By Kevin Foley
Much has been made of Mitt Romney’s days at the private equity firm Bain Capital where critics like Rick Perry say Romney was nothing but a “vulture capitalist.”
But Perry isn’t being fair to vultures, scavengers that perform a valuable if repugnant service, eliminating unsightly road kill from our nation’s highways and byways.
A better analogy for Romney is vampire capitalist. While vultures consume the dead, vampires suck life from the living, and that’s how Romney mostly went about amassing his fortune when he headed Bain.
Romney trumpets the “hundred thousand jobs” he created at Staples, Sports Authority and Dominos (numbers yet to be verified) while fallaciously claiming, “These are middle class jobs.” But the truth about what Romney was up to when he was running Bain is better depicted in the 1987 film “Wall Street.”
Romney’s Bain playbook was much like Gordon Gekko’s: Buy struggling companies on the cheap, sell off their assets, borrow heavily to pay off investors (and of course, Mitt Romney), fire workers, cut or eliminate employee benefits, then blow town, leaving behind a gasping victim clutching its metaphorical neck as it dies under an unbearable load of debt.
In the movies vampires are always seductive and sensuous. But there’s also something odd about vampires, from Nosferatu to Bela Lugosi to the Twilight Series. Underneath their unctuous smiles, they always seem a little wooden, vaguely detached from reality, not of this world.
But let’s talk about Mitt Romney.
One of his pals back in the late 1980s when leveraged buy outs were in vogue was Michael Milken, the junk bond king who went to prison for securities and tax violations. If one is judged by the company he keeps, Romney was in vampire heaven when he climbed into bed with Milken.
“The measure of private equity being jobs is silly,” observed Steven Kaplan, a professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business and an expert on private equity. “The right measure is what you are doing for your investors, and that’s where (Romney) looks extremely good.”
After vampires drink their fill, they move on in search of more humans, their everlasting life assured only by fresh blood and inky darkness. So it was Romney roamed the night looking for more companies, his unquenchable thirst for wealth, not job creation, his driving motivation.
The 258 humans who worked at the SCM factory in Marion, Indiana learned about vampire capitalism first hand in 1994, when Romney descended on their office supply company. The employees – some with 40 years of service - were all summarily fired but then told they could reapply for their jobs for less pay and fewer benefits.
These hard working Hoosiers chose to go on strike to protect their interests, so Bain simply closed the factory. To a little town like Marion, the economic impact was devastating.
The SCM folks were hardly alone. The Wall Street Journal looked at 77 businesses in which Bain invested during Romney’s tenure as its CEO. Of these, 22 percent either filed for bankruptcy or failed even as Romney and his investors collected billions.
“Instead of viewing ordinary workers as human beings who were parts of a team,” writes Robert Creamer in HuffPost, “(Romney) viewed them as ‘factors of production’ -- assets to be used when they helped him make money -- objects to be discarded when that would fatten his bottom line.”
Romney’s vision for America is, not surprisingly, quite similar to Bain Capital’s mission: Make the wealthiest wealthier.
According to a report by the Tax Policy Center, Romney’s proposed tax plan would increase after tax income for millionaires by 14.5 percent while those making between $30,000 and $40,000 would see less than a three percent increase. In real numbers, that’s $145,000 extra for somebody clearing a million and just $1,200 for a worker clearing $40,000.
If vampire capitalism worked for Bain, it’ll work for America.
Romanticized by authors like Ann Rice and Stephenie Meyer, vampires are often portrayed as sympathetic characters in their blood lust, worthy of our pity, even our affection. But in the end, vampires are always exposed as self-serving, immoral, and eternally damned.
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Kevin
Foley is president of KEF
Media Associates, an Atlanta-based producer and distributor
of sponsored news content to television and radio media. |