Friday, August 24, 2012

BloggeRhythms 8/24/2012

Kevin D. Williamson, of National Review on-line, posted an interesting article yesterday afternoon, regarding what he refers to as a “gossip” website called Gawker.
 
Williamson writes that “Gawker has an interesting headline up: ‘Inside Mitt Romney’s Tax-Dodging Cayman Schemes,’ which incudes some 950 pages of material related to Mitt Romney’s investments, mostly having to do with Bain Capital and together reveal the "mind-numbing, maze-like, and deeply opaque complexity with which Romney has handled his $250 million fortune."
 
Williamson then goes on that, “As John Cassidy relates in The New Yorker, Gawker’s own finances are “organized like an international money-laundering operation.” For example:
 
“Much of its international revenues are directed through Hungary, where [bossman Nick] Denton’s mother hails from, and where some of the firm’s techies are located. But that is only part of it. Recently, [Felix] Salmon reports, the various Gawker operations—Gawker Media LLC, Gawker Entertainment LLC, Gawker Technology LLC, Gawker Sales LLC—have been restructured to bring them under control of a shell company based in the Cayman Islands, Gawker Media Group Inc."
 
Cassidy then asks: “Why would a relatively small media outfit based in Soho choose to incorporate itself in a Caribbean locale long favored by insider dealers, drug cartels, hedge funds, and other entities with lots of cash they don’t want to advertise? The question virtually answers itself, but for those unversed in the intricacies of international tax avoidance Salmon spells it out: “The result is a company where 130 U.S. employees eat up the lion’s share of the the U.S. revenues, resulting in little if any taxable income, while the international income, the franchise value of the brands, and the value of the technology all stays permanently overseas, untouched by the I.R.S.”
 
Now that I’ve provided the background, here’s the part that interested me most where Cassidy recaps, I think perfectly, “So we have evil offshoring -exploiting those poor marginalized Hungarian nerds- baroque tax-minimizing schemes, assets that will not be repatriated because of U.S. taxes, and that favorite sin of the Left: hypocrisy. In my mind, hypocrisy is a lesser sin than stupidity, and it is sort of stupid to write up a breathless account about Romney’s doing the precise same thing your company does. Incidentally, there is nothing in the Gawker report or the accompanying documents suggesting that Romney or Bain did anything improper. And neither did Gawker, for that matter: U.S. tax practices create very powerful incentives to pursue avoidance strategies. Gawker’s owners apparently know that, even if its writers lack the guts or the intellectual capability to acknowledge as much.”
 
As for me, at the risk of sounding like redundancy, I think the three contributors to the preceding story did an outstanding job of illustrating leftist hypocrisy and it's very typical finger pointing. However, what really came through to me is that, when all was said and done, what Mitt Romney really did was manage his business to benefit its owners the most which is his primary responsibility. And not only that, in order to accomplish the same things for themselves monetarily, Gawkers management did exactly what he did and you can’t get a better endorsement of his ability than that.
 
That’s it for today folks.
 
Adios

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