinary people. It’s really hurting when it tries to switch the discussion to those topics, in preference to others.

 

To be continued

More on Mitt Romney’s tax returns, more ties with the Bushes

Posted on by
1

More reasons for Mitt Romney to release tax returns, or maybe another reason why he hasn’t released his tax returns

Ties with Team Bush, part 1

 

Bush endorsing Romney

To be clear, the foremost reason why a candidate for the White House should release financial records is principle. The public has a right to know of any encumbrances and influences borne by someone running for the presidency, and for a presidential candidate, especially a major candidate, to dismiss or to downplay this principle is unworthy.

Descending swiftly to less exalted planes of argument, it should be apparent by now that there are also political reasons for presumptive-GOP nominee Mitt Romney to release his income tax returns. He seems to be concealing something, and even aside from the principle enunciated above it’s making him look bad. Admittedly the widespread buzz about Romney’s secretiveness may be playing into the hands of the Romney campaign. Possibly the campaign has made a tactical decision to refuse to release the IRS returns right up to the point when it about-faces and releases them, showing once and for all that there’s nothing there.

 

Romney, spoofed

In the meantime, however, that possibility has done nothing to deter speculation about Romney’s paper trail or financial track record. Time and space preclude an exhaustive list of speculations voiced so far about what Romney might be hiding, but here are a few:

  • Did Romney pay no income tax at all some years, despite his wealth? Raised in January, this possibility has also been discussed in Bloomberg News and in the Washington Post, among other outlets.
  • Are Romney’s effective tax rates just embarrassingly low, compared to the taxes much poorer people pay in the United States? Think Progress discussed this one early, followed by other outlets including money.cnn.com and The Daily Beast.
  • Would his IRS returns reveal more about Romney’s embarrassing offshore accounts and assets? The newest issue of Vanity Fair has more on this.
  • Then there is the overlapping issue of tax havens and tax shelters, wherever they may be. Has Romney been even more closely associated with them than the public has yet been made aware?
  • Are there more discrepancies in Romney’s own bookkeeping, as between his IRS filings and his company’s SEC filings, or between his records and his public statements?

 

Here is another question.

A plethora of SEC filings and other sources indicate that Romney and his cronies in the business community, including Marriott, helped GWBush and the Bush team over the years. As has been noted elsewhere, in this eloquent piece by Joe Conason for example, the Bush administration and Team Bush are not looking good in electoral politics in 2012. It is politically understandable that Romney wouldn’t want to be linked with the Bush image. But  even a quick overview of George W. Bush’s track record in business corroborates  Ralph Nader’s comment in 2000 that George Bush was “a group of corporations running as a man,” and prominent among those corporations was Marriott–closely tied to Romney, Romney’s family, and Romney’s companies. Marriott ties not only gave Mitt Romney his first name (after the Willard in Marriott) but also gave Dubya his business career.

 

An early Carlyle Group acquisition

The Marriott clan’s ties to the Romney team, past and present, are too extensive and too well reported to need belaboring here. Romney-Marriott closeness is a political and financial given. That Marriott enterprises also provided George W. Bush the platform for his business career has not been widely reported–none of the major media outlets touched it, or thoroughly vetted Bush’s business career, in 2000–although I sketched part of the story in 2004. One minor entity was an unsuccessful airline food company named Caterair International Corporation, a spin-off from Marriott Corporation, which founded the airline-food industry in the thirties. As written previously, CaterAir  was started in 1989 by a private investors group including Bush supporters Daniel J. Altobello and Frederic V. Malek, who then brought Bush on. George W. Bush became a director at CaterAir officially in 1990, the company got an additional boost from the Carlyle Group, where George H. W. Bush came on board after leaving the White House in 1992, and Bush left in 1994 to run for Governor of Texas.

 

Former Texas Gov. Ann Richards

Romney-Bush family ties in Virginia

 

Coleman Andrews, second from left

The Marriott company or cluster of interests, however, is not the only Romney-Bush link. If we really want to know more about ties between Romney interests and Bush interests over the years, we can cut out the Marriott middleman and go straight to, among others, T. Coleman Andrews III, co-founding partner of Bain Capital and brother of Scott Andrews, who co-founded the investment firm Winston Partners with George W. Bush’s youngest brother, Marvin Bush. The family ties in politics and finance run deep. The Andrews’ late grandfather, Thomas Coleman Andrews, a founder of the John Birch Society, resigned from his position as IRS commissioner under Eisenhower. Scott Andrews served as an executive in two air transport companies, Presidential Airways and World Corp–where Coleman Andrews was chair. Both went bankrupt; Coleman Andrews left WorldCorp in 1998. A brother-in-law of Jack Kemp, he also became CEO of South African Airways.

Side note: Called in by Nelson Mandela as a consultant for South African Airways, Coleman Andrews reportedly spent hundreds of millions on consultants including Bain Capital. Andrews himself left SAA in 2001 with a golden parachute reported at $14 million. There is no indication at this time that the Romney campaign plans to include a stop in South Africa for one of its international fundraisers.

Space precludes an extensive history of WorldCorp here. Suffice it to say that Bain Capital and Bain alumni, or directors and officers, were all over the company and its bankruptcy, as shown here and here and here among numerous documents. WorldCorp and Bain were all over the problems at South African Airways, as noted. They were thick on the ground in the bankruptcy of World Airways–owned by WorldCorp and headed by Coleman Andrews–which also purchased consulting from Bain Capital. They were also extensively connected with a series of mergers and buy-outs through which a lesser known company called US Order became part of ever larger financial services firms. For example, see this SEC filing dating from the 2005 merger of InteliData and Corillian Corporation. InteliData, with Bain alum John Backus on board, became Coriallian; Corillian bought CheckFree, now FISERV.

“ Patrick F. Graham, age 65, has served as a director of InteliData since 1996 and was a director of US Order, Inc. from 1993 until US Order and Colonial Data Technologies Corp. merged to form InteliData in November 1996. Since October 2001, he has been the Vice President of Business Development and Strategic Projects for The Gillette Company, a consumer products marketer of personal care and personal use products. From July 1999 until October 2001, he was the Director of the Global Strategy Practice of A.T. Kearney, Inc., a management consulting firm. From 1997 until June 1999, he served as Chief Executive Officer of WorldCorp, Inc. On February 12, 1999, WorldCorp, Inc. filed a voluntary petition and a proposed plan of reorganization under Chapter 11 of the United States Bankruptcy Code with the United States Bankruptcy Court for the district of Delaware. He was previously a director of Bain & Company, Inc., a management consulting firm Mr. Graham co-founded in 1973. In addition to his primary responsibilities with Bain clients, he served as Bain’s Vice Chairman and Chief Financial Officer. Prior to founding Bain, Mr. Graham was a group Vice President with the Boston Consulting Group. Mr. Graham is also a director of Stericycle, Inc., a provider of medical waste services and OSHA compliance services.”

A co-founder of Bain, Graham served on the board of InteliData with an alumna of CaterAir and as stated another alumnus of Bain Capital as well as of US Order. The ties extend farther. This SEC filing from World Air Holdings, the holding company of World Airways and WorldCorp, lists as directors John Backus, A. Scott Andrews and Daniel J. Altobello. Again, sponsors of Bush family interests and of George W. Bush, respectively, in the realms of finance and of politics have been working hand in corporate glove for years with Romney cronies and partners. This is no far-fetched, diffuse, stretched set of associations; it’s partners and relatives with longstanding political and financial ties, serving in the same boardrooms–boardrooms, be it noted, that were key in some spectacular bankruptcies and other failures at a considerable human cost. Furthermore, the ties extend to some political views that are considered weird by any reasonable criterion.

It’s that simple.

Romney’s reluctance to release his detailed IRS records is not mystifying. It will be a little mystifying if he gets away with not doing so.

Today’s history lesson: CaterAir, George W. Bush (and Marriott)

Posted on by
5

Today’s history lesson: CaterAir, George W. Bush (and Marriott)

In July 2003, the founder of the Carlyle Group, David Rubenstein, chatted with company investors and made several tape-recorded comments about a former director at one Carlyle subsidiary. The subsidiary was an ill-fated airline-food company named CaterAir International Corporation, a spin-off from Marriott, and the director was George W. Bush:

“But when we were putting the board together, somebody came to me and said, look there is a guy who would like to be on the board.  He’s kind of down on his luck a bit.  Needs a job.  Needs a board position.  Needs some board positions. Could you put him on the board?  Pay him a salary and he’ll be a good board member and be a loyal vote for the management and so forth.”

“I said well we’re not usually in that business.  But okay, let me meet the guy. I met the guy.  I said I don’t think he adds that much value.  We’ll put him on the board because–you know–we’ll do a favor for this guy; he’s done a favor for us. We put him on the board and spent three years.  Came to all the meetings.  Told a lot of jokes.  Not that many clean ones.  And after a while I kind of said to him, after about three years–you know, I’m not sure this is really for you.  Maybe you should do something else.  Because I don’t think you’re adding that much value to the board.  You don’t know that much about the company.”

“And I said, thanks–didn’t think I’d ever see him again.  His name is George W. Bush.  He became President of the United States.  So you know if you said to me, name 25 million people who would maybe be President of the United States, he wouldn’t have been in that category.  So you never know.  Anyway, I haven’t been invited to the White House for many things.”

Audio of Rubenstein’s becoming candor can be found at Pacifica among other sites.

CaterAir was founded in 1989, spun off partly from Marriott Corporation by a private investors group including prominent Bush supporters Daniel J. Altobello and Frederic V. Malek.  Auspices were poor. Airline-food jokes aside, Marriott, which had founded the airline catering industry, reportedly let its airline catering division go because of thin profits and uncertainties in the airline industry. However, it also provided a place for the future candidate for Texas governor and the White House.

George W. Bush

The Carlyle Group, where George H. W. Bush joined the board after leaving the White House, gave George W. Bush the directorship at CaterAir in 1990.  Bush left in 1994 to run for Governor of Texas.  Here is a partial chronology of CaterAir’s bumpy career:

  • February 1990:  CaterAir restructures its longterm debt, withdrawing an earlier SEC filing for $110 million and going for $40 million more.  Eastern Airlines, which went bankrupt, was one earlier CaterAir client.
  • May 1990:  Merrill Lynch, a large brokerage firm with its own ties to the Bush clan, shops $250 million in refinancing for CaterAir, characterized in the business press as a high-risk, high-yield junk bond.
  • August 1990:  CaterAir completes its refinancing with a bridge loan.  Following the collapse of the junk bond market, two senior Merrill Lynch executives who led the company’s foray into junk bonds resign.  Bridge loans like the one to CaterAir are expected to become fewer.
  • December 1990:  CaterAir awards a contract to a California company to develop “a robotics system for its in-flight catering operations” including wrapping food.
  • March 1991:  Carlyle Group persuades Saudi Arabia’s Prince al-Walid bin Talal to spend a half-billion purchasing part of America’s largest banking company, Citicorp, earning a commission.  David Rubenstein says of Carlyle’s CaterAir purchase, “Despite the fact that the airline business is in trouble, the company is worth an enormous amount more than what we paid for it.”  Malek is quoted by NYTimes as saying, “I thought George W. Bush could make a contribution to CaterAir.”
  • December 1991:  CaterAir freezes or rolls back wages on most of its 20,000 employees, in spite of winning 66 new contracts in 1991.  Contracts with 48 air carriers in 28 cities include Virgin Atlantic at Boston’s Logan, All Nippon at JFK in New York, and Aerolineas Argentinas at Miami’s airport.
  • June 1992:  CaterAir among other companies campaigns against a bill in the California state senate to tax airline food, saying the tax will hurt their ability to employ workers.
  • August 1992:  CaterAir says it is not restructuring its debt in spite of flat sales.  Its joint ventures include Russia’s Aeroflot, the former national airline of the Soviet Union, operating a kitchen that caters to all flights through Moscow.
  • August 1992:  a former Marriott official pleads guilty to embezzling $1.4 million over 14 years, using fraudulent invoices from several vendors including CaterAir.
  • October 1992:  Carlyle buys part of General Dynamics Corporation, part of a two-year process becoming one of the nation’s largest military contractors.  Carlyle also completes purchase of a Washington, DC, radio station and two stations in Virginia; is said looking to buy more stations after FCC expansion of allowable number of stations in a market to 18 for one owner, up from 12.
  • December 1992:  an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association describes an outbreak of illness suffered by passengers including several Minnesota Vikings back in 1989.  Federal and state epidemiologists trace the problem to Marriott food handlers who did not wash their hands.  Shigellosis, from bacteria found in human feces, confirmed or probable in about 240 cases of passenger illness.  This division became CaterAir.
  • December 1992:  CaterAir’s St. Croix facility is closed down by the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) for five days, until it cleans up its kitchen and complies with FDA sanitation regulations.  The St. Croix is given a poor 57% rating and classified “Not Approved.”  Problems identified include “rodent pellets on a tray of salad plates” and elsewhere; “live flies throughout the kitchen”; “cockroaches on the kitchen floor and tray assembling room”; “old food and grease encrusted on the stove and food storage shelves”; etc.
  • January 1993:  George H. W. Bush leaves office.
  • April 1993:  CaterAir is now the nation’s largest airline caterer.
  • May 1993:  George W. Bush resigns from CaterAir.  The FDA’s magazine, FDA Consumer, publishes an article about its five-day closing down of the St. Croix catering operation back in December, titled “Caterer Cleans Up, Flies Right.”
  • July 1993:  company sells an Orlando, FL, property for $3.4 million.
  • August 1993:  CaterAir files with the SEC to sell another $230 million in notes.
  • November 1993:  company announces it will relocate its corporate headquarters to Bethesda, MD, from Potomac, MD.  Bush resigns from board of Harken Energy.
  • April 1994: a federal court rules against CaterAir in company’s appeal of an NLRB decision.
  • June 1994:  at a Chief Executive Roundtable, CaterAir International’s Altobello discusses his company’s “passport for success” program, said to recognize employees who provide exceptional service.
  • September 1994:  Governor Ann Richards’ reelection campaign runs an ad criticizing GWBush’s business experience, saying that companies where Bush served lost a combined $371.6 million.  The campaign publishes a handout titled The Bottom Line:  The Business Career of George W. Bush.  While the companies lost $371 million, the campaign says, Bush made $1.3 million.  CaterAir lost $285.1 million during Bush’s stint on board; Bush received $75,000.  The Bush campaign responds within hours, complaining about Richards’ “personal attacks.”
  • September 1994:  Daniel Altobello says Bush cannot be held responsible for losses at the company.
  • October 1994:  business experts, unnamed, defend Bush on grounds that his company role was limited to attending quarterly meetings.
  • August 1995:  Carlyle’s purchase of CaterAir is described as a “disaster.”
  • February 2001:  George W. Bush, now President, signals willingness to get involved in airline mechanics union negotiations with Northwest Airlines.  A former president of Northwest is Frederic Malek, who put Bush on CaterAir’s board; Malek is still a major Northwest shareholder.
  • Et cetera.

Be it noted that senior and longtime GOPer Malek’s ties with Republican presidential campaigns continue to the present.

Malek on television

Be it also noted that the counter-arguments, if you call them that, rolled out to obscure George W. Bush’s business record in the 1994 election–in Texas–strongly resemble those being used in the 2012 election by Mitt Romney. He’s No Longer With the Company, He Had Nothing to Do With Those Decisions, He Didn’t Do All That Much To Begin With etc.

Moving forward–

Is this another reason why Romney hasn’t released his tax returns? –That they would disclose yet more of Romney’s ties to the Bush team and to GWBush’s business and political career, now in some ill favor?

Romney with Bush

Then there is the larger problem, larger, that is, than one man’s political career. We report, you decide:  who is mainly responsible for the airlines’ troubles?  Minimum-wage-paid ill-trained lower-level employees?  Or overpaid and under-performing ‘managers’ who spent decades lobbying for every conceivable tax break, government giveaway, and executive privilege, while resisting every improvement in security, safety, and even cleanliness–and simultaneously using the existence of government agencies as a way to claim that their food, for example, is safe?

As in the article linked, one of the company’s first claims about food-borne illness is that the FDA helps it prevent same.

The Colorado shootings: There were danger signs

Posted on by
1

Colorado shooter’s stockpiling an arsenal was a danger sign

As word got out about the high-tech arsenal and combat gear amassed by Aurora, Colo., shooter James Holmes, some elements on the right immediately seized on the factual news as basis for supposititious theories. Predictably the theories are being circulated by email.

 

‘NaturalNews’ guy

The main narrative runs as follows:

Holmes’ equipment is too good for ordinary people to acquire, and therefore he must have had help/been coached by someone behind the scenes.

“In other words, this guy was equipped with exotic gear by someone with connections to military equipment.
SWAT clothing, explosives, complex booby-traps… c’mon, this isn’t a “lone gunman.” This is somebody who was selected for a mission, given equipment to carry it out, then somehow brainwashed into getting it done.”

The shooter’s actions seem out of character for Holmes.

“The New York Times is now reporting:
Billy Kromka, a pre-med student at the University of Colorado, Boulder, worked with Mr. Holmes for three months last summer as a research assistant in a lab of at the Anschutz Medical Campus. Mr. Kromka said he was surprised to learn Mr. Holmes was the shooting suspect. “It was just shocking, because there was no way I thought he could have the capacity to do commit an atrocity like this,” he said. (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/21/us/colorado-mall-shooting.html?page…)

“He spent much of his time immersed in the computer, often participating in role-playing online games…”

There is already conjecture that James Holmes may have been involved in mind-altering neuroscience research and ended up becoming involved at a depth he never anticipated. His actions clearly show a strange detachment from reality, indicating he was not in his right mind. That can only typically be accomplished through drugs, hypnosis or trauma (and sometimes all three).”

His behavior is inconsistent–“his behavior doesn’t add up”:

“His behavior already reveals stark inconsistencies that question the mainstream explanation of events. For example, he opened fire on innocent people but then calmly surrendered to police without resistance. This is not consistent with the idea of “killing everyone.”

Furthermore, he then admitted to police that his apartment was booby-trapped with explosives. If you were really an evil-minded Joker trying to kill people (including cops), why would you warn them about the booby trap in advance? It doesn’t add up.”

What does it all add up to? –An operation, a “deliberate plot” by government, its purpose to make guns look bad or, as they put it, go after the Second Amendment:

“More and more, this shooting is looking like a *deliberate plot* staged by the government itself much like /Operation Fast and Furious/ pulled off by the ATF
(http://www.naturalnews.com/032934_ATF_illegal_firearms.html) which helped smuggle tens of thousands of guns into Mexico for the purpose of causing “gun violence” in the USA, then blaming the Second Amendment for it.”

The kicker? — Another purpose for this black op was to distract attention away from Rep. Michele Bachmann’s nut-stuff, McCarthyite accusations about a ‘Muslim Brotherhood’ in government. This one also has been transmitted by email:

” Please change: “has been successfully distracted”

To:  “has in effect been distracted from the Michele Bachmann, et al./Muslim Brotherhood issue, ” (plus additional edit):”

 

The foregoing is not the only misapplied rightwing conjecture about the Colorado shooter. Another web site, with singular nastiness, posits that he may be Jewish (spelled coyly). An early attempt via Facebook that ferreted out the wrong guy was widely reported–as was ABC News’ linking him briefly to the Tea Party.

These last two errors, however, are to some extent atypical. One thing the goofiest arguments tend to have in common is insisting falsely that the shooter was part of a group (wittingly or un-). As I wrote in my previous post on this sad topic, that is the key distortion. Incident after mass shooting incident involves a disturbed, loner-type guy–Littleton, Colo., Virginia Tech, Aurora, Colo.; the shootings at schools in Scotland and in China; the massacre of young people at a youth camp in Norway. Yet always the rightwing noise machine, the gun stockpilers, the NRA and the weapons-and-gear industry who market to them, and the political figures who pander to them continue to focus on and characterize, not him, but Them.

This is a classic example of what Freud called projection and denial.

Sometimes ordinary language hardly seems enough. We need a people’s mic here.

This shooting wasn’t an army against one individual.

THIS SHOOTING WASN’T AN ARMY AGAINST ONE INDIVIDUAL!

 

It was the other way around.

IT WAS THE OTHER WAY AROUND!

 

It wasn’t a whole troop against one innocent guy.

IT WASN’T A WHOLE TROOP AGAINST ONE INNOCENT GUY!

 

You.

YOU!

It was one guy, armed to the teeth, shooting randomly at a crowd of innocent people,

IT WAS ONE GUY, ARMED TO THE TEETH, SHOOTING RANDOMLY AT A CROWD OF INNOCENT PEOPLE!

Still might not work, of course–nothing seems to penetrate with these people. Also, they tend to have an entrepreneurial angle that could influence independent judgment, assuming independent judgment is still a desideratum. The ‘naturalnews’ web site quoted above, if you notice, is a big pusher of survivalist equipment–stock up now–including dietary/nutritional supplements. This is the dietary/etc equivalent of Glenn Beck’s pushing gold, urging listeners (if any) to hoard it up before the coming economic conflagration, yet unnamed. These are the spokespersons, if you notice, who tend not to be fans of government agencies like the FDA, the Federal Reserve and the FDIC. Again there might be a touch of the entrepreneurial in their outlook.

This entrepreneurial dimension is one thing the wing-nut sites have in common with corporate media outlets. They also have one story element in common with the largest media outlets, the insistence on Holmes as a ‘mystery man’ with ‘no background’. As posted previously, this one became an instant myth, conveyed here and here for example.

The right-wingers hype the supposed mystery angle to different effect than the larger outlets, of course. For the former, Holmes’ supposed lack of footprint makes him a shadow figure, a private-life version of the Manchurian candidate some of them–including some wealthy GOP donors–perceive President Obama to be. In this view, he is a deteriorated version of the Cary Grant character in Hitchcock’s brilliant North by Northwest, someone who can be grabbed and used by government agencies, sucked into some larger plot.

 

Cary Grant, heading for cornfield

‘Mainstream’ outlets touted Holmes’ supposed lack of footprint to more subtle and insidious effect.  The message embedded in that no-social-media-footprint meme? Simple:

  • We Can’t Tell what kind of person will just go off the rails next
  • So We Can’t Tell who will go out and shoot up a bunch of people
  • So There Is Nothing We Can Do About It
  • Therefore, There’s No Use trying for gun control.

This is not exaggeration, or not by much. This is nearly verbatim the line of thought voiced by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) on a Sunday morning talk show after the Colorado shootings. It is also a line suspiciously easy for media outlets, under fear of pressure from NRA-influenced advertisers, to fall into.

Holmes will almost undoubtedly turn out to have had more cyber presence than has yet been fully reported. Before recently, he often went by the nickname Jimmy, and social media sites turn up countless Jimmy Holmeses; he did much of his combat-gear purchasing online, something that generally leaves a trail; and he played complex and obscure games online, like many of his peers. As written previously, one of Holmes’ new usernames turns up on Twitter–with the line, “When life gives you lemons, shoot people.”

 

News reports have already indicated some of the purchase trail. From the transcript:

“BOB ORR (CBS News Justice Correspondent): Bob, first of all, the Chief was modest. I don’t think he really gave us all the details of what the great work that’s been done on the ground has produced. The police there along with the federal partners have amassed a substantial case of evidence already. That this was a premeditated act of murder and the planning goes back about four months. They’ve recovered things like shipping labels from a dumpster in front of Holmes’s apartment. They’ve got credit card records. They know he shopped at internet sites like BulkAmmo.com, TacticalGear.com. They have a surveillance tape of Holmes allegedly picking up a hundred and sixty pounds of ammunition at a FedEx counter in Colorado. And they also have talked to a UPS driver that says, “Oh, I remember this guy. He had ninety packages delivered to him in his work address.”

More importantly, the unconscious obfuscation in this representation of Holmes as no-footprint is a sign of the deeper problem we have in discerning signs of mental illness or extreme distress even in people we know.

Mentally ill people are still people, and up to a point their behavior is that of other people. This is especially complicated in young people, who even in the best lives are often trying out new versions of themselves, deciding which version of themselves they want to be. The transition from Jimmy to ClassicJimbo could have been one of those harmless personality reinventions that young people engage in–like changing hair color or hairstyle, getting body piercings or tattoos, going on dating sites, choosing to go by first name rather than by middle name or vice versa, or by full name rather than nickname. (Some of the Obama-haters have made a big deal about that, re Obama; they tend not to mention that the young Mitt Romney–who started out Billy Romney–did the same.) Relocating to a different town, starting at a new school, changing relationships–all of these are stressful events; they also often accompany other experimentation, again often harmless.

But given what Holmes was engaged in, we don’t actually have to dig too deep to see the danger signs. The no-danger-signs meme is as false as the no-footprint meme. Holmes’ stockpiling deadly weapons and combat gear was itself a danger sign and should have raised a flag. ‘Jimmy Holmes’ may or may not turn up in social media. Maybe–can’t tell. His secretiveness or privativeness in playing online games may or may not turn out to exceed that of other adolescents; we can’t tell yet. But as with Cho at Virginia Tech and the pair of shooters at Columbine, one fact indubitably clear is that he was stockpiling implements of war, weapons and gear for the use of deadly force. A partial inventory of his deadly arsenal is provided by Aurora Police Chief Dan Oates; video here. Holmes also got online enough to display a mind running more and more on violence–shooting people. To the list of weapons and other gear and the explosive or incendiary devices in his apartment another item may be added. It sounds as if Holmes also purchased some kind of voice-distortion device for his answering machine, on which he left a recording that spooked a local gun-range owner.

It has now been reported that Holmes also sent a letter, before the shootings, to a professor at the University of Colorado. The letter did not receive its intended recipient, because campus mail did its usual thing.*

Extreme acts often generate extreme responses. Fortunately the shootings at a movie theater in Colorado have not brought a concomitant reaction of deadly force. But they did, initially at least, generate an extreme throwing up of hands in a collective media act of learned helplessness.

Hint, for those in the news media who–in between asking helplessly, What can we do?–are wondering What were the signs? Here are the signs: A young guy, educated, a good student, with his life ahead of him, started stocking up on assault guns, a high-powered rifle, body armor including throat protector and groin protector, tear gas/irritant containers, components for home-made explosives.

 

Et cetera.

ET CETERA!

 

* I am well aware that I have offended pro-gun lobbyists before. Some day, in a lighter moment, I hope to start on campus mail.

[Update]

Dr. Lynne Fenton, the assistant professor to whom James Holmes wrote and sent a package, was also director of student mental health services at the University of Colorado medical school. Holmes was also one of her psychiatric patients.