Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Romney mythology demystified by government documents

'Corporations are people - sure they are - where does the money go?' In your pocket!


Republicans talk a mean game of fiscal responsibility and a business world that is wounded on every side by government controls. But their heros don't really play it that way.

Most of GOP Presidential nominee Mitt Romney's wealth of $250 million he gained as a function of a government bailout.

According to the government records obtained by Rolling Stone, Bain & Company "defaulted on its debt obligations" at nearly the same time that "W. Mitt Romney . . . stepped in as managing director (and later chief executive) in 1990 and led the financial restructuring intended to get the firm back on track."

When a banker from Goldman Sachs urged Bain to consider bankruptcy as the obvious solution to the firm's woes, Romney's desperation began to show. He flatly refused to discuss it – and in the ensuing argument, one witness says, Romney almost ended up in a brawl when the Goldman banker advised him to "go fuck yourself." For the sake of Romney's career and fortune, bankruptcy was simply not an option – no matter who got screwed in the process.

In brief, the Romney mythology holds that Romney took leave of his duties at the private equity firm Bain Capital in 1990 and rode in on a white horse to lead a swift restructuring of Bain & Company, preventing the collapse of the consulting firm where his career began.

But government documents show the reality to be very different from that shining testimony.

“In fact, government documents on the bailout obtained by Rolling Stone show that the legend crafted by Romney is basically a lie. The federal records, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, reveal that Romney's initial rescue attempt at Bain & Company was actually a disaster – leaving the firm so financially strapped that it had "no value as a going concern." Even worse, the federal bailout ultimately engineered by Romney screwed the FDIC – the bank insurance system backed by taxpayers – out of at least $10 million. And in an added insult, Romney rewarded top executives at Bain with hefty bonuses at the very moment that he was demanding his handout from the feds.”

1 comment:

  1. All righty, then, Exxon is the drunk who drove the ship up on a reef and spilled a whole of lot of crude all over everything and didn't even get a DWI. They were ordered to pay damages, but never got around to that, either. However, every drunk who gets caught with a can of beer between their legs on the way home from work winds up with a very stiff sentence - sometimes a trip to the pen. How about it, Mitt? Huh?

    ReplyDelete