January 26, 2012

Newt Rips Romney for Millions in Goldman Sachs Investments

Newt Gingrich.<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/gageskidmore/6265574103/sizes/m/in/photostream/">Gage Skidmore</a>/Flickr

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Is Newt Gingrich a Mother Jones reader? You’d be forgiven for thinking so after hearing Gingrich’s new line of attack on GOP front-runner Mitt Romney. On the campaign trail in Florida Thursday, Gingrich singled out Romney’s dozens of investments Goldman Sachs-run funds for criticism. “Let’s be clear: you’re watching ads paid for with the money taken from the people of Florida by companies like Goldman Sachs, recycled back into ads to try to stop you from having a choice in this election,” Gingrich said in Florida Thursday, according to Politico. “That’s what this is all about.”

Newt went on:

“The question you have to ask yourself is, what level of gall does it take to think that we collectively are so stupid that somebody who owns lots of stock in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, somebody who owns lots of stock in a part of Goldman Sachs that was explicitly foreclosing on Floridians, somebody who is surrounded by lobbyists who made a living protecting Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, can then build his entire negative campaign in Florida around a series of ads that are just plain false.”

Last week, Mother Jones reported that Romney and his wife, Ann, profit off of almost three-dozen investments in funds run by Goldman Sachs in the couple’s blind trusts and individual retirement accounts. Though Romney filed his latest personal financial disclosure last August, we were one of the first news outlets to report on his extensive Goldman holdings. The investments are worth between $17.7 million and $50.5 million.

You can read the full story here.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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