Financial Literacy – A Public Good?

Education

Catalyst Conversation: Financial Literacy – A Public Good?

Financial Literacy – A Public Good?

Financial literacy has always been considered a private, rather than a public good, and hence, the theory has always been that the ignorant will only harm themselves. As we now know, financial ignorance hurts everyone. Our latest financial crisis was caused in part by the dangerous convergence of unscrupulous sellers and ignorant buyers. Going forward, most agree that on the seller side, the irresponsible middlemen all need to have more skin in the game, and last month we have discussed ideas to ensure this.

Inversely, we should consider whether responsibility also falls on the buyer. If so, then the financial illiteracy of the American consumer is of grave concern for all of us.

Public institutions have agreed that things like literacy, critical thinking and personal heath are not just private goods, but public goods that should be taught. Marcus Howard and Alex Johnston lead GCG in a debate around Financial Literacy and if we fight financial ignorance at the public level and if so, what are the best avenues to do so? With this subject, do we see an opportunity for new tools such social media, open source hardware/software, and crowdsourcing? If you were part of the incoming administration, how would you go about educating the next generation of financially literate consumers?

The Careerists

Chris Hedges' Columns

The Careerists

Posted on Jul 23, 2012

Illustration by Mr. Fish

By Chris Hedges
The greatest crimes of human history are made possible by the most colorless human beings. They are the careerists. The bureaucrats. The cynics. They do the little chores that make vast, complicated systems of exploitation and death a reality. They collect and read the personal data gathered on tens of millions of us by the security and surveillance state. They keep the accounts of ExxonMobil, BP and Goldman Sachs. They build or pilot aerial drones. They work in corporate advertising and public relations. They issue the forms. They process the papers. They deny food stamps to some and unemployment benefits or medical coverage to others. They enforce the laws and the regulations. And they do not ask questions.

Good. Evil. These words do not mean anything to them. They are beyond morality. They are there to make corporate systems function. If insurance companies abandon tens of millions of sick to suffer and die, so be it. If banks and sheriff departments toss families out of their homes, so be it. If financial firms rob citizens of their savings, so be it. If the government shuts down schools and libraries, so be it. If the military murders children in Pakistan or Afghanistan, so be it. If commodity speculators drive up the cost of rice and corn and wheat so that they are unaffordable for hundreds of millions of poor across the planet, so be it. If Congress and the courts strip citizens of basic civil liberties, so be it. If the fossil fuel industry turns the earth into a broiler of greenhouse gases that doom us, so be it. They serve the system. The god of profit and exploitation. The most dangerous force in the industrialized world does not come from those who wield radical creeds, whether Islamic radicalism or Christian fundamentalism, but from legions of faceless bureaucrats who claw their way up layered corporate and governmental machines. They serve any system that meets their pathetic quota of needs.

These systems managers believe nothing. They have no loyalty. They are rootless. They do not think beyond their tiny, insignificant roles. They are blind and deaf. They are, at least regarding the great ideas and patterns of human civilization and history, utterly illiterate. And we churn them out of universities. Lawyers. Technocrats. Business majors. Financial managers. IT specialists. Consultants. Petroleum engineers. “Positive psychologists.” Communications majors. Cadets. Sales representatives. Computer programmers. Men and women who know no history, know no ideas. They live and think in an intellectual vacuum, a world of stultifying minutia. They are T.S. Eliot’s “the hollow men,” “the stuffed men.” “Shape without form, shade without colour,” the poet wrote. “Paralysed force, gesture without motion.” 

It was the careerists who made possible the genocides, from the extermination of Native Americans to the Turkish slaughter of the Armenians to the Nazi Holocaust to Stalin’s liquidations. They were the ones who kept the trains running. They filled out the forms and presided over the property confiscations. They rationed the food while children starved. They manufactured the guns. They ran the prisons. They enforced travel bans, confiscated passports, seized bank accounts and carried out segregation. They enforced the law. They did their jobs. 

Political and military careerists, backed by war profiteers, have led us into useless wars, including World War I, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. And millions followed them. Duty. Honor. Country. Carnivals of death. They sacrifice us all. In the futile battles of Verdun and the Somme in World War I, 1.8 million on both sides were killed, wounded or never found. In July of 1917 British Field Marshal Douglas Haig, despite the seas of dead, doomed even more in the mud of Passchendaele. By November, when it was clear his promised breakthrough at Passchendaele had failed, he jettisoned the initial goal—as we did in Iraq when it turned out there were no weapons of mass destruction and in Afghanistan when al-Qaida left the country—and opted for a simple war of attrition. Haig “won” if more Germans than allied troops died. Death as score card. Passchendaele took 600,000 more lives on both sides of the line before it ended. It is not a new story. Generals are almost always buffoons. Soldiers followed John the Blind, who had lost his eyesight a decade earlier, to resounding defeat at the Battle of Crécy in 1337 during the Hundred Years War. We discover that leaders are mediocrities only when it is too late. 

David Lloyd George, who was the British prime minister during the Passchendaele campaign, wrote in his memoirs: “[Before the battle of Passchendaele] the Tanks Corps Staff prepared maps to show how a bombardment which obliterated the drainage would inevitably lead to a series of pools, and they located the exact spots where the waters would gather. The only reply was a peremptory order that they were to ‘Send no more of these ridiculous maps.’ Maps must conform to plans and not plans to maps. Facts that interfered with plans were impertinencies.”  

Here you have the explanation of why our ruling elites do nothing about climate change, refuse to respond rationally to economic meltdown and are incapable of coping with the collapse of globalization and empire. These are circumstances that interfere with the very viability and sustainability of the system. And bureaucrats know only how to serve the system. They know only the managerial skills they ingested at West Point or Harvard Business School. They cannot think on their own. They cannot challenge assumptions or structures. They cannot intellectually or emotionally recognize that the system might implode. And so they do what Napoleon warned was the worst mistake a general could make—paint an imaginary picture of a situation and accept it as real. But we blithely ignore reality along with them. The mania for a happy ending blinds us. We do not want to believe what we see. It is too depressing. So we all retreat into collective self-delusion.

In Claude Lanzmann’s monumental documentary film “Shoah,” on the Holocaust, he interviews Filip Müller, a Czech Jew who survived the liquidations in Auschwitz as a member of the “special detail.” Müller relates this story:
 
“One day in 1943 when I was already in Crematorium 5, a train from Bialystok arrived. A prisoner on the ‘special detail’ saw a woman in the ‘undressing room’ who was the wife of a friend of his. He came right out and told her: ‘You are going to be exterminated. In three hours you’ll be ashes.’ The woman believed him because she knew him. She ran all over and warned to the other women. ‘We’re going to be killed. We’re going to be gassed.’ Mothers carrying their children on their shoulders didn’t want to hear that. They decided the woman was crazy. They chased her away. So she went to the men. To no avail. Not that they didn’t believe her. They’d heard rumors in the Bialystok ghetto, or in Grodno, and elsewhere. But who wanted to hear that? When she saw that no one would listen, she scratched her whole face. Out of despair. In shock. And she started to scream.” 

Blaise Pascal wrote in “Pensées,” “We run heedlessly into the abyss after putting something in front of us to stop us from seeing it.”  

Hannah Arendt, in writing “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” noted that Adolf Eichmann was primarily motivated by “an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement.” He joined the Nazi Party because it was a good career move. “The trouble with Eichmann,” she wrote, “was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.”

“The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else,” Arendt wrote. “No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such.” 

Gitta Sereny makes the same point in her book “Into That Darkness,” about Franz Stangl, the commandant of Treblinka. The assignment to the SS was a promotion for the Austrian policeman. Stangl was not a sadist. He was soft-spoken and polite. He loved his wife and children very much. Unlike most Nazi camp officers, he did not take Jewish women as concubines. He was efficient and highly organized. He took pride in having received an official commendation as the “best camp commander in Poland.” Prisoners were simply objects. Goods. “That was my profession,” he said. “I enjoyed it. It fulfilled me. And yes, I was ambitious about that, I won’t deny it.” When Sereny asked Stangl how as a father he could kill children, he answered that he “rarely saw them as individuals. It was always a huge mass. … [T]hey were naked, packed together, running, being driven with whips. …” He later told Sereny that when he read about lemmings it reminded him of Treblinka. 

Christopher Browning’s collection of essays, “The Path to Genocide,” notes that it was the “moderate,” “normal” bureaucrats, not the zealots, who made the Holocaust possible. Germaine Tillion pointed out “the tragic easiness [during the Holocaust] with which ‘decent’ people could become the most callous executioners without seeming to notice what was happening to them.” The Russian novelist Vasily Grossman in his book “Forever Flowing” observed that “the new state did not require holy apostles, fanatic, inspired builders, faithful, devout disciples. The new state did not even require servants—just clerks.” 

“The most nauseating type of S.S. were to me personally the cynics who no longer genuinely believed in their cause, but went on collecting blood guilt for its own sake,” wrote Dr. Ella Lingens-Reiner in “Prisoners of Fear,” her searing memoir of Auschwitz. “Those cynics were not always brutal to the prisoners, their behavior changed with their mood. They took nothing seriously—neither themselves nor their cause, neither us nor our situation. One of the worst among them was Dr. Mengele, the Camp Doctor I have mentioned before. When a batch of newly arrived Jews was being classified into those fit for work and those fit for death, he would whistle a melody and rhythmically jerk his thumb over his right or his left shoulder—which meant ‘gas’ or ‘work.’ He thought conditions in the camp rotten, and even did a few things to improve them, but at the same time he committed murder callously, without any qualms.”

These armies of bureaucrats serve a corporate system that will quite literally kill us. They are as cold and disconnected as Mengele. They carry out minute tasks. They are docile. Compliant. They obey. They find their self-worth in the prestige and power of the corporation, in the status of their positions and in their career promotions. They assure themselves of their own goodness through their private acts as husbands, wives, mothers and fathers. They sit on school boards. They go to Rotary. They attend church. It is moral schizophrenia. They erect walls to create an isolated consciousness. They make the lethal goals of ExxonMobil or Goldman Sachs or Raytheon or insurance companies possible. They destroy the ecosystem, the economy and the body politic and turn workingmen and -women into impoverished serfs. They feel nothing. Metaphysical naiveté always ends in murder. It fragments the world. Little acts of kindness and charity mask the monstrous evil they abet. And the system rolls forward. The polar ice caps melt. The droughts rage over cropland. The drones deliver death from the sky. The state moves inexorably forward to place us in chains. The sick die. The poor starve. The prisons fill. And the careerist, plodding forward, does his or her job.

NCAA Hits Penn State With $60 Million Fine, Postseason Ban, Loss Of Scholarships And Wins

AP/The Huffington Post  |  Posted: 07/23/2012 9:18 am Updated: 07/23/2012 3:43 pm

Video, Jerry Sandusky, Joe Paterno, Freeh Report, Jerry Sandusky, NCAA, Ncaa Penn Sate Punishment, Ncaa Penn State, Ncaa Penn State Football, Ncaa Penn State Sanctions, Ncaa Penn State Scandal, Jerry Sandusky, Penn State Football Ncaa, Penn State Freeh Report, Penn State Ncaa Punishment, Penn State Scandal, Psu, Psu Football, Jerry Sandusky, Slideexpand, Sports News

 

The Penn State football team gathers on the field after warmups before an NCAA college football game against Michigan State at Beaver Stadium in State College, Pa., Saturday, Nov. 27, 2010. 

 

One day after the statue of Joe Paterno was removed from outside of Beaver Stadium on the Penn State campus, NCAA President Mark Emmert announced sanctions resulting from the football program's role in the sexual abuse scandal involving former defensive coach Jerry Sandusky. On Sunday, the NCAA announced its intention to implement "corrective and punitive measures" against Penn State.

On Monday, Emmert presided over a press conference in Indianapolis and revealed sanctions, including a hefty fine, a postseason ban, and loss of scholarships and previous wins.

"Football will never again be placed ahead of educating, nurturing and protecting young people," Emmert said during a press conference that lasted approximately 45 minutes.
Penn State Punishments:

• $60 million fine, representing approximately one year of football revenues. These funds will go to child sex abuse awareness programs.


• 4-year bowl game ban.


• Scholarship reduction, cap lasting four years.


• Any entering, returning football student athlete can transfer immediately. Presuming academic requirements are met, these potential transfers can play immediately.


• PSU vacates all wins from 1998-2011. The loss of 111 career wins drops Joe Paterno from atop the all-time wins list to 12th.


• PSU begins a five-year probationary period, with the NCAA reserving the right to implement further punishments.

"For the next several years PSU can focus on rebuilding its athletic culture, not worrying about whether it's going to a bowl game," Emmert said as he explained the rationale for this set of sanctions.

Shortly after Emmert concluded his remarks, Penn State Dr. Rodney Erickson issued a statement, addressing the NCAA punishment.

The tragedy of child sexual abuse that occurred at our University altered the lives of innocent children. Today, as every day, our thoughts and prayers continue to be with the victims of Mr. Sandusky and all other victims of child abuse. Against this backdrop, Penn State accepts the penalties and corrective actions announced today by the NCAA. With today's announcement and the action it requires of us, the University takes a significant step forward.
The NCAA ruling holds the University accountable for the failure of those in power to protect children and insists that all areas of the University community are held to the same high standards of honesty and integrity.

The announcement of these punishments comes less than two weeks after former FBI director Louis Freeh released his 267-page scathing report indicating that Joe Paterno and three top Penn State officials "repeatedly concealed critical facts" about the child-sex abuse committed by Sandusky.

Although Emmert previously indicated that the NCAA's "Death Penalty" was on the table in this case, Penn State football will not be suspended. Speaking about the NCAA's decision not to impose the Death Penalty, as it did to SMU during the 1980s, Emmert said that the "suspension of the football program would bring significant unintended harm."

Although Penn State will be permitted to play football during the upcoming season and throughout the period of punishment, head coach Bill O'Brien and his staff face an uncertain future. O'Brien also issued a statement after the NCAA sanctions were revealed, reaffirming his dedication to Penn State.

Today we receive a very harsh penalty from the NCAA and as Head Coach of the Nittany Lions football program, I will do everything in my power to not only comply, but help guide the University forward to become a national leader in ethics, compliance and operational excellence. I knew when I accepted the position that there would be tough times ahead. But I am committed for the long term to Penn State and our student athletes.

MORE FROM THE ASSOCIATED PRESS:

INDIANAPOLIS -- The NCAA slammed Penn State with an unprecedented series of penalties Monday, including a $60 million fine and the loss of all coach Joe Paterno's victories from 1998-2011, in the wake of the Jerry Sandusky child sex abuse scandal.

Other sanctions include a four-year ban on bowl games, the loss of 20 scholarships per year over four years and five years' probation. The NCAA also said that any current or incoming football players are free to immediately transfer and compete at another school.

NCAA President Mark Emmert announced the staggering sanctions at a news conference in Indianapolis. Though the NCAA stopped short of imposing the "death penalty" - shutting down the Nittany Lions' program completely - the punishment is still crippling for a team that is trying to start over with a new coach and a new outlook.

Sandusky, a former Penn State defensive coordinator, was found guilty in June of sexually abusing young boys, sometimes on campus. An investigation commissioned by the school and released July 12 found that Paterno, who died in January, and several other top officials at Penn State stayed quiet for years about accusations against Sandusky.

Emmert fast-tracked penalties rather than go through the usual circuitous series of investigations and hearings. The NCAA said the $60 million is equivalent to the annual gross revenue of the football program. The money must be paid into an endowment for external programs preventing child sexual abuse or assisting victims and may not be used to fund such programs at Penn State.

"Football will never again be placed ahead of educating, nurturing and protecting young people," Emmert said.

Emmert had earlier said he had "never seen anything as egregious" as the horrific crimes of Sandusky and the cover-up by Paterno and others at the university, including former Penn State President Graham Spanier and athletic director Tim Curley.

The investigation headed by former FBI Director Louis Freeh said that Penn State officials kept what they knew from police and other authorities for years, enabling the abuse to go on.
There had been calls across the nation for Penn State to receive the "death penalty," and Emmert had not ruled out that possibility as late as last week - though Penn State did not fit the criteria for it. That punishment is for teams that commit a major violation while already being sanctioned.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story stated that the $60 million fine levied against Penn State correlated to the team's annual football profits rather than revenue.

Global Super Rich Now Hoard $31 Trillion in Tax Havens: Report

Published on Sunday, July 22, 2012 by Common Dreams

Global Super Rich Now Hoard $31 Trillion in Tax Havens: Report

Amount far exceeds previous estimates

- Common Dreams staff 

 

A new report by the Tax Justice Network released Sunday reveals that between $21 trillion and $31 trillion is currently tucked away in global tax havens by the global super-rich--an amount that far exceeds previous estimates. Through exploiting gaps in global tax rules, the global financial elite are managing to hide "as much as the American and Japanese GDPs put together" from taxation, leaving the world's poor to carry the burden of global debt through harsh austerity measures.

 

The Cayman Islands: common tax haven.(David Doubilet/National Geographic) $32 trillion of hidden financial assets in offshore tax havens represents up to to $280 billion in lost income tax revenues, according to the study released to the Guardian's Observer.

The report pools data from the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, United Nations and global central banks.

In the report, The Price of Offshore Revisited, the Tax Justice Network details the ways in which the trillions of dollars are essentially smuggled out of countries into tax free havens such as Switzerland and the Cayman Islands through private banks.

According to the calculations, £6.3tn of assets is owned by only 92,000 people--0.001% of the world's population

"The problem here is that the assets of these countries are held by a small number of wealthy individuals while the debts are shouldered by the ordinary people of these countries through their governments," the report says.

"These estimates reveal a staggering failure: inequality is much, much worse than official statistics show, but politicians are still relying on trickle-down to transfer wealth to poorer people," said John Christensen of the Tax Justice Network. "People on the street have no illusions about how unfair the situation has become."
James Henry, who compiled the report, stated: “[Wealth is] protected by a highly paid, industrious bevy of professional enablers in the private banking, legal, accounting and investment industries taking advantage of the increasingly borderless, frictionless global economy.”

LIBOR scandal: What is it and why you should care

LIBOR scandal: What is it and why you should care

By The Christian Science Monitor
Saturday, July 21, 2012 15:35 EDT

Police wait for protestors to appear at a branch of Barclays Bank in central London, in this recent photo. The interest rate-rigging scandal has already forced the resignation of Barclays chief executive Bob Diamond, as lawmakers on both sides of the Atlantic ask why regulators didn't respond more quickly. (Olivia Harris/Reuters)

The latest banking fraud is centered in Britain, where the financial firm Barclays will pay half a billion dollars in fines for efforts to manipulate a benchmark interest rate. Other banks must have been involved, though, and the full range of the scandal has yet to emerge. Here's a quick look at what is known and why it matters.

What is LIBOR?

LIBOR stands for London Interbank Offered Rate. It's supposed to measure the average interest rate that banks charge when they lend to each other. LIBOR is also used as a foundation for other rates (such as the reset of adjustable rate mortgages) and a reference point for complex financial derivatives.

By one measure, some $300 trillion in loans or derivative contracts are pegged to LIBOR. That's 20 times the size of one year's economic output in the United States.

The LIBOR rates are determined by major banks. The banks report interest-rate estimates to the British Bankers Association, and the firm Thomson Reuters averages them to provide daily LIBOR numbers. The catch: The banks provide the numbers on an honor system. That's different from gathering data on observable transactions.

Who manipulated it, and how?

 

So far, Barclays is Exhibit A: Its chief executive officer has stepped down, and the firm will pay $453 million in fines to settle charges of LIBOR manipulation dating back as far as 2005. More banks will probably be implicated.

The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which charged Barclays and reached a June 27 settlement, stated that other banks were at least sometimes involved. Barclays traders "coordinated with and aided and abetted traders at other banks," the CFTC said, sometimes on days "when many derivatives contracts are settled or reset."

Two general types of manipulation have surfaced.

The first involved seeking to move LIBOR levels (up or down) to benefit a bank's own investment positions. The CFTC quoted e-mails between Barclays traders and colleagues responsible for reports that would influence LIBOR. A typical appeal: "We have another big fixing tom[orrow] and with the market move I was hoping we could set [certain] LIBOR as high as possible." A sample response: "Done ... for you big boy."

The second type: During the financial crisis, banks appear to have underreported LIBOR to try to appear financially stronger. Banks were scared to lend to each other, but a low LIBOR report could ease the aura of panic. According to Barclays employees, this occurred with an "everybody does it" attitude, and perhaps with regulators' consent.

With a dozen or more banks contributing data toward LIBOR, Barclays by itself could have only a small effect. How many other banks fudged LIBOR reports, and by how much? Three US banks participate in LIBOR panels: JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Citigroup.

Why does it matter?

 

Some commentators say LIBOR manipulation doesn't matter much: Deviations from market-derived interest rates weren't generally very large, they say, and many consumers benefited in the form of lower interest on their debts.

But other financial experts call it an egregious fraud, in which banks profited at the expense of customers and financial-market integrity. For every homeowner who benefited from a fractional dip in mortgage rates, there may be an investor who was on the losing end of the manipulation (a pension fund, perhaps, or a factory that uses derivatives to hedge risks). The investment firm Charles Schwab is among those suing to collect damages from LIBOR-related banks.

What's next?

Lots of litigation for banks. Regulators also face scrutiny: Did they knowingly avert their gaze? Were they asleep at the switch? Eventually, the scandal is likely to result in reforming LIBOR or replacing it with benchmarks based on readily observable financial transactions.

The full scope of the scandal has yet to be seen. At the very least, it further erodes the public's already shaky trust in bankers.

This article, LIBOR scandal: What is it and why you should care, is syndicated from The Christian Science Monitor and is reposted here with permission.

The Christian Science Monitor (http://s.tt/1ivIi)

LIBOR scandal: What is it and why you should care (via The Christian Science Monitor)

The latest banking fraud is centered in Britain, where the financial firm Barclays will pay half a billion dollars in fines for efforts to manipulate a benchmark interest rate. Other banks must have been involved, though, and the full range of the scandal has yet to emerge. Here's a quick look at what…

Mitt Romney's Republican Party Stands for Nothing

AlterNet.org

Mitt Romney's Republican Party Stands for Nothing

Most people probably consider former President Jimmy Carter to be some kind of liberal, but that's not how he ran for and won the nomination of his party. He was a centrist and moderate reformer, liberal only for his home state of Georgia. He was distinct from opponents like George Wallace in the South, from neo-conservatives like Scoop Jackson of Washington, and from liberals like Frank Church, Birch Bayh, and Sargent Shriver. If Carter represented a wing of the party, it was an emerging one. He came from the Southern wing of the party that accepted the righteousness of the Civil Rights Era. He was much more Blue Dog than liberal, and he governed that way, too, for the most part.

I was thinking about this when I read that George W. Bush will not be attending the Republican National Convention, let alone giving a speech there. Poppy Bush also declined an invitation, citing poor health. I hear that Sarah Palin didn't even receive an invitation to appear. On the one hand, this seems like a whitewashing of history. On the other hand, it brings into stark relief the fact that Mitt Romney doesn't really represent any faction of the Republican Party. He doesn't represent Yankee Republicanism because he has completely abandoned the values of traditional New England conservatives in favor of the southern flavor of the national party. It's not possible to find any issue where Romney is a moderate. This would not be true if Rudy Guiliani or Olympia Snowe or George Pataki were the nominee. There is no regional appeal to Romney. He will not compete for any votes anywhere between Delaware and Maine.

So, where is he taking his party? Carter helped solidify the New South and moderate his party's racial views. Reagan created a conservative revolution within the GOP that his successor failed to reverse. Bill Clinton helped invent the New Democrats, the DLC, and the Third Way. George W. Bush pushed for compassionate conservatism, which meant big spending with no cops on the beat, and permawar as the cherry on top. Barack Obama created a new coalition and showed the Democrats a new way to win elections.

It seems like all our recent presidents, with the exception of Poppy Bush, have had a major impact on their party. But not Romney. He's like an empty vessel. He might as well be Haley Barbour. Who could tell the difference?

The Republican National Convention is going to be weird. Dick Cheney might be the only Republican there who has ever been elected to serve in the White House. Maybe Dan Quayle will make it two.

And a Massachusetts conservative will give a speech that could just as well be delivered by Sen. Jefferson Beauregard "Jeff" Sessions III of Alabama.

By BooMan | Sourced from Booman Tribune

Posted at July 21, 2012, 11:04 am

Election 2012

20 Prominent Republicans Who Want Romney To Release More Tax Returns Right Now [UPDATED]

By Annie-Rose Strasser on Jul 17, 2012 at 3:50 pm

Mitt Romney continues to resist pressure to turn over more tax returns. In an interview today he said he is “simply not enthusiastic about giving them hundreds or thousands of more pages to pick through, distort, and lie about.”
The call for more information about Romney’s financial past, however, is bipartisan. A poll released today found fifty six percent of all voters, including sixty one percent of independents, think that Romney should release twelve years of returns.

These fifteen prominent Republicans are calling on Romney to release more tax returns, now:



 
1. George Will. On ABC’s “This Week,” Will, a long-time conservative commentator and Washington Post columnist, said, “The costs of not releasing the returns are clear, therefore he must have calculated that there are higher costs in releasing them.” At one point, he even played devil’s advocate to Republican consultant Mary Matalin, who was defending Romney.

 
2. Bill Kristol. “Here’s what he should do,” said Kristol, another conservative commentator, on Fox News. “He should release the tax returns tomorrow. This is crazy… you’ve got to release 6, 8, 10 years of back tax returns. Take the hit for a day or two. Then give a serious speech on Thursday.”

 
3. Ron Paul. Unitl just days ago, Paul was the other Republican presidential candidate. He is also one of those calling for Romney to release the returns. Paul told Politico today, “Politically, I think that would help him. …In the scheme of things politically, you know, it looks like releasing tax returns is what the people want.”

 
4. Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley. The Alabama Governor actually went further than others in suggesting that perhaps Romney is hiding something by not releasing his tax returns. “If you have things to hide, then maybe you’re doing things wrong,” he told the AP. “I think you ought to be willing to release everything to the American people.“

 
5. Michael Steele. The former chair of the Republican National Committee is pushing for release. He claims it will help voters trust Romney, especially since he claims there is nothing to see in the returns: “If there’s nothing there, there’s no ‘there’ there, don’t create a ‘there.’ Put out as much information as you can. Even if you don’t release 12 years worth of tax returns, at least three, four, five.”


 
6. Rep. Walter Jones. In an interview with CNN, the Republican Congressman from North Carolina said, “I think he should release his financial records and I think if he does it in July it would be a lot better than in October. …whenever you are asking for the vote of the American people you need to fully disclose what your holdings are, if you have any.”

 
7. Ana Navarro. “He should just release the stupid taxes and eliminate the Obama campaign tactic of insinuating he’s got something to hide,” the former adviser to John McCain said. “The Obama people are going to keep the issue alive and it has the potential of mushrooming into a bigger issue. …It’s time to just pull off the band-aid.”

 
8. Rep. Pete Sessions. Sessions (R-TX) leads the National Republican Congressional Committee, and even he called Romney’s tax returns “fair game” and a “legitimate question.” In an interview with CNN, Sessions said that “[Romney's] personal finances, the way he does things, his record, are fair game.”

 
9. Gov. Haley Barbour. The Mississippi Governor has been outspoken about the need for Romney to hand over the documents. “The advice I would give Romney is: Who cares about your tax returns? Release ’em!” Barbour said in a phone interview. “We need for this campaign to be about Obama’s record.” Earlier this week, Barbour also called for Romney to release the returns on CNN.

 
10. Matthew Dowd. This conservative commentator called it “arrogance” that Romney was not releasing his returns. Joining forced with Bill Kristol, Dowd spoke candidly about his doubts around Romney’s tax returns: “There is obviously something because if there was nothing there he would say have it…But I think the bigger thing is, it’s arrogance. Many of these politicians think I can do this, I can get away with this.”

 
11. Rick Tyler. Republican strategist and former adviser to Newt Gingrich’s campaign had this to say about Romney’s returns: “Mitt Romney had an opportunity to answer these questions during the primary. …He did not answer these questions and now they’re coming up again. …Only [Romney] can provide that information. …Or we’ll just have drip, drip, drip to November.”

 
12. John Weaver. This Republican strategist had a straightforward message that got picked up as a quote-of-the day. In regard to Romney releasing his returns, he said, “There is no whining in politics. …Stop demanding an apology, release your tax returns.”

 
13. Brit Hume. The conservative Fox News commentator told fellow Fox man Bill O’Reilly, “Any time it’s disclosure versus non-disclosure, you always wonder whether it isn’t better to put it out there. And if it turns out that if people get to hear once again that Mitt Romney is a very very rich man. …I guess the Obama team would have some sport with that for a couple days.”

 
14. David Frum. The conservative journalist David Frum Tweeted his opinion on the tax release controversy. “Tax returns the next problem. Releasing returns under pressure: more weakness, more pain,” he wrote in one tweet. “Do promptly and cheerfully what you will eventually have to do anyway,” he added.

 
15. John Feehery. This Republican strategist joined the growing list of Republicans asking Romney to release the returns when speaking with Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC. “Might as well get it over with,” he told her, “Couple of years, get it over with.”


 







16. Gov. Rick Perry Texas Governor and former Republican Presidential candidate Rick Perry (R) has come out and urged Romney to release his returns. According to the AP, “Perry said that anyone running for office should give people what he called ‘backgrounds,’ including tax returns, if asked and if the requests are within reason.” When Perry was running for President, he released 10 years of returns.

 
17. Sen. Chuck Grassley The Iowa Republican joins the fray, The Hill reports: “”I don’t think he should be called on to do anything extraordinary other than what other presidential candidates have done.’ When asked if he thought Romney should do as much as prior presidential nominees have, meaning release more returns, Grassley said, ‘based upon my comment, I’d have to say yes.’”

 
18. Sen. Dick Lugar In an interview with CBS, Lugar, who himself ran for president in 1998, said it would be smart for Romney to release more returns. “‘It was quite a number which we released.’ …He added it would be “prudent” for Romney to release more years of his tax returns. ‘I have no idea on why he has restricted the number to this point,’ Lugar said.”

 
19. Wayne MacDonald The chair of the New Hampshire GOP came out and told the Washington Post in a phone interview that Romney should probably just release the returns. “Certainly, I don’t think Mitt Romney has anything to hide, and probably the best thing to do is to eliminate any chance for (the Democrats) to make this an issue,” he said. New Hampshire will be an important state in the election.

 
20. Mike Murphy The Daily Beast adds another person, long-time GOP consultant and former Romney employee, to the ever-growing list: “‘Why they didn’t release more of this material a year ago is confusing to me,’ says Mike Murphy, a veteran GOP consultant who has worked for Romney in the past.”

While these Republicans have downplayed the effects of Romney releasing his returns, the tax information may not be so innocuous to the campaign after all. Several experts have said they believe Romney could have paid little to no taxes at all in past years (particularly 2009). 

Update

National Review, the conservative publication whose interview is quoted in the first paragraph of this post, has just come out and asked Mitt Romney to release his tax returns. National Review are long-time Romney supporters; they endorsed him in 2008. Here is National Review’s editorial:

The Romney campaign says he has released as many returns as candidate John Kerry did in 2004, and cites Teresa Heinz Kerry’s refusal to release any of her tax returns. Neither is an apt comparison [...]
Romney may feel impatience with requirements that the political culture imposes on a presidential candidate that he feels are pointless (and inconvenient). But he’s a politician running for the highest office in the land, and his current posture is probably unsustainable. In all likelihood, he won’t be able to maintain a position that looks secretive and is a departure from campaign conventions. The only question is whether he releases more returns now, or later — after playing more defense on the issue and sustaining more hits. There will surely be a press feeding frenzy over new returns, but better to weather it in the middle of July.