The Firm, Mitt, Cayman, Synchronicity

I just finished reading John Grisham's excellent, gripping novel The Firm. Perhaps you have either read it or watched the film version starring Tom Cruise (or both). Or maybe you're going to get involved watching the spin-off TV series. But for me, a novel many years old is suddenly very, very timely.

Part of the story in The Firm involves how the tiny Caribbean island of Grand Cayman is used as a haven for wealthy American tax dodgers to legally avoid paying federal tax on their holdings by depositing their money in one or more of the hundreds of banks set up there just for that one purpose. Several important scenes in the novel take place there (even though it isn't the primary setting). But it is crucial to the story...

Call it coincidence or call it synchronicity (which I personally define, for all practical purposes, to be "useful coincidence"), but this decades-old novel I just happened to pick up recently and read suddenly has relevance in the news of today.

Enter now Mitt Romney and the very recent allegation that he also has large deposits on the Caymans in order to, well, you know...

In The Firm, those who used offshore tax havens like Grand Cayman to avoid paying taxes were depicted as being technically law-abiding, but still shady and slimy characters that perhaps a young, idealistic lawyer like the story's protagonist may not take too kindly to (no worry: he really was O.K. with it, in a fictional sort of way). So I wonder to myself whether our possibly next president fits the description of someone who would take every legal means possible to squirm his way out of paying his due share of taxes? I think that is a more relevant question to ask than for the intimate, personal details of a very private conversation that Newt Gingrich may (or may not) have had with a former wife, don't you? After all, isn't the president, by virtue of his position in office, heavily involved in determining how much tax you and I will be paying?