Might as well throw up the other story making Mitt soil his magic drawers. Per the Boston Globe, Bain Capital seemed sure enough that Mitt still ran the place as late as 2002 to file papers with the SEC to that effect. MoJo reports that Bain bought substantial stakes in outsourcing firms as early as 1998.
This morning we learned that:
1) Bain most certainly did direct his firm to invest in outshoring companies while even Mitt admits that he ran the place, and
2) Either the Mitt campaign lied when they said that Mitt left the firm in 1999, or else someone committed a felony crime in filing false information with the SEC (see below).
For our friends visiting from conservative blogs, this is called ‘vetting’.
***Update***
Oops – number (2) was reported below and number (1) is new for this post. Fixed, sort of.
MikeJ
Mitt Romney’s $ecret $tash.
Mudge
Things get interesting when newspapers do their job.
beltane
Media complicity is the only thing keeping Rmoney’s candidacy alive at this point. Any Democrat in this position would have been forced to suspend his campaign and have a replacement chosen.
Mitt is the like the Mormon Spiro Agnew.
General Stuck
And I notice on memerandum, a paucity of right wing blogs trying to spin this into a Soros/Obama/Ayers soshulist plot. The day is young however.
Anoniminous
Now all we have to do is wait for the Corporate Media to pick-up the story.
I ain’t holding my breath.
dmsilev
@beltane: Media complicity, and the fact that there’s not much anyone can do to get rid of him without his cooperation. He’s got a majority of pledged delegates for the convention, which means any sort of coup would be difficult. Not to mention, having your presumptive nominee drop out 6 weeks before the convention and throwing the nomination wide open is essentially throwing in the towel on the election. Barring revelations that Mitt Romney helped cover up for Sandusky or something at that level, we’re stuck with him. Hopefully only until early November.
maya
This is it: AMORM! Amoral Mitt Outsourcing Republican Millionaire
hueyplong
I don’t think these filings were perceived as problematic, even if fully known, until the issue became whether there might be some kind of getting rich that might be perceived as unpopular.
No doubt this is why GOP establishment types were trying to get Newt to back off, and why they were all “WTF?” about that infomercial Newt created.
Another random guess is that they’re so used to winning news cycles and effectively shoving things down the memory hole that they figured they could outspend the problem with media message control and alternative narrative creation. A plan which, by the way, may still succeed. In fact, I’d almost bet on it.
kd bart
CNN won’t mention it unless they can link it to the horse race and can use pretty touch screens.
Violet
Easy out for Romney. Someone else did it. Someone committed a felony. Can he try that angle?
the Conster
@Anoniminous:
CNN’s national political correspondent Jim Acosta just reported on it. He mentioned it in the context of whether Joe Biden might bring it up in his speech at the NAACP. Acosta said the story is “potentially important”. This may be the case where the press actually throws the story into the ring, then stands back and says “let’s you and him fight”. That would be Rmoney’s worst nightmare.
ETA: I’m glad it’s the Globe that’s getting the goods on the mofo. There’s no love lost between Rmoney and Massachusetts, who know him best and love him least. This has all the makings of a Shakespearean tragicomedy.
beltane
Politico is going there: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/07/12/1108982/-Shocking-Politico-Question-Is-Romney-Guilty-of-a-Federal-Felony
I’m sure the Village will exonerate him in the end but as they say, the felony question is “out there”.
General Stuck
Sometimes the stars line up for an inexplicable performance in the theater of the absurd/
And Karl Rove provides the karmic boomerang to open the curtain, with a Potpourri of cherry picked poll gumbo to tell us Obama is going to lose. Ending with the clincher for today’s ironic happenstance.
I love the smell of a principled, practical, detailed governing vision in the morning
kd bart
@beltane:
Naturally, it’s good news for John McCain.
Violet
@kd bart: Or the hologram!
beltane
@Violet: He will probably be forced to try that angle but I’m not so sure the public will look kindly on a rich, unlikable douchenozzle blaming the hired help.
Violet
@beltane: And it’s a felony. Who the hell is going to take the fall for a felony conviction? I don’t see it working very well, but I wouldn’t put it past Mitt to try.
red dog
The SEC papers list the Mittster as the sole shareholder od Bain and that he was paid 100k a year up until 2002. How is this possible if he left in 1998? PANTS ON FIRE again and again….
Comrade Mary
Because I am a very, very bad person, I am not just heartened by the fact that the media may be kind of almost starting to do their job, but the FactCheck.org is hiding from the parts of the media that are kind of almost starting to do their job.
Violet
Also, too, no matter what he does, this is going to increase the calls for him to release his tax returns for those years. People will want to see what he said to the IRS.
He’s few places to hide on the tax returns. If his DAD was willing to release 12 years of them, what’s his problem? Why won’t he live up to his dad’s example?
Comrade Mary
John, please make this a tagline. I may turn it into a tattoo.
the Conster
I think the impetus to lie about the date was Stericycle. Offshoring is bad enough, but it’s the abortion profiteering that’s at the root of this. McCain knew and told Mitt, I’m sure, that Stericycle was the deal killer, so Mitt got his lies straight for the next time. He just happened to be running against a bunch of clowns who couldn’t tie their shoelaces and Mitt buried them all one by one under a pile of cash, and thought he could keep making it go away. Whoops.
feebog
More evidence that the Romneybot 2.0 has some serious hardwiring problems. He has been telling this lie over and over, and there are no doubt several sound bites out there on the intertubes. The Obama campaign is cutting the ad as we speak.
schrodinger's cat
Romney’s actions make perfect sense as the CEO of Bain but not as someone who had political ambitions. Also in the 90s globalization was sold as a win-win for everyone. Comparative advantage and all that jazz even Krugthulu was for it. Did Romney always have political ambitions?
ETA: If yes, then the FAIL is of epic proportions.
Bizono
The only thing the establishment media wants to talk about this is how the race is “virtually tied.” They need the ratings, and a clear Obama electoral vote lead is not what they want to report.
And the sick thing is that I suspect the media won’t make big headlines of things like today’s Boston Globe report because they fear how it could damage the horse race.
MikeJ
Bah! You haven’t mentioned his birth certificate once.
Mudge
@Comrade Mary: This may be an isolated incident of a newspaper doing it’s job, but I’ll take what I can get. More heartening is that the Globe is owned by the New York Times. Let’s see what the mothership does with this. Will they use the L word (not Lesbian) for Romney?
Citizen_X
@General Stuck:
Boy, you got that right, Karl. As a matter of fact, I suggest Obama use that quote directly in his stump speeches. And then go on to demonstrate how Rmoney has been, ah, somewhat less consistent.
Linda Featheringill
I know nothing about SEC filings but I wonder:
Didn’t Romney have to sign off on those statements that reported he was the Big Cheese? And if so, how could he put the blame on someone else?
dmsilev
@Violet:
Joe Biden basically said the same thing a couple of days ago. The Mittbot has Daddy issues, with which Biden cheerfully smacked him in the face.
OGLiberal
OT, but how about this for “both sides do it”:
http://swampland.time.com/2012/07/12/the-naacp-boos-romney-a-double-standard-and-a-breach-of-civility
Mike Furlan
@hueyplong:
I think you are correct.
With enough money they will create an alternative narrative, in which Obama is the liar, the outsourcer, the abortion profiteer, the out of touch rich guy, etc.
You can read how they will do this in the fine document linked to below:
http://www.webster.edu/medialiteracy/journal/…/FINALKARLROVE.doc
The Other Chuck
@General Stuck: So Karl Rove has The Math, does he?
That’s it, Obama landslide of ’84 proportions. Rove may have been a savvy political operator, but as a pundit he makes Bill Kristoll look prescient.
Roger Moore
@General Stuck:
It smells like Democratic victory. You sure as hell ain’t going to get that from a Republican.
Greg
@Linda Featheringill:
Depends on when exactly they happened. That part of Sarbannes-Oxley went into effect July 30, 2002 according to a quick Internet search. It’s a law that the CEO had to personally sign off and certify as correct SEC filings like this, because before that CEO’s were getting away with claiming that they didn’t actually know what was in them and any misstatements were all some underlings fault.
Unfortunately, it’s likely that all of these filings happened before the time when Romney would’ve been legally required to certify their accuracy.
They’ll still bite him in the ass, I think, but he has a little more wiggle room than he would these days, when he’d have had to have specifically legally certified that everything in the filings was accurate.
cmorenc
@hueyplong:
For a campaign so richly awash with money, it’s surprising how slow the Romney campaign and its surrogates have been so far getting out of the starting gate. Team Obama has been fabulously successful in preemptively defining Romney in swing states with its “offshoring vs inshoring” ads, and now news of those 2002 SEC filings and Bain’s substantial investments in a Chinese company explicitly dependent on offshoring as its business model reinforce this meme. Since it was Romney/Bain who did the SEC filing in question, questioning the legitimacy of those documents won’t work as a defense. They’re going to have to use a huge portion of that money on defense, rather than offense.
The other problem is that Obama is a thoroughly familiar, already long-sharply defined figure to the public at this point, and the GOP has found itself frustrated in trying to gin up any alleged scandals that get any traction with the public outside their own hard-core partisans who believe he’s a Muslim socialist Kenyan lacking a legitimate birth certificate and can’t prove he’s a real Murikan. Unlike John Kerry in 2004, the GOP already shot its best wad long ago (as in four years ago) on trying to assassinate Obama’s character. Yes there’s the economy, but the Bain issues play directly against Romney’s supposed strength. The huge problem for the Romney campaign and the GOP is that there’s surprisingly few good opportunities to control the message with all that money; about all they can do is shout “the economy sucks!”
scav
Technically, your honor, I wasn’t in the getaway car driving away, I kept my elbow outside the window at all times. If that doesn’t square with mere reality, well that reality isn’t thinking outside the box which is always and inevitably a Good Thing ™. If that statement seems all wet, it’s only beaucse I’ve off-shored my truth-telling and am speaking to you from one of my various undisclosed lie-havens.
Roger Moore
@beltane:
Once there’s blood in the water, the sharks will circle and get ready to attack.
amk
Biden is telling NAACP how the rethugs conspired on the very day of inauguration to derail
american governmentObama. Will the media ignore this too, coming a veep, no less ?Bobby Thomson
A few points in light of some common misunderstandings I’m seeing both here and elsewhere.
1. Shareholders are not supposed to be involved in the management of corporations. There is a trade. In exchange for turning over management of the business to a board of directors, shareholders get limited liability. If the corporation does something truly awful, in most cases shareholders can lose the value of their stock in a bankruptcy, but that’s it. They generally won’t lose all their other stuff (houses, boats, cars, Congressmen). So it means nothing that Romney is listed as sole shareholder. Shareholders aren’t supposed to be involved in day-to-day management at all (not in their capacity as shareholders) and have very limited rights.
2. Directors manage the business at a very high level but don’t do the day-to-day stuff. If Romney were just on Bain’s board, he could very credibly argue that he wasn’t involved in day-to-day management.
3. The CEO is involved in day-to-day management. Some are more involved in operations than others. Some delegate lots of operational responsibility to a Chief Operating Officer or a President. But here, Romney was both CEO and President. If he wasn’t in charge of the day-to-day operations (even in just a “the buck stops here” sense), no one was.
So, stop saying Romney must have been involved in Bain’s business because he was its sole shareholder. That’s inaccurate and throws his defenders a softball down the plate. That he was CEO and President is the relevant fact.
Rommie
Damn – if the MittYacht 3000 gets torpedoed right out of the water, what do they do with the convention still ahead? I can’t see them taking the first loser or anyone else from the primaries, but who else is insane enough to step in AND has any chance of a win?
Vetting indeed.
Lee
While I was at the gym on Saturday one of the TVs had FoxNews on.
I did not have my headphones, so I could not listen. I was reading the closed captioning and it really looked like all the guests were making fun of Romney. They were laughing at his flip-flopping all over the place on whether the mandate is a tax or not.
If a Republican loses Fox News….
Nina
@amk: Ooh, I was watching Joe on that, he absolutely KILLED! Hoping for a thread on that soon, it was too good not to watch again.
Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God
@schrodinger’s cat:
He ran for Senate in 1994 (as a pro-choice, pro gun control moderate barely to the right of Ted Kennedy). And even in 1999 it was assumed he’d be coming back from the Olympics to run for Governor eventually (which he did, in 2002– when he ran as a “Bill Weld moderate”). He then sort-of governed the state for 2 years and began his run for President before his term was up, giving anti-Massachusetts speeches for the W’s re-election campaign in 2004
Anvil-freude aside, seriously… can Romney really be this incompetent? Or (more frightening still) is his psychology so self-regarding that the notion that anyone would ever question him, or hold him to basic ethical standards, didn’t even occur to him?
Either disqualifies him as President, IMO. This guy’s making Nixon look like Lincoln.
General Stuck
@Bobby Thomson:
Here ya go
the Conster
@Bobby Thomson:
Sole shareholder is like being a sole proprietor. THe shareholder elects the board which carries out the wishes of the shareholder. It’s everything to be the sole shareholder.
ETA: It’s also uncommon in the case of a sole shareholder also being the Chairman of the Board, CEO and President that he wouldn’t be the sole director. IOW, he controlled everything.
schrodinger's cat
Even the liberal Michael Kinsley is defending Romney’s tenure at Bain. I am sure Sully will give him a Yglesias award.
Comrade Mary
Ack! Tim! Tim posted this! Not John!
I plead multitasking while sole shareholder, President and CEO of my business.
schrodinger's cat
@Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God: Nixon for one, was much smarter than the dumbass wingnuts of today.
giltay
@General Stuck: Of course, Romney’s camp is spinning “on paper” to mean “in theory”, rather than the proper “in black-and-white”.
hueyplong
I like your points, cmorenc, but you can add to “about all they can do is shout ‘the economy sucks!'” the fact that their obstruction of the legislative branch helps them ensure that the economy will in fact suck.
And the problem with unprecedented money is that there is no precedent to inform us as to what it can effectively buy. So that’s a worry, too, in that they may be limited only by their incompetence.
But the punchline is that I agree with you that the Obama campaigners so far seem a little more clever than the Romney ones, and that may be a reflection of the candidates themselves.
General Stuck
@giltay:
There is no way out of this. Romney is lying, either in a felonious way, or a political way.
schrodinger's cat
@Rommie: Snow Queen might want to jump in.
Linda Featheringill
@Mike Furlan: #32
But if Romney proves to be the gift that just keeps on giving, Rove & Co. might not have time to cover everything.
amk
@Bobby Thomson: Good point. No need to screw up a valid argument (that he was the CEO) with overkill (that he was a stockholder). (Though one could also argue that being a sole stockholder is equivalent to a sole proprietor and hence he was culpable on that front too)
Bobby Thomson
@General Stuck: Stuck, I’m not questioning that he was the CEO and President. I’m saying that’s what people should be hitting. That he was sole shareholder really does mean nothing in terms of day-to-day management. But he has no good explanation for how he could continue to act as CEO and President without getting his hair mussed.
Citizen_X
@cmorenc:
Ahem. Was it the long form of those documents?
JoeShabadoo
@Bobby Thomson:
The sole shareholder is involved with the business and certainly should be responsible for things like a focus on outsourcing. You can’t say someone owns 100% of a company but isn’t involved whatsoever. It is ridiculous on its face. At the very least he selected every member of the board or the guy who is running it for him. Picking the board of directors and people like that is how shareholders control companies. Do you really think shareholders just pick people to join the board and then let them do whatever they want, never change them and have no way to remove them? Do you think Romney has no power over these guys despite choosing them for the position and still owning the entire company? Romney could have been a director on the board of his own company, do you know if this is the case?
amk
@the Conster: Beat me to it.
General Stuck
@amk:
It won’t matter to the rubes out there. He was in control of his company in official documents signed and filed with the SEC. If somebody uses the ‘stockholder’ term, what is Romney going to say? when any rebuttal would surely include CEO, president, and company ball washer. That would only make him sound more dishonest and weasely than he already sounds like. corned rat. and the only question is how will the GOP wisemen deal with this, as well as their voters.
Jay C
@cmorenc:
Well, that line has proven to be a fairly effective vote-getter up to now, so I’m pretty sure they will be flogging it as much as they can. Without, of course, any specific policies or programs (outside of the usual tax-cut-mania boilerplate) to fix it, but never mind that or now.
Unfortunately, economic issues aren’t all Mitt and the GOP have to run on: my guess is that, in a quite counter-Rovian move, the Repubs are probably going to be staging a simultaneous attack on Obama’s perceived weaknesses; mainly, IMO, the “war on religion” crap, and the Administration’s unwillingness to countenance “freedom of religion” by not letting sex-obsessed religious fanatics dictate each and every facet of social and political policies.
I’m also guessing they will go hard-n-heavy on the “Israel” issue, as above: trying to cast Obama’s perceived lack of slavish obeisance to hardcore Likudnik policies as little better than enabling the Holocaust.
There are still a lot of shots in the GOP locker: as a country, I think we are quite lucky that their aim is usually off…
Citizen_X
@Rommie: Santorum 2012! The second coming!
JPL
Until Romney campaign draws a venn diagram explaining his action, I am withholding my opinion.
General Stuck
@Bobby Thomson:
Yea, I reread your comment and didn’t get what you were saying. Doesn’t matter though, imo, which one of the titles are used by lay people.@General Stuck:
cmorenc
One bit of good fortune in the timing of these latest Romney/Bain revelations is that it’s coming out the same day as the Freeh report on the Penn State scandal, which will definitely deflect media/public attention to a significant degree and the details of which are lots easier for the public to follow.
cmorenc
@cmorenc: Whups, edit function doesn’t work. My comment above should read:
“One bit of good fortune FOR THE ROMNEY CAMPAIGN in the timing of these latest Romney/Bain revelations is that it’s coming out the same day as the Freeh report on the Penn State scandal, which will definitely deflect media/public attention to a significant degree and the details of which are lots easier for the public to follow.
(desired editing addition in caps)
Mike Furlan
@Linda Featheringill:
Linda, that, “he is the gift that keeps on giving.”
I’m sure that there will be some awkwardly phrased moments in the debates, if we have debates.
And it looks like Obama will at least be in the same order of magnitude in fund raising.
With a 10:1 advantage in money, Romney could control the narrative.
So I’m hopeful. But then I thought it was obvious to the most casual observer the GW was unqualified to be President.
amk
@JPL: LOL. You win.
General Stuck
In any other election cycle, this revelation would certainly hurt any candidate, but they maybe could talk their way out of it as a foopah, and survive. But in this particular election, it is more like the Holy Grail delivered to Obama and democrats. And Romney is already disliked and mistrusted by the conservative base. My guess is he will want to spend more time with his family, and money.
replicnt6
@Bobby Thomson:
You are confusing a privately-held company with a publicly-held company, no?
Bain was privately-held, if I am not mistaken.
Origuy
@OGLiberal:
They got the subdomain name right.
rlrr
@JPL:
I see what you did there.
the Conster
@amk:
I would say that as far as excuse making Romney would be better off if he wasn’t the sole shareholder, because as a matter of corporate law, just acting as Chairman of the Board and CEO he could say he didn’t call the shots – he was just doing his job as the shareholder desired. But, he’s fucked either way. Hopefully.
RP
I don’t agree. It would be one thing if people were attacking Romney because he owned 10,000 shares of Exxon, but this is very different. If you’re the sole shareholder of a privately held company you control the company, period.
JoeShabadoo
@RP: But…but corporations are people! (my friend) The owner can’t possibly be responsible for the actions of a separate individual!
Bobby Thomson
@JoeShabadoo:
Not as a legal matter. Shareholders elect directors. They can replace them, but they don’t attend board meetings (unless they are themselves directors) and have no vote on most matters in their capacity as shareholders.
And I didn’t. But you can say they aren’t involved in day-to-day operations. Because they may not be.
No. And that’s not what I said, either. But shareholders are usually limited in their ability to drive corporate policy. And if directors don’t tell shareholders what they are doing, shareholders may not realize they want to replace them. Taking it another step, if a CEO doesn’t tell her board everything she is doing, the board may not realize they want to fire her.
Didn’t say he had no power. But if he were just a shareholder, he’d have an argument that he didn’t know everything they were doing.
We do know. Romney was chairman of the board, which means he was a director. Directors can fire CEOs and usually get much more information from them than shareholders. Shareholders usually can’t fire CEOs directly. Instead they can remove directors if they don’t sack the CEO.
Just owning the company doesn’t put Romney on the hook for everything that happens, because he could make a plausible Sergeant Schultz defense if everything ended there. But it gets very difficult for him to argue that he didn’t know what was going on when he was also CEO and President.
giltay
@General Stuck: I agree. I was just hoping they weren’t going to apply a haze of misdirection that the media would lap up.
Tried to see if this had made it to the Toronto papers, yet. Only the Globe and Mail has an article, which seems that the Republican response is, “No, you’re a liar!” Unfortunately, the tenor of the piece seems like “both sides do it”.
Violet
@Bizono:
For ratings, the only thing better than a horse race would be a complete meltdown of one of the candidates. If Romney implodes and still tries to hang on for the convention, other candidates fight him, especially Paul and his dedicated followers, that’s fireworks and ratings galore.
I think the media is still on the fence as to which way they will go with it, but I’m sure a few have considered this option.
JoeShabadoo
@Bobby Thomson: You are talking about legal ramifications while I’m talking about how it works in reality and what people will care about when you tell them the company Romney 100% owned was outsourcing. The other ones have legal implications but this is still great for smacking him around.
Martin
@Bobby Thomson: So, Oprah as sole shareholder of her corporation would have no input into the day-to-day operations?
In legal theory, you are correct. In practice it never, ever, ever, ever, ever works that way. Ever. And everybody knows it. Yeah, it works as a get-out-of-jail-free card, but this isn’t a legal matter – it’s a political matter. Different rules apply.
Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God
@Bobby Thomson:
That approach also makes him look like one shitty, substandard leader.
Not the best of optics when you’re running for POTUS.
rikyrah
@scav:
BWA HA HA HA HA HA HA
Tonal Crow
@Linda Featheringill:
Yes, he did. Here’s an example from 2001, in which Bain filed a report about its stake in a company called “Therma Wave”. The report, date 2/12/2001 and filed 2/14/2001, is *signed* by, among others (blockquote fail, FYWP):
BAIN CAPITAL INVESTORS V, INC.
By: /s/ W. Mitt Romney
——————————
Name: W. Mitt Romney
Title: President and Chief
Executive Officer
/s/ W. Mitt Romney
———————————-
W. Mitt Romney
====
Oh baby is Mitt a king-sized liar.
daverave
If this story gets any MSM traction (yeah, right) it could become a John Edwards moment for the Romneybot (yeah, right) leading to a brokered convention (yeah, right) with all sorts of comedic value.
elisabeth
FWIW, Kessler still says there’s no there there.
Bulworth
@elisabeth: What SEC filings?!
Catsy
Point of order here: who actually signed off on the Bain SEC filings? Was Romney’s signature on them?
Because while there’s already plenty we know for a fact that is damaging, that question really matters. If he signed off on those SEC filings in any way and at any point, he’s completely toast. If that was someone else’s work… he looks bad, but there’s still a little wiggle room.
ETA: never mind, I see that Tonal Crow is on this. Wow, Romney is completely and thoroughly fucked. This is glorious.
Z
Romney announced in August 2001 that he was giving up his 100% ownership of voting shares of Bain Capital in order to focus on things other than business in his life/career/whatever. If he had no role in Bain for the two and a half years leading up to this, I don’t really see the point of his announcement. I also don’t get why this announcement doesn’t seem to be part of the current dust-up… it’s pretty easy to find on Lexis-Nexus.