Replies to post #147797 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[teapeebubbles]

uh oh looks bad for mitt

[F6]

Romney’s net worth pegged at $190-$250M


Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney eats a pork chop on a stick yesterday at the Iowa State Fair.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

By Matt Viser, Globe Staff
08/12/2011 4:06 PM

DES MOINES – Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is worth between $190 million and $250 million, his campaign said today after filing a personal financial disclosure statement with the Federal Election Commission.

That dollar figure would make him the wealthiest candidate in the 2012 White House race, eclipsing President Obama and with his only possible rival being former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman, who has yet to release his disclosure form. He is among the heirs to the Huntsman Corp. fortune.

Romney’s financial disclosure form can be found here [ http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/Romney%20financial%20disclosure%20from%20Boston%20Globe.pdf ].

Romney’s statement provides the most detailed look yet at the former venture capitalist’s finances during the past four years yet shows his net worth essentially unchanged over that time.

Although rendered in broad ranges, the release suggests that his income was not hit the same way many Americans experienced the downturn in the economy. Romney has never released his tax returns, and has declined requests to do so this year, which would offer a fuller picture of his fortune.

Romney, who was criticized earlier this year for saying to a group of voters that he was “unemployed,” earned nearly $114,000 last year for serving on the board at Marriott International.

In the past year, Romney also received substantial speaking fees, including from some financial firms that he has sought to protect from more government regulations. For those speaking engagements, he was paid anywhere from $11,475 to speak at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, Calif., to $68,000 to speak at the National Franchisee Association in Las Vegas.

He was also was paid speaking fees by Barclay’s Bank, Goldentree Asset Management, HP Healthcare Services, and Quest Educational Foundation. A Get Motivated Seminar, via satellite link in Boston, yielded $29,750 for Romney.

“He has occasionally received compensation for speeches and those have been disclosed in accordance with the law,” said Gail Gitcho, the Romney campaign’s communications director.

Romney’s wife, Ann, also owns horses in California worth between $250,001 and $500,000, according to the forms.

Ann Romney has frequently promoted the use of horse riding as a therapeutic way of coping with multiple sclerosis, from which she suffers. The horses she owns engage in competitions and earn prizes, according to Gitcho, so they are required to disclose Romney’s share of an limited liability company that owns them.

The Romneys also have investments in a wide range of areas, including consumer staples like electronics and office supplies, large oil companies, and financial, health care, and telecommunications companies.

His investments are held in a blind trust, which he created when he became governor of Massachusetts in January 2003. The trustee is Brad Malt, at the Boston office of the law firm Ropes & Gray.

“They do not control the investment of these assets,” Gitcho said in a statement. “The assets are under the control and overall management of a trustee.”

The Romneys also have more than $1 million invested in Solamere Founders Fund, which is run by the eldest of their five sons, Tagg, and hold between $250,001 and $500,000 in gold metal.

Mitt Romney has between $250,001 and $500,000 in Bank of America cash accounts, and he continues to earn millions from a retirement deal with Bain Capital, the venture firm that he started in 1984 and left in 1999.

Romney also earned between $100,001 and $1 million in profits from his book, “No Apologies.” That money was divided evenly among six charities: Joey Fund, Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, Sabin Children’s Foundation, National Multiple Sclerosis Society, Dana Farber Cancer Institute Jimmy Fund, and Homes for Our Troops.

In 2010, Mitt Romney donated his book profits to three different charities: Homes for Our Troops, Dana Farber Cancer Institute Jimmy Fund, and Boston Boys & Girls Club.

The form filed with the FEC today indicated that the Romneys had financial holdings in a range of between $85 million and $264 million. The campaign said a more accurate range was between $190 million and $250 million, but would not provide any further detail.

Romney so far has not put any of his own money into his presidential campaign, as he did four years ago.

About half of the holdings four years ago belonged to Mitt Romney, and theoretically could have been liquidated and used for his campaign. The other half belonged to his wife. The campaign yesterday would not say whether the split continues to be about half-and-half.

All federal candidates are required to file the disclosures within 30 days of declaring their candidates, but they can seek two 45-day extensions, which Romney did.

That meant Romney’s forms were due on a Friday – typically a day when politicians announce news they don’t want to promote – and when the political class was consumed with the Iowa Straw Poll taking place tomorrow.

Matt Viser can be reached at [e-mail].

© 2011 NY Times Co.

http://www.boston.com/Boston/politicalintelligence/2011/08/romney-net-worth-pegged/lHBpKxaHYWDhJzOiCuA7fI/index.html [with comments]

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[StephanieVanbryce]

Mitt Romney’s Bain problem


E.J. Dionne Jr.
Published: July 1

While the Supreme Court’s upholding of the health-care law was last week’s most important event in historical terms, it will not be the decisive event of the 2012 election. In the long run, polling in swing states suggesting that Mitt Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital is hurting him could have larger implications for where this campaign will move.

It’s certainly true that had the court knocked down President Obama’s signature domestic achievement, the defeat would have been woven into a narrative of ineffectual leadership and mistaken priorities. Instead, the president found vindication not only from the court’s liberals but also from Chief Justice John Roberts.

But precisely because the decision saved the president from disaster on health care, it only reinforced the importance of the economic argument Obama and Romney have been having for months. And here is where Romney’s Bain problem kicks in.

As Democrats, mostly from Washington and New York, debated the efficacy of attacks on Romney’s role in Bain, an entirely different conversation was being driven in the swing states, courtesy of ads broadcast by the Obama campaign and especially by Priorities USA Action, the pro-Obama super PAC. The ads portray highly sympathetic workers who lost their jobs and companies that collapsed even as Bain’s principals made substantial profits.

An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/the-morning-plum-the-race-to-define-mitt-romney/2012/06/27/gJQAmq0X6V_blog.html ] last week provided surprisingly dramatic evidence of how much these commercials are wounding Romney.

In the country as a whole, 23 percent said they viewed Romney more positively because of his experience “managing a firm that specializes in buying, restructuring and selling companies,” while 28 percent said this made them view Romney more negatively. But in this year’s 12 battleground states, many of which have gotten a heavy run of the anti-Bain ads, only 18 percent viewed Romney’s business experience positively; 33 percent viewed it negatively. Obama led Romney by three points nationally but by eight in the battlegrounds.

This is disturbing news for Romney, who hoped his business experience would be an unalloyed asset. The numbers also underscore voter resistance to the core conservative claim that job creation is primarily about rewarding wealthy investors and companies through further tax cuts and less regulation. Americans are not anti-business, but they are skeptical that everything that is good for corporations is also good for their employees, and for job creation itself.

The Bain ads have done double-duty, specifically undermining Romney but also serving as a parable for how aspects of the current financial system hurt workers and local communities. Profits and productivity can rise even as real wages stagnate or fall, and jobs can be offshored and outsourced. The Romney campaign’s response to a recent Washington Post story describing Bain’s record on outsourcing — the campaign sought to “differentiate between domestic outsourcing versus offshoring” — sounded more like bureaucratic gobbledygook than an effective answer. Obama picked up on the story immediately, calling Romney an “outsourcing pioneer.”

But can the Obama campaign turn the argument over Romney and Bain into a broader challenge to the Republican claim that the only thing government can do to spur job creation is to get out of the way? “Jobs” will remain the Romney battle cry for the rest of the campaign, but the success of the anti-Bain offensive points to an opportunity for Obama to engage in a kind of political jujitsu. He can argue that Romney’s primary interest is not in job creation at all but in low-tax and deregulatory policies he would favor whether the economy was soaring or flat.

In a recent talk at the Center for American Progress, Stefan Löfven, the new leader of the Swedish Social Democratic Party, outlined a way to turn the debate around, arguing that job creation worldwide should be the focus of center-left parties. New policies on job creation should also be concerned with the quality and conditions of the jobs, how quickly the unemployed can be moved to new work and how the unemployed are treated and assisted toward new opportunities.

Here are the questions voters should be encouraged to ask in 2012: Should government focus directly on innovative approaches to creating good jobs in a new economy? Or should it be relegated to a position of powerlessness in which its only option is to concede ever more benefits to those — including the financial wizards at Bain — who are already doing very well indeed?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ej-dionne-jr-mitt-romneys-bain-problem/2012/07/01/gJQA3oFqGW_story.html?tid=pm_opinions_pop