Mitt Romney, The Morman Cult and Amherst Co. Republicans

Mitt and his team are crying the blues about voters having questions about Mitt's Tax Returns.   They maintain that it is a big distraction created by the Democrats.   Romney needs to come clean and answer the questions.

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Everybody who has run for President for the past 5 decades has released the information for the public to see.    What makes Romney think he is anything special?   I live in Amherst County, Virginia and edit a blog and I want to know if Mitt Romney has fairly paid his taxes.   I want this information from any person who runs to be President.   If you are a Republican please tell me why you questioned President Obama's birth certificate and wanted to see his school transcripts and have picked at every thing about this President and his family.   For over three years you have belittled and disrespected President Obama and now you say Mitt Romney has the right to not reveal information about whether he pays taxes to the country he wants to lead.

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Mitt Romney, The Morman Cult and Amherst Co. Republicans


Recycling Scoundrels, Con-artists and Fraudsters,  Mitt's apple didn't fall far from Joseph Smith's tree.


by Christopher London

The American people have a right to vet those among us who seek the highest office in the land.   The Mormon Veil of Secrecy may fly in Salt Lake City, but let us remember, Romney is running for the Presidency of the United States of America not the Mayor of Mormonville, so he might want to stop behaving like Shawn Merriman, the other Mormon Madoff and turn over his tax returns.


You know the ones, the ones that John McCain reviewed as part of the VP selection process in 2008 and then chose Sarah Palin as his running mate because "she appeared to be the better candidate." 


The American people thus have a right to review Mitt Romney's tax returns;   his contributions to Joseph Smith's loony LDS Mormon Cult notwithstanding.   This crap may fly inside certain circles in Salt Lake City but it does not fly in the rest of America.     I will be shocked if Amherst Counties most partisan Republican thinks it is ok to conceal the tax returns.


Why Mitt Romney Won’t Release Tax Returns? 


Is It?


The 100 million in Mitt's IRA came from the pension funds of the workers that were fired after Romney dismantled their companies.   For those of you who have IRA's read the limits on how much you can contribute per year and then calculate how many lifetimes it will take you to hit 100 Million.   It is certain you live by different rules than Mitt Romney.


Romney was involved in Swiss Tax Evasion Scandal of 2009 and took advantage of an amesty deal offered by the IRS to crooks who were evading taxes.


Romney paid NO TAXES in certain years, or really low percentages under 4%.


Romney has not paid taxes for ten years as charged by Harry Reid or six years as has been charged by others.


Lets drift back in time and take a close look at the Morman Cult that Romney holds a leadership position in.


This is the man the GOP wants to be President of the United States.   


"While 19th Century con-artist, convicted fraudster and polygamous pedophile, Joseph Smith, the founder of the LDS Mormon Cult, was in jail awaiting trial, an armed mob of men with painted faces stormed the jail and shot him and his brother Hyrum to death".    


June 27, 1844 marked a turning point for the Latter Day Saint movement, of which theego-maniacal prophet, Joseph Smith was the founder and leader. 


When he was attacked and killed by a mob, Smith was the mayor of Nauvoo, Illinois, and running for President of the United States.   He was killed while jailed in Carthage, Illinois on charges relating to his ordering the destruction of facilities producing the Nauvoo Expositor, a newspaper whose first and only edition claimed 
Smith was practicing polygamy and that he intended to set himself up as a theocratic king."    In short, they were right.   Smith did not want that information getting out so he tried to shut down the free press.


Mitt Romney, also a prolific LIAR, wants to be king and much like the ego-maniacal prophet, Joseph Smith he too hopes to rise to the leadership of this nation while defrauding the heartland.    Romney will not hang in these times for his endless shape-shifting or his sense of elitist entitlement that allows him to operate under the 
mistaken belief that he also need not be truthful with the American people simply because he poses as some moral man of god who is a Bishop in the Mormon Church.    Joseph Smith, Shawn Merriman and Mitt Romney ----- ah the wonder of the Mormon Church, otherwise known as the LDS Mormon Cult. 


You really have to hand it to this outfit for its ability to recycle the con generation after generation in the form of yet another white blue eyed devil.    Bernie Madoff has nothing on this trio of dishonest ego-maniacal scoundrels, all blessed  "men of god"  in the Mormon Cult.


Republicans have no sense of decency and will back any candidate they think will return them to power.   Mitt Romney makes George W Bush look like a harmless baby.

Mitt is Number One

 Chris London, Esq. is a New York City based lawyer, activist, writer and founder of ManhattanSociety.com, a 501 (c) (3) conduit; a free press vehicle for essential New York Charity and Culture. Sheepshead Bay High School 1980. Boston University, B.A., Economics with High Honors, 1984. University of Pennsylvania Law School, J.D., 1987.

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Harry Reid Doubles Down on Romney Tax Evasion

When Harry Reid made the claim that Mitt Romney has dodged paying his taxes for a decade according to an anonymous source, I thought he walking right up to the line of slander.

Well, it seems Harry knows something.   Harry is doubling down on the claim citing additional anonymous sources.   Seems Mitt would just release the returns if he is telling the truth, but he is running and hiding and having a verbal spar with a Senator.

Earlier this week, Harry Reid revealed why Mitt Romney is refusing to release more tax returns:   He didn’t pay taxes for an entire decade!    It almost sounds too crazy to be true, and in fact, Reid is “not certain” that it isn’t a total lie.    However, he is sure of one thing:   “I am not basing this on some figment of my imagination,” 

Reid told the Las Vegas Review-Journal.  “I have had a number of people tell me that.”    So we aren’t talking about just one anonymous Bain investor, but several people who have seemingly only shared this story with Reid.

In an interview with Nevada reporters on Wednesday, Reid refused to name his sources or back down on his accusation.   “I don’t think the burden should be on me,” he said.   “The burden should be on him.    He’s the one I’ve alleged has not paid any taxes.   Why didn’t he release his tax returns?”

Romney claims he is honest and has nothing to hide.   He also refuses to release the tax returns.   Mitt is taking the fifth.   He is refusing to answer on the grounds that anything he truthfully reveals will incriminate him.   Mitt Romney has not been truthful.

Other sources are surfacing with the same or similar stories of Mitt not paying any taxes at all, zero, zip, nada.    

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Tax haven or tax evasion?   Mitt Romney's off-shore accounts in the Caribbean




Cayman Islands]------"Welcome to the islands--wash all your troubles away."    Those are some of the words of a catchy tourism ad enticing us to the Cayman Islands where sand, sea sun and fun are the ultimate goal.    I could understand the draw of azure sea and those balmy, gentle breezes, the mismerizing tropical sunsets and those long, romantic moonlit nights--so maybe it started as a vacation spot.    Wondering what I'm babbling about?    Bear with me, it's going to get clearer.


Candidate Mitt Romney started slowly but has since surged his way to the front-runner perch in the GOP race for the presidential nomination.    However, recent polls say he is slowing slightly in South Carolina while Newt Gingrich seems to be galloping a little faster only days before that state's primary.


Maybe the media's increased snooping into his 'off-shore tax affairs' has something to do with that, or it could just be Newt's ability to pander shamelessly to South Carolina voters who seems to favor his brand of politicking.    During Monday's debate loud applause followed The Newt's offer to  "help poor people develop a love 
for work."




On Martin Luther King Day no less, he stood unabashedly and apparently still completely unaware of how offensive his rhetoric is to a certain segment of the population.   We all know who he meant by those poor people with  'poor work eithics'  when he got the thunderous ovation.    He has spoken about this before and said worse. 


Before, he wanted to put  "poor Black children to work as janitors of their schools."   The meaning of the day was completely lost on him.


But I digress.   Where were we?    Oh yes, Romney's taxes or rather lack thereof.    The ex-governor of Massachusetts and  "father"  of "Romneycare"  is under fire for his many off-shore accounts stashed in the Cayman Islands. 


Sounds like a David Balducci novel, doesn't it?


According to a fascinating report on ABC's Nightline the exotic Caribbean island is the haven for 138 accounts of Bain Capital with over $130 million.    Interestingly, these accounts lead to a post office box, number 908, not a physical company and he is just one in a long line of the super rich who use the Caribbean Islands as their  'tax-free vaults.'    Switzerland is a tad too far and cold so this is a closer, more  'attractive' location.


Secrecy in the Cayman Islands is tighter than the Holy Grail and Fort Knox combined for no one can get any information on these accounts.    The other presidential candidates smell blood and are circulating for the "kill."     Perry, Gingrich, Santorum all went after Romney during the debates, calling for Romney to release his tax information.     Now that he is the GOP Candidate releasing info is a different story.




Romney has stonewalled on this request for months, only recently admitting in his usual oddly uncomfortable way that he paid a much lower tax rate than the rest of us--15 percent to be exact.    He tried to explain away the seemingly unfair taxation but the attempt is not comforting for millions who are struggling in our abysmal economy and still have to pay more than their fair share.


The very rich Romney said he paid little taxes because his money come from investments not earned income.    Is that suppose to make the rest of the struggling population understand and feel better?    Fellow billionaires Warren Buffet and Bill Gates explained why this capital gains tax is unfair--and how it has helped create the 
sharp imbalance in income and wealth in this country.    When Buffet said he paid lower taxes than his secretary, we all gasped, for it was stunning information. 


On the off-shore  "shelved wealth"  Romney did not say much, only that he wasn't evading taxes-- but he did not give reasons why he needed to use the Caribbean Island as his  "bank."    What's wrong with our shores?


Someone who wants to be president, hides his money off-shore--"outsources"  his profits while avoiding taxes?     He said he paid the same taxes as if he had saved his money on U.S. land.     If that were true, why go to the trouble to send it on a trip in the first place? Want it to get a tan?


Romney has proven time and again that he is woefully out of touch with the 99.65 percent of America.    He has inhaled that rarefied air of the '.35 percenters' for so long that to him $374,317.62 is a small sum of money. 


While answering questions on why his tax rate was a low 15 percent, the presidential candidate said his speaking fees, along with his investments, allow him the cushy low rate despite his vast wealth.    When asked how much he made in speaking fees, he replied with a chuckle,  "Not very much."    The above sum is what he reportedly made in 2010.     Then there is his $10,000 wager at Rick Perry during one of the GOP debates.     Do you see the 
disconnect?     


I always knew something was not quite right with the governor from Massachusetts. I couldn't put my finger on exactly what made him look so shifty and uncomfortable in his skin.    What made his stiffness stand out as glaringly odd for a man who knows his way in the world.    There is a lot going on under the Ken-doll, robotic 
smiling 'surface.


Come on Romney, what's the real deal?    Inquiring minds want to know.      Republicans are going to vote for you no matter what.    Even the religious right and the Tea Party have bit their lips and gotten in line.     Candidates who ran against you and despise you are now supporting you.     Republicans have circled the wagons and surrendered their option to think.    The only thing you haven't flip-flopped on is the R behind your name.     Thanks for that.





Who Pays The Biggest Percentage of Their Income to the IRS, You or Mitt?




At the risk of turning you off completely, I’m going to talk about a subject we all loathe:  taxes.    Specifically, I’m going to talk about Mitt Romney’s obstinate refusal to release more than two years of his tax returns and why it’s a button with me.


Just now as I was writing this, I decided to Google “Romney and tax returns” and lo and behold.    Now I’m even madder.


According to the Los Angeles Times:


In excerpts released by ABC News, Romney was unable to say whether he had ever paid less than the 13.9% tax rate he paid in 2010.     “I haven’t calculated that.      I’m happy to go back and look, but my view is I’ve paid all the taxes required by law,” Romney told ABC’s David Muir.


Romney’s 13.9% rate falls far below rates typically applied to those with incomes approaching the $20.1 million he made in 2010.


“I know that I pay a very substantial amount of taxes, and every year since the beginning of my career so far as I can recall,”  Romney later added.


Let’s look at that word  “substantial.”      First off, I hardly think a tax rate of less than 14 percent applies.     Fifty percent, maybe. Second, what’s with him saying,   “so far as I can recall”?    Romney has based his entire candidacy on the premise that he was a genius in business while running Bain Capital.     Yet he doesn’t even 
remember if he ever paid less than a 14 percent tax rate?


I prefer to say it won’t wash but it is really a crock.


I suppose Romney thought by going to London and acting all presidential and Olympian he could deflect attention from the exploding controversy over his taxes.    But he couldn’t even get that right.    Romney alienated the entire British population with his insensitive remarks about Brits’ readiness and even their enthusiasm for the Olympics.      (This is why I think Mitt should do more interviews.     He’s spectacularly bad at them.)     It would be 
like me being invited over to one of Mitt and Ann’s homes for dinner and bringing a case of Budweiser or a bottle of vodka.    It just isn’t done.    At least he didn’t cause a nuclear incident in Israel.


But let me go back to why I’m so irate about Romney’s failure to release his tax returns.




“Romney’s personal tax rate is a particular point of interest.    In 2010 and 2011, Mitt and Ann paid $6.2 million in federal tax on $42.5 million in income, for an average rate of just shy of 15 percent, substantially less than what most middle-income Americans pay.    Romney manages this low rate because he takes his payments form Bain Capital as investment income, which is taxed at a maximum of 15 percent, instead of the 35 prcent he would 
pay on ordinary income (emphasis his).


What’s your federal tax rate? 


I am not kidding--15 percent.   What is it with 15 percent and rich people?     I want to know. 


Is it some morally acceptable threshold, as in 20 percent is too much, but we can live with 15?, if we can't skinny it down to 4% or zero it out completely.


Is it really fair that someone earning the average salary levels in Amherst County pays more taxes than a millionaire?


Romney's whole act  just confirms for me how unfair our tax system is.   And how thoroughly the system is rigged in favor of the rich. This is why I find Romney’s refusal to release his tax returns so outrageous.    What is he trying to hide?




The most serious risk outsiders have imagined is that some recent return, especially 2009’s, showed no tax liability, even though a campaign spokeswoman, Andrea Saul, insisted Romney had never paid zero income taxes.     Romney walked back this statement by Andrea Saul by adding as far as he could remember.


But paying  “next to nothing,”  resulting from capital losses and various legal deductions, normal and creative, is distinctly possible.


Lest you think I’m picking on Mitt, the Washington Post has an extremely illuminating chart comparing Romney’s tax returns—the one and a half,  anyway,  that we’ve seen--with those of five recent presidents.    Guess who paid the least?     In case you are a republican here's the answer, Romney paid the least.


The results speak to why Romney wants to talk as little as possible about his tax returns (and, more broadly, his wealth) while President Obama’s campaign wants to bring it up as much as possible.
Romney’s earnings are by far the highest and his tax rate is the lowest of any of the individuals measured in the chart.    As Sunlight’s  Lee Drutman writes:   “The reason is pretty straight forward.    Romney’s income primarily comes from investments, and the resulting capital gains are taxed at a rate of 15 percent.”


Which reminds me.   I need to go talk to my accountant about setting up some tax havens in Bermuda, or at least open up a bank account across the line over in Nelson County.

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BURIED TREASURE     Grand Cayman, where Bain Capital maintains at least 138 funds

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.

Even so, these provided a lavish smorgasbord for Romney’s critics. Particularly jarring were the Romneys’ many offshore accounts. As Newt Gingrich put it during the primary season, “I don’t know of any American president who has had a Swiss bank account.” But Romney has, as well as other interests in such tax havens as Bermuda and the Cayman Islands.

To give but one example, there is a Bermuda-based entity called Sankaty High Yield Asset Investors Ltd., which has been described in securities filings as “a Bermuda corporation wholly owned by W. Mitt Romney.” It could be that Sankaty is an old vehicle with little importance, but Romney appears to have treated it rather carefully. He set it up in 1997, then transferred it to his wife’s newly created blind trust on January 1, 2003, the day before he was inaugurated as Massachusetts’s governor. The director and president of this entity is R. Bradford Malt, the trustee of the blind trust and Romney’s personal lawyer. Romney failed to list this entity on several financial disclosures, even though such a closely held entity would not qualify as an “excepted investment fund” that would not need to be on his disclosure forms. He finally included it on his 2010 tax return. Even after examining that return, we have no idea what is in this company, but it could be valuable, meaning that it is possible Romney’s wealth is even greater than previous estimates. While the Romneys’ spokespeople insist that the couple has paid all the taxes required by law, investments in tax havens such as Bermuda raise many questions, because they are in “jurisdictions where there is virtually no tax and virtually no compliance,” as one Miami-based offshore lawyer put it.

That’s not the only money Romney has in tax havens. Because of his retirement deal with Bain Capital, his finances are still deeply entangled with the private-equity firm that he founded and spun off from Bain and Co. in 1984. Though he left the firm in 1999, Romney has continued to receive large payments from it—in early June he revealed more than $2 million in new Bain income. The firm today has at least 138 funds organized in the Cayman Islands, and Romney himself has personal interests in at least 12, worth as much as $30 million, hidden behind controversial confidentiality disclaimers. Again, the Romney campaign insists he saves no tax by using them, but there is no way to check this.

Bain Capital is the heart of Romney’s fortune: it was the financial engine that created it. The mantra of his campaign is that he was a businessman who created tens of thousands of jobs, and Bain certainly did bring useful operational skills to many companies it bought. But his critics point to several cases where Bain bought companies, loaded them with debt, and paid itself extravagant fees, thereby bankrupting the companies and destroying tens of thousands of jobs.

Come August, Romney, with an estimated net worth as high as $250 million (he won’t reveal the exact amount), will be one of the richest people ever to be nominated for president. Given his reticence to discuss his wealth, it’s only natural to wonder how he got it, how he invests it, and if he pays all his taxes on it.

Ironically, it was Mitt’s father, George Romney, who released 12 years of tax returns, in November 1967, just ahead of his presidential campaign, thereby setting a precedent that nearly every presidential candidate since has either willingly or unwillingly been subject to. George, then the governor of Michigan, explained why he was releasing so many years’ worth, saying, “One year could be a fluke, perhaps done for show.”

But his son declined to release any returns through one unsuccessful race for the U.S. Senate, in 1994, one successful run for Massachusetts governor, in 2002, and an aborted bid for the Republican Party presidential nomination, in 2008. Just before the Iowa caucus last December, Mitt told MSNBC, “I don’t intend to release the tax returns. I don’t,” but finally, on January 24, 2012—after intense goading by fellow Republican candidates Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry—he released his 2010 tax return and an estimate for 2011.

These, plus the mandatory financial disclosures filed with the Office of Government Ethics and released last August, raise many questions. A full 55 pages in his 2010 return are devoted to reporting his transactions with foreign entities. “What Romney does not get,” says Jack Blum, a veteran Washington lawyer and offshore expert, “is that this stuff is weird.”

The media soon noticed Romney’s familiarity with foreign tax havens. A $3 million Swiss bank account appeared in the 2010 returns, then winked out of existence in 2011 after the trustee closed it, as if to remind us of George Romney’s warning that one or two tax returns can provide a misleading picture. Ed Kleinbard, a professor of tax law at the University of Southern California, says the Swiss account “has political but not tax-policy resonance,” since it—like many other Romney investments—constituted a bet against the U.S. dollar, an odd thing for a presidential candidate to do. The Obama campaign provided a helpful world map pointing to the tax havens Bermuda, Luxembourg, and the Cayman Islands, where Romney and his family have assets, each with the tagline “Value: not disclosed in tax returns.”

Romney’s personal tax rate is a particular point of interest. In 2010 and 2011, Mitt and Ann paid $6.2 million in federal tax on $42.5 million in income, for an average tax rate just shy of 15 percent, substantially less than what most middle-income Americans pay. Romney manages this low rate because he takes his payments from Bain Capital as investment income, which is taxed at a maximum 15 percent, instead of the 35 percent he would pay on “ordinary” income, such as salaries and wages. Many tax experts argue that the form of remuneration he receives, known as carried interest, is really just a fee charged by investment managers, so it should instead be taxed at the 35 percent rate. Lee Sheppard, a contributing editor at the trade publication Tax Notes, whose often controversial articles are read widely by tax professionals, is nonplussed that the Obama campaign has been so listless on the issue of carried interest. “Romney is the poster boy, the best argument, for taxing this profit share as ordinary income,” says Sheppard.

In the face of such arguments, Romney’s defense is that he never broke the rules: if there is a problem, it is in the laws, not in his behavior. “I pay all the taxes that are legally required, not a dollar more,” he said. Even so. “When you are running for president, you might want to err on the side of overpaying your taxes, and not chase every tax gimmick that comes down the pike,” says Sheppard. “It kind of looks tacky.”

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.

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The Caped Avoider!

One might perhaps accept an explanation by Romney’s campaign spokeswoman, Andrea Saul, that the candidate’s failure to include his Swiss account in earlier financial disclosures was merely a “trivial inadvertent issue.” But deeper questions do emerge.

All the assets on Mitt’s financial disclosures are in blind trusts or retirement accounts held by him and Ann. Blind trusts are designed to avoid conflicts of interest for those in public office by having politicians’ assets managed by independent trustees. The Romneys’ blind trust was created when Mitt was elected governor of Massachusetts. Curiously, the Romneys appointed Bradford Malt as their trustee. It’s certainly true that under Malt the trusts don’t appear to be as blind as they might be: for instance, in 2010 the Romneys invested $10 million in the start-up of the Solamere Founders Fund, co-founded by their eldest son, Tagg, and Spencer Zwick, Romney’s onetime top campaign fund-raiser; Solamere is now in the Ann Romney blind trust. Malt has said he invested in Solamere without consulting Mitt or Ann and explained he liked Solamere because of its diversified approach and because he knew the founders and had confidence in them.

Likewise, the Romneys were reported to have invested at least $1 million in Elliott Associates, L.P., a hedge fund specializing in “distressed assets.” Elliott buys up cheap debt, often at cents on the dollar, from lenders to deeply troubled nations such as Congo-Brazzaville, then attacks the debtor states with lawsuits to squeeze maximum repayment. Elliott is run by the secretive hedge-fund billionaire and G.O.P. super-donor Paul Singer, whom Fortune recently dubbed Mitt Romney’s “Hedge Fund Kingmaker.” (Singer has given $1 million to Romney’s super-pac Restore Our Future.)

It is hard to know the size of these investments. Romney’s financial disclosure form lists 25 of them in an open-ended category, “Over $1 million,” including So­lamere and Elliott, and they are not broken down further. Romney hides behind a disclaimer that the fund managers “declined to provide such information” about their underlying assets. Many of these funds are set up in tax havens such as the Cayman Islands, where a confidentiality law states that you can be jailed for up to four years just for asking about such information.

Andrea Saul said of these investments, “Everything … was reported correctly.” Joseph Sandler, a Democratic lawyer who has worked with candidates on disclosures for more than two dec­ades, is skeptical. “The law is the law,” Sandler says. “[Romney] says, ‘Well, you know, they won’t tell me.’ But when you run for office in the U.S. and are not prepared to comply with disclosure requirements, you should either divest yourself of the assets or don’t run.” The Washington Post summarized the opinions of experts across the political spectrum by saying Romney’s disclosures were “the most opaque they have encountered.”

Mysteries also arise when one looks at Romney’s individual retirement account at Bain Capital. When Romney was there, from 1984 to 1999, taxpayers were allowed to put just $2,000 per year into an I.R.A., and $30,000 annually into a different kind of plan he may have used. Given these annual contribution ceilings, how can his I.R.A. possibly contain up to $102 million, as his financial disclosures now suggest?

The Romneys won’t say, but Mark Maremont, writing in The Wall Street Journal, uncovered a likely explanation. When Bain Capital bought companies, it would create two classes of shares, named A and L. The A shares were risky common shares, to which they would assign a very low value. The L shares were preferred shares, paying a high dividend but with the payoff frozen, and most of the value was assigned to them. Bain employees would then put the exciting A shares in their I.R.A. accounts, where they grew tax-free. With all the risk of the deal, the A shares stood to gain a lot or collapse. But if the deal succeeded, the springing value could be stunning: Bain employees saw their A shares from one particularly fruitful deal grow 583-fold, 16 times faster than the underlying stock.

The Romneys won’t tell us how, or even if, they assigned super-low values to the A shares, but there are a couple of ways to do it. One is to use standard options models to price the shares—then feed inappropriate assumptions into those models. Romney could alternatively have used a model called liquidation valuation, which Kleinbard says would have been “completely inappropriate.” Without seeing the assumptions used on Romney’s tax returns from the years when those lowball A shares were squirted into his I.R.A., we cannot know how he did it. Whatever methods he used, however, the valuations were, according to Andrew Smith, of Houlihan Capital in Chicago, “pushing the envelope.” (Andrea Saul retorts, “Why should successful investments be criticized?”)

Mitt’s and Ann’s I.R.A.’s have also been receiving profit interest from (mostly Cayman Island–based) Bain Capital funds that were set up long after he had left the company, in 1999. For example, the 2010 return reveals a profits interest in a Cayman-based fund called Bain Capital Partners (AM) X LP, which was transferred to the Ann D. Romney trust in October 2010. An attachment to the return says the Ann D. Romney trust is “performing services” to the partnership, which is boilerplate language for these kinds of filings. Her blind trust could receive lightly taxed income from Bain Capital for years to come, well into the presidential term her husband hopes to win.

But administrative guidance says you can do this kind of thing only if the compensation is in recognition of past services you have provided. “This should not mean retired from the mother ship 10 years out and getting profits you had nothing to do with,” Sheppard says, adding that Romney can get away with it because of excessive “administrative indulgences” that have allowed a “perversion of the law in favor of a small class of overcompensated investment managers.”

Romney’s I.R.A. also appears to have invested in so-called blocker corporations in the Cayman Islands and elsewhere. U.S. pension funds, foundations, and even I.R.A.’s routinely use offshore blocker corporations to avoid something called the Unrelated Business Income Tax, which was designed to keep nonprofits from competing with ordinary companies in areas outside their core purpose: if you invest directly you get hit with the tax, but if you invest in a blocker, which then invests in the U.S. business, you escape it. Romney’s I.R.A. appears to have employed this lawful escape route, and his campaign has used language suggesting that it has. But that would mean the Romney camp’s claim that Mitt’s tax consequences of investing via the Cayman Islands is “the very same” as it would have been had he invested directly at home is simply not true. (Romney spokesperson Andrea Saul says Romney “gets the same benefit anyone would get from an I.R.A.,” but she did not respond to questions on whether his I.R.A. had used blockers or avoided taxes by investing via tax havens.)

A Deutsche Bank analysis of 68 Bain deals Romney was involved in calculated an internal rate of return—a standard private-equity benchmark—at a staggering 88 percent annually (though after fees and inflation, investor performance may have been little more than half that). It is substantially on this stellar rec­ord that Romney is now running for president. His work at Bain was unquestionably good for himself and for Bain, but was it also good for the businesses he acquired, for their workers, and for the economy, as he claims?

A report by Bain and Co. itself, looking at the period from 2002 to 2007, concluded that there is “little evidence that private equity owners, overall, added value” to the companies they took over: nearly all their returns are explained by broad economic growth, rising stock markets, and leverage. Josh Kosman, who researched the subject of private equity for his book The Buyout of America, singles out Bain Capital in particular. “They take pride in pushing the leverage envelope [i.e., use of borrowed money, which magnifies returns, while off-loading the risks onto others] more than their peers,” he says. “I have heard that from limited partners in Bain’s funds. I have heard that from bankers who lend money to finance their leveraged buyouts. Bain always prided itself on ‘We’ll push leverage more than the others.’ They brag about that, behind closed doors.”

Dade Behring is a cause célèbre for Romney’s and Bain’s critics, and it illustrates the leverage problem clearly. In 1994, Bain bought Dade International, a medical-diagnostics company, then added the medical-diagnostics division of DuPont in 1996 and a German medical-testing company called Behring in 1997. Former Dade president Bob Brightfelt says the operation started well: the Bain managers were “pretty smart guys,” he recalls, and they did well cutting out overlap, and exploiting synergies.

Then brutal cost cutting began. Bain cut R&D spending to an average of 8 percent of sales, a little more than half what its competitors were doing. Cindy Hewitt, Dade’s human-resources manager, remembers how the firm closed a Puerto Rico plant in 1998, a year after harvesting $7.1 million in local tax breaks aimed at job creation, and relocated some staff to Miami, then the company’s most profitable plant. Based on re­a­ssur­ances she had received from her superiors, she told those uprooting themselves from Puerto Rico that their jobs in Miami were safe for now—but then Bain closed the Miami plant. “Whether you want to call it misled, or lied, or manipulated, I do not believe they provided full information about what discussions were under way,” she says. “I would never want to be part of even unintentionally treating people so poorly.”

Bain engaged in startling penny-pinching with the laid-off employees. Their contracts stipulated that if they left early they would have to pay back the costs of relocating to Miami—but in spite of all that Dade had done to them, it refused to release the employees from this clause. “They said they would go after them for that money if they left before Bain was finished with them,” Hewitt recalls. Not only that, but the company declined to give workers their severance pay in lump sums to help them fund their return home.

In 1999, generous pensions were converted into less generous benefits, wages were cut, and more staff members were laid off. Some employees contacted Norman Stein, then the director of the pension-counseling clinic at the University of Alabama law school, with a view to challenging the conversions. Stein says the employees were “extraordinarily nervous,” so fearful, in fact, that they refused to let lawyers even make copies of pension documents. “I have been dealing with pensions issues for over 25 years and I never saw anything like this,” recalls Stein. The spooked employees did not go to court. Stein says that, while breaking pension contracts like this was not unheard of, the practice at that time was “questionable,” adding that Dade may have saved $10 to $40 million from converting its pensions.

The beauty—or savagery—of leverage is that it can magnify any and all cash-flow boosts, such as this one. Take $10 to $40 million squeezed from a pension pot, then use that to create new, rosier financial projections to borrow several times that amount, and then pay yourself a big special dividend from the borrowed funds, many times the size of the pension savings. That is just what Bain Capital did: the same month it converted the pensions, it created new financial projections as a basis to borrow an extra $421 million—from which Bain, its co-investor Goldman Sachs, and top Dade management extracted $365 million in dividends. According to Kosman, “Bain and Goldman—after putting down only $85 million … made out like bandits—a $280 million profit.” Dade’s debt rose to more than $870 million. Romney had left operational management of Bain that year, though his disclosures show that he owned 16.5 percent of the Bain partnership responsible for the Dade investment until at least 2001.

Quite soon, however, a fragile Dade faced adverse conditions in the currency markets, and it had to start in effect cannibalizing itself, cutting into the core of its business. It filed for bankruptcy in August 2002 and Bain Capital departed. When Dade emerged from bankruptcy, its new owners invested in long-term R&D, and it flourished again.

Nor was this an isolated incident: Kosman lists five other “formerly healthy” companies—Stage Stores, Ampad, GS Technologies, Details, and KB Toys—Bain helped drive into bankruptcy, while making big profits. (Despite numerous entreaties from Vanity Fair to Bain Capital to address on the record points in this article with which it might disagree, the firm refused to do so and instead provided this statement: “When politics overwhelm fact, some will distort or cherry-pick our record and launch unfounded allegations and insinuations. The truth and the full record show that Bain Capital operates with high standards of integrity and excellence in compliance with all laws. Any suggestion to the contrary is baseless.”)

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Tax Haven U.S.A.

The term “financialization” describes two interlocking processes: a disproportionate growth in a country’s deregulated financial sector, relative to the rest of the economy, and the rising importance of financial activities with a focus on financial returns among industrial and other non-financial corporations, often at the expense of real innovation and productivity.

Some see the rising influence of finance and financial models in epochal terms. Author of Financialization and the U.S. Economy Özgür Orhangazi summarizes academic literature that sees financialization “as one of the indicators of the decline of the heg­e­mon­ic power”: imperial Venice, Genoa, Holland, and Britain all saw their power rise on the back of productive industrial capitalism, followed by domination by the financial sector, which eventually began to cannibalize the productive sector in pursuit of financial returns—a process that ended in weakness and collapse.

Little noticed in the academic discussions of financialization is the role of offshore tax havens, one of the big reasons the financial sector has become so powerful. In 1966, Michael Hudson, a young Chase Manhattan balance-of-payments economist, was in a company elevator when he was handed a memo by a former State Department operative. The memo came from the U.S. government, and Hudson was tasked with figuring out how much foreign money the U.S. might attract. “They were saying, ‘We want to replace Switzerland,’ ” Hudson explains. “All this money will come here if we make this the criminal center of the world. We wanted foreign criminal money, which was patriotic, but not American criminal money.”

In the years since then, almost unknown to most Americans, the United States has turned itself into a giant tax haven for foreigners, just as the memo suggested. Federal and state tax laws have been deliberately shaped to give foreigners special tax exemptions unavailable to Americans, plus financial secrecy and exemptions from regulatory restraints. “We have criticized offshore tax havens for their secrecy and lack of transparency,” said Senator Carl Levin. “But look what is going on in our own backyard.”

In this grand scenario, tax havens such as the Caymans serve as feeders of foreign savings into Tax Haven U.S.A. from abroad, providing foreign investors with additional ways to skip around tax, disclosure, and regulatory requirements that they might trigger if they invested directly.

The money sucked into Tax Haven U.S.A., often via the “feeder” tax havens, is frequently tax-evading and other criminal foreign money, in the spirit of Hudson’s 1966 memo, and it is predominantly channeled not into productive investment but into real estate and financial business.

One cannot properly understand Wall Street’s size and power without appreciating the central role of offshore tax havens. There is absolutely no evidence that Bain has done anything illegal, but private equity is one channel for this secrecy-shrouded foreign money to enter the United States, and a filing for Mitt Romney’s first $37 million Bain Capital Fund, of 1984, provides a rare window into this. One foreign investor, of $2 million, was the newspaper tycoon, tax evader, and fraudster Robert Maxwell, who fell from his yacht, and drowned, off of the Canary Islands in 1991 in strange circumstances, after looting his company’s pension fund. The Bain filing also names Eduardo Poma, a member of one of the “14 families” oligarchy that has controlled most of El Salvador’s wealth for decades; oddly, Poma is listed as sharing a Miami address with two anonymous companies that invested $1.5 million between them. The filings also show a Geneva-based trustee overseeing a trust that invested $2.5 million, a Bahamas corporation that put in $3 million, and three corporations in the tax haven of Panama, historically a favored destination for Latin-American dirty money—“one of the filthiest money-laundering sinks in the world,” as a U.S. Customs official once put it.

Bain Capital has said it did everything required by the U.S. government to check that the investors were not associated with unsavory interests. U.S. law doesn’t require Bain to enforce the tax laws of its investors’ home countries, but the presence of Swiss trustees, Bahamas trusts, and Panama corporations would raise red flags with any tax authority.

Many Americans might react with a shrug to the idea of shady foreign money such as Robert Maxwell’s being invested here. But, says Rebecca Wilkins, of the Washington, D.C.–based nonprofit Citizens for Tax Justice, “It is shocking that a presidential candidate should think that is O.K.”

Romney has refused to release more than one year of personal tax returns, despite calls from Democrats and some Republicans to do so, saying his critics would distort the information and use it against him. He has promised to release a second year of returns but did not offer to do so before the election.

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Romney's Tax Plan For YOU

It has become clear that Mitt Romney does not want to release any additional tax returns. 

But that's not the only tax issue the presumptive nominee has been reluctant to talk about. He has been equally quiet on a policy question that could have a direct impact on the amount of taxes paid by millions of Americans. 

Romney has for months touted an ambitious plan that promises massive tax cuts.   He has also steadfastly refused to say how he would pay for them.

Romney has proposed a 20% across-the-board cut to income tax rates. He also wants to scrap the Alternative Minimum Tax, eliminate the estate tax and chop the tax rate paid by corporations from 35% to 25%. 

All those cuts mean the government would collect far less revenue. Romney claims his plan will make up the difference in-part by limiting deductions, exemptions and credits currently available to top-level income earners. 

But he hasn't lifted the curtain on which deductions he is planning to curtail. 

In April, reporters stationed outside a private fundraising event in Palm Beach, Fla. overheard the former Massachusetts governor rattle off a list of deductions that would likely be eliminated. 

But a campaign official later said that the candidate was "tossing ideas out" and not "unveiling policy."

And just last month, when Romney was directly asked by CBS News to name the deductions, the candidate evaded the question, instead saying that "we'll go through that process with Congress."

The lack of detail extends even to tax breaks that Romney himself has taken advantage of -- to the tune of millions of dollars.

Romney and his campaign have, for example, given a variety of answers on what the candidate plans to do about the tax treatment of carried interest, an obscure compensation method used primarily in high-stakes finance.

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Full election coverage: America's Choice 2012

The tax break, which benefits private equity partners, continues to save the Republican presidential candidate millions of dollars in taxes after a pioneering career at Bain Capital.

Romney has, in the past, explicitly called for keeping the tax benefit in place. But this election cycle, even when asked directly, the candidate has not clearly articulated a position.

Campaign staffers have added to confusion over the candidate's position, occasionally suggesting that Romney would, once elected, consider rolling back the tax break.    At other times, the campaign has walked those suggestions back.

When asked again for more details about his tax plan, a spokesperson for the Romney campaign said to CNNMoney 

that Romney "has proposed a comprehensive plan to repair the nation's tax code by bringing marginal rates down to stimulate entrepreneurship, job creation, and investment, while still raising the revenue needed to fund a smaller, smarter, simpler government."

The spokesperson added that Romney "looks forward to working with Congress" on tax reform.   In other words, don't expect more details unless he actually wins the race for president.

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(Related: Romney's confounding position on carried interest)

From a political perspective, the lack of detail may be beneficial. After all, each deduction benefits a certain constituency.   But the hazy policy prescription leaves the public in the dark -- and lets Romney skate on a devilishly difficult area of tax policy.

A recent report by the Tax Policy Center, an independent research group, showed just how difficult Romney's plan would be to implement, particularly if they are on top of other proposed tax cuts.

The Tax Policy Center estimates that if today's Bush-era income tax rates were made permanent, Romney's additional rate cuts would lead to a reduction of $320 billion in tax revenue in 2015. 

One way to make up for that difference, the report said, would be to shave 72% off the value of all itemized deductions; above-the-line deductions (such as the one for alimony); a host of smaller tax credits; and benefits such as the health insurance tax break many workers get.

Lawmakers could decide to eliminate some benefits altogether and leave others untouched, or reduce them all but by different amounts. The analysis assumed no changes in taxpayer behavior.

"It won't be impossible to pay for substantial individual tax rate reductions by cutting tax expenditures," Howard Gleckman, the editor of TaxVox, wrote in a blog post. "But it will be very, very hard."

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