These Questions Are Retroactive

These are my questions about Mitt Romney's role at Bain Capital, and Bain Capital in general:

1a) If you, Mitt Romney, were not really CEO of Bain Capital from 1999 to 2002 as you claim today, then who was CEO during that time?
1b) Can we speak with that person to verify that he or she was CEO of Bain Capital, and/or the person responsible for most business decisions?
1c) Was there a press release given to the business media back in 1999 or between 1999 to 2002 that announced who this replacement CEO is/was?

2) If that other person was CEO during that time, why did the company's SEC filings still list you as CEO?  And why were you still signing that paperwork as well as other business filings?

3) If you had retired from Bain Capital in 1999, why were you still receiving a base salary of at least $100,000 well into 2002?  Most retirement plans I've known do not work that way.  Were you receiving a salary for a no-show job?

4) If you had cut all ties from Bain Capital as you claim on your 2011 campaigning forms by 1999, why did you tell Massachusetts election officials under oath in 2002 that you were still regularly involved in Bain's business dealings to justify your residency requirement to run for Governor?

'Cause I'm with Andrew Sullivan on this one:

But responsibility for Bain? Think about it. No one disputes that Romney co-founded Bain, hired most of its staff, and honed its methods and strategies from 1984 to 2002. No one can dispute that he was paid at least $100,000 from 1999 to 2002 for being CEO. There is no massive difference between the kind of strategies Bain pursued from 1984 to 1999 when Romney was managing full-time and from 1999 to 2002, when he was managing part-time and by his own lawyer's assertion that his Bain activities "continued unabated just as they had." Is Romney saying that nothing that happened at Bain after 1999 is his responsibility but that everything that happened after January 2009 is all Barack Obama's fault?
Yep, that's what he's saying. It's a pathetic double standard argument from a suddenly pathetic and panicking campaign...

Romney's had the image problem already with being a habitual flip-flopper; getting nicknamed as the "Etch-A-Sketch" candidate whose ideology/talking points can change with a shake of a toy; of neither being conservative or liberal or even moderate, that he simply has no core belief and says whatever he needs to say at that moment to get what he wants.  Now he's trying to avoid responsibility for something that he claimed with pride back in 2002 to run for Governor, but now refuses to acknowledge as it's embarrassing as hell in 2012.

Now he's on record as being a liar, either lying in 2002 to get what he wanted (Governor of Massachusetts), or lying now in 2012 to get what he wants (President of the United States).

And making it worse for him is the fact that the campaign forms he signed to run for President in 2011 carry with them a penalty of perjury... which is a felony at the federal level.  How long will it take for someone in a position to do so file a criminal complaint to have his signed statements investigated?

These questions aren't going to go away with the next news cycle, Mitt.  If you don't answer, people will assume the worst.  Unless of course the answers are somehow worse...  In which case, the Republicans need to start looking for another candidate...

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Current Political Mood

I'm just not inclined to think much about politics these days.

Even with the sudden uptick in the Occupy Wall Street news - and the Far Right blowback to something that can successfully counter their Teabagger movement - for some reason I'm neither thrilled nor contemplative.

There's still a lot of protesting and military action going on in the Middle East for example.  Meh.

There's the economic meltdown in Europe still happening in slow motion.  Meh.

There's the anti-voting BS the Republicans are attempting at the state level to suppress minorities, the poor, and college-age voters.  Meh.

Just not feeling connected to the world at the moment, that's all.

Too much outrage burn-out?  Too much stress coping with unemployment?  Dunno...

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Fool me Thirty-Seven Times, It's Still SHAME ON YOU, You Crooked Bastards

Pretty much link to Digby about the Foreclosure Crisis (Part Thirty-Seven, Or Didn't We Just Have a Problem With Banks Just Two Years Ago?):

...So I'm listening to Andrea Mitchell and Jim Cramer explain the Foreclosure Fraud Crisis as they wail and rend their garments about how terrible it will be for just everyone if these poor banks are held responsible for this problem because the whole economy will implode.

That's nonsense. People should go to directly jail at this point, do not pass go. The real estate market is still officially fucked and while everyone wants it to "find its bottom" coddling the big financial institutions and their crooked subsidiaries and contractors has not worked all that well for average Americans at any point in this ongoing crisis (or for Democrats for that matter.) The only people who are benefiting from the capitulation to the Big Money Boyz's threats and hoary predictions on this one are the Big Money Boyz and the GOP. The economy still sucks and will continue to suck until the incentives for this criminal behavior and self-destructive malfeasance are stopped...

Even those with good motives among the powers-that-be (and there's reason to be suspicious about many of them) continue to believe they can finesse this problem with band-aids or superficial remedies to keep the rubes quiet until the invisible hand fixes everything. They are petrified in the meantime that unless they give the oligarchs what they want, they will pull the plug and then where will we be?

This is magical thinking. There is not going to be any easy way out of this. The invisible hand may be working but it often works on a very, very long timeline and many bad things can happen to a society while it does its thing. Meanwhile, every incantation and folk medicine they've applied to this problem has resulted in another round of infection. It's time to open up the wound and completely clean it out. The patient will heal much faster and it's far less likely to die in the meantime...

...As I wrote yesterday, these banks are once again holding the country hostage with their threats that if anything should be done about their criminality they'll blow up the whole damned place. Well, they already are ---- in slow motion. If we want to find a "bottom" to this market, they need to institute a serious cram-down program to help real people work out these messed up mortgages instead of allowing the banks fix their balance sheets through fraud and the market to stabilize by throwing people into the streets. It's not working.

And everybody needs to stop worrying about the moral hazard of letting average people off the hook for their mortgages and worry a little bit more about the moral hazard of continually allowing these huge financial institutions to get away with murder...

This is the result of decades of failing to hold people accountable for their actions... the slow, inexorable end to oversight... the unwillingness by those in a position to stop the reckless and criminal all because of the glorified concept of "Free-market"... the foolishness of those who pursued their greed and ambitions without recognizing the damage done the last time we let this happen, and their open disdain of the New Deal policies put in place to make sure those damaging acts never happened again.

That saying "Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice, shame on me" is only partially correct.  We've been fooled, again and again by The Geniuses Of Capitalism, the CEOs and Financial "Wizards" of Wall Street, into thinking that they held all the answers and had all the skills to make everyone and everything better by their guiding hands.  But we're not the ones who committed the crimes and fooled the people day in and day out: that's still THEIR fault and those CEOs and banking "wizards" need to answer for their crimes.  We're only to blame if we let them go.  AGAIN.

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