Guest View: Show me the money!

On August 9th, 1974, President Richard Nixon resigned. (After a bipartisan vote of the House Judiciary Committee to impeach “Tricky Dick”.) Then the newly-elected Miss Oklahoma visited Washington. Asked if she’d seen the Senate Office Building (“the S.O.B.”) yet, “Miss O” innocently replied, “Oh – is Nixon still in town?”
Speaking of “tricky’, this July 16th, the Senate minority “filibustered” the D.I.S.C.L.O.S.E. Act. That “Senate rule” that’s not in the Constitution meant a 53-45 majority (on, sadly, a party-line vote) couldn’t pass a law to make secretive groups identify who invests a tax-deductible $10,000 or more to elect “the best politicians money can buy”. Those so-called “social welfare” groups include a $300 million fund run by the strategist they call “Bush’s Brain” (- a nickname some folks wouldn’t brag about.)
That vote proves the old saying about “statutory immunity from prosecution”: the obstructionists “write the statutes so they get immunity from prosecution.” Maybe they didn’t want to bunk @ Club Fed with that congressman who was busted with stacks of cash in his freezer. (“Nothing talks like cold, hard cash.”) But our republic won’t work if it doesn’t say, (as Tom Cruise, playing the conscience-plagued sports agent “Jerry McGuire”, dutifully yelled into the phone for his only faithful client), “Show me the (tax-deductible secret donation) money!”
And speaking of money, no wonder Wall Street’s sidewalk pastures a bronze statue of a stampeding, out-of-control “bull”. Having “the best government money can buy” has guaranteed “under-regulated Wall Street” scandals since 1929’s stock market crash and the 1980’s savings and loan collapse.
For example, “LIBOR” (London InterBank Offered Rate) was rigged. $800 trillion of “paper (your mortgage) or plastic” (your credit cards) may be anchored to it. But bankers conspired to lie about LIBOR’s “rate at which banks loan each other money” – so that LIBOR was whatever would keep the “bankers behaving badly’s” champagne corks flying the highest that day.
Then there’s “Rategate”. The Mafia used to rig bids on public contracts. Then Wall Street did. President Obama’s Justice Department recently convicted bankers of cheating taxpayers by conspiring to rig interest rates banks bid to pay government bodies like school districts, cities and counties. (For depositing the not-yet-spent money those bodies raised issuing, say, school, highway or courthouse construction bonds.)
Then there’s Wells Fargo’s $175 million settlement this month for race-based overcharging of mortgage applicants – one tip of the mortgage industry’s titanic, economy-sinking iceberg. Economists define “recessions” as six months or more of negative growth which usually lasts less than a year. But recovery from “financial panics” like Hoover’s 1929 stock market crash or Bush’s 2008 junk mortgage-securities crash takes about 10 years.
And compare President Truman’s responsible “The buck stops here” to Governor Romney’s “My bucks stop there” – in Romney’s “Bermuda Triangle”, where money disappears into Bermuda’s secret accounts.
“I (Romney) paid my taxes, and not a penny more.” Then why did his sworn Securities Exchange Commission reports show $100,000 or more a year (from companies he owned) as his worked-for “ordinary income”? (Which we working stiffs pay a lot higher tax rate on than the 15% “capital gains” rate he normally claims.) Unless Romney wasn’t really in a “passive-investor coma” those years that he made obscene profits by pocketing job-promoting government subsidies and “corporate welfare”, then firing those American workers and raiding their pension and health care funds. (Funds which we taxpayers then had to bail out.)
In 1998, Romney breathed almost $15 million of life into a Communist Chinese startup whose “business plan” was to ship existing American jobs to Red China. (Before 1999, the year he now claims that, contrary to his sworn S.E.C. filings, he, like Pontius Pilate, “washed his hands” of his still-wholly-owned company’s mutation from “venture capitalism” to “vulture cannibalism”.)
Please, Governor, as Republican strategists are chorusing, why not let us peek at those 23 years of tax returns you gave Senator McCain’s V.P.-selection team in 2008? (Or is that why McCain picked Sarah Palin over you?)
(It’s true that Romney refuses to “fashion police” (criticize) Ralph Lauren’s polo player designer-emblem’s replacing the American flag on the U.S. Olympic Team’s uniforms. Or the fact that they’re “Made in Red China”. But to be fair, that polo player was not really modeled after Mitt astride his prancing $77,000 a year “dressage” horse. And Romney did not really name his hay-burner “Hobby-loss Carry-forward Future Tax Write-off” – except in the one year’s incomplete tax return he’s let us peek at.)
Romney’s YouTube video-dodging of the latest tax and vulture cannibalism charges begins with “My goodness!” But “my goodness”, Mr. Romney – won’t they keep calling you “the new Nixon” and “Tricky Mitt” as long as you keep dodging tax questions (about your scandalous profits and teeny-weeny tax bills?) Because goodness, Governor, you’re making your megabucks look like – (as movie sexpot Mae West confessed to a starlet who gushed, “Goodness, what beautiful diamonds!”) – “Goodness had nothing to do with it!”
Karen and Tom Lantz live in Hollister.