Romney the debt maker

It would be a very different world if you or I could borrow money, put a big chunk of what we borrowed in an bank account in the Cayman Islands or Switzerland, and then stick someone else with the debt. That's what Mitt Romney did.

You see, Bain Capital was a mechanism for Romney to make himself and his "NASCAR team owning" buddies and the tax dodgers he advised very, very rich. The essence of the Bain Scheme was to borrow a lot of money to buy a company, saddle the company with the debt while paying himself big fees and then walk away.

Here is a wonderful analysis of this "business" plan. Thank god most of his investments missed Oregon, though Bain is investing in hospitals and Romney still gets money from Bain.

Sometimes things worked out, like the company Staples. Sometimes what happened is a lot of American workers lost their jobs and the companies went bankrupt.

While Romney raked in a cool quarter billion dollars. And it is likely he raked in a lot of money from Goldman Sachs and others that were getting bailed out by our tax dollars. A transfer from Main Street to Wall Street to Bain Street!

We don't know. Romney is hiding that information. Why? Because there is something to hide.

Does anyone, anyone, really think this man of piercing ambition, who has and will say anything to anybody to get elected, would not release his tax returns if they validated his argument that he should be president?

Not bloody likely.

Jail the Bankers

Look, take exception to the source, if you want. But read it. Then this.

Then download the report itself. Just Google: Wall Street and the Financial Crisis: Anatomy of a Financial Collapse. It was written by a bipartisan Senate committee.

Okay, you don't have to read all 650 pages of that. But download it anyway, so that when someone spouts off that it's just Rolling Stone or The New York Times, you can prove it is far more than that.

Lloyd Blankfein and Daniel Sparks and David Viniar and Thomas Montag should be given their day in court. If 12 of their peers determine they should go free, that's fine, then free they should be. But America needs them to stand trial.

Do this despite your temptation to give in to causistry, your desire to bury outrage by pretending 'it's impossible to know" and "in whose opinion?" Or worse, "It's just too hard."

C'mon, get off your ass and be an informed citizen, just like Thomas Jefferson said. That does not mean Fox News. There is such a thing as truth. Do what you need to do to learn what that is in the "market place of ideas." It's your job as a citizen, and you have been underemployed for too long.

Read it, do a little more digging, and form your own opinion. Then do something. But don't ignore it. You have ignored it for too damn long, and look where we are today because of that.