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.”
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?
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