[Note to Readers: The original article (below) was published on 9/22/12 at my blog here. Given the puzzling level of attention to this article & one surreal, pathetic, unprofessional, non-standard report on this diary/blog in mainstream (CBS DC local) media report (see my upcoming blog ridiculing this CBS "report" on a hypothesis articulated by a non-famous blogger, whose main point was to critique media & whose other points are much more important- ironically confirming my media critique) on my Daily Kos version, I will eventually give it a proper editing.

The question on minds of many hard-working American tax-payers is: "What dark secret is candidate Romney hiding in his (pre-2010) tax records that's worth all the bad press & suspicions caused by his secretiveness?"



GOP presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, has been exceedingly hostile towards requests for transparency about his past tax records, only releasing his tax records for 2010 & 2011 as of yesterday (9/21/12), which essentially confirmed what even casual observers know: he's filthy rich & like most of the top 1% has accountants, tax lawyers exploit a myriad of tax loopholes, off-shore tax havens, and financial shenanigans to minimize his taxable wealth/income.







Using my superficial knowledge about this issue & only the power of scientific thinking, I proffer the following falsifiable prediction:





Mitt Romney is hiding the fact that the he was one of the that the he was one of the 5000 wealthy American tax-dodgers that Swiss bank UBS turned over to US authorities, as part of a USDOJ-brokered 2009 deal, which both fined UBS for hiding rich American's money in a massive tax-evasion scheme , and offered the 5000 rich Americans "amnesty" (from criminal prosecution, trials & prison time), if they paid back the tax revenues they stole from US Treasury during the previous years.





In other words, I hypothesize that Mitt Romney is hiding the fact that- according to US law- he should be in a federal prison , but is only free and running for to be the next US president because of the special "amnesty" program offered to 5000 American financial elite, who violated US law in order to hoard their riches in in an illegal tax-evasion scheme, which was cooked up by Swiss banks & exposed by a heroic whistleblower, who- in accord with the new 1% US morality- was the only one to be imprisoned, while Romney & his elite 1% cronies plotted his White House takeover.

Here's a simple lesson for the incurious swarm of media reporters/commentators who routinely fail to ask the most important questions or connect the most "obvious" dots, or really do much more than distract & regurgitate undigested propaganda to prop up the charade that we have a healthy democracy (e.g. free press, free speech, competitive elections) of, by, and for the people.





Induction: See how my superficial scanning of headlines illuminated an important research question (e.g. what's Romney hiding in his tax records?) and some basic facts (e.g. Romney has 1% 'above-the-law' values, already admitted to some serious tax fraud/mistakes, US 'amnesty' deal for 5000 rich tax-cheats)





Logical reasoning: He's hiding something else more damaging than public perception that he's hiding something, or the other tax fraud he committed. His 1% fortune put him in small sub-population UBS would likely risk recruiting for illegal tax-evasion scheme. Romney's 1% "above the law" & greedy values & dishonest character make him type of rich American to utilize illegal tax-evasion scheme. Proof he purchased "amnesty" from criminal prosecution/prison for tax evasion would be devastating & worse than bad press of being suspiciously secretive & intransparent. He already admitted to retroactively "correcting" his tax-evasion crime that was embarrassingly dishonest (claiming Utah residence until he opted to run for MA governor) that saved him more than median US income (i.e. "conscious, profitable mistakes"), so it must be something much more embarrassing and worth all the negative press he's getting for not fully disclosing like his father did.





Deduction : My hunch is that his records show he paid massive back-taxes in exchange for USDOJ offered amnesty.





Hypothesis-testing: Normally, I'd do research to see if logic or available facts contradict this hunch, but logic tells me this would've been a headline and the question hasn't been answered yet, and my objective here is to provide a rudimentary tutorial to American media stenographers (i.e. called journalists elsewhere) on how they could use a scientific mode of thinking to generate the most important questions (to the public not their venerated power-holders), and guide what are called "empirical investigations."





For example, if I were a paid journalists I'd first make sure this hypothesis is not easily contradicted by logic or available facts before even tossing this supposition out there. If I determined it was plausible, then I'd ask Mitt Romney to deny it on the record. If he refused to explicitly deny it, I'd conclude that I was probably correct and write an article demonstrating my reasoning and the facts, and explore alternative ways of dis-confirming or confirming my hunch, while increasing pressure on Romney to disclose the pre-2010 records, which will certainly revealing some embarassing truths, if my hunch is wrong.





Once again my goal here was to illustrate how a legitimate investigative journalist (or average citizen) can generate the most important questions, hypotheses and empirical analysis using a basic mode of scientific inquiry.





Hopefully, this encourages some US media reporters to experiment with this mode of inquiry called a "scientific (or objective) mode of analysis." The great thing is that once you get the hang of it, you can use it to explore any empirical question of public interest, and we'd all be very grateful in the end.









IMPORTANT WHISTLEBLOWING NOTE: given my long-standing emphasis (see, given my long-standing emphasis (see, War on Whistleblowers, Democracy & Enlightenment: US Authoritarianism's Rapid Institutionalization Unstoppable ? in many articles/posts) on the critical importance of whistleblowing and the threats to our democracy, economy, security, health/safety posed by the "War on Whistleblowers," it's worth noting that:





1) The USDOJ-brokered "amnesty" deal & UBS settlement brought in about $5.75 billion in revenues to the IRS/US Treasury (i.e. approx. annual cost of 2007 bill providing health insurance to 4 million poor American kids blocked by 1 of Bush's 4 vetoes).





2) Guess who was imprisoned for 31 months for involvement in this massive tax-evasion scheme & recently released? If you read my blog, you'll likely guess correctly...that's right...it was the UBS whistleblower, Bradley Birkenfeld, who voluntarily approached the US authorities with evidence of the illegal Swiss bank tax-evasion scheme that was being exploited by 5000-35000 of America's top 1% to avoid paying their fair share of taxes. Starting to see the pattern? Much of the US government is so corrupted that the massive coercive power apparatus is used to destroy & imprison whistleblowers who must risk their freedom, lives, careers, to act in the public interest, in order to protect the 1%'s wealth, interests & freedoms to do whatever they want, while letting the bottom 99% pick up the tab.





3) In a very rare sign of positive reform in direction towards defending public interest, the US not only released the whistleblower from prison, the IRS awarded him $100+ million reward, and sent out millions of letters to potential whistleblowers that they'll be handsomely rewarded (not imprisoned) for reporting serious tax evasion/fraud. Assuming this massive defrauding of the American people would've otherwise continued, that single heroic whistleblower saved the countless billions of dollars in addition to the $5.75 billion he alone helped bring in.





"Both men said their workdays ended around 10 p.m., though they described their late-night routines somewhat differently. Mr. Obama said that after his wife and daughters went to sleep..." [see article for more such "critical" details]

I feel I should clarify some things up front. To be clear, my original objective was merely demonstrate how a journalist/citizen could use a scientific mode of thinking to generate a logically coherent, plausible, falsifiable theoretical explanation of important empirical phenomena (i.e. what's known & hidden in tax records?), which produced hypotheses that could be tested on empirical evidence, something I clearly state that I did NOT intend to do. I never claim to prove this theory is true, and openly admit that I had not even done the preliminary research I would normally do to make sure my hunch wasn't ridiculous (remember I picked an issue I professed virtual igorance about), because my objective was to illustrate how I would use logic & science to go about investigating this- or any- importan question. I was only aware of superifical facts from headlines when I first published this. I was partly motivated by my long-standing disgust with US media's failure to ask important questions, or practice adversarial/investigative journalism, so I embarked on this intellectual journey to simply rely on my superficial knowledge of the headlines & see what answers scientific thinking would produce. I was not going to publish it because I wasn't finished editing it, and because I felt I hadn't made my objective clear, & didn't want to get mocked for "believing" a theory I hadn't even done basic fact-checking on, but said "what the heck" & published it in the wee hours, expecting a handful of strangers might read it. Based upon the comments I received and sheer quantity of views/shares of my little thought piece (if trustworthy, 90,000+ via social networking shares), I tentatively conclude my theoretically-deduced hunch convinced people who likely knew more about the facts than me that this theory was plausible (something I hadn't seriously attempted to discern for my "tutorial" to journalists), some of whom supplied details (see comments) that further corroborated my reasoned guesstimate. No one has yet provided compelling evidence or logic contradicting this theory (I learned had been more seriously explored by some paid journalists; see links at bottom), which is a good sign for a scientific theory that must be considered a "provisional truth" until its internal logic is debunked or evidence disconfirms it. The most important fruit of this exercise was that it may have coincidentally produced a perfect "gem" of question the media & citizens can demand Romney answers. Given the scandalous nature of this plausible theory, the fact that Romney is violating norms of disclosure (measured by average of years/records of previous candidates, including his father), this puts the burden of proof on him to demonstrate why he deserves "special treatmnet" & that this "dark secret" hypothesis is false. If he refuses, then we can conclude he feels he deserves more privacy than past/present candidates & values this more than public's right to know they can trust their candidate/president wasn't a criminal, or what he's hiding is worse than what's been hypothesized. Personally, I think it appalling that the media & Americans tolerate such secretive, evasive, intransparent behavior of a candidate for president, and disgraceful that anyone must waste time trying to guess whether our leaders are hiding criminal pasts when Romney could easily dispel such suspicions.The crux of the hypothesis deduced (for purposes of illustrating "scientific thinking" to credulous media) from my superficial knowledge of headlines was that Romney's hiding fact that he took advantage of the USDOJ's 2009 "amnesty" program for tax-cheats & paid penalties/fines for assets/income he'd illegally hidden for years.The rest of this article is not technically scientific-but may refer to more important truths overshadowed by the misinterpreted headline- is my personal attempt to put this question/possibility in its broader socio-economic-political-cultural context, and is laden with my own normative, political biases, such as my profound belief that any legitimate US president should not be trusted unless he's willing to categorically come clean with his financial past, like every other candidate. Maybe you believe Romney deserves special treatment & rights.]**Here's the new "What's Romney Hiding?" Obama ad:Indeed, at a time when the US is plagued with grotesque levels of poverty, and both- economic & political- inequality , a vast majority of Americans not longer trust the so-called "free press" or Congress, and believe corporate elite have too much influence over the US government & US elections, our the same New York Times that was critical to selling Americans on the Iraq War, feeds the follow soporific, drivel on 9/23/12 about the candidates vying to become the leader of the most powerful super-power in human history:How disgracefully shameful that while the famous NYT was wasting ink & paper to mimick real journalism, an unpaid, Un-person like myself, who hadn't been following the election closely, cooked up (in a spare hour or so) what may be the most plausible answer to the question about what Romney's hiding in his tax records, which very well might reveal that thewho heeped haughty scorn on the bottom 47% for feeling entitled to food (!) and not paying any taxes, mayfor many years until he opted to avoid the risk of getting busted, exposed & sent to prison, quietly accepted the US "amnesty" deal, paid his back-taxes plus penalties, so that he could not only avoid prison, but run to be the venerated leader of the most influential super-power humanity has ever witnessed.No wonder most journalists- let alone citizens- are mostly unaware that- ongoing NDAA case is- possibly the biggest constitutional showdown between the President & Judiciary since the Pentagon Papers has been proceeding, the very future of the 1st Amendment free speech, free press & association, and fundamental rights to due process, indefinite detention of citizens, are in the process of being decided as I write. On tha issue as well, I'm pretty surethat the new NDAA "war on terror" powers, are essentially a re-wording of Pres. and Bush's secret legal memos that were declassified on 3/2/2009, but point blank said the president can suspend the 1st & 4th Amendments, use the military/CIA inside the US, and treat citizens with legal status of "the enemy," and this is critically relevant to understanding this important case that the media barely covers.Although I didn't intend on seriously investigating this issue (& haven't), I received some links indicating that it is much more likely Romney's "dark secret" is that he'd probably be in prison for tax-evasion if he was one of us 99% peasants, insofar as as the 2009 "amnesty" program was for all tax-dodgers hoarding unreported assets somewhere.

The point is that I generated a theory so plausible and potentially scandalous that all the media have to do now is their job, and relentlessly hound Romney until he disproves the allegation, which is a much better question than the new Obama ad poses ("What's Romney hiding?"), because it is a very specific question that corners him into either coming clean with the American people, or risk looking like Pres. Nixon assuring us that "I'm not a crook," while refusing to hand over the evidence that would conclusively demonstrate whether the GOP voters fell for a Con job by a neo-Con man.





If the same conservative-biased media and debate moderators that have had Obama jumping around to disprove every allegation their right-wing rumor machine dreams up can not hound a presidential candidate to simply comply with traditional disclosure norms, then I'm going to conclude we simply do not have a healthy democracy, or legitimate elections that are anything more than choreographed parades that gloss over the voracious cancer eating away at the soul of America (something I'll conclude until Citizens United is overturned, voter suppression stops, journalists start doing their jobs, & I feel protected by the 1st & 5th & 8th Amendment, an impossibility if the plaintiffs lose in the ongoing case over the NDAA provision 1021).





Here's an exercise journalists can practice to prepare for asking Romney an important question:





"Mr. Romney, did you take advantage of the 2009 "amnesty" deal and pay penalties for tax evasion? Is that why you so carefully parse your language, referring to taxes 'owed,' and averages over many years? I'm sorry, unless you settle this question, the American people simple cannot trust you with such immense power & responsibilities that will affect the future of humanity."

Is there truly no journalist in America with the courage to demand the truth & defend our democracy, by doing their damn job?I hope that my hunch was right & this goes viral, just to shame the media with a gigantic wake-up call.If I had an inkling more than a handful of strangers would read this, I would have finished editing and polishing it, which I suppose I must do now.