Romney, the rich and the delicate politics of wealth and class

If I had parked my earnings offshore and parceled the rest in tax shelters, I'd be a part of as rich as Mitt, too.

What dark secrets are contained in Mitt Romney's tax returns?

Why is he desperately keeping the record hidden?

Does he expect he can petulantly stonewall the American people and end the speculation?

He can end all the controversy by releasing everything he released to the John McCain campaign in 2008 when he auditioned for Vice President.

Yet he continues to hide? Why?

JFK, was rich, John Kerry is rich, and parks his boat in another state so he can save on tax payments. We are not rich, but you can bet we take advantage of every write off. The Government squanders all the tax money you give them so it is better that you give tham as little as possible.

Lance Winslow wrote:

If I had parked my earnings offshore and parceled the rest in tax shelters, I'd be a part of as rich as Mitt, too.

Never happen.

You aren't smart enough.

Obama and Romney are Millionaires. Warrren Buffet is a Billionaire. Success is Suddenly a problem for certain Ugly Democrats.

Obama has a Mansion in Chicago. Obama is a Millionaire yet no one wants to be like him because he's a disgusting person that continues trying to divide the country. Hitler would be proud of Barack Hussein Obama.

PooPoo Platter wrote:

What dark secrets are contained in Mitt Romney's tax returns?
Why is he desperately keeping the record hidden?
Does he expect he can petulantly stonewall the American people and end the speculation?
He can end all the controversy by releasing everything he released to the John McCain campaign in 2008 when he auditioned for Vice President.
Yet he continues to hide? Why?

Kindergarten records
Punahou school records
Occidental College records
Columbia University records
Columbia thesis
Harvard Law School records
Harvard Law Review articles
Scholarly articles from the University of Chicago
Passport(s)
Medical records
Files from his years as an Illinois state senator
Illinois State Bar Association records
Any baptism records
Obama/Dunham marriage license
Obama/Dunham divorce documents
Soetoro/Dunham marriage license
Adoption records

We'll trade ya!! LMAO

Why does anyone even listen to the MSM anymore? Skewed polls, political agendas, false info, and arrogant elitists. Mitt Romney is a decent man, a wonderful father and grandfather. Plus he has more business experience than the entire White House staff. The MSM should be ashamed, but people without souls feel no shame.

A top priority was figuring out how to rope in major Wall Street donors who supported Obama in 2008 but weren’t committed to big fund-raising roles in 2012 — people like Hamilton E. James, the billionaire president and chief operating officer of the private-equity firm Blackstone; and Eric Mindich, a former Goldman Sachs whiz kid who went on to start his own hedge fund. Mitt Romney’s campaign had already poached the investor Peter W. May and the hedge-fund titan Paul Tudor Jones, who in 2007 held a 500-person Greenwich, Conn., fund-raiser for Obama with George Soros. The Obama team wanted to avoid more high-profile defections.

“You call some people on Wall Street up, and they’re undecided,” one Obama bundler said.“They’re ‘waiting for clarity’— that’s the term they use. Or they say the administration ‘hasn’t led sufficiently’ on an issue.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/magazine/ob...

One day in late October, Jim Messina, Obama’s campaign manager, slipped into the Regency Hotel in New York and walked up to a second-floor meeting room reserved by his aides. More than 20 of Obama’s top donors and fund-raisers, many of them from the financial industry, sat in leather chairs around a granite conference table.

Messina told them he had a problem: New York City and its suburbs, Obama’s top source of money in 2008, were behind quota.

He needed their help bringing the financial community back on board.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/magazine/ob...

Curtis Lowe wrote:

Why does anyone even listen to the MSM anymore? Skewed polls, political agendas, false info, and arrogant elitists. Mitt Romney is a decent man, a wonderful father and grandfather. Plus he has more business experience than the entire White House staff. The MSM should be ashamed, but people without souls feel no shame.

"If you don't have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from."
--Barack Obama, 2008

For the next hour, the donors relayed to Messina what their friends had been saying. They felt unfairly demonized for being wealthy. They felt scapegoated for the recession. It was a few weeks into the Occupy Wall Street movement, with mass protests against the 1 percent springing up all around the country, and they blamed the president and his party for the public’s nasty mood.

The administration had created a hostile environment for job creators. Indeed! Hence the economic stall.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/magazine/ob...

For most of the last two decades, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, the financial world has split its donations between the two parties.

But Obama far outraised his Republican rival, John McCain, on Wall Street — around $16 million to $9 million — and Goldman Sachs executives sent Obama more money than employees of any other company in the world.

One former supporter, Dan Loeb, compared Obama to Nero; the president’s enemies insinuated worse.

In 2010, Stephen A. Schwarzman, a founder of Blackstone, said that an Obama proposal to raise taxes on “carried interest”— the main source of income for most private-equity managers — reminded him of “when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.”

Is it any wonder that the Obama team has already held more major fund-raisers than George W. Bush did during the entire 2004 campaign?

Several of the president’s advisers feared the truth would radiate into the broader business community, driving the narrative that Obama was anti-business.

In early February, Messina traveled to New York again to meet with 30 or so Obama supporters at the Core Club, a members-only establishment in Midtown that caters to the hedge-fund crowd. In a brief presentation, Messina thanked those who had been supportive, described the campaign’s plans for 2012 and offered his impressions of the president’s likely opponent, Romney. According to several people in the room, he closed with an appeal to the executives for help, asking them to consider signing on as hosts for the small dinner, now scheduled for March 1 (they had just locked in that date).“We want it to be a big success,” Messina told the room.

Mindich, the former Goldman whiz kid, had a question. If Romney were the nominee, Mindich asked, how would the Obama campaign go after him? Would it attack his record at Bain Capital? Would it attack the private-equity industry?

Near him sat Blackstone’s James, who, just a few weeks earlier, had called attacks on private equity “vicious ... inaccurate and unfair.” Mindich and James are friends, and some in the room speculated that Mindich’s question was for James’s benefit.

Our target, Messina assured the room, would be Mitt Romney and his record, not the private-equity industry. But the campaign, he added, couldn’t control what the president’s surrogates — like Priorities USA — might do.

In other words, Messina lied givent he fact that Obama had always planned on using whatever divisive means were necessary to smear his opponent.

Just as disturbing has been Obama's Helter Skellter personality. His previous quotes coming back to haunt him...

"If you don't have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from."
--Barack Obama, 2008

Hollywood, a reliable source of Democratic campaign cash, was looming larger in Obama’s fund-raising calculations. So were tech entrepreneurs and gay donors.

Sure enough, the host list for the March 1 event was changing shape. A dinner that had been aimed chiefly at Wall Streeters was now being branded as an “Eveolution” event, one that would demonstrate Obama’s support for Gay Marriage. Sally Susman, a top executive at Pfizer and a prominent fund-raiser in the gay community, came on board as a host.

Like all the high-ranking volunteers in Obama’s fund-raising efforts, the hosts were e-mailed weekly talking points from the campaign and could request memos on specific issues as needed.

At another table, the president recognized Jeffrey R. Gural, a real estate developer and major Democratic donor. The two had spoken around Christmas, when Obama, who had planned to be in Hawaii but was kept in Washington because of payroll-tax negotiations, called Gural to thank him for his support. Gural introduced him to his wife, Paula, and told the president how much he appreciated his phone call.

Gural was upset about the Republicans’ resistance to the president’s tax proposal — but he was also concerned about the White House’s messaging.“If you ask someone coming out of Grand Central Station if they’ve had their taxes lowered, none of them would believe it,” Gural said.

At about 7:30, Obama left the room for a private meeting with a few aides and one of the hosts, UBS’s Robert Wolf. About an hour later, he re-emerged to speak to the crowd at the gala next door. By 9:30, he was on his way to a dessert event on the Upper East Side — his 100th major fund-raiser of the campaign. In just one night, he raised more than $5 million. It was nearly a one-day record, enough to put New York back on track for its fund-raising quota.

With Obama, it's all about the money. Give it to him and he's your faux friend.

Obama still flush with cash from financial sector

President Obama has still managed to raise far more money this year from the financial and banking sector than Mitt Romney according to new fundraising data.

Obama’s key advantage over the GOP is the ability to collect bigger checks because he raises money for both his own campaign committee and for the Democratic National Committee, which will aid in his reelection effort.

As a result, Obama has brought in more money from employees of banks, hedge funds and other financial service companies than all of the GOP candidates combined, according to a Washington Post analysis of contribution data. The numbers show that Obama retains a persistent reservoir of support among Democratic financiers.


Obama collected $76,600 from Bain Capital employees through September — and he needed only three donors to do it.

How does that happen without Obama breaking the Law?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obama-...