Mitt Romney for President of the Cayman Islands

In his blog on Vanity Fair, James Wolcott recommended the blockbuster investigative report by Nicholas Shaxon about the untold millions salted away in offshore accounts by Republican presidential candidate Millionaire Mitt Romney.

Excerpts form Shaxon's report:

• As Newt Gingrich put it during the primary season, “I don’t know of any American president who has had a Swiss bank account.” But Romney has, as well as other interests in such tax havens as Bermuda and the Cayman Islands.

• Bain Capital is the heart of Romney’s fortune: it was the financial engine that created it. The mantra of his campaign is that he was a businessman who created tens of thousands of jobs, and Bain certainly did bring useful operational skills to many companies it bought. But his critics point to several cases where Bain bought companies, loaded them with debt, and paid itself extravagant fees, thereby bankrupting the companies and destroying tens of thousands of jobs.

• A full 55 pages in Romney's 2010 return are devoted to reporting his transactions with foreign entities. “What Romney does not get,” says Jack Blum, a veteran Washington lawyer and offshore expert, “is that this stuff is weird.”

• A $3 million Swiss bank account appeared in the 2010 returns, then winked out of existence in 2011 after the trustee closed it...Ed Kleinbard, a professor of tax law at the University of Southern California, says the Swiss account “has political but not tax-policy resonance,” since it—like many other Romney investments—constituted a bet against the U.S. dollar, an odd thing for a presidential candidate to do. The Obama campaign provided a helpful world map pointing to the tax havens Bermuda, Luxembourg, and the Cayman Islands, where Romney and his family have assets, each with the tagline “Value: not disclosed in tax returns.”

Read Nicholas Shaxon's blockbuster article, Where the Money Lives in the August 2012 issue of Vanity Fair.

Read the Associated Press article published in the Washington Post on July 4, 2012, entitled, Mystery Bermuda-based company and other undisclosed Romney assets hint at larger wealth.

Jagor's comment:

After reading the above articles, I concluded that Millionaire Mitt Romney is running for president of the wrong country; with all the millions of dollars he's got stashed away in the Cayman Islands, he should running for president of the Cayman Islands, not the  United States of America.

Millionaire Mitt Romney could follow the precedent set by a sleazy Texan plutocrat named "Sir" Allen Stanford, who embezzled billions of dollars out of naive, middle-class Americans and virtually bought the island of Antigua, in the Leewards [Antigua is one of the 47 countries around the world that Jagor has visited].  Stanford is currently in prison serving a 110-year sentence for cheating investors out of more than $7 billion over 20 years in one of the largest Ponzi schemes in U.S. history.

The simplistic and pathetic rebuttal of Millionaire Mitt's apologists that "it's legal" to stash away untold millions in foreign offshore tax havens doesn't hold water.

I have often written that something may be legal but it may also be immoral or unethical.  The defenders of Millionaire Mitt's tax avoidance should be reminded reminded that slavery was perfectly legal, although immoral and unethical, until the 13th Amendment in 1865.

Therefore it may currently be legal for Millionaire Mitt Romeny to stash millions and millions of dollars abroad in order to avoid paying his fair share of taxes. [He only paid a tax rate of around15% in 2010 as indicated by his income tax delcaration for that year--the only income tax return he has ever released; that's about half the rate most middle-class Americans are paying to Uncle Sam.]

And it may not be aginst the law for Millionaire Mitt Romney to lack sufficient faith in the American economy that he doesn't want to keep his money in his own country.  But But it sure isn't ethical--or patriotic. And it's not even intelligent for a man who is running for the presidency of the United States.  In fact, it's weird.

By contrast, Republican Richard M. Nixon released  all his financial records when he was running for president against John F. Kennedy in 1960--all his income tax returns, all his assets and liabilities, all of it.

 When the American people figure out that Millionaire Mitt Romney has perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars stashed in tax havens all over the planet, they are going to want to send him a one-way ticket not to the White House but to one of those tax havens.

My recommendation is that he gets a one-way ticket to George Town, the capital of the Cayman Islands.  And I'll be glad to contribute to the cost of his airfare.

I'm sure Millionaire Mitt Romney has anough money to buy all the votes necessary to insure him the presidency of that island territory.

Jagor