Republican presidential candidate and presumptive nominee Mitt Romney remained doggedly steadfast in his pledge to release only two years of his personal income tax returns Monday. This decision follows a weekend of increased pressure from both Democrats and Republicans to disclose more of his financial information.
Making an appearance on Fox News, Romney said his rivals wanted to “make a mountain” out of an issue he views as inconsequential compared to many problems facing the American people.
Despite a detached patrician stiffness reminiscent of Sen. John Kerry, Romney is an astute candidate. He has spun the innate charisma of your average department store mannequin into a viable presidential contention. Even so, he openly mocks the electorate’s reasonable expectation that he would be completely forthcoming with regard to his personal income.
This creates a substantial paradox for a man whose bid for office is largely predicated on business acumen. It’s as if he has asked us to place faith in his strength leading a large company, but then tells us that we’ll just have to trust him on the actual results.
“The Obama people keep on wanting more and more and more, more things to pick through, more things for their opposition research to try and make a mountain out of and distort and to be dishonest about,” Romney continued, before reasserting his pledge to release just two years worth of returns.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
Over the weekend, Democrats and some Republicans criticized Romney for not releasing more tax information. Both sides arguing that further documentation of Romney’s financial holdings would shed light on any offshore investments. Romney released tax returns from 2010, and put out an estimate of his 2011 information in April. He filed an extension with the Internal Revenue Service to file after the April deadline, and pledged to release the official documents when they’re completed by his accountant.
One thing about which Romney seems patently oblivious is the fact that most Americans do not have “offshore” holdings… mostly because we’re not holding enough to move it offshore. The fact that he has resources of this magnitude and has gone to great lengths to keep them secret breeds suspicion.
Well it should. The financial systems of many microstates (most of which are either in the Caribbean or Europe) have come under increasing fire from the United Nations. We can take for example the flyspeck Principality of Liechtenstein (61 square miles) nestled between Switzerland and Austria. The Liechtenstein royal house, owners of the nation’s largest bank (LGT), arguably wields more power than any other monarchy in Europe. According to the U. S. Department of State, beyond LGT, there are 15 other banks, three non-bank financial companies, 16 public investment companies, numerous insurance and reinsurance companies, 230 licensed fiduciary companies and some 75,000 “letter-box” holding companies in the Principality. Also present is a branch of the Al-Taqwa Bank, once a primary financial repository for Al-Qaeda. A 2008 report by the International Monetary Fund observes: “Non-resident business constitutes more than 90 percent of the private banking activities conducted in Liechtenstein.”
In recent UN investigations, it was discovered that a rouges gallery including South American drug lords, Russian mafia, East European human traffickers, Arab arms smugglers… even Saddam Hussein once had an airplane register there, even though the country has no airport. A similar tale could be told of nearly every Caribbean banking center.
So why wouldn’t we just trust someone who had offshore holdings that they didn’t want to disclose? As shrewd a politician as Romney certainly is, he has clearly missed the first rule of American politics: It’s not what you’ve done. It’s what you lie about. We’ll forgive a lot of nefarious stuff, but we can’t countenance being misled.
Everybody knows Romney’s rich as Croesus. That part isn’t a mystery. Evading only makes him look like he has something to hide; and while the Democrats may be spurring this tempest in a teapot, Romney started it.