COMMENT: The 2012 Presidential race will likely be decided by the economy, or the electorate’s perception of same. Observing the media’s treatment of the candidates is reminiscent of the grotesque media bias to which Al Gore was subjected in 2000. (Robert Parry, among others, has noted the overt bias of the mainstream media toward Dubya during that election.)
A recent article in The Village Voice highlighted the manner in which Romney’s Bain Capital operated. It is the supposed “success” of Bain Capital that has been touted by Romney and the flacks in the media running interference for him as proof that this “businessman” has the necessary expertise to run the U.S. economy.
The fact of the matter is that Bain Capital and Romney epitomize the very worst aspects of predatory private equity business. If a President Romney runs the American economy the way that he operated at Bain, it bodes very poorly for American workers.
It is to be noted that, after cannibalizing businesses and screwing working folks for fun and a great deal of profit, Romney parked a great deal of money in offshore bank accounts in the Cayman Islands, one of the most notorious tax havens.
I am charging the listeners (and readers) to do a little homework. I want them to distribute this article, and the information about Romney’s offshore bank accounts. In the Internet age, it should be possible for a relatively small number of listeners to generate a great deal of buzz in this regard. If Romney gets in, you are going to be very, very sorry.
“Drivers, start your engines!”
“Mitt Romney, American Parasite” by Peter Kotz; The Village Voice; 4/18/2012.
EXCERPT: It was the early 1990s, and the 750 men and women at Georgetown Steel were pumping out wire rods at peak performance. They had an abiding trust in management’s ability to run a smart company. That allegiance was rewarded with fat profit-sharing checks. In the basement-wage economy of Georgetown, South Carolina, Sanderson and his co-workers were blue-collar aristocracy.
“We were doing very good,” says Sanderson, president of Steelworkers Local 7898. “The plant was making money, and we had good profit-sharing checks, and everything was going well.”
What he didn’t know was that it was about to end. Hundreds of miles to the north, in Boston, a future presidential candidate was sizing up Georgetown’s books.
At the time, Mitt Romney had been running Bain Capital since 1984, minting a reputation as a prince of private investment. A future prospectus by Deutsche Bank would reveal that by the time he left in 1999, Bain had averaged a shimmering 88 percent annual return on investment. Romney would use that success to launch his political career.
His specialty was flipping companies—or what he often calls “creative destruction.” It’s the age-old theory that the new must constantly attack the old to bring efficiency to the economy, even if some companies are destroyed along the way. In other words, people like Romney are the wolves, culling the herd of the weak and infirm. . . .
. . . . Bain would slash costs, jettison workers, reposition product lines, and merge its new companies with other firms. With luck, they’d be able to dump the firm in a few years for millions more than they’d paid for it.
But the beauty of Romney’s thesis was that it really didn’t matter if the company succeeded. Because he was yanking out cash early and often, he would profit even if his targets collapsed.
Which was precisely the fate awaiting Georgetown Steel.
When Bain purchased the mill, Sanderson says, change was immediate. Equipment upgrades stopped. Maintenance became an afterthought. Managers were replaced by people who knew nothing about steel. The union’s profit-sharing plan was sliced twice in the first year—then whacked altogether.
“When Bain Capital took over, it seemed like everything was being neglected in our plant,” Sanderson says. “Nothing was being invested in our plant. We didn’t have the necessary time to maintain our equipment. They had people here that didn’t know what they were doing. It was like they were taking money from us and putting it somewhere else.”
History would prove him correct. While Georgetown was beginning its descent to bankruptcy, Romney was helping himself to the company’s treasury. . . .
. . . . In the midst of that 1994 campaign [against Ted Kennedy], one of Romney’s companies, American Pad & Paper, bought a plant in Marion, Indiana. At the time, it was prosperous enough to be running three shifts.
Bain’s first move was to fire all 258 workers, then invite them to reapply for their jobs at lower wages and a 50 percent cut in health care benefits.
“They came in and said, ‘You’re all fired,’ ” employee Randy Johnson told the Los Angeles Times. “ ‘If you want to work for us, here’s an application.’ We had insurance until the end of the week. That was it. It was brutal.”
But instead of reapplying, the workers went on strike. They also decided the good people of Massachusetts should know what kind of man wanted to be their senator. Suddenly, Indiana accents were showing up in Kennedy TV ads, offering tales of Romney’s villainy. He was sketched as a corporate Lucifer, one who wouldn’t blink at crushing little people if it meant prettying his portfolio.
Needless to say, this wasn’t a proper leading man’s role for a labor state like Massachusetts. Taking just 41 percent of the vote, Romney was pounded in the election. Meanwhile, the Marion plant closed just six months after Bain’s purchase. The jobs were shipped to Mexico. . . .
. . . . An example of Romney’s cold-blooded approach is his 1994 purchase of Dade International, an Illinois medical-equipment company. He soon merged it with two similar firms, a move that tripled sales.
Once again, he couldn’t help but raid the vault, peeling away $100 million for himself and investors at the same time Dade was laying off 1,700 American workers.
After Bain closed a Dade plant in Puerto Rico, human-resources manager Cindy Hewitt was asked to lure a dozen of those employees to work in the company’s Miami factory.
But that plant soon closed as well. Although Romney was gobbling up millions, Bain still wanted those laid-off employees to repay their moving costs.
“They were treated horribly,” Hewitt told The New York Times. “There was absolutely no concern for the employees. It was truly and completely profit-focused.”
Yet Bain’s molestation wasn’t complete. It was trying to sell Dade but didn’t like the offers it received on the open market. So it created an artificial market of its own.
In 1999, it forced Dade to borrow $242 million, which was used to buy back company stock from Bain, Dade executives, and their banker, Goldman Sachs.
Bain was again extracting profits with borrowed money. It had pushed Dade’s debt to a bracing $2 billion. To help pay for the deal, the company laid off another 367 workers.
But that debt proved too much for Dade’s shoulders to carry. Three years later, the company was bankrupt.
Kosman calls it standard Romney operating procedure. To pump short-term earnings, he would essentially “starve a company,” whacking not just employees, but also customer-service and research-and-development funding—the ingredients of long-term prosperity. . . .
COMMENT: And where did this “businessman” put his money? He stashed it in the Cayman Islands, where he won’t have to pay U.S. taxes. What a guy!
EXCERPT: Although it is not apparent on his financial disclosure form, Mitt Romney has millions of dollars of his personal wealth in investment funds set up in the Cayman Islands, a notorious Caribbean tax haven.
A spokesperson for the Romney campaign says Romney follows all tax laws and he would pay the same in taxes regardless of where the funds are based.
As the race for the Republican nomination heats up, Mitt Romney is finding it increasingly difficult to maintain a shroud of secrecy around the details about his vast personal wealth, including, as ABC News has discovered, his investment in funds located offshore and his ability to pay a lower tax rate.
“His personal finances are a poster child of what’s wrong with the American tax system,” said Jack Blum, a Washington lawyer who is an authority on tax enforcement and offshore banking. . . .
Uncle Sam and The Swastika
Here is the great work of Lucy Komisar on some of Romney’s other shenanigans, involving this time the Marriott hotels chain.
http://www.thekomisarscoop.com/2012/01/romney-on-board/
I work for a corporation half owned by Bain Capital Partners. I understand Mitt left in 1999 but I believe he still takes dividend checks. And even though Mitt has moved on (not really), the crummy business and labor practices continue in his wake. It employs over 45,000 people, 75% of which are part time with no benefits. Most can barely get the hours they need to live. If sales are down, even on a weekly basis, then you can expect your hours to be cut. Even in a business subject to the fluctuations of consumer spending (what a way to make a living) this is degrading treatment and unnecessary unless you’re looking to nickel-and-dime every possible labor cost—which is the cost of people, nuisances that they are. Sometimes it feels more like a wage lottery than a job.
@GrumpusRex: Sorry about that. Last job I had didn’t pay all that well either and the hours were kinda crappy but I was 17 and desperate for cash......and then they dropped me after only a few months. Been outta luck ever since......hopefully my next job will be a decent one.
[...] The “Bain” of American Wage Earners: Romney’s Way [...]
Romney and Bain typify the financial parasitism which dominates the US economy and its political representatives who populate the 2‑Party-System™.
Be it Obama (more than likely...) or Romnoia post-Nov election the strategy is to continue decimating the general working population through destroying social benefits won during the last century.
Look at La Pen in France, she just won almost 20% of the vote, roughly what Ron Paul would get here if he were allowed on the ballot.
This is the case since no truly progressive alternative is allowed to manifest. This is fertile ground for lumpen fascist movements to flourish.
@Stu: I’d be pretty concerned about Le Pen but here in the U.S. I still seriously doubt RP would get close to 10% of the popular vote, let alone 20%, not this late in the game(mainly because of his failure in 2008, when his popularity was at its peak with progressives). I still maintain that at least a slight(60%?) majority of RP voters are likely going to be conservatives and right-leaning centrists who think that Romney is too mainstream and Obama is too liberal......if anything at all, RP may actually end up hurting Romney, so he may not be able to run......
that said, though, I can’t disagree with Dave’s assertion that some disaffected progressives may indeed be sucked into the RP vortex, though I feel more optimistic than he does in that regard. There were a LOT of them who were turned off when they found out about his past shenanigans, from what I’ve seen, and right now, it seems to be the fringe conservatives who are mainly ignoring the evidence, and even trying to counter it with B.S.
Beyond Romney’s pillage and burn business models, the guy is personally chilling. He is entirely a surface personality and there is an absence of real humanity there. I get a bad feeling that there is no one in there. His practiced folksy manner is too smooth and he is always ‘on’. Every hair in place, always smiling, he could be a programmed video figure with all the neuro-linguistic canned responses he produces. He has obviously had intensive training in demagogy techniques. I listen carefully but there is no actual content in what he says. Obama tends this way also but Romney is the master. Perhaps there is no real Romney and we are about to elect a computer program as chief executive.
@Dwight: At least Obama’s been pretty good at messing with the Repubs this last year or so. I do believe, though, that his greatest accomplishments are likely to occur during his second term, because then, he’d have far less to lose by pissing them off.
Mitt Romney and his foreign policy team are hyping the Russian threat (think Soviet) as the biggest and baddest thing out there. It may be mere opportunistic and reflexive right-wing politicking, but I can’t be the first to realize it aligns Romney with geo-strategic goals of Underground Reich vis-a-vis US/Russian relations.
I agree that there is something fundamentally disturbing and false about the man, and absolutely ghoulish in his well practiced sophistry. It is really chilling.
@GrumpusRex: I have to agree 100%.
Putin, as incompetent as he may be, is no wannabe Stalin. The Russians aren’t looking for new worlds to conquer(if I may quote the 1990 WWIII classic, “By Dawn’s Early Light”).
Romney’s foreign policy would be absolutely disastrous if implemented and could set back US/Russian relations by perhaps as much as 25 years or so, maybe further!
I don’t believe it would result in WWIII or anything(I don’t buy into that kind of fearmongering like some others on the ‘Net might), but certainly something would give.
Mitt Romney is related to George H. Bush, George W. Bush, Prescott Bush, the whole Bush group, along with others, to many to mention.
They all are descendants of Anne Hutchinson, and the Chart showing the tie-ins along with photographs can be found in the Utah Ancestry Library located in Salt Lake City, Utah.
So will we be under the Bushy Dynasty or what? George W. Bush authored the executive order that created the “Homeland Security Agency”. That EO merged the military and the civilian law enforcement systems.
@Pat Owens: Very interesting stuff, indeed. I’m assuming that Anne Hutchinson may have been the 17th century Puritan who got booted out of the Mass. Bay colony for opposing the ‘orthodoxy’, as it were? If so, that is one hell of an ironic revelation(since Romney was once governor of Mass. and George Bush, Sr. was born there, originally.).
Anne Hutchinson was Anne Marbury & her husband William Hutchinson are listed from 1586 to 1642. The statements coming from that Romneys father and children that were born in Mexico, well is subterfuge for the public. Let people learn they’ll be voting indirectly for the Bush’s.
There’s a new book out by a former Romney colleague at Bain capital that has the Romney campaign a little uncomfortable, not because the book is saying things the Romney campaign doesn’t necessarily agree with but, in politics, words tend to speak louder than actions. So if you’re plans are to complete a class coup on behalf of the top 0.1%, you probably don’t want want one of your obnoxious old Bain buddies out there trying to peddle a book about how the poor should be more grateful for all the rich do for them and how we need to make things even better for the rich and worse for the poor in order to provide proper ‘risk taking’ incentives. Art History majors in particular, and their lack of go-getter motivations, appear to be one of the primary sources of this need for a more billionaire-friendly culture. The whole thing is worth a read but I think the very end of the article really captures the essense of the message in book and why its publication might result in a few unintended electoral consequences:
I much enjoyed this dress down of Adam Davidson, courtesy of Yves Smith. His ‘benefit of the doubt’ reporting of the (rapacious) moneyed elite, and all of ‘Planet Money’ at NPR, is to be loathed.
http://exiledonline.com/yves-smith-nprs-adam-davidson-parrots-disinformation-as-he-extols-rule-by-the-top‑0–1/
This Village Voice article could become important again with Romney being mulled for Trump’s Secretary of State. The hits just keep comin’.
Americans are blissfully ignorant of the turd stew we’ve just thrown ourselves into.