Obviously Barack Obama was right in criticizing Mitt Romney's stewardship of Bain Capital. How else to evaluate the business experience that Romney has made a central tenet of his campaign?
As Obama put it all too accurately: "My opponent, Governor Romney -- his main calling card for why he thinks he should be president is his business experience. He's not going out there touting his experience in Massachusetts. He's saying: 'I'm a business guy. I know how to fix it.' "
And the fixing of the beleaguered companies acquired under Romney's leadership at Bain Capital involved the very practices that have led to the loss of good American jobs to ensure the outrageous rewards that made Romney so wealthy.
Although Romney presents his activities as a form of venture capitalist investment, giving life to new enterprises, his practice has been quite the opposite. Ninety percent of Bain Capital's deals by the end of his tenure involved dismembering once-thriving enterprises and selling off the parts, along with the jobs connected to them. "He made his money mainly through leveraged buyouts," The New York Times reported five years ago in a detailed survey of Bain Capital's practices under Romney, "mortgaging companies to take them over in the hope of reselling them at big profits in just a few years."
Those immense profits were taxed at the capital gains rate of 15 percent instead of the 35 percent that income earners at that level were otherwise required to fork over. "The amounts of money are so vast that it is truly a matter of time before the taxation of private equity is front and center of the public agenda," noted James E. Post, an expert on such matters at Boston University. He added,"Increasingly, this world of private equity looks like a world of robber barons, and Romney comes out of that world."
Those comments were made back in 2007, when Romney was gearing up for an ultimately failed run at the Republican presidential nomination. But the expected outrage over the pirate practices of the hedge fund hustlers never much materialized, and the Romneys of the world have sailed through the subsequent years of economic implosion free of any serious accountability. The money they are able to dispense to politicians is that good.Take the case of Newark Mayor Cory Booker, whose comments about being nauseated by Obama's Bain Capital remarks were quickly exploited in Republican ads. What is truly nauseating is that Booker did not reveal that his own rise to power was floated by contributions from Bain and other leading financial hustlers.
