by Jules Witcover

Occupy Wall Street, meet Mitt Romney. The Republican presidential frontrunner is probably doing more to get across the message of income inequality in America than all the downtown tents and their occupants put together.

Allegations of Romney activities as a former corporate predator have for weeks been a central topic in the GOP primary debates. Rival Newt Gingrich and others have accused the former Bain Capital executive of stripping failing companies and recasting them for investor profit, sometimes resulting in lost middle-class jobs. Rick Perry's image of "vulture capitalism" resonates.

Now Romney has reluctantly acknowledged that he games the system to pay low taxes, a fact expected to be revealed when he discloses his income tax returns. He has promised to do so, but full disclosure may not happen until sometime in April. Never mind that by then he could have the presidential nomination sewed up.

Romney says he pays taxes at a rate of only 15 percent because most of his income is in capital gains from past very lucrative investments, which have given him a net worth he figures ranges from $190 million to $250 million. That certainly should put him in the 1 percent that the Occupiers keep ranting about in New York and other urban protests around the country.

Romney added to the inequity outcry when he said this about the more than $370,000 he earned in one year of speech-making: "I get speaker's fees from time to time, but not very much." Joe Sixpack might not agree. The Democratic National Committee was quick to produce a politician quipping: "I'll bet you $10,000 the American people think that's a lot," recalling Romney's rich-man wager in an earlier debate.

He is not, of course, out there all by himself tapping into the lucrative speaking racket. Gingrich has given him a good run for his money in that department, as well as collecting consulting fees from various businesses who seek his wisdom (but certainly not, he insists, for his influence with old chums on Capitol Hill).

All the bantering about personal wealth among the Republican candidates doesn't help combat the GOP's reputation, pushed constantly by the Democrats, as the party of the rich. Personal wealth, however, currently fuels the campaigns of both parties through that newfangled obscenity the super PAC.

The Supreme Court majority in the Citizens United case has wreaked havoc on the political system as never before, by allowing unlimited corporate giving as long as it does not go directly to a candidate's official campaign and there is no collusion between it and the Super-PAC. With a license to use fat-cat money to smear opposing candidates whether the beneficiary approves or not, such groups have raised negativity to new heights.

The Court's conservative bloc, buying into the notion that corporations are people and have the right to free speech as well individuals, naively bought into the fiction that just because formal campaign strategists and PAC operatives don't talk, collusion won't happen. On the simplest level, an official campaign can eschew negative advertising, knowing the PAC for its candidate will fill the gap, in spades.

Both Romney and Gingrich have been crying crocodile tears about the other not getting his super PAC to desist, while each pleads he has no power to prevent his own unofficial arm from continuing the smearing. Romney in last Monday's South Carolina debate called for an end to all super PACs, and returning to the official campaigns the role of all advertising of their choosing. "Let people make contributions they want to make to campaigns," he said, "let campaigns then take responsibility for their own words."

Many veteran campaign managers want no part of any outside "independent expenditure" group over which they have no control, and especially over advertising that may backfire on their candidate. But as long as this Supreme Court-sanctioned free flowing of money goes on in an avalanche of negativity, and the court holds that corporations have the same free-speech rights as individuals, the man and woman in the street will continue to be the loser. The court majority's tin ear on the political ramifications of its actions has never been more obvious and destructive.

 

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Mitt Romney: Wealth and Influence on the Campaign Trail | Politics

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