Dilbert illustrates the Romney-Ryan Budget Plan’s Uncertainty Principle
The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle states that “the more precisely the position of some particle is determined, the less precisely its momentum can be known, and vice versa.”
A related principle, Quantum Entanglement, “… occurs when particles…interact physically and then become separated… their shared state is indefinite until measured.”
We were reminded of these fundamental laws of quantum mechanics this weekend as the media ‘measured’ Mitt Romney’s claims about his involvement with Bain Capital (BC) in the three years following his supposed retirement in February, 1999.
Prior to last week’s deluge of investigative reports from the likes of The Boston Globe, Vanity Fair, AP, Huffington Post, and Bloomberg News, the ‘state’ of Mitt’s involvement had been largely undetermined. Since then, a number of government filings between 1999-2002 have been unearthed, filings which consistently portray Mittens as BC’s CEO, president, managing director, and sole stock owner, and for which he was compensated $100k per year for at least two of those years. (Rev Al Sharpton reported this evening that there are some 147 such government reports.)
Just askin: When was the last time you were paid a thousand large for doing nothing but signing some prepared forms?
Other conflicting accounts included this BC press release describing Romney as remaining in the loop:
“Romney said he will stay on as a part-timer with Bain, providing input on investment and key personnel decisions. But he will leave running day-to-day operations to Bain’s executive committee.” (Greg Gatlin, “Romney Looks To Restore Olympic Pride,” The Boston Herald, 2/12/99)
In a frantic attempt to change the media coverage, Romney did even more damage this weekend during his Full Monty round of interviews with the major tv outlets. ThinkProgress autopsies Mitt’s performance:
Romney Interview Directly Contradicts His Previous Statements About Bain Tenure
Mitt Romney told CBS News‘s Jan Crawford Friday evening that he did not attend Bain Capital meetings after he left the company in February of 1999 to run the Winter Olympics. But this answer appears to contradict sworn testimony he delivered in 2002 “as part of a hearing to determine whether he had sufficient residency status in Massachusetts to run for governor”:
– 2002: “[T]here were a number of social trips and business trips that brought me back to Massachusetts, board meetings, Thanksgiving and so forth.”
– 2012: “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.”
“Jan, I had no involvement with the management of Bain Capital after 1999,” Romney insisted on Friday.
Recall that Romney has a proven problem with memory:
Mitt Romney remembers Detroit celebration from before he was born
ROYAL OAK, Mich. — Several nights ago, Mitt Romney began to recount a tale about when Detroit was the pride of the nation, a place where everyone wanted to be.
“I think my dad had a job, like, being the grand master or whatever of the 50th celebration of the automobile in Detroit,” Romney said at a Tea Party rally in Milford. “They painted Woodward Avenue with gold paint. My memory’s a little foggy here, so, uh, but – yeah I was probably four or something like that. But they had the cars go down Woodward Avenue.”
His memory was a little foggy, however, because he wasn’t born. The Golden Jubilee, as the event was called, occurred nine months before Romney’s birth…
The discrepancy, first cited by the Toronto Star, is not the first time Romney got an event wrong about his early childhood.
In 2007, Romney had to acknowledge that he had not watched his father march with Martin Luther King Jr., as he had asserted in a nationally televised debate. Romney said at the time that his father had told him that he had marched with King and that he was using the word “saw” in a “figurative sense.”
“I did not see it with my own eyes, but I saw him in the sense of being aware of his participation in that great effort,” Romney said then.
But historical evidence and news reports showed that George Romney never did march with King. The civil rights leader was supposed to march in Detroit, but he declined to attend.
And then of course there is Willard’s famous memory failure when as an 18 year old (i.e. his first year of adulthood), he lead a pack of other boys in brutalizing an underclassman because he looked different.
Willard Mitt Romney during his bullying days at Cranbrook School
All these questions could be easily resolved if Willard would simply release his contemporaneous tax returns for the years in question.
What’s that you say— Mitt said he won’t release anything but his 2010 and 2011 returns?
Hmmm….
There are, of course, other reasons why Romney would be reluctant to share the details of his purported business genius. For instance, there might be years where he didn’t pay any tax at all, as Senator Henry Reid suggested last week on the Senate floor:
His father, George Romney, set the precedent that people running for president would file their tax returns, let everybody look at them. But Mitt Romney can’t do that because he’s basically paid no taxes in the prior 12 years.
[h/t Brooklyn Boy at The Big Orange]
Or maybe Romney’s offshore accounts would reveal that he had invested in funds that bet against the US dollar and/or Treasury bills– Shorting America, if you will. How devastating would that be in contrast with the Obama Campaign theme of Betting On America?
Politically, the central problem for the Romney Campaign is that the period in question included a number of BC investments that resulted in the loss and outsourcing of American jobs, in particular, the demise of GSI, formerly GS Steel. The LA Times explains:
Leveraged buyouts allow investors to purchase businesses with the acquisition funded sometimes by significant amounts of debt. To critics, these leveraged deals can make acquired companies more vulnerable to economic downturns, leading to a greater likelihood of bankruptcy and job cuts. At the same time, the deals sometimes introduce discipline to firms and even whole industries that need it.
Either way, Bain investors typically profited.
That was true in the case of GS Industries,the 10th-biggest Bain investment in the Romney years. Bain formed GSI in the early 1990s by spending $24 million to acquire and merge steel companies with plants in Missouri, South Carolina and other states.
Company managers cut jobs and benefits almost immediately. Meanwhile,Bain and other investors received management fees from GSI and a $65-million dividend in the first years after the acquisition, according to interviews with company employees.
In 1999, as economic challenges mounted, GSI sought a federal loan guarantee intended to help steel companies compete internationally. The loan deal was approved, but in 2001, before it could be used, the company went bankrupt, two years after Romney left Bain.
More than 700 workers were fired, losing not only their jobs but health insurance, severance and a chunk of their pension benefits. GSI retirees also lost their health insurance and other benefits. Bain partners received about $50 million on their initial investment, a 100% gain.
Not exactly a narrative that a campaign predicated on casting Romney as The Great Jobs Creator wants to let loose in the world, especially since the American taxpayer ended up footing a big chunk of the pension fund deficit, aka a government bailout.
Then there’s the related problem of the Romney campaign wanting it’s cake and eat it too. From Salon.com:
In late May, for example, Ed Gillespie (a Romney adviser and surrogate) gave Romney credit for all the jobs created by Bain over its entire history — not stopping in 1999, not even stopping in 2002. Every time Romney’s been hit over something that happened after February 1999, it claimed more definitively than it could prove that he had nothing to do with that stuff.
Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, right Mitt?
Watching the Romney campaign try to spin its way out the gaping political hole they’ve dug for themselves is mostly tiresome, sometimes amusing. This morning on MSNBC , Romney Communications Director Gail Gitcho was asked to explain what Gillespie meant when he referred to the 1999-2001 period as Romney’s “retroactive retirement.” As any good propagandist would, she ignored the question and instead resorted to regurgitating boilerplate Romney campaign talking points like a Chatty Kathy Doll who just had her string pulled.
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Former Obama Chief of Staff and current Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel framed the issue succinctly on Sunday’s This Week With George Stephanopolous:
“Stephanie cited the law and it’s very clear. Either the filing with the SEC is accurate and his personal financial disclosure is not honest or that’s honest and the SEC [filing] isn’t. Both can’t be accurate.”
Let’s credit Romney for not being so stupid as to have committed numerous felonies by filing fraudulent SEC documents. That would mean he has been lying to the American people; i.e he was actively involved in overseeing BC’s larger investment activities, even if he didn’t have a hands on, day to day involvement.
No matter how you parse and spin BC’s mid-years, it’s been a very efficient wealth extraction machine that Romney built from the ground up. And it continues to function as designed, providing him with tens of millions of dollars of annual income, even since his “retroactive retirement.”
Meanwhile, Willard continues to whine about how the Obama Campaign is going on all negative on his ass by demanding that he release the majority of his tax returns; petition BC to release the minutes from its board meetings; explain the contradictory statements between himself and BC’s PR department; explain why he shouldn’t be considered a pioneer of outsourcing, etc.
Hypocrite that he is, Romney conveniently forgets that he is now receiving the same sort of negative treatment he meted out to Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum during the primaries. C’mom Mitt: Put your “big boy pants on,” as Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz invited him to do today.
With a growing number of conservative stalwarts such as Bill Kristoll, Haley Barbour, Mike Murphy, and George Will pleading for Romney to come clean, it may only be a matter of time before he caves. But as Will, Murphy, and others have concluded, what he’s hiding must be a hell of a lot worse than the tremendous heat he’s taking by continuing to stonewall the entire country, so he may hold out to the bitter end. Ah, what a tangled web he weaveth.
A final component of quantum entanglement is worth considering here.
… there is a correlation between the results of measurements performed on entangled pairs [Romney and Bain], and this correlation is observed even though the entangled pair may have been separated by arbitrarily large distances.
Although these first studies focused on the counterintuitive properties of entanglement, with the aim of criticizing quantum mechanics, eventually entanglement was verified experimentally, and recognized as a valid, fundamental feature of quantum mechanics. The focus of the research has now changed to its utilization as a resource for communication and computation.
To that we might suggest adding modern political messaging as well, the Romney campaign being the poster child for just such a quantum analysis.
Be here now (and zen).
