Bloomberg News has uncovered Mitt Romney’s use of a tax shelter that allows him to lower his taxes by placing assets in a tax-exempt “charitable remainder unitrust” and then drawing payments from the trust. The charity—in Romney’s case, the Mormon Church—is supposed to get what remains in the trust after a period of time, but his trust is structured in such a way that the church may end up with only a tiny portion of the $750,000 trust. Read more »
There were fourteen arrests on Wednesday of community supporters of the Sensata workers who marched on the facility to demand a meeting with the manager of the plant. Arrested include Rev. Jesse Jackson, Bishop Tavis Grant, Rockford Alderman Victory Bell-Rockford, local community members, and three Sensata workers. Labor union representatives from Illinois were also arrested. Sensata workers also filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board over retaliation threats by the company.
Read More »
Dave Johnson at OurFuture.org reports: “This morning there was a sit-in in the lobby of the Sensata factory. Six people were arrested. The people arrested include JoAnn Matthews, mother of Sensata worker Mary Jo Kerr; 82-year-old community supporter Paul Holz; and Kathy Hoyer, who worked at Sensata for two decades before being laid off earlier this year, and her son. Last week, three community members—including the daughter of a Sensata worker—were arrested for blocking trucks removing equipment from the plant.”
In the video above, JoAnn Matthews describes the arrest.
From The Boston Globe: “Romney … did not have a history of appointing women to high-level positions in the private sector. Romney did not have any women partners as CEO of Bain Capital during the 1980s and 1990s.
The investment banking field was male-dominated, to be sure, especially during Romney’s time. Women started to break into the upper echelons of the firm after it started a hedge fund called Brookside in 1996.
Today, 4 of out of 49 of the firm’s managing directors in the buyout area are women.”
John Nichols of the Nation writes about the relevance of the Sensata layoffs and “Bainport” protests on the eve of the October 18 presidential debate between President Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney: “What’s happening in Freeport is a small piece of a big story: that of outsourcing technology jobs—the high-tech positions that should be powering America’s economic renewal—from the United States to China. And that issue ought to be on the agenda for Tuesday’s debate.”
Read More »
The Nation is reporting that Tagg Romney, one of Mitt Romney’s sons, has taken advantage of his father’s connections to Bain Capital to create his own private equity firm, Solamere Capital. Not surprisingly, Solamere’s investors have a big stake in a Romney presidential victory, and there’s nothing to prevent Tagg from pressing their case to his dad. It is, as The Nation story is headlined, “The Romney Family Recipe for Crony Capitalism.” Read the story »