Posts tagged Bain capital
Empty Rooms With so Much In Them
Mitt Romney’s Tax Dodge: A guide to how the multimillionaire twists the law to hide his massive fortune - and avoid paying his fair share in taxes
Are Romney’s tax dodges legal? It’s impossible to say for sure, given how little he has disclosed. But tax experts note that there are plenty of red flags, including an investigation by New York prosecutors into tax abuses at Bain Capital that began on Romney’s watch. “He aggressively exploits every loophole he can find,” says Victor Fleischer, a professor of tax law at the University of Colorado. “He’s pushing the limits of tax law beyond what many think is reasonable.” Indeed, a look at Romney’s finances reveals just how skilled he is at hiding his wealth – and paying a fraction of his fair share in taxes.
Listen to Mitt Romney speak, and see if you can notice what’s missing. This is a man who grew up in Michigan, went to college in California, walked door to door through the streets of southern France as a missionary and was a governor of Massachusetts, the home of perhaps the most instantly recognizable, heavily accented English this side of Edinburgh. Yet not a trace of any of these places is detectable in Romney’s diction. None of the people in any of those places bled in and left a mark on the man.
Romney is a man from nowhere. In his post-regional attitude, he shares something with his campaign opponent, Barack Obama, whose background is a similarly jumbled pastiche of regionally nonspecific non-identity. But in the way he bounced around the world as a half-orphaned child, Obama was more like an involuntary passenger in the demographic revolution reshaping the planet than one of its leaders.
Romney, on the other hand, is a perfect representative of one side of the ominous cultural divide that will define the next generation, not just here in America but all over the world. Forget about the Southern strategy, blue versus red, swing states and swing voters – all of those political clichés are quaint relics of a less threatening era that is now part of our past, or soon will be. The next conflict defining us all is much more unnerving.
That conflict will be between people who live somewhere, and people who live nowhere. It will be between people who consider themselves citizens of actual countries, to which they have patriotic allegiance, and people to whom nations are meaningless, who live in a stateless global archipelago of privilege – a collection of private schools, tax havens and gated residential communities with little or no connection to the outside world.
Mitt Romney isn’t blue or red. He’s an archipelago man. That’s a big reason that voters have been slow to warm up to him. From LBJ to Bill Clinton to George W. Bush to Sarah Palin, Americans like their politicians to sound like they’re from somewhere, to be human symbols of our love affair with small towns, the girl next door, the little pink houses of Mellencamp myth. Most of those mythical American towns grew up around factories – think chocolate bars from Hershey, baseball bats from Louisville, cereals from Battle Creek. Deep down, what scares voters in both parties the most is the thought that these unique and vital places are vanishing or eroding – overrun by immigrants or the forces of globalism or both, with giant Walmarts descending like spaceships to replace the corner grocer, the family barber and the local hardware store, and 1,000 cable channels replacing the school dance and the gossip at the local diner.
Obama ran on “change” in 2008, but Mitt Romney represents a far more real and seismic shift in the American landscape. Romney is the frontman and apostle of an economic revolution, in which transactions are manufactured instead of products, wealth is generated without accompanying prosperity, and Cayman Islands partnerships are lovingly erected and nurtured while American communities fall apart. The entire purpose of the business model that Romney helped pioneer is to move money into the archipelago from the places outside it, using massive amounts of taxpayer-subsidized debt to enrich a handful of billionaires. It’s a vision of society that’s crazy, vicious and almost unbelievably selfish, yet it’s running for president, and it has a chance of winning. Perhaps that change is coming whether we like it or not. Perhaps Mitt Romney is the best man to manage the transition. But it seems a little early to vote for that kind of wholesale surrender.
And this is where we get to the hypocrisy at the heart of Mitt Romney. Everyone knows that he is fantastically rich, having scored great success, the legend goes, as a “turnaround specialist,” a shrewd financial operator who revived moribund companies as a high-priced consultant for a storied Wall Street private equity firm. But what most voters don’t know is the way Mitt Romney actually made his fortune: by borrowing vast sums of money that other people were forced to pay back. This is the plain, stark reality that has somehow eluded America’s top political journalists for two consecutive presidential campaigns: Mitt Romney is one of the greatest and most irresponsible debt creators of all time. In the past few decades, in fact, Romney has piled more debt onto more unsuspecting companies, written more gigantic checks that other people have to cover, than perhaps all but a handful of people on planet Earth.
I know this is long but it’s important.
(If you want to skip over this post on your dash press the J key)
People are getting all up in arms about Mitt Romney’s tax returns and how much money he made working with Bain Capital. But I see absolutely nothing about CRC Health Group and Aspen Education being discussed alongside it. Nothing.
These are corporations aquired by Bain Capital in 2006, CRC Health Group being the corporation that owns Aspen Education. Aspen Education is a corporation that profits off of the “teen help and rehabilitation” industry. They have slick advertising and market their services to families with “struggling” teens, be it drug or alcohol abuse or getting a C in math class.
These facilities have a long history of physically, emotionally, and sexually abusing children and teens. There have been a slew of news stories over the past decade or more that are quickly forgotten that report on a “rehabilitation” clinic for teens where the unqualified counselors have done things such as solicit sexual favors from the kids they work with or even leaving them shut in a room to die because they claim the kid screaming in pain is lying to get attention. I’m not exaggerating.
And the abusers, the staff at these facilities, nearly always walk away unscathed. One of the reasons why is that their contracts they manipulate already vulnerable families into signing are potentially illegal. They demand that the parents or legal guardians of the child sign over legal custody to the facility, while in the same contract they deflect all responsibility for any harm, emotional or physical, that could befall the child, including death. And kids have died—see the articles linked above. They have been starved, denied medical attention, killed themselves, overheated, or frozen to death or nearly died because of these things.
But there are other human rights violations besides these that go on regularly at Aspen Education facilities. Clients (the kids and teens) are denied certain reading material, mail that is deemed “inappropriate” (letters from friends or non-facility-approved family members), private phone conversations (calls are very limited to begin with), immediate phone access to call police or their parents if something is wrong, personal property that is not “suitable”, even speaking to other clients is sometimes forbidden. This is a violation of civil rights, whether the client is a minor or not.
The facilities themselves are also atrocious, if the clients sleep inside at all (in Aspen wilderness programs there is no place to sleep indoors, even in winter or high summer). Clients are forced to clean as punishment, as Bain Capital cut massive costs to these already shady programs so there is no professional cleaning service to keep the living conditions sanitary. Medications (which are widely prescribed) are often administered by unqualified staff. There are often no trained nurses on the grounds—they may have been laid off or fired or simply quit and not replaced. Clients are packed 4-6 to a room that should only comfortably fit two kids and their belongings. Childen run the risk of being forced to live with kids who are violent and could harm their peers. The counselors are often questionably trained, and Aspen Education widely uses tactics of causing emotional damage to the child in their method of “therapy”. Food, water, sleep, and outdoor access can be denied as punishment in these programs. They psychologically break down the child to build them back up again, brainwashed.
Now what do families pay to have their children living like this? Anywhere from $6,000-$18,000 per month. There is obviously no financial aid or scholarships available. Wherever that money is going, it’s not to the facilities or even to pay the underqualified workers there (oftentimes they make minimum wage or a little over). That money is going straight to the executives of Aspen Education, CRC Health Group, and Bain Capital. Even though Romney “retired” in the early 2000s, he still kept a stake in the profits of the company and managed from behind the scenes. This means that Mitt Romney is making money off of abused children and teens. The corporations know about all these scandals or they wouldn’t be covering them up so well. People have tried to sue, but it is an unpleasant process that often ends with Aspen turning to their contracts and claiming they have no responsibility, or they settle it out of court and that’s it.
Oh but there’s more! For a small fee, escorts can be hired to kidnap the child from their own home to bring them to a program. They are recommended by Aspen, and parents sometimes comply and hire them. They will come to the house, grab the child or teen, handcuff them and bring them to the facility, sometimes crossing state lines to do so.
These human rights abuses are happening right now in the United States, with over 30,000 clients experiencing Aspen Education’s practices every day. This needs to stop, but the problem is that absolutely no one is talking about it. I’ve never seen a post about it on Tumblr, and the news that pops up about it goes away quickly and doesn’t make front pages. This is big. Families are being scammed and vulnerable young adults, teens and children are being tortured right here in our country and no one’s doing a thing.
Spread the word. Please. Don’t reblog if you don’t want to, but start doing research and talking about this with people. Bring it up when Romney is mentioned. Something needs to be done!
There are some pretty intense factchecking fights over what is true and not true about the Obama campaign’s claims about Romney’s record at Bain Capital. Media outlets are struggling with how to render a verdict; most seem to think Obama has exaggerated.
But one outlet has found a voice willing to deliver a judgment. CNN has published a column (7/16/12) by veteran pundit David Gergen headlined:
Facts don’t support Obama’s charges against Romney
This is, for Gergen, pretty strong stuff; he’s a talking head whose head mostly talks about campaign strategy and the like. He’s not one usually to call balls and strikes on political claims.
But you don’t have to read too far into Gergen’s piece to realize that you can stop reading it:
Let me acknowledge upfront what I have said several times on CNN: I have a past relationship with the top partners at Bain that is both personal and financial. I have worked with them in support of nonprofit organizations such as City Year. I have given a couple of paid speeches for Bain dinners, as I have for many other groups. I was on the board of a for-profit child care company, Bright Horizons, that was purchased by Bain Capital. It was a transaction with financial benefits for all board members and shareholders, including me.
So, yes, I have a bias. But let me also add how that bias plays out: I have come to admire and like the leaders of Bain Capital because I have learned firsthand that in a private equity industry, where there are obviously some predatory companies, Bain stands out for the respect in which it is generally held and for the generous philanthropy of some of its partners. Nothing I have seen so far has shaken that view.
So CNN wanted someone who’s financially benefited from his ties to Bain Capital to fact check Obama’s claims about Bain Capital. Wow, I can’t wait to see what he finds!
And check out Gergen’s style of factchecking:
When the story first broke Thursday in the Boston Globe suggesting that Romney and Bain had fudged, CNN asked if I would do some reporting. I reached two of the top people whom I know in the company and, on background, they told me the same story that Bain sources told CNN’s John King….
So he called his friends at the company. On background. What a concept.
This explained to me exactly what is wrong with republicans, specifically Mitt Romney
I have to say, when I first read this quote, from Edward Conard of Bain Capital in his new book “Unintended Consequences” the first thing I wondered was why the fuck someone would put this in writing, and then publish it under their own name. And then I realized its because these people aren’t ashamed of thoughts like these. This is how people like Mitt Romney think.
“Lets not kid ourselves about just how cheap offshore labor really is. We not only pay substantially less per hour, we also avoid the costs we would incur if these workers immigrated here. We don’t pay for their medical expenses when they show up in the emergency room without insurance. We don’t pay for their pension costs if they don’t save for retirement. We don’t pay for their children’s public education. Nor do we pay for their out-of-wedlock children, their unemployment benefits and workers’ compensation, their slips and fall torts, their wear and tear on our public infrastructure, and the cost of their drunk driving, drug use and other crimes.”
Edward Conrad
Nice elitism, there. Explain to me again why anyone with a functioning brain and a milligram of human decency should vote for Mitt Romney.
Tony Soprano Explains Bain Capital
Investigation: Mitt Romney’s Offshore Accounts, Tax Loopholes, and Mysterious I.R.A. | Politics | Vanity Fair
A person who worked for Mitt Romney at the consulting firm Bain and Co. in 1977 remembers him with mixed feelings. “Mitt was … a really wonderful boss,” the former employee says. “He was nice, he was fair, he was logical, he said what he wanted … he was really encouraging.” But Bain and Co., the person recalls, pushed employees to find out secret revenue and sales data on its clients’ competitors. Romney, the person says, suggested “falsifying” who they were to get such information, by pretending to be a graduate student working on a project at Harvard. (The person, in fact, was a Harvard student, at Bain for the summer, but not working on any such projects.) “Mitt said to me something like ‘We won’t ask you to lie. I am not going to tell you to do this, but [it is] a really good way to get the information.’ … I would not have had anything in my analysis if I had not pretended.
“It was a strange atmosphere. It did leave a bad taste in your mouth,” the former employee recalls.
This unsettling account suggests the young Romney—at that point only two years out of Harvard Business School—was willing to push into gray areas when it came to business. More than three decades later, as he tried to nail down the Republican nomination for president of the United States, Romney’s gray areas were again an issue when he repeatedly resisted calls to release more details of his net worth, his tax returns, and the large investments and assets held by him and his wife, Ann. Finally the other Republican candidates forced him to do so, but only highly selective disclosures were forthcoming.
[…]
The assertion that he broke no laws is widely accepted. But it is worth asking if it is actually true. The answer, in fact, isn’t straightforward. Romney, like the superhero who whirls and backflips unscathed through a web of laser beams while everyone else gets zapped, is certainly a remarkable financial acrobat. But careful analysis of his financial and business affairs also reveals a man who, like some other Wall Street titans, seems comfortable striding into some fuzzy gray zones.
