On July 5, 2012, Rebecca Kaplan writes an Associate Press (AP) report that says that a once-invisible offshore company has helped bolster Mitt Romney’s wealth even though it did not appear on his state or federal financial reports for 15 years.
President Obama’s reelection campaign seized on the report as raising further questions about their rival’s business background, prompting Romney’s campaign to seek to turn the focus back to Obama’s handling of the economy.
The offshore company, Sankaty High Yield Asset Investors, is based in Bermuda. It recently posted $1.9 million in earnings, but the company did not appear on Romney’s disclosure forms until he released his 2010 tax returns during the primary campaign.
“The mystery surrounding Sankaty reinforces Romney’s history of keeping a tight rein on his public dealings, already documented by his use of private e-mail and computer purges as Massachusetts governor and his refusal to disclose his top fundraisers,” AP wrote. “The Bermuda company had almost no assets, according to Romney’s 2010 tax returns. But such partnership stakes could still provide significant income for years to come, said tax experts, who added that the lack of disclosure makes it impossible to know for certain.
The problem that is slowly, but steadily being exposed, is that Romney and other executives, traders, private-equity managers and hedge-fund moguls on Wall Street are part of a system that has turned much of the economy into a betting parlor. Their practice of casino-styled capitalism lead to our economy’s near imploding in 2008, destroying millions of jobs and devastating family incomes and home equity.
It is this financial system and its components that are responsible for the continued hoarding and concentration of productive capital wealth and income, with the richest 400 Americans owning as much as the bottom 150 million put together.
And now these elitists muti-millionaires and billionaires are buying the 2012 election, and with it, American democracy––both economic and political.
The Republican Party is not what it was when Romney’s father ran for the office of the presidency. Now with the younger Romney as their flag-wavier, GOP leaders brazenly epitomize the excesses of what I term “hoggism” that is destroying the United States economy and overwhelming our democracy, resulting in the further concentration of future productive capital economic growth.
The younger Romney’s father, George, was made personally rich as the President of an auto company, American Motors. We know this because during his run for president, he released not one, not two, but 12 years’ worth of tax returns, explaining that any one year might just be a fluke. From those returns we learn that in his best year, 1960, he made more than $660,000 — the equivalent, adjusted for inflation, of around $5 million today.
But Mitt Romney, who made even more money during his business career at Bain Capital, refuses to release his tax return except for one “selected” year. Unlike his father, the younger Romney didn’t get rich by producing things people wanted to buy; he made his fortune through financial engineering that seems in many cases to have left workers worse off, and in some cases driven companies into bankruptcy. For the first time in American history has a major presidential candidate had a multimillion-dollar Swiss bank account, plus tens of millions invested in the Cayman Islands, known as a tax haven. The public will never know for sure how he manipulated tax-advantages, whether legitimate or illegitimate, because he has refused to release any details about his finances. This refusal raises suspicions and suggests that he and his advisers believe that voters would be less likely to support him if they knew the truth about his investments.
This is an issue that must be forced into the open, as Americans have a right to know the truth to assess the merits and character of a candidate for the Presidency of the United States.
Mitt Romney’s stated policy agenda is cutting tax rates on the very rich, but does not reveal the extent to which he would personally benefit from the policies he advocates.
If Romney, who claims to have insightful and practical business experience, then as one who claims to be a leader, should it not be expected of him to level with voters and present a “master plan” for putting the nation on a path to prosperity, opportunity, and economic justice. Would it not seem reasonable that he would have written a book on his economic policy agenda?
To be balanced, President Obama also has not put forward an economic policy agenda either, except for the aiming his policies at creating jobs and returning America to a “full-employment” economy. This has proven to be unsuccessful.
Both Obama and Romney should realize that the continual focus on full employment means, “full toil and waste for all forever.” They need to address the question of how are all individuals to be adequately productive when a tiny minority (productive capital owners) produce a major share and the vast majority (labor workers), a minor share of total products and services, and thus, how do we get from a world in which the most productive factor—physical capital—is owned by a handful of people, to a world where the same factor is owned by a majority—and ultimately 100 percent—of the consumers, while respecting all the constitutional rights of present capital owners?
The problem is that we simply do not have anyone presenting or discussing the central issue that I have been raising about how the system furthers concentrated ownership of productive capital economic growth, while leaving the vast majority of people essentially enslaved in labor tasks exponentially being destroyed or degraded by technological innovation and invention––the result of tectonic shifts in the technologies of production and the steady off-loading of American manufacturing and jobs. Where is the media and academia who have remained silent on this pressing issue? Where are those leaders that can be supported for serving the public interest, and where is the money to mount presidential, senatorial,and congressional campaigns that won’t behold them to special interests? This is problematic!
Sadly, after a half-century, we have no leaders with a growth strategy that could restore the economic productiveness of the American economy. The growth strategy I have presented is not new, but it has not yet registered in the minds of leaderless politicians and their advisors from the left to the right of the political spectrum and a population of people who have been mis-educated and mis-led by conventional economists from all the conventional schools of economics.
