Friday, August 17, 2012

The Mitt Romney-Paul Ryan's Brother Money Connection

Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan's brother provide an object lesson on how crony capitalism is done,

Romney may have breached state ethics laws as Governor of Massachusetts by holding a stake in a company that did lucrative work for his administration and was linked to the family of Paul Ryan, according to the Daily Telegraph.

Imagitas, a marketing company, was contracted by the state of Massachusetts after receiving $5 million  investment from Bain Capital, Romney’s investment firm.

DT has learned that one of Paul Ryan's brothers, Tobin Ryan, is a former Bain consultant. Both Romney and Tobin Ryan apparently stood to benefit from the $230 million sale of the company in 2005, while Romney remained governor of Massachusetts.

Massachusetts law requires that all state employees divest themselves of financial interests in private sector contracts with state agencies. At the time, failure to do so could have resulted in a $2,000 fine or a 2.5-year prison sentence.

DT goes on:

The finding also sheds light on previously unnoticed connections between Mr Romney’s involvement in the private sector, government and campaign finance. 
Imagitas donated tens of thousands of dollars to the Republican Governors’ Association while it was chaired by Mr Romney. A former Imagitas investor and director donates to both Mr Romney and Paul Ryan, who also received thousands of dollars in contributions from his brother Tobin....
For three years from 1995, Tobin Ryan, who is now 47, was a senior manager at Bain & Company, the consulting firm where Mr Romney made his name. Mr Romney was at the time leading Bain Capital, the firm’s investment arm, inside the same Boston headquarters.
In March 1998, Mr Ryan left Bain to become a vice-president at Imagitas. The company had been co-founded by Tom Beecher, another former Bain consultant. Their company secured the $5 million (£3.2 million) from Bain Capital in June 2000. 
Flush with funds, Imagitas quickly expanded. It won contracts with several state governments to produce vehicle registration mail-outs, on which it sold advertising. Five colleagues said that Tobin Ryan had responsibility for this project. “He was my boss’s boss,” said Michael Donovan, the firm’s director of government relations at the time.
“A lot of the folks who joined us around that time came from the worlds of politics and government,” said a manager who reported to Mr Ryan on the vehicle registration project. Another, who like several former employees requested anonymity, said Mr Ryan’s role included travelling to states to meet with senior government officials.
In December 2001, Imagitas secured a contract with Wisconsin, whose then-governor, Scott McCallum, was a political ally of Paul Ryan, who is a US congressman for the state. Roger Cross, the administrator of Mr McCallum’s department of motor vehicles at the time, said: “I know Tobin through politics, not business”. Tobin Ryan declined to say whether he had been involved in the Wisconsin deal.
Imagitas announced a similar partnership with Massachusetts in July 2002, shortly before Mr Romney was elected as the state’s Republican governor, and just after Tobin Ryan says that he departed the company. Its work for the state continued for several years under Mr Romney’s governorship. His officials boasted that it saved taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars a year.
Mr Romney’s 2002 financial disclosure form states that he still owned 100 per cent of Bain Capital Investors VI, the fund’s controlling entity, and Bain Capital Inc, their overall parent company. However, the forms did not detail the individual companies, such as Imagitas, in which Bain Capital held investments. New state employees were obliged to prevent conflicts of interest with existing contracts... 
Spokesmen for Mr Romney repeatedly declined to confirm or deny that he had profited from the sale of Imagitas, or to answer a series of detailed questions about his financial connections to the firm lodged by The Daily Telegraph earlier this week. “You’ve seen his disclosure forms - you know what’s on them,” one campaign source said....
Another corporate backer to profit was The Carlyle Group, the Washington-based investment firm with extensive links to the Republican party, which put $20 million (£12.8 million) into Imagitas in 2000.
 Tobin Ryan omits his work at Imagitas from his corporate biography. 

(ht PEUreport)

15 comments:

  1. Carlyle Group (at the bottom of the piece)is EVERYWHERE!! Well, everywhere there's government moolah to be made.
    They're makin' Goldman look good by comparison.

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  2. Is there any doubt that a Romney administration would favor the rich and increase the income gap in our country? Mitt is a pariah in Mormon Clothing and will stop at nothing to expand an empire of greed for the rich in this country by expanding tax cuts for the 1% of the wealthiest Americans. He’s out to gut the Middle Class for every red cent he can get. Will his sacred Mormon underwear grant him the protection and money to buy this election? See for yourself as Mitt dons his tighty-whities sent down from the Good Lord Himself at http://dregstudiosart.blogspot.com/2012/05/mitt-romneys-magic-mormon-underwear.html

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  3. A party that chooses Romney over Ron Paul is just plain stupid.

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  4. So we get to either not vote (my choice) or we choose between 2 lying, thieving, conniving, manipulative, sociopathic, warmongering, police-state, demonic, mafia-criminals who are intentionally destroying and will further destroy this country economically for the benefit of their puppetmasters who are essentially the same people.
    Yes, please give me another heaping helping of fascism please!

    I know they're not likely on this blog, but I marvel at the brainwashed, propagandized idiots out there who still play partisan politics thinking that there's any difference between the 2 puppets. Not to mention the fact that anyone who supports either one of these criminals is either incredibly stupid, incredibly drugged up on hallucinogens, or irredeemably morally and intellectually bankrupt.

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    1. Why must you defame the mafia by likening them to statist sociopaths! What did the mafia ever do to you?

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  5. Great post on crony capitalism:

    http://www.carlyle.com/news-room/news-release-archive/pitney-bowes-acquire-imagitas

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  6. Tobin Ryan has since 2009 been a private equity executive at the California-based Seidler Equity Partners.

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  7. Great stuff today on Romney/Ryan. Why is it this story or the facts behind it have (so far as I know) never been published/broadcast in US news media? Even weirder, doesn't Obama's oppo research get into this stuff? Enough with the tax returns (that's merely a populist distraction). Why not bite with real teeth into the insider-crony state contracting, alledgedly "private", yeah, like in Mexico?
    Maybe O's crew doesn't want to open the crony-buddy-govt contract Pandora's box. US establishment media are obvious tools.

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  8. The fact that Romney/Ryan purposely distort Obama's $716B cut to medicare shows me just how dishonest they are. Especially since the cut is being spent on medical care, it doesn't reduce benefits to seniors. Compare that to Ryan's proposal that cuts the same amount and the money is used to make up the difference created by tax breaks for the very rich. Why shouldn't the very rich be paying the same tax rate I am? Why should capital gains be taxed differently? Money is money. The interest on my savings, which the bank uses to invest, is taxed the same as my income. That money is still being invested.
    "The $716 billion in cuts do not affect benefits for today's seniors. Instead, they reduce provider reimbursements and are intended to curb waste, fraud and abuse." ----- And I'll bet you ten thousand dollars, Ryan / Romney did NOT mention that little bit of information to the crowd.....
    “When Paul Ryan says his priority is to make sure that we’re, you know – that he’s just being America’s accountant and trying to be responsible… I mean this is the same guy who voted for two wars that were unpaid for, voted for the Bush tax cuts that were unpaid for, voted for the prescription drug bill that costs as much as my health care bill – but wasn’t paid for,” Obama said on April 15, 2011.
    In 2008, Ryan released his "Roadmap for America's Future," which described his sweeping vision for how to gut America's main entitlement programs of Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid. The plan made him a hero among conservative circles, and Ryan eventually remade it as his "Path to Prosperity" plan, which President Barack Obama and Democrats have criticized for embracing tax cuts for the very rich while slashing government programs that help the poor. (It wasn't just Democrats who criticized Ryan. While running for president, Newt Gingrich called Ryan's plan "right wing social engineering," which probably helped kill Gingrich's bid.)
    President Obama actually helped raise Ryan's profile on the right by critiquing the Congressman's budget, and just last year, Ryan was reportedly mulling his own run for president.
    Critics have called Ryan’s 2011 proposal the “end of Medicare as we know it,” and that’s true. Until now, Medicare has operated as a “fee-for-service” system; under Ryan’s plan, it would operate more like a voucher system, although Ryan and his aides have resisted this term. Medicare would cease to pay for health services directly, instead operating as a board that approves a menu of health plans for public sale and doles out predetermined lumps of money to people enrolled in Medicare, to help them buy those plans.

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  9. Here are the top 10 comments about Bain from Romney’s Republican rivals:

    1. “The idea that you’ve got private equity companies that come in and take companies apart so they can make profits and have people lose their jobs, that’s not what the Republican Party’s about.” — Rick Perry [New York Times, 1/12/12]

    2. “The Bain model is to go in at a very low price, borrow an immense amount of money, pay Bain an immense amount of money and leave. I’ll let you decide if that’s really good capitalism. I think that’s exploitation.” — Newt Gingrich [New York Times, 1/17/12]

    3. “Instead of trying to work with them to try to find a way to keep the jobs and to get them back on their feet, it’s all about how much money can we make, how quick can we make it, and then get out of town and find the next carcass to feed upon” — Rick Perry [National Journal, 1/10/12]

    4. “We find it pretty hard to justify rich people figuring out clever legal ways to loot a company, leaving behind 1,700 families without a job.” — Newt Gingrich [Globe and Mail, 1/9/12]

    5. “Now, I have no doubt Mitt Romney was worried about pink slips — whether he was going to have enough of them to hand out because his company, Bain Capital, of all the jobs that they killed” — Rick Perry [New York Times, 1/9/12]

    6) “He claims he created 100,000 jobs. The Washington Post, two days ago, reported in their fact check column that he gets three Pinocchios. Now, a Pinocchio is what you get from The Post if you’re not telling the truth.” — Newt Gingrich [1/13/12, NBC News]

    7. “There is something inherently wrong when getting rich off failure and sticking it to someone else is how you do your business, and I happen to think that’s indefensible” — Rick Perry [National Journal, 1/10/12]

    8. “If Governor Romney would like to give back all the money he’s earned from bankrupting companies and laying off employees over his years, then I would be glad to then listen to him” — Newt Gingrich [Mediaite, 12/14/11]

    9. “If you’re a victim of Bain Capital’s downsizing, it’s the ultimate insult for Mitt Romney to come to South Carolina and tell you he feels your pain, because he caused it.” — Rick Perry [New York Times, 1/8/12]

    10. “They’re vultures that sitting out there on the tree limb waiting for the company to get sick and then they swoop in, they eat the carcass. They leave with that and they leave the skeleton” — Rick Perry [National Journal, 1/10/12]

    Just last night, Newt Gingrich defended his attacks, saying “I think there are things you can legitimately look at in Bain Capital. I think there are things you can legitimately look at in anybody’s record, including Mitt Romney’s record.”

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    Replies
    1. What? There were ONLY TWO rivals? You have ten comments split amongst these.

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  10. Bain Capital is not the same as Bain Consulting. Different companies.

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    1. Don't confuse things. In the 1990s, Bain Capital partner Mitt Romney was asked to rejoin and lead Bain & Co. (the management consulting firm) as interim CEO. Bringing along two lieutenants from Bain Capital.

      Romney ran both firms during the time in question,

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  11. Oh my god, a $5 million investment!! Get the digitalis Maude!

    So what is that, like ten seconds of Federal Government spending? Keep on wetting your panties over nickles while Obama and Cronies steal trillions.

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