Romney’s asso­ci­a­tions with Known Con­glom­er­ates* and Mor­mon High Strangeness

* “known con­glom­er­ates” is a term coined by a Rob C. on this site, whose mean­ing is unclear. It sounds omi­nous, though, and so is a use­ful phrase.

Man Behind Ari­zona Immi­gra­tion Law: Rom­ney ‘Absolutely’ Called SB-1070 A National ‘Model’
By Alex Seitz-Wald on Apr 24, 2012 at 3:00 pm

Rus­sell Pearce [ not to be con­fused with William Pierce, a sym­pa­tico fel­low ideologue ]

Mitt Rom­ney had the most con­ser­v­a­tive immi­gra­tion pol­icy of any Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial can­di­date dur­ing most of the pri­mary, but now that’s he try­ing to appeal to His­panic vot­ers as he piv­ots to gen­eral elec­tion, the pre­sumed GOP nom­i­nee has been shift­ing back towards the cen­ter. Yes­ter­day, he opened to door to a Repub­li­can alter­na­tive to the DREAM Act — a law he vowed to veto dur­ing the pri­mary — and ear­lier, he said that he never called for mak­ing Arizona’s harsh immi­gra­tion law a “model” for the nation.
But that’s not how one of the key peo­ple behind that law, for­mer Ari­zona Sen­ate Pres­i­dent Rus­sell Pearce, sees it. The for­mer Repub­li­can law­maker, who was ousted in a recall elec­tion, was the key force behind turn­ing SB-1070, authored by Rom­ney adviser Kris Kobach, into law.
He told reporters today that he “absolutely” believed Mitt Rom­ney had endorsed the law as a model for the coun­try. The Huff­in­g­ton Post’s Elise Foley reports:
“The folks that he’s said [are] his advis­ers on this, I have worked with for years and have great con­fi­dence and trust in them,” Pearce told reporters after a Sen­ate sub­com­mit­tee hear­ing on the immi­gra­tion law. “I know Rom­ney is a com­pas­sion­ate man, most of us, I’d like to think, are. But I think he also under­stands the cri­sis and the dam­age to this repub­lic and the need to enforce our law.” [...]
Rom­ney also has advo­cated for what he called “self-deportation,” or mak­ing things dif­fi­cult for undoc­u­mented immi­grants until they decide to leave, one of the cen­tral tenets of the Ari­zona law. [...] “[Self-deportation] is in SB 1070,” Pearce said.
Pre­vi­ously, Pearce has said that Romney’s “immi­gra­tion pol­icy is iden­ti­cal to mine.”
Rom­ney has tried to dis­tance him­self from Kobach, who also helped author the con­tro­ver­sial immi­gra­tion crack­downs in Alabama, South Car­olina, and other states. But Kobach quickly con­tra­dicted him, say­ing he reg­u­larly advises senior mem­bers of Romney’s staff.

[from http://www.nowscape.com/mormon/hitler_temple_2.htm

In 2003, Jason Todd Ready, a promi­nent and vio­lent neo-Nazi was bap­tized a mem­ber of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; in July 2004, he had the Melchizedek Priest­hood con­ferred upon him by Rus­sell Pearce who bap­tized Mr. Ready into the Mor­mon Church. Mr. Ready was ordained an elder of the LDS faith. On May 2nd, 2012, J.T. Ready and four oth­ers were found dead in a mas­sacre in Gilbert, Ari­zona. Ready had shot the other four and then pulled the trig­ger on him­self. J. T. Ready was a polit­i­cal asso­ciate of for­mer AZ sen­a­tor Rus­sell Pearce who was ousted in a Novem­ber 2011 recall election.

[ and from the same site, the fol­low­ing peo­ple have recieved posthu­mous, proxy LDS bap­tisms, allow­ing them a pos­si­ble future exit from the Mor­mon pur­ga­tory of Outer Dark­ness (to err is human, to for­give Nazis is divine, apparently} ]

1. Bal­dur von Schirach
2. Alfred Jodl
3. Franz von Papen
4. Arthur Seyss-Inquart
5; Albert Speer
6. Con­stan­tin Frei­herr von Neu­rath
7. Hans Fritzsche
8. Her­mann Wil­helm Göring
9. Rudolf Hess
10. Joachim von Ribben­trop
11. Wil­helm Kei­tel
12. Ernst Kaltenbrun­ner
13. Alfred Rosen­berg
14. Hans Frank
15. Wil­helm Frick
16. Julius Stre­icher
17. Walther Funk
18. Hjal­mar Schacht
19. Fritz Saukel
20. Erich Räder
21. Karl Dönitz

In the same spirit as behind the term ‘self-deportation’, Ver­MIT­Tler refers to prison sui­cides as ‘self-paroled’.

Mit­tens pulls a Sergeant Schultz: He knew noth­ing! Noth­ing!

It’s worth noth­ing that Mittens’s SEC fil­ings from 1999–2001 for his Bain hold­ings lists Mitt as the only shared­holder, owner, and CEO of Bain. So he wasn’t just one of mul­ti­ple own­ers of Bain. He was the ONLY owner:

TPM
Report: Bain Told Investors Rom­ney Was Inac­tive In 2000

Benjy Sar­lin July 12, 2012, 3:28 PM

Mitt Rom­ney may have been listed in SEC fil­ings as sole share­holder, CEO and pres­i­dent of Bain Cap­i­tal and its affil­i­ated funds from 1999 to 2001, but a new report sug­gests that the com­pany did not con­sider him active in the firm at the time.

Accord­ing to For­tune, con­fi­den­tial doc­u­ments dis­trib­uted by Bain in 2000 to prospec­tive investors in a new private-equity fund did not list Rom­ney as a part of the man­age­ment com­mit­tee that would han­dle day-to-day operations.

Rom­ney and a Bain spokesman both denied on Thurs­day that the pres­i­den­tial can­di­date had any man­age­r­ial role with the firm after leav­ing to work on the Olympics in Feb­ru­ary 1999. The Obama cam­paign has argued that Rom­ney should be held account­able for Bain’s actions from 1999–2001, since he was still listed as the company’s “sole stock­holder, chair­man of the board, chief exec­u­tive offi­cer, and pres­i­dent” and a 2001 SEC fil­ing listed his pri­mary occu­pa­tion as a “man­ag­ing direc­tor.” Obama deputy cam­paign man­ager Stephanie Cut­ter even sug­gested Rom­ney may have crim­i­nally mis­led the SEC and pushed him to release min­utes from meet­ings clar­ify his position.

...

Note, that Rom­ney cam­paign is cur­rent demand­ing an apol­ogy for the asser­tions that Rom­ney was still act­ing as a CEO after he left in 1999 to run the Olympics. This is a par­tic­u­larly sore point for Mit­tens because so many of Bain’s most egre­gious out­sourc­ing actions took place in the 1999–2001 period. But the cam­paign doens’t appear to deny at all that Rom­ney was still the sole owner after 1999. Sim­ply that he wasn’t run­ning the place. So he allegedly played no role in plan­ning or exe­cut­ing Bain’s out­sourc­ing, he just prof­ited hand­somely from it.

“Blind trust” strikes again.

Thanks for post­ing this. I’d be inter­ested in your response to my lat­est; even if you rip it to shreds, I’d be grateful.

A lot of Romney’s “spooky” friends also have ties to, God help us, the small group of agents who took over the Howard Hughes empire. I had hoped not to men­tion this, but the links really are too numer­ous to ignore.

I con­fess I’m in over my head here, because I never took a deep inter­est in Hughes. I’ve read maybe three books about him in my life. As you know, Hughes became a lint trap for goofy spec­u­la­tion. And now...well, the cur­rent gen­er­a­tion doesn’t seem to find him even slightly interesting.

Still, it really is the case that Rom­ney has worked with a lot of peo­ple who were very close to the Hughes oper­a­tion. There must be a rea­son for this.

The set of net­works you allude to really took off with the daily drug­ging of Hughes and the takeover of his com­pa­nies by a Mormon/CIA/Nazi aparat. Hughes was cor­rupt enough by him­self but still balked at some projects. With Hughes effec­tively a veg­etable the group spawned South Amer­i­can death squads, expanded their casino skim, branched out into nar­cotics and gun-running, broad­ened their ties with the Texas/California aero­space indus­try, with old-family orga­nized crime and prob­a­bly with the Bor­mann net­work. They also enjoyed domes­tic assas­si­na­tions, elec­tion fraud, money laun­der­ing and ponzi investor schemes. Plans were in place to elim­i­nate Nixon even though Hughes had been his bene­fac­tor, prob­a­bly because Hughes wasn’t in charge any­more and Nixon’s over­tures to China and his foot-dragging when it came to ush­er­ing in mar­tial law were seen as too accom­mo­dat­ing to communism.

The Howard Hughes Med­ical Insi­tute was from the out­set extremely secre­tive and hos­tile to inquiry. They had few ties to the out­side med­ical com­mu­nity and no one could say with cer­tainty exactly what their func­tion was or what they were research­ing. It would have been a per­fect front for hid­ing assets, fund­ing exte­rior black projects, or con­duct­ing illicit med­ical research out of the pub­lic eye. This was early on and the char­ac­ter of the HHMI may have changed.

Allow­ing for peo­ple get­ting old and being replaced by their sons, acolytes or busi­ness part­ners, the few names you men­tion are some of a larger cast of char­ac­ters who sur­face over and over begin­ning with the JFK assas­i­na­tion and the mul­ti­tude of assas­si­na­tions that fol­lowed, the series of for­eign gov­ern­men­tal coups, Water­gate, Iran-Contra, and ter­ror­ists acts of all stripes. The play­ers may change over the gen­er­a­tions but the con­ti­nu­ity is amaz­ing and unde­ni­able. If Ogelby’s premise about the Cow­boy and Yan­kee fac­tions are still valid, these are the cow­boys. That would make Rom­ney their most impor­tant pub­lic man­i­fes­ta­tion since Reagan.

The whole “Did Mitt or did’t Mitt con­tinue work­ing at Bain after 1999?” ker­fuf­fle got a boost yes­ter­day. Mit­tens uttered the magic words: “I do not recall...”:

TPM
6:58 PM EDT, Fri­day July 13, 2012
Rom­ney: ‘I Don’t Recall’ Com­ing Back For Mass. Meetings

Mitt Rom­ney said that he had no rec­ol­lec­tion of return­ing to Mass­a­chu­setts for busi­ness meet­ings in 2002 fol­low­ing his depar­ture from Bain Cap­i­tal to head the Olympics in Salt Lake City.

“I left Bain in Feb­ru­ary of 1999,” Rom­ney said in an inter­view with CBS’s Jan Craw­ford on Fri­day evening. “Peo­ple can point out how — I was in Salt Lake City for three straight years. I don’t recall even com­ing back once to go to a Bain or man­age­ment meet­ing. We were, I was out there run­ning the Olympics and it was a full time job, I can tell you that.”

Rom­ney tes­ti­fied to Mass­a­chu­setts offi­cials in 2002 that he main­tained busi­ness ties dur­ing his Olympics work, under­min­ing his argu­ment that he had no con­nec­tion to Bain Cap­i­tal or related com­pa­nies after 1999.

...

A large caveat about my last com­ments on the Hughes orga­ni­za­tion: Such a series of extreme alle­ga­tions, sum­ma­rized with­out qual­i­fi­ca­tion or nuance and pre­sented with­out corol­lary evi­dence, is prob­a­bly close to use­less. Prefer­ably, one should speak or write to per­suade oth­ers who have not been exposed to such evi­dence and one should present such evi­dence of like alle­ga­tions in a rea­son­able, orderly man­ner. In this case the sup­port­ing facts would require vol­umes and can’t be ade­quately pre­sented in a short post, so I made no attempt at it.

I intend to be more cir­cum­spect in the future. With space aliens and Illu­mi­nati assigned to their places in fan­tasy, there are still many real­i­ties of our world that sound wildly implau­si­ble when stated suc­cinctly and with­out accom­pa­ny­ing weight of evi­dence. Of these, it is prob­a­bly best to with­hold one’s opin­ion until one is pre­pared to dot the ‘i’s.

Oh Mit­tens:

LA Times
Bain Cap­i­tal started with help of off­shore investors
Mitt Romney’s firm raised more than a third of its first invest­ment fund from wealthy for­eign­ers — who mostly used com­pa­nies in Panama, then known for tax advan­tages and bank­ing secrecy.

By Joseph Tan­fani, Melanie Mason and Matea Gold

July 19, 2012, 3:00 a.m.
Wash­ing­ton Bureau

WASHINGTON — When Mitt Rom­ney launched Bain Cap­i­tal in 1984, he strug­gled at first to raise enough money for the untested ven­ture. Old-money fam­i­lies like the Roth­schilds turned down the young Boston consultant.

So he and his part­ners tapped an eclec­tic ros­ter of investors, rais­ing more than a third of their first $37-million invest­ment fund from wealthy foreigners.

Most of the for­eign investors’ money came through cor­po­ra­tions reg­is­tered in Panama, then known for tax advan­tages and unusual bank­ing secrecy.

Pre­vi­ously unre­ported details, doc­u­mented in Mass­a­chu­setts cor­po­rate fil­ings and other pub­lic records, show that Bain Cap­i­tal was enmeshed in the largely opaque world of inter­na­tional high finance from its very inception.

...

The first out­side investor in Bain was a lead­ing Lon­don financier, Sir Jack Lyons, who made a $2.5-million invest­ment through a Panama shell com­pany set up by a Swiss money man­ager, fur­ther shield­ing his iden­tity. Years later, Lyons was con­victed in an unre­lated stock fraud scandal.

About $9 mil­lion came from rich Latin Amer­i­cans, includ­ing pow­er­ful Sal­vado­ran fam­i­lies liv­ing in Miami dur­ing their country’s bru­tal civil war.

That first invest­ment fund — used to invest in start-up com­pa­nies and lever­aged buy­outs — paid out a stun­ning 173% in aver­age annual returns over a decade, accord­ing to a prospec­tus pre­pared by an out­side bank. It was the start of the pri­vate equity pow­er­house that ulti­mately fueled Romney’s polit­i­cal career. He now cites his expe­ri­ence at Bain as a chief qual­i­fi­ca­tion for the White House.

Rom­ney faced unusual com­pli­ca­tions when he launched Bain Cap­i­tal, a spin­off of Bain & Co., the Boston con­sult­ing firm he joined when he grad­u­ated from Har­vard Busi­ness School.

At the time, U.S. offi­cials were pub­licly accus­ing some exiles in Miami of fund­ing right-wing death squads in El Sal­vador. Some fam­ily mem­bers of the first Bain Cap­i­tal investors were later linked to groups respon­si­ble for killings, though no evi­dence indi­cates those rel­a­tives invested in Bain or ben­e­fited from it.

...

Bain part­ners put in $12 mil­lion of their own money, then sought the rest from wealthy individuals.

Records show the first invest­ment in Bain Cap­i­tal — $1.25 mil­lion in June 1984 — was in the name of Jean Over­seas Ltd., reg­is­tered in Panama by Mar­cel Elfen, a Swiss money man­ager. Later, the invest­ment was doubled.

The Pana­man­ian shell com­pany appar­ently was a vehi­cle for Lyons, the British busi­ness­man and phil­an­thropist. Lyons died in 2008.

His son, David Lyons of Que­bec, said in a phone inter­view that he had never heard of Jean Over­seas, but he con­firmed that his father was “absolutely” an early investor in Bain Cap­i­tal and said that Elfen, who died last year, was his father’s money manager.

David Lyons said that wealthy Euro­peans like his father often invested through off­shore shell cor­po­ra­tions. “It allowed some con­fi­den­tial­ity,” he said. “It allowed a lot of things.”

Jack Lyons worked as an out­side con­sul­tant for Bain & Co., but that ended when he and three oth­ers were charged in the Guin­ness Affair, a stock scan­dal that rocked Britain. Con­victed of fraud in 1990, he was spared prison time due to his fail­ing health, but was stripped of his knighthood.

Rom­ney and his part­ners also won over the money man­ager for one of California’s wealth­i­est fam­i­lies, the Crock­ers, whose fam­ily trust put in $4.8 mil­lion. Rom­ney “was the most con­fi­dent exec­u­tive I’ve ever come across,” said William Swan­son, who at the time man­aged the family’s investments.

Other early investors included Robert Maxwell, the British pub­lish­ing baron, who invested $2 mil­lion. After his drown­ing death in 1991, inves­ti­ga­tors dis­cov­ered Maxwell had stolen hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars from his company’s pen­sion funds.

But early on, the fundrais­ing was still falling short. Harry Stra­chan, a Bain Cap­i­tal part­ner who was born in Costa Rica to Amer­i­can mis­sion­ary par­ents, knew Cen­tral Amer­i­can busi­ness­men through his involve­ment in a Harvard-backed busi­ness school in Nicaragua. Why not pitch to them?

Rom­ney and Bill Bain were ini­tially “ter­ri­fied of bring­ing in Cen­tral Amer­i­cans,” Stra­chan told the Boston Globe in August 1994. “They were afraid of drug money.”

Reas­sured by Stra­chan, Rom­ney flew to Miami to meet the group in 1984.

“My friends were impressed by Mitt and the team and signed up for 20% of the fund,” Stra­chan wrote in his self-published mem­oir, “Find­ing a Path.” He did not respond to requests for comment.

The group included some of El Salvador’s wealth­i­est peo­ple: cof­fee grower Miguel A. Dueñas; mem­bers of the De Sola fam­ily, also cof­fee exporters; and Ricardo Poma, whose fam­ily con­glom­er­ate now owns car deal­er­ships and lux­ury hotels across Cen­tral Amer­ica. Other investors included Frank Kar­don­ski, who co-founded the Panama Stock Exchange, and Diego Rib­adeneira, nowEcuador’sambassador to Peru.

Most of the money they put into Bain Cap­i­tal was through cor­po­ra­tions set up in Panama with names such as Velof Trust, Jolla and Uni­ver­sal Sell­ing Co.

In the 1980s, Panama was “the coun­try of choice for for­eign­ers want­ing to make invest­ments on a con­fi­den­tial basis,” said Steven H. Hagen, a Miami lawyer who pro­vides tax advice to off­shore com­pa­nies and inter­na­tional investors.

The use of an off­shore cor­po­ra­tion to invest in a U.S. busi­ness shields for­eign investors from estate taxes, but not income taxes, Hagen said.

At the time, El Sal­vador was being torn apart in a civil war that ulti­mately left tens of thou­sands dead. The Bain investors — some of whom had their plan­ta­tions seized and fam­ily mem­bers tar­geted — were wait­ing out the war in Miami.

“Many of them were try­ing to move their money else­where,” said Jef­fery M. Paige, a Uni­ver­sity of Michi­gan pro­fes­sor who wrote a book about the Sal­vado­ran rul­ing class. “It was a dif­fi­cult tran­si­tion, and of course their invest­ment out­lets were limited.”

Among the Bain investors were Fran­cisco R.R. de Sola and his cousin Her­bert Arturo de Sola, whose brother Orlando de Sola was sus­pected by State Depart­ment offi­cials and the CIA of back­ing the right-wing death squads, accord­ing to now-declassified documents.

Orlando de Sola, who has denied sup­port­ing the death squads, is now serv­ing a four-year prison term for unre­lated fraud charges. In an inter­view at the prison in Meta­pan, El Sal­vador, he said he did not ben­e­fit from the fam­ily invest­ment in Bain Capital.

Before Bain, the family’s hold­ings were based in El Sal­vador, he said. “I would say their rela­tion­ship with Bain Cap­i­tal was a step to diver­sify into for­eign invest­ments. But I insist to you, I was not part of it.”

The other Latin Amer­i­can investors declined or did not respond to requests to comment.

Other early investors were happy to talk about their lucra­tive early bet. Jack Han­ley, for­mer head ofMon­santo Co., put in $1 million.

“It seemed like a hell of a smart thing for me to do to ride their coat­tails,” said Han­ley, now 83. “I got rich.”