An investigative piece in the Boston GLobe by Beth Healy and Michael Kranish pretty much shreds the claim that Mittens had nothing to do with Bain Capital after 1999.

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.

Yes, this article documents that Mittens kept the CEO title not because he thought he might come back after the Olympics, but so he could squeeze the biggest possible severance package out of the company.

Other must-reads — Ryan Grim and Zach Carter, “Mitt Romney Avoided Major Tax Hit By Shifting Stock Of Offshoring Firm”

Paul Krugman, “Pathos of the Plutocrat“

Mittens keeps saying he has released his 2010 returns. But Josh Marshall notes the returns are missing his FBARs — Form TD F 90-22.1, Report of Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts.

Back in 2009, the IRS instituted a major tax amnesty program for folks who had previously secreted money in Swiss and other offshore banks. The amnesty stemmed from a settlement the US government had reached with UBS that year. Those who came forward voluntarily in the prescribed period of time could pay their back taxes, pay their fines but avoid any criminal penalties.

So, did Romney or anyone acting on his behalf or for some entity he controlled take advantage of the 2009 UBS amnesty program? You’ll note the reporter’s question flagged above asked if all FBARs were filed “in a timely fashion.” Malt didn’t address that part of the question. He just said all had been filed. So in addition to the question of the amnesty, were FBARs retroactively filed?

Given the radioactive-ness of the whole Swiss bank account issue I’m a little surprised that this whole thing hasn’t gotten more attention. And I’m also surprised since to the best of my knowledge — hard to prove a negative — Romney or his representatives have never been asked whether he took advantage of the amnesty program.

There are other possibilities — read Josh Marshall’s post for details.

It’s what she said:

Ann Romney dismissed concerns about her husband’s tax returns Thursday, contending that the two of them have “given all you people need to know.”

“You know, you should really look at where Mitt has led his life, and where he’s been financially,” the potential first lady said on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” “He’s a very generous person. We give 10 percent of our income to our church every year. Do you think that is the kind of person who is trying to hide things, or do things? No. He is so good about it. Then, when he was governor of Massachusetts, didn’t take a salary for four years.”

“We’ve given all you people need to know and understand about our financial situation and how we live our life,” she added later.

Charles Pierce:

Excuse me?

“You people”?

(Let us pause now to speculate on the megatonnage of faux-outrage that would be unleashed if Michelle Obama referred to the rest of us as “you people.” Fifteen more milligrams, and Rush’d be on the moon.)

Tell me again that this whole political mess isn’t about the fact that Willard doesn’t think conventional rules apply to him, that he never has thought conventional rules applied to him, and that he doesn’t go to bed every night cursing the Founders for not making the presidency a legacy position.

The Politico article linked at the top of the post says that Mormons are required to give ten percent of their income to the Church. Is there any indication that the Romneys support any other nonprofit or charity? Not that I’ve seen.

And I think Charles Pierce is right that Romney doesn’t think the rules apply to him. In all the speculating about what Mittens might be hiding in his tax returns, I want to add one more possibility — that he isn’t hiding anything that we already don’t know or suspect. He just doesn’t think his money is anybody else’s business. A Huffington Post report by Ryan Grim and Abby Hunstman seems to support that conclusion.

Mitt Romney has been determined to resist releasing his tax returns at least since his bid for Massachusetts governor in 2002 and has been confident that he will never be forced to do so, several current and former Bain executives tell The Huffington Post. Had he thought otherwise, say the sources based on their longtime understanding of Romney, he never would have gone forward with his run for president.

Bain executives say they’ve been instructed to keep company and Romney-specific information completely confidential, tightening the lockdown on an already closed company.

Marty Kaplan says it’s not the tax returns; it’s the arrogance.

Romney reeks of entitlement. He thinks it’s up to him to decide whether his financial life should be transparent. It doesn’t even occur to him that he owes this to voters — that it’s an obligation, not an option.

Mr. and Mrs. Mittens seem to think they are entitled to live in the White House just because, and they don’t have to explain why we should trust them. Mittens doesn’t even think he has to present a coherent plan that explains how he intends to govern. We’re just suppose to be able to tell that he’s the superior candidate, somehow.

Mittens gives me the willies.

Great white bwana Mitt Romney wants us to know that his tax returns have lots and lots of pages and we simple natives probably can’t understand them. When asked about his tax returns by a hack writing a puff piece for National Review, he said,

My tax returns that have already been released number into the hundreds of pages. And we will be releasing tax returns for the most current year as soon as those are prepared. They will also number in the hundreds of pages. In the political environment that exists today, the opposition research of the Obama campaign is looking for anything they can use to distract from the failure of the president to reignite our economy. And I’m simply not enthusiastic about giving them hundreds or thousands of more pages to pick through, distort, and lie about.

Ooo, that Obama is so mean. And he plays rough. And Mittens is just so tired of having to deal with the little people and their little issues about tax returns.

See also the Booman.

About the only part of Mitt Romney’s resume that isn’t being publicly trashed at the moment is his gig at the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics. But that could change.

Charles “he da man” Pierce points to a 2001 Sports Illustrated article that explains how the 2002 Olympics turned into a big, fat pork pie for a few Utah businessmen:

Is this a great country or what? A millionaire developer wants a road built, the federal government supplies the cash to construct it. A billionaire ski-resort owner covets a choice piece of public land. No problem. The federal government arranges for him to have it. Some millionaire businessmen stand to profit nicely if the local highway network is vastly improved. Of course. The federal government provides the money.

How can you get yours, you ask? Easy. Just help your hometown land the Olympics. Then, when no one’s looking, persuade the federal government to pay for a good chunk of the Games, including virtually any project to which the magic word Olympics can be attached.

For the past few years, while attention was focused on the Great Olympic Bribery Scandal—in which Salt Lake City boosters dispensed as much as $7 million in gifts, travel, scholarships, medical care, jobs and other goodies to IOC members (and their relatives and companions) to ensure that Utah’s capital city would be chosen to host the 2002 Winter Games—private and public interests have siphoned an estimated $1.5 billion out of the U.S. Treasury, all in the name of those same Olympics.

To be fair, Mittens is only mentioned twice in the article.

This is not to say that the recipients are unappreciative. Mitt Romney, SLOC’s president, has acknowledged the U.S. government’s contribution by saying, “We couldn’t have done it without them. These are America’s Games.” …

… Security is costing you about $240 million. Given the events of Sept. 11, few people would quibble with so large an outlay even though it’s a 150% increase over the federal tab for safeguarding the Atlanta Gaines, which had twice as many venues and four times as many athletes to protect. What’s surprising is that $200 million of this was approved before Sept. 11. Less than 24 hours before the attacks, in fact, Romney was in Washington seeking $12.7 million to cover a portion of salaries and expenses for Utah police who will be involved in Games security.

One of the major recipients of federal largesse named in the article is Robert Earl Holding. Holding is an oil billionaire who owns a resort that was the site of several ski events. Last February the Dems accused Mitt of cronyism regarding his ties to Holding, and at the time it didn’t make much of a splash. But maybe it’s time to trot it out again. I found this little snip from February about Holding at Forbes, of all places —

And now Mitt Romney, about to celebrate the 10th anniversary of his leadership of the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics, is being accused of cronyism.

Politico notes that one of the biggest players in the 2002 games was Idaho billionaire Robert Earl Holding.

Holding owns Snowbasin, a Utah resort that served as the venue for many 2002 events, including the men’s and women’s downhill races. He also held a seat on the Salt Lake Olympics Organizing Committee.

Politico points out that Holding was kicked off the board at Romney’s request. Romney continued to back him, however, saying he had done nothing wrong.

Holding, in turn, has backed Romney, contributing $9,600 to his campaigns in the past five years and co-hosting a fundraiser in 2011.

This is from Politico:

Romney helped out cronies and at least one campaign donor. One of the biggest players in the games was Utah oil and real estate magnate Robert Earl Holding, who sat on Romney’s Olympic board — while also garnering a $14 million contract for from the committee for use of his ski resort in downhill events.

Holding’s project, Snowbasin, also reportedly benefited from earmarks for road improvements, and a controversial land-swap deal that Romney helped push for.

Holding was eventually booted off the board by then Utah-Gov. Michael Leavitt — at Romney’s request. But he defended Holding’s honor, saying the businessman “hadn’t done anything inappropriate.”

He’s also publicly claimed that such “conflicts of interests” were a natural part of business and only wrong if those involved didn’t recuse themselves from discussion of their own projects.

Holding, incidentally, has contributed $9,600 to Romney’s campaigns since ’07 and co-hosted a fundraiser for Romney in Ketchum, Idaho last summer.

John McCain, now a Romney man, slammed the Holding-Olympics axis a decade ago as part of his anti-earmarks crusade.

“It’s one thing to rip off the taxpayers… but then you also enrich developers for tens of millions more through land swaps and building roads for them,” McCain told NPR in 2003, “referring to Holding,” according to the network.

Mittens, of course, is now lamely accusing President Obama of “crony capitalism.”

Must-read article at Bloomberg by Anthony Luzzatto Gardner:

What’s clear from a review of the public record during his management of the private-equity firm Bain Capital from 1985 to 1999 is that Romney was fabulously successful in generating high returns for its investors. He did so, in large part, through heavy use of tax-deductible debt, usually to finance outsized dividends for the firm’s partners and investors. When some of the investments went bad, workers and creditors felt most of the pain. Romney privatized the gains and socialized the losses.

What’s less clear is how his skills are relevant to the job of overseeing the U.S. economy, strengthening competitiveness and looking out for the welfare of the general public, especially the middle class.

What particularly good about this is that it focuses on the period before 1999, when Mittens was, unambiguously, in charge. For example:

In 1992, Bain Capital bought American Pad & Paper by financing 87 percent of the purchase price. In the next three years, Ampad borrowed to make acquisitions, repay existing debt and pay Bain Capital and its investors $60 million in dividends.

As a result, the company’s debt swelled from $11 million in 1993 to $444 million by 1995. The $14 million in annual interest expense on this debt dwarfed the company’s $4.7 million operating cash flow. The proceeds of an initial public offering in July 1996 were used to pay Bain Capital $48 million for part of its stake and to reduce the company’s debt to $270 million.

From 1993 to 1999, Bain Capital charged Ampad about $18 million in various fees. By 1999, the company’s debt was back up to $400 million. Unable to pay the interest costs and drained of cash paid to Bain Capital in fees and dividends, Ampad filed for bankruptcy the following year. Senior secured lenders got less than 50 cents on the dollar, unsecured lenders received two- tenths of a cent on the dollar, and several hundred jobs were lost. Bain Capital had reaped capital gains of $107 million on its $5.1 million investment.

Gardner has several other examples of Romney playing casino capitalism. This is the guy who would be good for the U.S. economy?

Add to that the fact that Mittens wants to cut taxes on the wealthy even more but raise them on lower income folks. It’s like he wants to do to America what he did to American Pad & Paper — borrow money to pay the guys at the top, and let everyone else suffer. And polls suggest increasing numbers of Americans realize they are permanently stuck among “everyone else” and have no hope of every being wealthy themselves.

Paul Krugman argues that this election really does boil down to a battle between the rich versus the rest:

he story so far: Former President George W. Bush pushed through big tax cuts heavily tilted toward the highest incomes. As a result, taxes on the very rich are currently the lowest they’ve been in 80 years. President Obama proposes letting those high-end Bush tax cuts expire; Mr. Romney, on the other hand, proposes big further tax cuts for the wealthy.

The impact at the top would be large. According to estimates by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, the Romney plan would reduce the annual taxes paid by the average member of the top 1 percent by $237,000 compared with the Obama plan; for the top 0.1 percent that number rises to $1.2 million. No wonder Mr. Romney’s fund-raisers in the Hamptons attracted so many eager donors that there were luxury-car traffic jams.

What about everyone else? Again according to the policy center, Mr. Romney’s tax cuts would increase the annual deficit by almost $500 billion. He claims that he would make this up by closing loopholes, in a way that wouldn’t shift the tax burden toward the middle class — but he has refused to give any specifics, and there’s no reason to believe him. Realistically, those big tax cuts for the rich would be offset, sooner or later, with higher taxes and/or lower benefits for the middle class and the poor.

But it’s also the case that most American voters aren’t aware of Mittens’s specific proposals yet, or what they would do to the deficit and to their pocketbook. Krugman goes on to argue that in today’s media environment, when most people are never given straight facts, ragging Romney about his Bain record is about “the only way to bring real policy issues into focus.”

Josh Marshall explains why now is exactly the right time to hammer Mittens with his Bain Capital background.

But beyond all the specific accusations, they’re [the Obama campaign] painting a picture that makes Romney look ridiculous, like a joke. They’re making Romney look stupid and powerless on the front where he believes he’s one of the standouts of his generation. And that’s plain lethal for a presidential candidate.

But how does it come into play? Simple. Mitt Romney has two claims on the presidency: successful governor of major state and captain of industry. He’s largely written off the first by disavowing a genuine and perhaps far-reaching accomplishment: health care reform. Which leaves him with Bain Capital.

The play here is to make this swirl of awfulness the first thing people think of when that phrase gets uttered.

Think about it this: when do you think the next time will be that Romney talks about Bain Capital on the stump? What will people be thinking about when the 15 minute convention video about Romney’s life gets to the part about Bain capital? The Obama camp is working to build a mental roadblock in front of any persuasive discussion of Romney’s professional life, something which should be the major predicate of his whole campaign. They’re not quite there yet. But they’re getting close.

Mistermix asks the question — what does Romney have left to run on? The two major pillars of his biography — being governor of Massachusetts and being a successful CEO of Bain Capital — are out of play, or nearly so. What’s he got left?

The Romney campaign’s big counter-offensive today is to accuse the President of cronyism. Per Steve M., not even Cokie Roberts thinks that will work. And lawsy, when an empty-suit elitist loses Cokie, he should be very afraid.

This is brilliant — Ed Gillespie, a senior campaign advisor for Mitt Romney, said on Meet the Press today that Mittens retired retroactively from Bain in 1999.

He actually retired retroactively at that point. He ended up not going back to the firm after his time in Salt Lake City. So he was actually retired from Bain.

This is something like a Catholic marriage annulment, yes? You can be married for 20 years, then the Church declares that the marriage never happened.

The Bain flap really is pulling the rug out from under Romney, since his plan was to run on his business experience. He didn’t want to run on his record as governor — there’s that “Romneycare” thing he doesn’t want to talk about — so he was going to play big shot business guy. And that’s being yanked out from under him. This is not to say the GOP won’t be able to patch together another run for Mittens to stand on. But, really, the day when CEOs were looked at as demigods is long passed.

See also Krugman, “No Bain, No Gain.”

So Mittens is going for the Clinton Defense, proclaiming firmly that he did not have sex with had no contact whatsoever with Bain Capital after 1999.

Lifted from the Maddow Blog, here are links to documents that say otherwise:

In Primary Debate, Romney Suggested He Was At Bain Until 2002

Executive Branch Personnel PUBLIC FINANCIAL DISCLOSURE REPORT (pdf)

Bain Capital Fund VI, L.P. Schedule 13D – May 2, 2000

Bain Capital Fund VI, L.P. Schedule 13D – February 11, 2001

Romney stayed longer at Bain

Massachusetts State Ethics Commission Statement of Financial Interests for Calendar Year 2002 (pdf)

Mitt Romney’s Own 2002 Testimony Undermines Bain Departure Claim

Sully: “How does Romney attend board meetings of Bain acquisitions, sign six filings on Bain acquisitions, get a six figure salary as an executive, list himself as sole owner and CEO with the SEC in these years, and insist he was not ‘involved in the operations of any Bain Capital entity in any way’?”

I say Bill Clinton was a lot more persuasive. You’ve got to be a natural-born charmer to get away with this kind of blatant lying, and Mittens ain’t that. Josh Marshall’s impression is that Mittens’s defense makes him look weak.

Even more remarkably, he picked yesterday to announce that he won’t be releasing any more tax returns after all. Nyah nyah nyah.

And even more weird, the Romney campaign says that the Obama campaign is unraveling. They are also “reckless and wild” and “scared to death.” Yeah, like Bugs Bunny was scared to death of Elmer Fudd.

David Weigel looks on in wonder at the degree to which the Romney camapaign is flat-out contradicting the documented record and even some of Mittens’s past statements about Bain Capital.

This is a truly bizarre scandal. At base, we’re seeing a candidate get shamed because he took a (paid) leave of absence in order to successfully turn around the Olympics. But the way he described that decision in his 2006 book Turnaround made it clear — he kept up some Bain Capital ties. “When I talked to my partners at Bain Capital,” he wrote, “I opined that it wouldn’t make sense for me to come back to the company at the end of my tenture at SLOC as I had following my [1994] campaign.” They disagreed and came to a different arrangement — not as much control as he’d retained in 1994, but not zero influence.

If only the campaign had explained this clearly. The reason that Romney’s having trouble escaping this language trap is that it was built and baited by hasty “war room” responses.

But even that explanation could be a lie, because it appears he intended to go back to Bain after the Salt Lake City Olympics but changed his mind in 2001.

As I said yesterday, if Mittens had chosen to defend Bain business practices rather than try to lie his way out of this, it possibly wouldn’t have hurt his campaign that much. But there’s so much blood in the water now even the candy-ass Dem sharks are smelling it.

Mittens has said he expected to be booed when he said he would repeal Obamacare.

Mitt Romney said Wednesday that he “expected” the negative response to his address earlier in the morning at the NAACP convention in Houston, where he was booed after vowing to repeal President Obama’s signature healthcare law.

“We expected that,” the presumptive GOP presidential nominee told Fox Business Network’s Neil Cavuto in a interview set to air later in the day. “I am going to give the same message to the NAACP that I give across the country, which is that ObamaCare is killing jobs, and if jobs is the priority, we are going to have to replace it with something that actually holds down healthcare costs, as opposed to something that causes more spending for the government and more spending for American families.”

Never mind there is no evidence “Obamacare” is “killing jobs”; never mind there is evidence it already is slowing the rise in health care costs and will save the taxpayer’s money — would it have killed him to say “Affordable Care Act” instead of “Obamacare”? It’s one thing to say he disagrees with the President’s policies, but outright ridicule is just asking for it. And of course, Mittens was asking for it.

He said later of his audience at the NAACP, “If they want more free stuff from the government, tell them to vote for the other guy.” Yeah, them black folks just want the government to take care of them. Where have we heard that before?

Even George W. Bush wasn’t that blatantly racist.

Update: Mittens lied about when he left Bain. Next: New reports say sky is blue, grass green.