or dogs Mitt called to Bain and said "fetch"

or had anything to do with the plant closings, he never asked a single question about where all the money was coming from! Sort of like a Mafia wife!

We're keeping the Repubs on defense. It helps that our claims are mostly factual, but we need to keep up the bad publicity directed towards them.

when he is trying to establish residency. Otherwise he wasn't running Bain when he was talking to the SEC, get it?

He was running Bain and all sorts of other companies they owned when he filed with the SEC.

When he filed with the FEC he forgot that he had filed with the SEC to the contrary.

The FEC form says "to the best of my knowledge" and we are talking about a man who can't remember how many houses he owns. Odds are pretty high that he wasn't involved in day to day activities at Bain, but does not want his base voters to know that he was the largest shareholder in a medical waste disposal company that incinerated foetuses as part of their business.

I believe that was what he was interested in hiding and this weird "active" or "not active" debate is a smoke screen to distract us from "legally responsible" which there is no question of.

It doesn't matter who was making the decisions--he signed forms that made them his responsibility.

All of the noise is about preventing the public from understanding that simple fact.

not to mention possible felony by claiming sole responsibility to SEC and no responsibility to FEC (?) during the same time period.

When we file our taxes and do not disclose any outside interests,we are libel under perjury laws for failing to disclose. How much more do we have to explain to people that this Rat broke the law. It does matter.

n

It is all about intent. The FEC does not care if the information is true and complete beyond "to the best of my knowledge."

It is only a crime if he intentionally made false statements. The FEC doesn't really go after that very often and they usually settle for some sort of civil penalty rather than turning it over to the DOJ.

One must remember The Republican Rule of Law--it is only illegal if they catch you. Otherwise it is just business.

Only 10 of the 77 largest companies Bain invested in made money for Bain. Of those 4 went bankrupt. Out of all of them 17 went bankrupt after Bain walked away from them. Bain restructured companies and laid off workers--any claim Romney makes about creating jobs is offset by the jobs he destroyed, but nobody has good numbers for either job creation or job destruction.

The current debate is about companies that moved jobs offshore while Bain owned them and whether or not Romney made those decisions himself or just rubber stamped them as CEO.

Oddly enough the outsourcing complaints do not yet include a subsidiary engaged in moving all of the big players in the computer industry to China. For some reason nobody has latched on to that, yet, but I'm sure they will sometime soon. The company moved none of its own jobs to China, but they helped companies like H-P and IBM move thousands of jobs there.

I think even if we factor that into Romney's outlandish claim of creating 100,000 jobs we would find that his career track record would leave him very much in the job destroyer category. Most of the 100,000 jobs he claims to have created were created by former Bain companies after Bain had ceased to manage them.

As a manager and investor Romney was clearly more lucky than good.

Romney created Bain, created the corporate culture of Bain, and appointed the managers who acted in his place according to his delegated authority and established policies. If Romney objected to what was being done in his name as CEO he could have intervened at any time. If he didn't make himself aware of what was being done in his name as CEO then he was negligent and nonetheless responsible. This is an important point. It doesn't matter whether he signed off on every deal since he was the titular head of Bain at the time.

There's no evidence one way or another that "as CEO he could have intervened at any time." Now, assumptions are nice and it's necessary to make them, but we should always be aware of our assumptions and how valid they are. That's something akin to rule 1 in critical thinking.

When Romney left for UT he had to delegate responsibility; in the many scores of reports that Bain had to file with the SEC in each of the years 1999, 2000, 2001, and 2002, his name shows up in perhaps a half dozen--I assume more have yet to be found, but odds are it's not going to be even a 10th of them. The terms of that delegation of authority might have allowed him to intervene or they might not. I'd assume "not" simply because many decisions are final once executed, and you don't want agreements and decisions to be held up while you consult with somebody 2000 miles away every day over minutiae. Moreover, if he had obligated elsewhere to not engage in management decisions at that level he'd be in breach of contract and possibly a felon if he intervened. Depends on the definitions and relevant regulations and laws. I've heard lots of politicians and pundits talking, but not so many securities lawyers, and even fewer that know anything about the relevant agreements.

In fact, the previous paragraph might be entirely pointless when it comes to offshoring. "Bain" had ownership but they were investing others' money, and various managing directors had control over specific companies that were bought out. This much we know fairly confidently. Bain would vote to buy a company, they'd have specific directors put on the company's board, and then the managers would manage. Bain had agreements with investors that covered some details, and directors had a lot of discretion. Exactly how much of the decision was "Bain level" and how much was up to the directors--many of whom were on comany boards of directors where Bain didn't have even a quarter of the stock--or how much of the decision was left up to the companies' management and not the companies' boards, even, is are open questions. Nobody wants to ask them because they don't have good answers and they only serve to blunt political claims based on silence and assumptions that we already know enough to poke holes in.