Mitt Romney and sacks of fertilizer. What's the difference? The sacks of shit behind him don't lie.
(Tip o' the tinfoil hat to Mrs. JP for the heads-up. Who loves ya, baby?)
As I write this, noted liberal attorney Gloria Allred and her client are at
Norfolk Probate and Family Court in Canton, Massachusetts. Her client is Maureen Sullivan Stemberg. So why is that so important?
It's important because Allred is uniting with the Boston Globe on a motion to impound the now-sealed court records of the Stembergs' War of the Roses-type divorce in 1991. The story was broken by the muck-raking TMZ as well as the Globe, Time magazine and Daily Kos,
the Huffington Post and others. And they're trying to get the court
records unsealed and gag order lifted because the Globe got a tip that
not only did Mitt Romney testify on behalf of his buddy Tom Stemberg,
the founder of Staples, but he'd even helped his campaign surrogate lie
about his corporation's worth (And, remember, Staples was supposed to be
Bain Capital's first great triumph, if the definition of "triumph" is
in not bankrupting a company they'd taken over and ship all the jobs to
Communist China). But 21 years ago, a few years after the company began
taking off, Romney had supposedly testified during the divorce
proceedings that, gee, maybe I'm not such a great businessman, after
all, and my poor CEO friend Tom here really isn't worth as much as his
mean estranged wife and divorce lawyer are claiming he is.
Regarding
the actual worth of the company, here's Tom crowing in his own words
about the company during those heady salad days in an interview with Parade Magazine just late last August:
We had a board
meeting in the early ‘90s, and by this time, Staples was a
multibillion-dollar operation. It had a delivery business, a contract
business, and an international business.
Note he said, "the early '90's." Which was no more than a
year or two after the divorce. And we're supposed to believe that
Staples' stock had benefited from some miraculous, quasi-religious
turnaround in its fortunes so that in 12-24 months it had been
transformed from a start-up company into a global multi-billion dollar
corporate giant, a success that neither Stemberg, Mitt Romney nor anyone
at Bain Capital could've foreseen? It's a miracle, brothers and
sisters! Hallelujah!
The other half of the story, the aftermath, ought to
be considered at least as important as Multiple Mitt committing perjury
on the stand 21 years ago. Says TMZ,
Sources tell us
... Tom also got custody of the couple's one child, making allegations
of abuse against Maureen. And get this ... in the mid-90s, after the
divorce, Tom sent the boy a letter saying, although he loved him,
because of issues related to the divorce "it will not be possible for
you to be a part of our family for the foreseeable future."
Maureen lost her home in the process and struggled financially.
In other words, Stemberg and Mitt treated Maureen
Sullivan Stemberg (an MS sufferer as well as a cancer survivor) and son
as if she was just another one of Bain Capital's tens of thousands of
employees who'd just lost their jobs to downsizing or outsourcing or
offshoring and left to fend for herself.
Meanwhile, weeks after the divorce, Mittens and his buddy Stemberg broke their necks getting to Goldman Sachs and sold their "overvalued" stock for a mint.
I have to admit, I find Allred's and her clients' timing a
little suspicious, what with election day in 12 days. But if perjury
was indeed committed, condemning a mother and child to poverty, then
justice certainly has to be pursued. And one has to wonder, in the event
the Romneys ever get divorced, if Mitt will lowball his own offshored
fortune just to fuck over Ann, another wife of a rich man who suffers
from MS and is a cancer survivor? My guess would be, Abso-fucking-lutely
yes because right wingers are greedy sociopathic scum first and
husbands and fathers ninth or tenth.