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Segami

(14,923 posts) Mon Sep 24, 2012, 04:33 PM Sep 2012

YOU BUILT THAT? LOL!: How Mitt Romney SHOOK DOWN American Taxpayers For His Welfare Olympics

It's been called Mitt Romney's "golden moment"—the time he took over the troubled Salt Lake City Winter Olympics and led them to respectability on the world stage in 2002. His boosters say that Romney's stewardship of the U.S. Olympics show that he would be a fine president because of the way he managed a vast international enterprise with a huge budget. What they don't talk about is how Romney and his Salt Lake buddies raised the money to finance the games. They took a page from the playbook of Bain Capital and other private equity funds, using an approach popular with the moneymen known as OPM—other people's money. Never put up your own cash if you can find someone else to do it for you.

For the Salt Lake games they found the biggest sugar daddy around: the federal government.

Many records were set at the 2002 Winter Games, but chances are that one will never be broken. That's the amount of federal dollars that Romney and his crew siphoned out of the federal treasury to help pay for the Olympic games: $1.5 billion. That was more than the federal government had spent on all seven Olympic Games held in the U.S. since 1904—combined. In inflation-adjusted dollars.We discovered this during a yearlong investigation to find out who was paying for the Olympics and who in Utah would benefit from the games.

With the help of Utah's congressional delegation, Romney's Salt Lake Olympic committee pried federal dollars out of more than three dozen agencies on an unprecedented scale: $500 million for highways, bridges, roads and interchanges; $30 million for parking lots; $25 million for buses; $11 million for infectious-disease monitoring, food inspection, and medical response; $2 million to house the media; $1 million for a weather forecasting system; and several hundred thousand dollars to plant new trees in and around Salt Lake City—to name only a few of the goodies.

Romney himself lobbied Congress for a $12.7 million handout to cover the overtime pay of local police during the games. In defending the request for federal dollars, Romney said: "This is one last piece of the public-safety puzzle. You can't have the complete chain if you take out a couple of links." No matter how you look at it, the strategy that Romney and the Olympic committee employed so effectively in Salt Lake City to underwrite the games is completely at odds with the image that he and his running mate Paul Ryan are now trying to project as stalwarts of a frugal government that disavows subsidies and expects people to
stand on their own.