The HyperTexts

Romney Hood

Like a reverse Robin Hood, Bishop Willard Mitt Romney stole jobs from the poor to give dividends to the rich. Now he seems intent on sending American citizens to the poorhouse, en masse. He recently earned the sobriquet "Romney Hood" after the non-partisan Tax Policy Institute reported that Romney's tax proposals are likely to result in a net tax increase of $2,000 for middle-class wage earners while reducing the taxes of the wealthiest Americans by hundreds of thousands of dollars, each.

The Crown Princes of Entitlements

I am a big believer in getting money where the money is. The money is in Washington.—Mitt Romney

Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan claim to be "fiscal conservatives" who abhor government spending and can fix America's economic problems with quick waves of their magical wands. But the truth is that Romney and Ryan both supported huge federal bailouts, as long as their rich patrons, cronies and constituents got most of the loot. Paul Ryan effusively praised George W. Bush's 2002 federal stimulus package, which mostly benefitted wealthy Americans by lowering their taxes. And even as he was damning President Obama's much fairer 2009 stimulus package, Ryan was lobbying for millions of stimulus funds for his constituents. Mitt Romney accepted a huge federal bailout of the Olympics, bragging that he knew how to get money from the federal government, then claimed that he "saved" the Olympics when it was really "we the people" who did the saving with our tax dollars. The only thing Romney's and Ryan's magic wands will accomplish, if we are foolish enough to elect them, is to reduce taxes on the richest 1% of Americans to below 1%, leaving the rest of us to pay thousands more in taxes even as we get smaller Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits when we are no longer able to work. That ain't magic, it's highway robbery.

I've learned from my Olympic experience [that] if you have people that really understand how Washington works and have personal associations there you can get money to help build economic development opportunities ... We actually received over $410 million from the federal government for the Olympic games. That is a huge increase over anything ever done before and we did that by going after every agency of government.—Mitt Romney

Romney cited more than $1 million that one his colleagues managed to get for the Olympics from the Department of Education, concluding:

That kind of creativity I want to bring to everything we do.—Mitt Romney


Mr. Free Stuff

W. Mitt Romney scornfully accuses ordinary Americans of wanting "free stuff" when they request affordable healthcare, and yet it seems he may have paid virtually no federal income taxes for years, despite being one of the world's wealthiest men. Wouldn't that make him the King of Free Stuff?

Does Mitt Moneybags really believe in American exceptionalism, or just his own "exceptions" (i.e., evaded income taxes)? If Romney really believes in American exceptionalism, why did he stash so much of his cash in Bermuda and the Cayman Islands? He drives high quality American-made cars, so why does he park his money in obscure banks on tiny, insecure islands? Why did a fabulously wealthy man like Mitt Romney choose the Yugo of banks, rather than a Cadillac?

The answer seems obvious. Multi-million-dollar offshore "IRAs" are a rich man's way of fleecing the 99% of American workers who have to pay their taxes, rain or shine, via automatic payroll deductions. That Romney would scam other Americans calls his character into question: whatever happened to leading by example? That he would mock middle-class Americans by claiming they want "free stuff," after he used every trick in the book to avoid paying his taxes, is simply beyond the pale. Everyone knows there only two reasons that rich people go to Bermuda and the Cayman Islands: to work on their tans or their tax shelters. And we all know that the Romneybot has not been programmed to lie in the sand and soak up the sun ...

Top Ten Mitticisms

A "mitticism" is like a witticism, minus the intelligence. These things were actually said by the Romneybot in its attempts to communicate with warm-blooded earthlings ...

We should double Guantanamo!
Planned Parenthood, we're going to get rid of that!
Let Detroit go bankrupt!
I'll take a lot of credit for the fact that this industry's come back. (Referring to the auto industry he wanted to go bankrupt and did nothing to help.)
I would repeal Obamacare! (Even though Obamacare is modeled after his claim to fame, Romneycare?)
Corporations are people, my friend ... of course they are ... human beings, my friend.
Banks aren't bad people. They're just overwhelmed right now ... scared to death ... feeling the same thing that you're feeling.
I am a big believer in getting money where the money is. The money is in Washington.
Atta girl! (Taunting a closeted gay high school student, Gary Hummel.)
He can't look like that! That's wrong! Just look at him! (Before tackling a gay classmate, John Lauber, and cutting off his long, bleached-blonde hair.)

Mr. Roboto

I bathe in statistics.
Who let the dogs out? Who, who? (During an awkward photo op with a group of African American kids.)
PETA is not happy that my dog likes fresh air. (After having strapped his dog to the roof of his vehicle for an 11-hour road trip.)

The quotes above seem like the output of a badly-engineered android, one that could not possibly be mistaken for an actual human being. And what about these statements, made by the Romneybot to ingratiate itself with potential voters? ...

I love this state. The trees are the right height. The streets are just right.
I had catfish for the second time. It was delicious, just like the first time.
I am learning to say y'all and I like grits, and ... strange things are happening to me.
Morning, ya'll. I got started this morning right with a biscuit and some cheesy grits. (No one calls them "cheesy" grits.)
I was going to suggest to you that you serve your eggs with hollandaise sauce and hubcaps. Because there's no plates like chrome for the hollandaise.
These pancakes are about as large as my win in Puerto Rico last night, I must admit. The margin is just about as good.
Look at us in here! We are all nice together, all nice and wet, you know, like a can of sardines. ("Nice"?)
That's a big lava lamp, congratulations!
Davy, Davy Crockett. King of the wild frontier!
I'm an unofficial southerner.
Please give us a big hug, that's the girls. I've been getting hugs from the Southern girls ... from 12, to well, a lot more than 12.
I never imagined I'd be up here like Larry the Cable guy!
I love the hymns of America, by the way.

When asked at the Daytona 500 whether he followed NASCAR, the Romneybot replied, "Not as closely as some of the most ardent fans, but I have some great friends who are NASCAR team owners."

I should tell my story. I'm also unemployed.—Mitt Romney (one of the earth's wealthiest men)
I get speaker's fees from time to time, but not very much. —Mitt Romney (in a single year he earned $374,000 in speaker's fees)

When talking about money, as Gary Kamiya put it in a Salon article, Romney comes across "not only as an obscenely rich person, but as an obscenely rich person from another planet."

As Charles P. Pierce wrote in an article for Esquire: "People have been trying to humanize the Romneybot since he first stepped into politics against Ted Kennedy almost 20 years ago. They tried for two years when he was governor and, to most of the people around the State House, he went out as pretty much the same ice sculpture they'd sworn in. They tried for two years during the run-up to the 2008 campaign and, according to the one worthwhile anecdote in Game Change, by the end of the primary process, everybody wanted to spit on him. Did it look to any of you that his rivals this time around wanted to do anything else, either? No matter what they're saying now, they all thought he was a slick bond salesman who was buying the nomination. Newt Gingrich looked sincerely like he wanted to eat Romney's heart in the marketplace throughout almost all of the debates. Here is the simple fact: Unless you are a member of his family, you simply cannot like Mitt Romney."

The Romneybot has a cold, calculating CPU, but its output is wildly inconsistent. For instance, in 2004 the Romneybot said: "The people of America recognize that the slowdown in jobs that occurred during the early years of the Bush administration were the result of a perfect storm. And an effort by one candidate to somehow say, 'Oh, this recession and the slowdown in jobs was the result of somehow this president magically being elected,' people in America just dismiss that as being poppycock.  ... Every indication is that the economic policies adopted and pursued by this president are creating jobs at a very high pace. And so the people of America have to ask, 'Do I stay with the president, who is rebuilding the economy, who is creating jobs, or do you want to stop mid-stream and find someone new?'"

But of course when the president in question is Barack Obama, the Romneybot immediately spits out pure poppycock.

And here is what the Romneybot said about its record of sluggish job growth after four years as governor of Massachusetts, in 2006: "You guys are bright enough to look at the numbers. I came in and the jobs had been just falling off a cliff ... And then we turned around and we're coming back. And that's progress. And if you're going to suggest to me that somehow the day I got elected somehow jobs should immediately [have] turned around, why that would be silly. It takes a while to get things turned around. We were in a recession; we were losing jobs every month. We've turned it around ... That's progress."

But when the person with the record of job growth progress that is not immediate is Barack Obama, the Romneybot immediately spits out sheer silliness.

In November 2006, shortly before the Romneybot retired as governor of Massachusetts, its approval rating was a dismal 34%, ranking it 48th of 50 U.S. governors.

Mitt Romney's Nixonian Meltdown: Let's get rid of the half of Americans who won't vote for me, by letting them starve to death!

Here's what Mitt Romney told fellow millionaires at a closed-door, $50,000-per-plate fundraiser: "There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the President no matter what. All right, 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, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That, that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. 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."

First, it is the president's job to care about all Americans, even those who didn't vote for him. Second, to say that no Democrat works, or pays income taxes is a blatant lie; millions of people who pay no income taxes are Republicans. Third, to call food an "entitlement" is ridiculous. Is it an "entitlement" not to starve to death, in a land of plenty with more than enough food for everyone? Has any American presidential candidate before Romney ever suggested that we should let half the American people starve to death if they didn't vote for him? That seems to be what Romney is saying, in a Nixonian meltdown, as he expresses his obvious disgust for the 150 million Americans who have the temerity to think independently and disagree with him.

According to W. Mitt Romney, if you believe in helping less fortunate Americans, you are part of a mass of shiftless moochers and parasitic leeches who fall far short of the glory of W. Mitt Romney. But the majority of the Americans in Romney's 47 percent are working people: retirees, soldiers, teachers, cops, firefighters, steelworkers, members of the clergy, and many others. And most of them have worked far more honestly that Mitt the Ripper, who made millions by firing American workers and outsourcing their jobs to China and other low-wage countries, then evaded income taxes himself via off-shore Bermuda and Cayman Island "IRAs."

At the same fundraiser, Mittler (as he is called by the LGBT community) also expressed his disgust for seemingly all Palestinians: "I look at the Palestinians not wanting to see peace anyway, for political purposes, committed to the destruction and elimination of Israel, and these thorny issues, and I say there's just no way."

When Romney talks about the people he despises—poor people, Palestinians, and most people who aren't rich white Americans like himself—he sounds disturbingly like Hitler talking about the Jews.

Even hardcore conservatives were shocked at Romney's bigotry. For instance, William Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard, called Romney's comments "stupid and arrogant."

Palestinians who both want and work for peace said Romney's accusations were ridiculous: "No one stands to gain more from peace with Israel than Palestinians and no one stands to lose more in the absence of peace than Palestinians," chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat told Reuters. "Only those who want to maintain the Israeli [military] occupation will claim the Palestinians are not interested in peace."

Nobel Peace Prize laureates Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu and Jimmy Carter have accused Israel of practicing apartheid and ethnic cleansing. Leading Jewish intellectuals from Albert Einstein to Noam Chomsky have rebuked Israel for using massive military superiority to unjustly dominate and displace Palestinians, who have now lost more than 80% of their native land without compensation. To blame Palestinians for all the hostilities is like blaming Native Americans for not submitting meekly to ethnic cleansing and genocide at the hands of white supremacists. Rather than exchanging land for peace, Israel chooses to relentlessly gobble up more and more Palestinian land via a massive, brutal military occupation. Romney is either lying through his teeth, or he has failed to study and understand the reality on the ground in Israel/Palestine. Virtually the entire global community agrees that Israel must end its land-grabbing in the West Bank, but thanks to American politicians like Mitt Romney, Israel continues to let robber barons do their thing, protected by a super-powerful military funded and armed by American taxpayers to the tune of more than $130 billion over the years.


"Let Them Eat Cyanide"

Mitt Romney promises to reduce taxes on middle-income Americans. But what does he mean by "middle-income"? During an interview on ABC's "Good Morning America," Romney told host George Stephanopoulos, "No one can say my plan is going to raise taxes on middle-income people, because principle number one is (to) keep the burden down on middle-income taxpayers." Stephanopoulos then asked, "Is $100,000 middle income?" Romney replied, "No, middle income is $200,000 to $250,000." But according to the Census Bureau the median American household income is just over $50,000. So Romney seems to be either bent on deception, or hopelessly out of touch.

Even if you are fortunate enough to make $200,000 or more per year, do you think the federal government should give the bulk of tax cuts to the people who make the most money, while other people lose their jobs and homes?

The proposed Romney-Ryan budget plan will further decimate the American middle class, by virtually eliminating all federal income taxes on the wealthiest 1% of Americans, because it makes capital gains, interest and dividends tax free. If this plan had been in effect in 2010, Mitt Romney would have paid less than 1% (.0082, to be exact) on earnings of $21 million. It seems Romney and Ryan intend to get rid of all taxes for the super-rich, while reducing taxes somewhat for people making $200,000 or more. This will force everyone else to pay more taxes, or leave the federal government without the means to keep the current safety nets of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid intact. But at some point in their lives, especially as they age, the vast majority of Americans will need those safety nets. When Marie Antoinette was told that French peasants had no bread to eat, she allegedly said, "Let them eat cake." Now it seems that Willard Mitt Romney, one of the world's wealthiest men, is saying that when elderly Americans need healthcare, we should say, "Let them eat cyanide!" and when poor people are hungry we should say, "Let them starve to death!"

As much as I would like to see my taxes reduced, I cannot sanction this blatantly unjust plan to let the wealthiest Americans avoid virtually all taxes, by condemning elderly Americans who worked and paid taxes all their lives to the human equivalent of a glue factory. Can you?

Magical Mittens

Mitt Romney seems to believe that he can boost the economy without actually doing anything: "If it looks like I'm going to win, the markets will be happy. If it looks like the president's going to win, the markets should not be terribly happy. It depends of course which markets you're talking about, which types of commodities and so forth, but my own view is that if we win on November 6th, there will be a great deal of optimism about the future of this country. We'll see capital come back and we'll see—without actually doing anything—we'll actually get a boost in the economy."

And yet he ridicules Democrats for talking about hope and change!

Romney invests in Chinese Slave Labor Camp, complete with barbed wire and guard towers

One of the most disturbing things I have heard about Mitt Romney from his own lips is his confession that he toured a Chinese slave labor camp/factory, then invested in it, with never a word of protest about the terrible conditions he saw there. Instead of protesting the existence of such gulags, the Romneybot became a pioneer of outsourcing American jobs to them, through his vulture capital outfit, Bain Capital. Here is how Romney described what he saw, in private during a high-dollar fundraiser attended by his rich cronies, not knowing that he was being filmed by a whistleblower: "When I was back in my private equity days, we went to China to buy a factory there. It employed about 20,000 people. And they were almost all young women between the ages of about 18 and 22 or 23. They were saving for potentially becoming married. And they work in these huge factories; they made various uh, small appliances. And uh, as we were walking through this facility, seeing them work, the number of hours they worked per day, the pittance they earned, living in dormitories with uh, with little bathrooms at the end of maybe 10 rooms. And the rooms they have 12 girls per room. Three bunk beds on top of each other. You’ve seen, you’ve seen them? And, and, and around this factory was a fence, a huge fence with barbed wire and guard towers. And, and, we said gosh! I can’t believe that you, you know, keep these girls in! They said, no, no, no. This is to keep other people from coming in …"

The account above has been reported by major news services such as the Boston Globe. Because the factory made small appliances, we can safely assume that it belonged to Global Tech Appliances, a company that takes over manufacturing from American companies like Sunbeam and Mr. Coffee. According to SEC documents first reported by Mother Jones magazine, a Bain Capital affiliate called Brookside initially acquired about 6 percent of GTA on April 17, 1998 and later increased its ownership to more than 9 percent. Romney was listed as the "sole shareholder, sole director, President and Chief Executive Officer of Brookside Inc." So it seems clear that Romney alone was responsible for deciding what to do about the 20,000 young girls he saw living in what sounds like a Nazi concentration camp complete with barbed wire fences and guard towers. Did he go public and protest what he saw? No, he invested in the slave labor facility, then helped American companies save money by firing American workers and outsourcing their jobs to such sweat shops.

What would you have done, knowing that at best the girls were being used like pack mules, and that at worst a fire might kill them all? Wouldn't you have said something to someone, to try to help the girls, and others like them in other Chinese factories? Why did Mitt Romney, a child of wealth and privilege and one of the world's wealthiest men, became a business partner of their enslavers, then send them more American businesses as customers?

What sort of man is Mitt Romney, really? Here's a rather blunt appraisal. China’s Xinhua news agency criticized Romney in a strongly-worded editorial, noting the profits Romney has made from investments in China: "It is rather ironic that a considerable portion of this China-battering politician’s wealth was actually obtained by doing business with Chinese companies before he entered politics."

If Romney wants to get involved in manufacturing, he should stick to his particular area of expertise: flip-flops.

Bishop Romney

The Sheriff of Nottingham had nothing on Bishop Romney! Was Bishop Romney a male chauvinist? Here's a revealing excerpt from "The Mind of Mitt" in Vanity Fair:

As both bishop and stake president, he at times clashed with women he felt strayed too far from church beliefs and practice. To them, he lacked the empathy and courage that they had known in other leaders, putting the church first even at times of great personal vulnerability. Peggie Hayes had joined the church as a teenager along with her mother and siblings ... As a teenager, Hayes babysat for Mitt and Ann Romney and other couples in the ward. Then Hayes’s mother abruptly moved the family to Salt Lake City for Hayes’s senior year of high school. Restless and unhappy, Hayes moved to Los Angeles once she turned 18. She got married, had a daughter, and then got divorced shortly after. But she remained part of the church. By 1983, Hayes was 23 and back in the Boston area, raising a 3-year-old daughter on her own and working as a nurse’s aide. Then she got pregnant again. Single motherhood was no picnic, but Hayes said she had wanted a second child and wasn’t upset at the news. "I kind of felt like I could do it," she said. "And I wanted to." By that point Mitt Romney, the man whose kids Hayes used to watch, was, as bishop of her ward, her church leader ... Then Romney called Hayes one winter day and said he wanted to come over and talk. He arrived at her apartment in Somerville, a dense, largely working-class city just north of Boston. They chitchatted for a few minutes. Then Romney said something about the church’s adoption agency. Hayes initially thought she must have misunderstood. But Romney’s intent became apparent: he was urging her to give up her soon-to-be-born son for adoption, saying that was what the church wanted. Indeed, the church encourages adoption in cases where "a successful marriage is unlikely." Hayes was deeply insulted. She told him she would never surrender her child. Sure, her life wasn’t exactly the picture of Rockwellian harmony, but she felt she was on a path to stability. In that moment, she also felt intimidated. Here was Romney, who held great power as her church leader and was the head of a wealthy, prominent Belmont family, sitting in her gritty apartment making grave demands. "And then he says, ‘Well, this is what the church wants you to do, and if you don’t, then you could be excommunicated for failing to follow the leadership of the church,’" Hayes recalled. It was a serious threat. At that point Hayes still valued her place within the Mormon Church. "This is not playing around," she said. "This is not like ‘You don’t get to take Communion.’ This is like ‘You will not be saved. You will never see the face of God.’" Romney would later deny that he had threatened Hayes with excommunication, but Hayes said his message was crystal clear: "Give up your son or give up your God." Not long after, Hayes gave birth to a son. She named him Dane. At nine months old, Dane needed serious, and risky, surgery. The bones in his head were fused together, restricting the growth of his brain, and would need to be separated. Hayes was scared. She sought emotional and spiritual support from the church once again. Looking past their uncomfortable conversation before Dane’s birth, she called Romney and asked him to come to the hospital to confer a blessing on her baby. Hayes was expecting him. Instead, two people she didn’t know showed up. She was crushed. "I needed him," she said. "It was very significant that he didn’t come." Sitting there in the hospital, Hayes decided she was finished with the Mormon Church. The decision was easy, yet she made it with a heavy heart. To this day, she remains grateful to Romney and others in the church for all they did for her family. But she shudders at what they were asking her to do in return, especially when she pulls out pictures of Dane, now a 27-year-old electrician in Salt Lake City. "There’s my baby," she said.

Here is a disturbing excerpt from a Huffington Post article:

A 1994 article in the Boston Phoenix told the story of an anonymous woman (who has since been identified) who wrote an article in a feminist Mormon magazine claiming Romney, as bishop, discouraged her from having an abortion even though her health was at stake. Romney later said he could not remember the incident.

The episode above was also reported by Vanity Fair. Here is how the second woman, also a mother of five, described her experience with Bishop Romney after being told by her doctors that she had a serious blood clot in her pelvis and that even if she risked her life to give birth, the baby's chance of survival would be only 50 percent:

"As your bishop," she said that he told her, "my concern is with the child." The woman wrote, "Here I—a baptized, endowed, dedicated worker, and tithe-payer in the church—lay helpless, hurt, and frightened, trying to maintain my psychological equilibrium, and his concern was for the eight-week possibility in my uterus—not for me!"

Romney would later contend that he couldn’t recall the incident, saying, "I don’t have any memory of what she is referring to, although I certainly can’t say it could not have been me." Romney did however acknowledge having counseled Mormon women not to have abortions except in exceptional cases, in accordance with church rules. The woman told Romney that her stake president, a doctor, had already told her, "Of course, you should have this abortion and then recover from the blood clot and take care of the healthy children you already have." Romney, she said, fired back, "I don’t believe you. He wouldn’t say that. I’m going to call him." And then he left. The woman said that she went on to have the abortion and never regretted it. "What I do feel bad about," she wrote, "is that at a time when I would have appreciated nurturing and support from spiritual leaders and friends, I got judgment, criticism, prejudicial advice, and rejection."

That Romney claims not to remember giving advice that could have killed a woman or endangered her health, especially when she had five children to care for, is troubling. He has also claimed not to remember tackling a gay classmate, pinning him to the ground, and cutting off his hair, even though students who watched the event remember it vividly many years later. Most of us would remember such things vividly, with tremendous remorse, if we were ever capable of such callous behavior. But we don't remember ants we crushed by accident. Is that how Willard Mitt Romney thinks of females outside his family circle, and gays? Here's another revealing excerpt from the Huffington Post article:

In July 1994, during Romney's U.S. Senate campaign, the Boston Globe published a story saying that Romney, in a speech to a congregation of single Mormons, said he found homosexuality "perverse and reprehensible." The story cited one named and three unnamed sources. Romney denied the comments. "I specifically said they should avoid homosexuality and they should avoid heterosexual relations outside of marriage," Romney told the Globe then. "I did not use the words perverse or perversion. I just said it was wrong. ... That is what my church believes."

So if his church believes something, it seems Romney believes it too. But the Mormon church has any number of strange beliefs: ... that Jesus was a polygamist, that God is an exalted man who lives as a physical being with multiple wives on the planet Kolob, that only men with multiple wives can reach the highest heaven (making polygamy a prerequisite for salvation), that in heaven the wives of polygamists will remain eternally pregnant and have billions of spirit children, that there are multiple gods, that human beings can become gods, and that magical underwear required and sold by the Mormon church can protect Mormons from lust and attacks by supernatural entities.

Is it possible that some of these beliefs are incorrect and should not be used to deny women and gays fully equal rights? Has the Mormon church, perhaps, been wildly wrong before?

Until 1978 the Mormon church taught that black people were the children of Cain and were black because they had been cursed by God, making them unfit to serve as ministers. The Mormon prophet Brigham Young said that if a white man has sex with a black woman the "law of God" is "death on the spot." (This despite the fact that according to the Bible it seems that  the greatest prophet, Moses, and the wisest man, Solomon, both had black wives.) Brigham Young told the Utah Territorial Legislature that "any man having one drop of the seed of [Cain] ... in him cannot hold the priesthood and if no other Prophet ever spake it before I will say it now in the name of Jesus Christ I know it is true and others know it." John Taylor a president and prophet of the Mormon church, taught that God is a segregationist who discriminates against blacks, who "represent" the Devil. Mormon apostle Mark E. Petersen said that if a child had a single drop of negro blood, he would "receive the curse" and that the best such a cursed child could hope for, if he was "faithful all his days," was to be a "servant" (slave) in heaven. But then in 1978 one of the "prophets" of the church had a "revelation" that the curse had somehow mysteriously been lifted. But in the church's official notice, the prophet went oddly unnamed, as if no one wanted to take credit for the prophecy.

When the Mormon church was so obviously wrong about racism and segregation, and attempted to correct its obvious mistake in such a contrived and clumsy manner, can it be trusted to hand down edicts on the rights (or lack of rights) of women and gays? Should a potential president like Willard Mitt Romney withhold (or attempt to withhold) basic human rights from women and gays because his church teaches that women are supposed to submit to men in all things, and that God discriminates against non-heterosexuals, the way he used to discriminate against "the children of Cain?

Or are the Mormon church's current teachings about women and gays as absurd and laughable (albeit not funny) as its former teachings about blacks?

Did Romney call homosexuality "perverse"? Isn't that a teaching of most conservative Christian churches, including the Roman Catholics, the Southern Baptists and the Mormons? Romney’s alleged comments on homosexual practices were part of a 20-minute address he delivered on November 14 to the Cambridge University Ward, which numbers about 250 to 300 single Mormons. "He said he was appalled at the incidence of homosexuals in the congregation," said Rick Rawlins, a 32-year-old Mormon who had previously served as a counselor to the ward’s bishop. "He went on to say that he found homosexuality both perverse and reprehensible." Romney denied the veracity of the comments but, as the Globe noted, the account was confirmed by three other attendees: "I believe that his general message was that sex outside of marriage is immoral, but on the other hand, I do remember that there was a specific remark that he was appalled at the incidence of homosexuality in the ward and he termed it perverse," said one. "It was specific enough that I wanted to go see Bishop [Steven] Wheelwright right after that talk." Another person present offered this account. "During the talk, President Romney began talking about families and family values, and he mentioned homosexuality as a perversity. He went on for some time." This person didn’t recall the exact term Romney used to express his dismay at report of homosexual conduct, but said: "He certainly was conveying that he was appalled." Said a fourth person: "He started going on about being upset about homosexuality in this ward. I remember him calling it a sickness and a perversion."

It seems to me that Romney and the Mormon church, like other fundamentalist sects of Christianity, are now wrestling with intolerance against homosexuality the way they once wrestled with intolerance against "the children of Cain." Obviously, the churches are wrong and their prehistoric teachings do not come from a loving, wise, just, enlightened God.

Can we afford to have a president who refuses to admit that his church's "prophets" are wrong and that their teachings are relics of a stone age past? Should millions of Americans be denied full equality because someone like Mitt Romney believes that God is a sexist and a homophobe?

Why does Mitt Romney deny gay veterans their constitutional rights?

While other American men his age were fighting and dying in Vietnam, young Willard Mitt Romney took two and a half years off to vacation in France as a Mormon missionary, receiving a deferment from military service as a "minister of religion" despite being barely out of high school. While vacationing in France, Romney encouraged his fellow missionaries to read Think and Grow Rich! by Napoleon Hill, so it seems Romney was evangelizing Mammon along with God and magical underpants. Nor did he wish to serve his country as a soldier. As a Massachusetts Senate candidate in 1994, Romney told the Boston Herald: "It was not my desire to go off and serve in Vietnam." But when he met an American veteran of the Vietnam War recently, Romney had the audacity to deny him his constitutional rights.

"You can’t trust him," said Bob Garon, a gay 63-year-old vet, after meeting Romney, looking him in the eye, and calling him out for his bigotry.

While Garon was risking his neck in Vietnam, Mitt Romney was tooling around Le Havre and Paris. But Romney, acting in his usual cold-blooded style, had no problem telling Garon that he is a persona non grata, despite his service to his country.

Asked by reporters to assess Romney’s chances for the nomination after their encounter, Garon replied: "I did a little research on Mitt Romney and, by golly, you reporters are right. The guy ain’t going to make it. Because you can’t trust him. I just saw it in his eyes. I judge a man by his eyes."

Ironically, Romney met Garon during a campaign stop at Chez Vachon, a French cafe in Manchester, N.H. While working the room, Romney spotted Garon wearing a flannel shirt and a Vietnam Veteran hat, then slid into his booth for a quick photo op. But to his consternation, as the cameras rolled, Garon confronted Romney with a blunt question: "New Hampshire right now has some legislation kicking around about a repeal for the same-sex marriage. And all I need is a yes or a no. Do you support the repeal?"

"I support the repeal of the New Hampshire law," Romney said, confirming that he denies equality to gay Americans, even if they risked their lives in service to their country while he vacationed in France, incubating his get-rich-quick schemes.

Garon, who was eating breakfast with his male husband, pointed out correctly: "If two men get married, apparently a veteran’s spouse would not be entitled to any burial benefits or medical benefits or anything that the serviceman has devoted his time and effort to his country, and you just don’t support equality in terms of same-sex marriage?"

Romney confirmed that he not only denies gay veterans the right to marry, but that he also denies their partners having the same rights and benefits as heterosexual partners of other veterans. This is consistent with what Romney has said about denying gays the right to marry or to enter into civil unions, thus leaving them bereft of essential human rights.

"It's good to know how you feel, that you do not believe everyone is entitled to their constitutional rights," Garon replied dismissively.

When Romney started to argue that the Constitution is a homophobic document, a desperate-sounding aide urged him to wrap up the conversation: "Governor, we’ve got to get on with Fox News right now!" Was Romney saved from a knockout blow by the ding-dong bell of likeminded bigots?

"Oh, I guess the question was too hot," Garon remarked.

"No, I gave you the answer," Romney replied. "You said you had a yes-or-no [question]. I gave you the answer."

"You did," Garon agreed, although quite understandably not pleased or impressed. "And I appreciate your answer. And you know, I also learned something, and New Hampshire is right: You have to look a man in the eye to get a good answer. And you know what, governor? Good luck ... You’re going to need it."

"You are right about that," Romney said, unintentionally acknowledging that his bigotry against gay vets would come back to haunt him.

As reporters swarmed around his booth, Garon, an independent, said that he would not support Romney.

"I was undecided," Garon said. But "I’m totally convinced today that he’s not going to be my president—at least in my book. At least Obama will entertain the idea. This man is ‘No way, Jose.’ Well, take that ‘No way, Jose’ back to Massachusetts."

Later, Garon spoke to MSNBC about the exchange. "Well, quite frankly I'm not a professor of the Constitution but I don't believe it says anything about a man and a woman defining marriage," he said. "I didn't expect the answer that I got—I thought he'd be a little more diplomatic in his answer. But I did ask for a yes-or-no question and I've got to respect that that he did give me a yes-or-no answer."

But shouldn't we expect a prospective president and commander-in-chief to give the right answer, the fair answer, the just answer, the equitable answer?

Garon continued, "What I didn't expect from Mr. Romney is how confrontational he was and argumentative ... my question was really hoping that if he did get into the White House that he'd be in support of the benefits entitled to veterans and their spouses. Currently, they're not ... It just makes no sense to me."

Asked by reporters after Romney left why he feels so strongly about the issue, Garon responded passionately: "Because I’m gay, all right? And I happen to love a man just like you probably love your wife. I went and fought for my country and I think my spouse should be entitled to the same benefits as if I were married to a woman. What the hell is the difference?"

A very good question, indeed.

Garon said there is one aspect of Romney’s candidacy he supports: "I kind of liked his health care plan in Massachusetts." But of course Romney now castigates President Obama for Obamacare, even though it was clearly modeled on his own Romneycare. Romney has also waffled on climate change, women's reproductive rights, gun control and other issues. Take invasions of other countries, for example. His father, George Romney, who had once supported the Vietnam war, famously claimed that he had been brainwashed, possibly costing him the presidency. Mitt Romney agreed with his father and was quoted in a 1970 Boston Globe article as saying: "We were brainwashed. If it wasn’t a political blunder to move into Vietnam, I don’t know what is." But today Romney is a right-wing war hawk. He supported the invasion of Iraq and the troop surge. He supported the invasion of Afghanistan. He sealed his political marriage to Paul Ryan in the shadow of a battleship, after "America's Comeback Teamn" ran down to the podium from the battleship, laughing and waving. And in his speech to the Citadel in October 2011, Romney seemed to be the one brainwashing young American cadets to pursue wars of preemptive retaliation (i.e., offensive wars). If you continue reading this page, you can hear Romney sounding like the second coming of Hitler ...

Mitt Romney strikes me as a fascist who believes that might is right and will say or do almost anything to achieve his personal goals of acquiring money, fame and power. It seems the only position that he hasn't changed is his belief in his money, his power and his budding godhood. Like Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Napoleon and Hitler, this endlessly strange creature named Willard Mitt Romney seems to see the rest of us a pawns in his game of cosmic chess. He claims that his Mormon faith is very important to him, and perhaps that's part of the problem, because Mormonism teaches that human beings can become gods and rule worlds. Romney and the Romulans seem to be cold-blooded conquerors intent on ruling ours.

The 13% Solution

When asked to disclose his tax returns, Willard Mitt Romney replied, "I am not a business." But he famously (or infamously) said that "corporations are people." Mitt the Flopple changes political positions the way Imelda Marcos changes shoes. But he is remarkably consistent about his taxes. Mitt the Omitter consistently makes up excuses not to explain why he seems to be one of the biggest tax evaders in American history. Perhaps we should call him Darth Evader.

Romney claims that he paid at least 13% in taxes for the last decade, while being careful not to specify federal income taxes. And did he pay 13% of everything he made or only of the money that he didn't shelter from taxes? It seems obvious that Romney has a LOT of money in Bermuda and Cayman Island tax shelters. Major new services like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, TIME, Reuters and CBS News have reported that he may have up to $100 million, or close to half his estimated net worth, in esoteric Caribbean investments. In fact, it seems he may have placed entire Bain Capital holdings in offshore "IRAs." So suppose Romney made $20 million one year, sheltered $19.9 million in offshore "IRAs," then paid taxes on only $100,000 in earnings? Yes, he might have paid 13% in taxes on the $100,000 and that might be commensurate with what other Americans pay after deducting personal exemptions, charitable contributions, etc. But his real effective tax rate might be closer to 1.3%, or zero, depending on how much money he made, and how much of that money was sheltered. The only way for anyone to know Romney's real tax rate is for him to release his tax returns. The fact that he refuses to release any of his returns prior to 2010 suggests that there are major problems with his older returns. Do we want a commander-in-chief who expects American soldiers to risk their lives in battle, when he's too cowardly to pay his fair share of taxes to help provide them with the best possible equipment and training?

The proposed Romney-Ryan budget plan would eliminate taxes on interest, dividends and capital gains, making it possible for millionaires and billionaires to reduce their effective tax rates to 1% or less. (According to Romney's 2010 tax return, under the new Romney-Ryan plan he would have paid slightly less than one percent on $21 million in earnings.) In order to fund this lavish bounty for the super-rich, less wealthy Americans will have to pay thousands more in taxes per year. Then, finally, Willard Mitt Romney can legally avoid paying taxes, since you and I will be covering for him!

Outsourcing Pioneer

Why is the year 1999 so important to Romney? Because when the Washington Post published an article headlined "Bain Capital invested in companies that moved jobs overseas," the Romney campaign was caught flatfooted. The Post disclosed that Bain had invested in companies like Modus Media, Stream International, Hi-Tech Manufacturing, SMTC and Holson Burnes, that had not only shipped thousands of American jobs overseas, but had helped pioneer the practice. It seems clear that Romney does not want to be connected to such pioneering, hence the since-disproven claims that he had "absolutely nothing" to do with Bain after early 1999.

To make matters worse, Romney even invested money in a Chinese company, Global-Tech Appliances, that specializes in taking over manufacturing from American companies like Sunbeam and Revlon. Part of Romney's GTA holdings ended up in Sankaty High Yield Asset Investors LTD, a Bermuda-based corporation that lists Romney as "the sole shareholder, a director, and President." According to an AP report, Sankaty is "is among several Romney holdings that have not been fully disclosed" and there is a "mystery surrounding" Sankaty. Vanity Fair noted that "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." Another mystery is why Romney was using a Bermuda-based entity to invest in a Chinese firm that specialized in outsourcing American manufacturing jobs.

Bain first invested in GTA in 1998, before Romney "left" the firm in 1999, so it seems clear that Romney was deliberately investing in and profiting from outsourcing long before anyone else "took over," if that ever actually happened.

As reported by The Christian Science Monitor and Washington Post: "During the nearly 15 years that Romney was actively involved in running Bain, the private equity firm that he founded, it owned companies that were pioneers in the practice of shipping work from the United States to overseas call centers and factories making computer components, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. While Bain was not the largest player in the outsourcing field, the private equity firm was involved early on, at a time when the departure of jobs from the United States was beginning to accelerate and new companies were emerging as handmaidens to this outflow of employment."

A CBS Evening News report confirms that there are accusations that "Mitt Romney's companies were pioneers in outsourcing U.S. jobs to low-wage countries." Now, if such accusations are false, all Romney and Bain have to do is provide hard evidence to the contrary. All companies with payrolls keep detailed records of hirings and firings, so why have Romney and Bain failed to provide any hard evidence of net job increases? Obviously, because there isn't any such evidence. In reality, Romney and Bain fired thousands of American workers and outsourced many other jobs to foreign countries, while Romney became one of the world's wealthiest men by sheltering most or all of his Bain wealth from taxes in offshore Bermuda and Cayman Island "IRAs."

And the claims that Romney had "no involvement" with Bain after early 1999 seem more than shaky ...

James Cox, a professor of corporate and securities law at Duke University, has pointed out that Bain’s continued reference to Romney as CEO and sole shareholder indicate that Romney remained the "final authority" and that Romney would likely have been updated regularly about Bain’s profits while negotiating his severance package. Thus, according to Cox, Romney’s insistence that he had no involvement with "any Bain Capital entity" appears "inconsistent" with his actions.

According to Stephanie Cutter, Romney was "either misrepresenting his own position at Bain to the SEC, which is a felony, or he was misrepresenting his position at Bain to the American people."

According to the Boston Globe, which was able to interview Bain insiders, "Romney has said in financial disclosure statements that he 'was not involved in the operations of any Bain Capital entity in any way' after Feb. 11, 1999. But he was still legally the CEO, with numerous duties and obligations that were his alone, until early 2002. Interviews with a half-dozen of Romney’s former partners and associates, as well as public records, show that he was not merely an absentee owner during this period. He signed dozens of company documents, including filings with regulators on a vast array of Bain’s investment entities. And he drove the complex negotiations over his own large severance package, a deal that was critical to the firm’s future without him, according to his former associates. Indeed, by remaining CEO and sole shareholder, Romney held on to his leverage in the talks that resulted in his generous 10-year retirement package, according to former associates. 'The elephant in the room was not whether Mitt was involved in investment decisions but Mitt’s retention of control of the firm and therefore his ability to extract a huge economic benefit by delaying his giving up of that control,' said one former associate, who, like some other Romney associates, spoke only on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak for the company."

Romney continued to refer to himself as CEO. In July 1999, five months after he had "left" Bain, he provided a blurb for a press release issued by Rehnert and Wolpow, in which he was referred to as "Bain Capital CEO W. Mitt Romney, currently on a part-time leave of absence." In the release, Romney said of departing Bain partners, "While we will miss them, we wish them well and look forward to working with them as they build their firm." So Romney obviously still considered himself a part of Bain and its future. Romney’s name continued to appear as CEO and owner on dozens of Bain fund documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission until January 2002.

So it seems Romney was truthful with the SEC, but lied repeatedly to the American people ... and is still lying, even though he's been caught red-handed.

Swimming with the Sharks

Corporations are people, my friend ... of course they are ... human beings, my friend.—Mitt Romney

But as we all know, some corporations are more like cold-blooded sharks than warm-blooded human beings ... especially private equity firms like Mitt Romney's rapacious team of orca-like corporate raiders, Bain Capital.

Under Romney's direction, Bain loaded companies like GST Steel and Dade International with massive debt in order to pay Romney and other investors massive dividends, while the companies went bankrupt and their workers became jobless. Now Romney, the consummate slick pro-corporation politician, has raised large sums of campaign cash from Wall Street firms like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley because they know he'll scratch their backs by letting them do what he did himself: profit from the elimination and outsourcing of American jobs. Romney insists that "corporations are people" and has called federal government spending to assist tornado and flood victims "simply immoral" because it increases the national budget deficit. But when has he ever called government borrowing to fund wars and Wall Street bailouts "immoral"? Romney knows where his bread is buttered, and who provides the rich cream. Like most Republican politicians these days, he seems quite happy to let the commoners go without bread, as long as his wealthy patrons and cronies can continue to have their cake and eat it too.

In his book The Buyout of America: How Private Equity Is Destroying Jobs and Killing the American Economy, Josh Kosman describes Bain as "notorious for its failure to plow profits back into its businesses." Bain was the first large private equity firm to derive a large percentage of its revenues from corporate dividends and other investor-gratifying distributions. Companies acquired by Bain sometimes borrowed large sums of money in order to increase their dividend payments, ultimately leading to the collapse of what had been financially stable businesses. According to Bloomberg, "Whether companies boomed or filed for bankruptcy, the Boston-based firm found profits for Romney, its other executives and investors ... Interviews with former employees and executives at Bain and companies it controlled, along with a review of Bain’s activities described in public documents and news accounts, paint a picture of an operation that wasn’t focused on expanding employment. Instead, Bain’s mission, like [that of] most private equity firms, was to generate gains for its investors."

Dade International is a good example. Dade was combined by Bain with several other companies, becoming Dade Behring. At least 1,600 employees were dismissed from 1996 to 1999, according to SEC reports. Bain and Goldman Sachs sold their Dade shares for $365.4 million, in addition to prior dividends and other distributions, before the company went bankrupt. According to Michael Rumbin, Dade's vice president of technology, "They leveraged this thing to the hilt and got out when they could. We were left holding the bag." Rumbin became one of Romney's and Bain's casualties when he too lost his job. Now we know why private equity firms are better known as "corporate raiders."

The Romneybot

Have people taken to calling Romney the "Romneybot" because he lacks the things that make human beings human: warmth, humor, compassion, empathy, and a sense of fair play and justice? It can be painful watching Romney when he tries to josh around with other people or connect with them emotionally. Something appears to be missing ... he really does act like an android programmed to spit out the correct answers without understanding the questions at the heart and gut level. Americans want their presidents to care about Americans who are suffering, and we have been fortunate to have had presidents who really did seem to care: Lincoln, FDR, JFK, Carter, Reagan, Clinton and Obama, to name a few. Even George W. Bush, for all the terrible mistakes he made, seemed to care; his problems lay in other areas, such as thinking and speaking. But Romney strikes me as being more like Nixon: something essential seems to be missing. This is evidenced in their inability to connect with average Americans.

For instance, here's what Romney said recently about less wealthy Americans who want affordable healthcare, referring to his speech to the NAACP:

When I mentioned [that] I am going to get rid of Obamacare they weren’t happy ... That’s okay. I want people to know what I stand for, and if I don’t stand for what they want, go vote for someone else; that’s just fine … But I hope people understand this, your friends who like Obamacare, you remind them of this, if they want more stuff from government tell them to go vote for the other guy — more free stuff.

But Romney seems to be all about "free stuff" ... for himself and his super-rich friends. Even if it's somehow "wrong" for poor people to want affordable healthcare for their children and aging parents, isn't it vastly worse from someone richer than Midas to insult them while ripping apart their safety nets, so that he can become even richer? (As I wrote this paragraph, I had a vision of Ebenezer Scrooge denying raises to Bob Cratchit while Tiny Tim wasted away for want of an operation.)

How can someone who gets away with highway robbery turn around and condemn average Americans for requesting a much smaller break? For instance, Romney served on the board of Damon Clinical Laboratories, which pled guilty to charges of defrauding Medicare and agreed to pay the largest health care criminal fraud fine in history at the time, over $119 million altogether. Corporate Crime Reporter put it like this: "As manager and board member of Damon Corp, Mitt Romney sits at the center of one of the top 15 corporate crimes of the 1990’s." Romney never reported Damon's fraud to the proper authorities. When Corning bought Damon, it discovered the fraud and reported it. Bain and Romney earned millions from their investment in Damon, but conveniently never noticed that Damon was obtaining "free stuff" from our cash-strapped federal government. According to a Boston Globe report, Romney claimed that he and fellow board members uncovered what was later determined to be a criminal scheme to defraud Medicare in 1993, yet acknowledged that the directors did not turn over their findings to federal authorities who were then investigating the medical testing industry. While Damon went bankrupt, with thousands of employees losing their jobs, Bain Capital enjoyed a $12 million profit, with over $450,000 of that money going to Romney personally.

Is it fair that Romney made so much money from healthcare, then turned around and mocked less advantaged people for only wanting healthcare they can afford?

Please don't get me wrong: I don't begrudge Romney his success or his wealth. But if it's true that he paid virtually no taxes for more than a decade, while amassing a fortune estimated at $200 million or more, that seems terribly unfair to the 99% of Americans who do pay their fair share of taxes, rain or shine. When he mocks and criticizes them, that only adds insult to injury and makes him seem like a heartless, soulless android ... the Romneybot.

Romney strikes me as a hypocritical creep for three reasons: (1) he blasts Obamacare, but his Romneycare was obviously the model for Obamacare; (2) he favors bailing out Wall Street billionaires yet denies average Americans what he imperiously calls "entitlements;" and (3) he has no compunction about taking "free stuff" himself, by evading taxes despite his fabulous personal wealth.

Mr. "Free Stuff" Part II

Obviously, there is something terribly wrong when a rich, imperious tax dodger lectures hard-working American taxpayers about not asking for "free stuff" when, in reality, all they want is a fair shake.

Romney's hypocrisy about American healthcare seems to know no bounds. When he traveled to Poland, he praised Poland for its economic success, but Poland provides free medical care to all its citizens despite having less that half the per-capita income of the U.S. When Romney traveled to Israel, he praised Israel for its superior economy, which he attributed to a superior culture. But in Israel, healthcare is universal and medical insurance is compulsory. As a result, Israel has the fourth-highest life expectancy among earth's nations, at 82 years. And of course Romney has no problem giving "free stuff" to his rich friends in Israel. (He and Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin "Bibi" Netanyahu are pals.) According to the Washington Report on Middle Eastern Affairs, since 1949 the U.S. government has given Israel more than $134 billion in financial aid. That's more than $23,000 per Israeli citizen. So American taxpayers who struggle to afford healthcare for themselves have probably paid for every Israeli citizen to enjoy superior healthcare, either in whole or in part.

Before Romney lectures Americans, I think he should listen for a change to a real conservative:

Foreign aid is taking money from the poor people of a rich country and giving it to the rich people of a poor country.—Ron Paul

Why does Romney want to give "free stuff" to his rich friends in Israel, why denying affordable healthcare to Americans? Is it because Romney is getting "free stuff" from rich, powerful Jews, in return for Romney selling his fellow citizens down the river?

Romney’s $101 Million Cayman Island IRA

How did Mitt Romney end up with a $101 million Cayman Island IRA? It seems Romney may have sheltered all or most of his Bain Capital wealth from taxes by putting it into an offshore "IRA" and only allowing it to be valued correctly once the appreciation was protected from taxes. If there is some other reasonable explanation for how anyone's IRA can be so huge, when contributions are limited to a few thousand dollars per year, I'd like to hear it.

I first became suspicious about Romney's finances when he started squirming like a fish out of water when asked about releasing his tax returns during a Republican presidential debate. I was sure at that moment that there was something in his tax returns that he didn't want the public to see. Ironically, Romney's father, George W. Romney, had voluntarily released his tax returns for twelve years when he became a presidential candidate in 1967.

But Mitt Romney's public squirmings told me that something was obviously wrong with his tax returns. Then later something in a Huffington Post article about his tax returns caught my eye, because a single Bain fund was valued at $5 million to $25 million, and yet it was called only "part" of his total IRA. Most IRAs are relatively small because the contributions are capped at a few thousand dollars per year. Romney's IRA seemed impossibly large, and it also seemed extremely odd that it was made up of multiple offshore Bain investments in the Cayman Islands, which are world-famous for two things: beautiful beaches and hideous tax shelters. So I began trying to determine what Romney's full IRA amounted to. Here's a Reuters report that I found on the subject ...

How did Romney's IRA grow so big?
Reuters
by Lynnley Browning
Monday, January 23, 2012

In the wake of news reports last week that presidential contender Mitt Romney owns an individual retirement account worth as much as $101 million, questions are growing over how it could have gotten so big when contribution limits are capped at $5,000 or $6,000 a year.

Tax lawyers and accountants suggest an answer: Romney may have made use of an Internal Revenue Service loophole that allows investors to undervalue interests in investment partnerships when first putting them into an IRA. These assets can produce returns far in excess of those that could be generated from other investments made at the capped level.

An investor could even set an initial value for a partnership interest at zero dollars, because under tax regulations an interest in a partnership represents future income, not current value, said Chris Sanchirico, co-director of the Center for Tax Law and Policy at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

Whether Romney used this technique, which is legal, when he put partnership interests into his IRA is a question that won't likely be answered when he discloses his 2010 tax returns on Tuesday.

Romney's IRA, valued at between $20.7 million and $101.6 million, as reported by The Wall Street Journal last Thursday, holds stakes in 13 investment entities run by Bain Capital, the private-equity firm he cofounded and led for 13 years.

"One possibility for its size is that he put his Bain partnership interests into the IRA and valued them at a very low number," said David Weisbach, a law professor who focuses on tax at the University of Chicago Law School.

Andrea Saul, a spokeswoman for the Romney campaign, declined to respond to emails and calls.

In the wake of growing scrutiny of his personal wealth, Romney, one of the wealthiest contenders ever for the White House, told Fox News host Chris Wallace on Sunday that on Tuesday he would release his 2010 tax returns and estimates for his 2011 return.

The release will not provide much insight into his IRA. That is because a personal income-tax return shows IRA contributions and withdrawals only for the year of the return, and not for previous years, and does not show whether any contributions were in the form of undervalued partnership interests. While an IRA investor can sometimes be required to file a separate return for the IRA, it is unclear whether Romney intends to release any such returns.

Romney's personal financial summary, disclosed last August under federal election rules, shows that his IRA holds his most lucrative investments, which are stakes in partnerships run by Bain Capital. Those stakes include Bcip Trust Associates III, a Bain fund that is his single largest investment, with assets valued at $5,000,001 to $25,000,000. Bcip Trust Associates III produced income to Romney's IRA of over $5,000,000 over 2010 and through August 12, 2011, according to the summary.

Robert Stack, head of international tax at law firm Ivins Phillips & Barker, said it is possible that Romney's IRA grew so large not only because of an increase in the value of the funds in which it invests but also through lucrative profits, typically 20 percent of investment gains per year, that funds can generate for their general partners.

It is not known whether Romney is a general partner in the Bain funds, meaning invested in the partnership responsible for managing the funds, or simply an investor in the funds. The Romney campaign has declined to comment on this issue.

The general partners' cut of the profit, known as carried interest, is taxable each year if the funds in which the IRA is invested earn certain management fees or borrow to make their investments. Tax lawyers say they want to know whether Romney's IRA holds any carried interest and whether it has paid tax on it—something not disclosed in his personal financial summary or on a federal income tax return. "In the context of a $100 million IRA, that is what we would want to know," said David Miller, a tax lawyer at Cadwalader Wickersham & Taft.

The average IRA held by Americans holds $42,500, according to the Investment Company Institute, a trade group. While the Romney campaign has said that some of his IRA consists of retirement savings rolled over from previous plans, accountants say rollovers would not likely explain the size of his IRA.

"Even if he rolled over a 401k, with the annual caps on contributions, you're still only talking about a few million dollars," said Robert Green, an accountant who is founder of Green Trading, a tax and accounting firm that caters to the investment industry. Last year, individuals could contribute a maximum of $16,500 a year to their 401(k) plans.

Tax lawyers say it is also important to know whether Romney's IRA holds stakes in Bain funds directly, or through related, offshore entities.

These entities, commonly used by tax-exempt investors such as Romney's IRA, legally allow the investors to avoid having to pay a special tax, known as the unearned business income tax, or UBTI.

While the Wall Street Journal suggested on Thursday that avoidance of the special tax was a big reason for the size of Romney's IRA, some tax lawyers said that its size might simply reflect the extreme profitability of a carried interest held by the IRA. "The best guess is that he put the carried interest into the IRA," Miller said.

Romney's IRA produced income of $1.5 million to $8.5 million over 2010 and through August 12, 2011, according to his financial summary, but it is unknown what, if any, taxes the IRA may have paid on its carried interest. Saul, Romney's campaign spokeswoman, declined requests for comment.

(Reporting by Lynnley Browning; Additional reporting by Gregory Roumeliotis; Editing by Amy Stevens, Eddie Evans and Carol Bishopric)

The average American IRA is $42,500, so Romney’s seems outrageously large. His IRA produced income of $1.5 million to $8.5 million between 2010 and 2011, so it seems quite possible that it may be closer to the high end estimate of $101.6 million. Romney’s total wealth has been estimated at around $200 million. If he shielded half his money from all taxes, that would seem to drop his effective tax rate from around 14% to around 7%. And that would explain why he looked like a fish out of water when he was asked about disclosing his tax returns. In this case, I suspect that two plus two probably results in four ... as in four more years for President Barack Obama.

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