Gawker Media somehow got ahold of almost a thousand pages of financial gobbledygook relating to Bain Capital and Mitt’s investments. The problem is that they are just an ordinary bunch of remarkably resourceful reporters running a little online media site, so they need help figuring out what it all means. If you speak that language, go here and give ’em a hand.
***Update***
Of course, as Dan Rather might have said, you have to keep an eye out for fakes. A common ratf*ck tactic is to bury a sexy counterfeit in a mountain of boring but real documents. The crowdsourcing approach seems like a nice way around that risk – each interesting nugget will get pored over by dozens of reg’lar folk before any media personality will take a swing at it.
jwb
Yay, the return of Mittwit’s finances to the front page!
Ugh
Yes.
schrodinger's cat
Romney is the Enron candidate with all the entities and tax shelters. Imagine what an ex KGB chief could do with all the information Mittster is hiding.
pete
Remind me again, in which country is he running for President?
lamh35
biggest poss news so far, the retirement created in 2002 when Romnwy claims to have retired in 1999!!!
politi.co/Njf0pU
John O
We’re collecting money here, not trying to send a man to Mars. This is another in an unending series of examples of why the tax code should be about 10 pages long of simple math.
You know, so everyone could understand where the money comes and goes.
Felinious Wench
Former Enron employee here, in Corporate Tax.
Parsing now.
jwb
@lamh35: The “prospectively retroactive retirement package” as dmsilev dubbed it in the previous thread.
KXB
I don’t speak tax, but from the 1-paragraph descriptions of some of the Bain funds, looks like quite a bit of his wealth is invested with Chinese companies. The big players in China tend to be state-owned. If I were making an ad, I’d wonder out loud about how many of these funds pressured the management of companies they invested money in to move their operations to China.
martha
@Felinious Wench: Where do we send the chocolate and flowers? :)
EconWatcher
BurnsPEsq, this is it: Your chance for a moment in the sun. Do us proud.
Culture of Truth
I like the part where his investment fund begs for more Obama stimulus.
Violet
Some writer at Fortune magazine says they’re worthless.
Then he gives some examples.
Does this mean the files are serious?
jwb
Villagers—sometimes they just amuse me. Many are on twitter whining about having to make sense of these BORING financial reports. “Can’t we all just be Deatheaters?”
jurassicpork
I saw this on DKos. I’m on it. This is so cool. It’s like Wikileaks is back in full force. In the meantime…
OK, so now I have an anti-Romney campaign sign in my front yard. But is it art? You decide.
Felinious Wench
@martha:
My current employer, who is getting no work out of me today. :)
Hill Dweller
@schrodinger’s cat:
I’m betting Willard’s blatant race-baiting in those welfare ads has infuriated Obama campaign. If so, they’re going to drop everything they have on Willard’s head.
Felinious Wench
@Violet:
I’d rather determine that myself, thank you.
Roger Moore
@lamh35:
There was also one created after he dropped out of the 2008 Presidential race that was created as part of his retirement package. AFAIK, the explanation for this is that his retirement package was supposed to give him an interest in everything Bain did for a decade after he left.
burnspbesq
@EconWatcher:
I’ll get to it, but not until late this afternoon. I do have to earn a living.
jwb
@Violet: I would say it’s a reporter who, if he is not being paid now to run interference, will be fired the second an interesting bit turns up in the NYT, WSJ, WaPo, FT, etc.
Litlebritdifrnt
@jurassicpork:
Most definitely I would love one of those!
Culture of Truth
There is NOTHING to see here
Please move along
Violet
@Hill Dweller:
They may be angry, but they’re not dumb enough to drop everything yet. They’re saving some good stuff for October. Late October.
If this is what they’re dumping now, what else day they have that they’re holding back?
Culture of Truth
Then wouldn’t it be perfect fit for Fortune Magazine?
lamh35
@Violet: well then that reporter should be fired and the Robme camp should be pissed because months ago was when Obama start his Bain attacks and when no one in the village thought they were working. So if this reporter sat on these files until now, then he missed a real opportunity.
But it’s to our advantage that he did, then the whole “retroactive retirment” line that the Romney advisor coined never would have happened.
eric
ha, rubes. you are not reporters and certainly not a reporter for Fortune. hack away you hacks with your hackitude. Now pass me another mimosa.
Violet
@Felinious Wench: I’d rather you determine that too!
In case anyone mixed it up–I didn’t say the “I’ve already seen the documents” stuff. That’s some guy at Fortune mag.
Roger Moore
@Violet:
What he’s saying is that it’s mostly information that a careful journalist could have dug up based on public information. That just leaves open the question of why no careful journalist has done so yet.
Mattminus
Remember the Bush military service records…
Litlebritdifrnt
From the Twitterz
? Martin
@Felinious Wench: My goodness. I guess all we need to know is where it lands on the Enron Financial Evilness scale, then.
Hoodie
@Violet: Let’s take care to not overlook the faint odor of freshly fucked rat. I would hate to see a reprise of the kerning orgy around GW’s National Guard records. This fact pattern — stonewall and then, miraculously, a release of records from an unknown source to an overeager recipient — is disturbingly familiar.
wrb
@Hill Dweller:
I think the potential national security threat posed by Mitt’s undisclosed dealings needs much more attention. Needs to be mentioned again and again. Tax cheating isn’t the worst possibility.
Weknow he’s done business from unsavory characters from Adelson to death squad and drug families.
Is he beholden to anyone? Is he vulnerable to blackmail?
jwb
And here’s Drudge extending the vast left-wing media conspiracy to Google, Twitter and Facebook.
jwb
@Roger Moore: Because they are currently whining about the fact that Gawker’s dump is making them go through these BORING reports, with numbers and everything.
? Martin
@Violet:
So they’re almost certainly a goldmine.
Effectively Fortune is confirming that Mitt is doing all the financial bullshit that Fortune readers love, which of course isn’t news to them, but probably is to anyone who does their own taxes.
eric
@? Martin: most of you libs dont even pay taxes, you moochers. now were is the waiter with my mimosa?
? Martin
@jwb: Once again, Republicans are a victim of everyone.
KXB
It may also be a round-about way to pressure Romney to release his tax returns. If Romney challenges the authenticity of the documents, the next questions is, “OK, if you believe they are fake, prove it. Show us your taxes and we can see if the numbers match up.”
eric
My guess is that the Obama team (and Reid) has someone that shared a deal with Romney and took amnesty or shared enough k1s that the information about taxes or romney’s real weakness is airtight. where is my popcorn?
mikefromArlington
Meg Kelly asked just now on Fox what to make of that last convention they had to cancel a day of the convention because of hurricane Gustav, and this time they could get a direct hit.
I got an answer for her. It’s a fuckin’ sign from God, that’s what it is. He gave you a warning last convention to stop hiding behind the bible while acting like dicks. Well, they didn’t listen so this time he’s go an make sure you’re listening!
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@schrodinger’s cat:
If alpha male Mitt can’t even keep a House Rep from his own party in line I don’t think Putin is going to need to work to hard.
Amir Khalid
@KXB:
Which, I believe, is why there will be nothing said about the Bain files, not so much as one word, from Mitt/Ryan 2012.
Dexter
OT: Latest weather forecasting models apparently show Hurricane Isaac to pass through Florida Keys once it cross Cuba. May not be a very good news for Tampa!!
schrodinger's cat
@Dexter: But it is good news for John McCain.
wrb
It occurred to me that the O campaign’s confidence that there is something bad in Mitts returns could stem from the UBS deal. While I don’t believe that the White House looked at the returns they almost certainly looked at the list UBS turned over. They would need to when designing the amnesty program. They would want to know what sort of people they were dealing with. All drug dealers? Prominent citizens?
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Roger Moore:
Those cocktail wienes don’t eat themselves you know. Reporters have more important things than going threw old and boring documents.
BruinKid
OT: Hopefully one of you can write this up later. Fox News has just outed the Navy SEAL who was about to publish a book about his experiences being on SEAL Team Six when they took out bin Laden.
He may face legal trouble if he disclosed classified information, but this may also put his life and his family’s life in danger since, you know, bin Laden is still a revered figure in jihadist circles.
I’m guessing this means his book didn’t make Obama look bad.
ChrisNYC
I’m hoping there’s great stuff in here but Gawker’s not in it for the principle so this may be more flash than anything else. And Gawker’s not a little shop. $60 million in revenue in 2010, 130 US based employees and, ironically, established in the Caymans and structured to avoid, you guessed it, US taxes. Just saying, this is not a group of idealistic youngsters fighting the man. They’re in it for the clicks.
pseudonymous in nc
@? Martin:
Exacta-fuckin-mundo. The financial journalists might think it’s a pile of nothing, but Russian-doll corporate schemes are old hat to them.
If you run a business, do you organise it like this? It’s on a par with “does your tax return look anything like this?”
The rich are different from you and me.
smintheus
@Violet: As I’ve said, one thing they have is a bombshell of a story about Romney’s connection to Medicare fraud when he owned and managed Damon Corp. After Bain/Romney sold it off in the mid ’90s, Damon was hit with the biggest Medicare fraud fine in history.
mikefromArlington
Fox will no doubt try to paint this hero as a traitor now.
Maude
@BruinKid:
The former SEAL could say, due to the danger to my family, I am withdrawing the book.
Swiftboater.
MikeJ
@smintheus: Mitt Romney is the Coach Calipari of medicare fraud.
Mike G
“…that fits the slant of Fortune, a.k.a ‘Corporate-People Magazine'”.
They don’t want to expose to the public the routine tax-dodging sleaze that goes on in these corporations.
JPL
@BruinKid: Just collateral damage.
the Conster
@mikefromArlington:
The deliciousness of Gustav was that it came right after some dumbfuck preacher prayed for a storm to drown out Obama in Denver. Ratfarts!
quannlace
I just can’t keep track of my Seals these days. Is this one of the Navy seals involved in the Osama swift boat scheme?
hueyplong
The Fortune writer quote is condescension without content. What we “quickly learned” from his blurb is that he should be ignored, with no inferences taken one way or the other about what may or may not be gleaned from these materials (or their authenticity).
Villago Delenda Est
@BruinKid:
That’s a reasonable assumption, based on everything we know about the open sewer that is Faux Noise.
RareSanity
@Violet:
Here’s the thing about that…
On the one hand you have this writer from Fortune magazine asserting his authority on the subject, because…well, he’s a employed by Fortune Magazine for Pete’s Sake.
A cursory search of the interwebs, seems to document that the main basis for his “authority” on the subject of complex financial transactions, written buy lawyers and accountants, seems to be that…he’s been writing about Wall St. for a long time.
I have zero confidence that he would even be able to fully understand every nuance contained in 950 pages of professionally prepared, financial records. Records that have been written by people, that make their living at designing financial transactions, whose sole purpose, is to obfuscate the true nature of the transaction.
These are professionals. As much as Dan Primack may be a professional journalist that covers Wall St., he may have no idea what he’s actually looking at, when he see records like this.
Then, on the other hand, you have Gawker. A group of people that Mr. Primack would like to cast as “amateurs” and not sufficiently employed by Fortune, so they should be ignored.
However, those “amateurs” has the good sense, upon receiving these documents, to say, “There’s something here…we don’t know what it is, but it definitely feels like something. Before we start wildly speculating on things we don’t fully understand, we would like ask some professionals, experienced in these types of transactions, to tell us what’s really going on. As we get the translations, that’s when we’ll start offering opinions.”
I agree with @jwb, if there is something there, and this person has just gone on the record as saying he ha this information, and just cast it aside because he thought it wasn’t important, he’s going to be fired.
Hell, I would say that he’s about halfway there, by indirectly authenticating the documents. He said that these are the same documents he’s already seen, and that he received them directly from Bain Captial.
If Gawker finds something, because they admitted that they didn’t fully understand what they were reading, and enlisted professionals to help…while this guy decided that since he didn’t understand it, it must not be important…he’s toast.
max
Reading it, albeit slowly. The Fortune guy is right that this doesn’t appear to be actual secret information – but that doesn’t mean it’s not interesting.
max
[‘Sigh. I was going to to do useful things today.’]
smintheus
@MikeJ: Wish I understood what that means, but it went over my head.
smintheus
@MikeJ: Wish I understood what that means, but it went over my head.
smintheus
@MikeJ: Wish I understood what that means, but it went over my head.
Culture of Truth
If you run a business, do you organise it like this? It’s on a par with “does your tax return look anything like this?”
The Mormon church is a business and it is run like this.
JustAnotherBob
Perhaps the Fortune reporter had a discussion with his editor and they decided the best way to handle things was “Nothing to see here, just move along”.
If that happened then I wouldn’t expect the reporter to be fired. A firing at a higher level, perhaps. Or just a decision to ride it out….
JustAnotherBob
Perhaps the Fortune reporter had a discussion with his editor and they decided the best way to handle things was “Nothing to see here, just move along”.
If that happened then I wouldn’t expect the reporter to be fired. A firing at a higher level, perhaps. Or just a decision to ride it out….
jwb
@max: I never had the impression that these were secret documents, just hard to get and somewhat time-consuming to assemble.
jwb
@max: I never had the impression that these were secret documents, just hard to get and somewhat time-consuming to assemble.
catclub
@smintheus: Until Rick Scott’s company got in the competition?
smintheus
@catclub: Exactly. You’d almost say that Republican governors have a pattern of running companies that profit from Medicare fraud.
Jon
@schrodinger’s cat: This.
Enron. It’s just like freakin’ Enron. I’m so old I can remember Enron.
Why oh why can’t we have a sane opposition party?
karen
Is this the same Oppo stuff that McCain had in 2008?
burnspbesq
Based on a quick skim, I don’t see and dead girls, live boys, or smoking guns in any of those financial statements. There is a fair amount of sophisticated stuff there: derivatives, short sales, etc., but not anything I wouldn’t expect to see from someone with his wealth and background.
It looks like the distributive shares of those partnerships’ gains and losses were reported on the 2010 return, which is actually somewhat surprising; I would have expected that stuff to be owned by a blocker and deferred. Romney could actually argue, if he had an infinite amount of chutzpah, that he paid more tax than he had to (or, at least, paid it sooner than he had to).
So you’re left with the same completely valid argument that you’ve had all along: a system under which someone with adjusted gross income of $21.6 million in 2010 has a tax liability of barely $3 million is fucked up.
WaterGirl
@BruinKid:
My thought exactly!
jpe
I’m fluent. I’m also guessing these are no big deal. they’re just financials for the funds, after all.
jpe
@burnspbesq: no one other than exempt orgs can defer via blockers. ya get whacked with cfc and/or pfic tax that way, which is far worse than current recognition.
drm
Victor Fleischer has examined some of the documents posted by Gawker. His conclusion differs from that of Dan Primack (Gawker’s worthless ‘Bain Files’.) Make your own judgement as to who might be better qualified to opine on this topic.
Romney’s Management Fee Conversions
Note that some of the Bain transactions questioned by Fleischer are as recent as 2009.
burnspbesq
@jpe:
There are ways to use multiple tiers of CFCs and check-the-box elections to make what would otherwise be FPHCI active.