How Romney Did it: Romney ran a company called Bain
Capital. Under Romney's ineffable leadership it bought an Illinois
company called Dade. After some manipulations, streamlining, slashing
benefits, and more aggressive marketing, Dade got bigger. Then Bain
Capital wanted to cash out. But nobody would offer the kind of money
for Dade that Bain Capital felt it deserved. No problem.
Dade borrowed hundreds of millions of dollars to... buy itself!
From Bain! At the direction of Bain! What kind of price
did they pay? Ask yourself: how do think you should get for you?
You betcha!
The story has a tragic end. Dade, now burdened with hundreds
of millions of dollars in debt could no longer afford to innovate and soon
went bankrupt.
That's how Romney "creates jobs": he buys you. Then
he borrows your money to buy yourself back from him at a very good
price. He ends up with a pile of money and you end with a pile
of debt. To top it off, he pays less tax on the capital gains profits
he made than you did on the salary you no longer receive because you went
bankrupt.
This is the same Rick Perry who recently told The San Francisco
Chronicle that he was the sort of leader who could go to Washington and “take a
wrecking ball, a sledgehammer — whatever it takes to break up the good-old-boy
corporate lobbyist mentality that is putting this country’s future in jeopardy.
NY Times, November 5, 2011
As the Republican primaries begin more and more to
resemble a Marx Brothers Movie (think of "Duck Soup"), the absolutely in
your face, we don't give a damn about even giving the appearance of
integrity attitude of most of the candidates is absolutely astonishing.
The above quote is from an article on Perry's obsessive use of corporate
private jets to travel around the country attending sporting events,
dinners, and meetings, without even hiding the fact that he is being
lavishly funded by the very "good old boys" who corrupt our political
process.
He's not even really very coy or sly about it. It's as if they
don't really believe that, behind all the fury of the Tea Party and the
Occupy Wall Street movements, there is anything real about public
disapproval of the government.
The other astonishing thing-- which isn't so astonishing the closer you
look at it-- is that no politician has come along to take advantage of the
fury American voters now feel towards their leaders. Where is the
Jimmy Carter of 2011? You would think that all you would need right
now if for some plain-spoken young idealist to come along and refuse the
corporate jets, the lavish donations, the idiotic slogans, the American flag
pin, and just waltz right through the primaries to become the next President
of the United States. But the Republicans think that a
"plain-speaking" lobbyist who travels on corporate jets and gropes female
employees qualifies.
Not so astonishing, really. The system is so rigged in favor or
money and the money is completely controlled by corporate interests-- even
Obama took a lot of money from rich donors-- that it may well be impossible
for a Jimmy Carter to succeed today.
Besides, it looked like Obama was that kind of candidate, but he has
proven, over and over again, that he is unwilling or unable to stand up to
the same corrosive forces when applied to a sitting president. Like
any other sitting president, his time in office seems primarily calibrated
towards raising money to run for a second term. And I would guess that
the intelligence and military communities have succeeded in convincing him
that any tinkering with Guantanamo and any reduction in military or homeland
security spending will leave him vulnerable to attack by the right for not
being tough enough on evil, no matter what he believes about how effective
or counter-productive any particular measures might be.
