Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone sums things up pretty well.
Last May, in a much-touted speech in Iowa, Romney used language that was literally inflammatory to describe America’s federal borrowing. “A prairie fire of debt is sweeping across Iowa and our nation,” he declared. “Every day we fail to act, that fire gets closer to the homes and children we love.” Our collective debt is no ordinary problem: According to Mitt, it’s going to burn our children alive.
And this is where we get to the hypocrisy at the heart of Mitt Romney. Everyone knows that he is fantastically rich, having scored great success, the legend goes, as a “turnaround specialist,” a shrewd financial operator who revived moribund companies as a high-priced consultant for a storied Wall Street private equity firm. But what most voters don’t know is the way Mitt Romney actually made his fortune: by borrowing vast sums of money that other people were forced to pay back. This is the plain, stark reality that has somehow eluded America’s top political journalists for two consecutive presidential campaigns: Mitt Romney is one of the greatest and most irresponsible debt creators of all time. In the past few decades, in fact, Romney has piled more debt onto more unsuspecting companies, written more gigantic checks that other people have to cover, than perhaps all but a handful of people on planet Earth.
By making debt the centerpiece of his campaign, Romney was making a calculated bluff of historic dimensions – placing a massive all-in bet on the rank incompetence of the American press corps. The result has been a brilliant comedy: A man makes a $250 million fortune loading up companies with debt and then extracting million-dollar fees from those same companies, in exchange for the generous service of telling them who needs to be fired in order to finance the debt payments he saddled them with in the first place. That same man then runs for president riding an image of children roasting on flames of debt, choosing as his running mate perhaps the only politician in America more pompous and self-righteous on the subject of the evils of borrowed money than the candidate himself. If Romney pulls off this whopper, you’ll have to tip your hat to him: No one in history has ever successfully run for president riding this big of a lie.
Worth a read.
theloquaciousliberal says
This is indeed an excellent, long but very readable explanation of the Bain/Romney ethos. But my favorite line is about Sarah Palin where the author argues that Romney chose Ryan as a known represenative of an idea (that government “debt” is the nation’s leading problem) but that McCain instead:
A google search reveals that neither of these brilliant compund adjectives have ever been used in writing about Palin before. Along with the “combustive mix” phrasing, I find them hilarious, accurate and insightful.
Bravo, Mr. Taibbi.
bob-gardner says
the point is that all these companies are loaded up with debt. Then, very early in the process, Bain got (gets?) paid out of the borrowed money.
Bain didn’t build it; they borrowed on it.
dave-from-hvad says
that’s burning up our children and their future. After all, it’s only taxes that cause financial hardships for people. Everything else — like rent and mortgage payments, utilities, health care, college — is affordable for just about everyone.
jconway says
This was a really depressing read. In many ways I used to feel that Romney would be a bad President since it would be four more years of gridlock, four more years of trying to stop a conservative agenda rather than enact a liberal one, four more years of worrying about war or the court. Now I’ve realized he, unlike Obama, is the one who will preside over managing an American decline. While the KB Toys anecdote went on for a little long and was a little unfair (the internet, Toys R Us and Wal-Mart played a giant role in nailing that coffin-not to mention KBs rise came at the expense of small mom and pop shops), it illustrated that we used to be, not that long ago, a country that made things, including goods the world wanted that created wealth and jobs. Trickle down sort of worked in the mid century thanks to strong unions, bipartisan consensus on the need for worker-management cooperation, living wages and healthcare. Even union busters and Carnegie felt the need to endow corporations, foundations, build great universities and libraries. We see none of that noblesse oblige from the Gekko class. Its very manachean Randian view, there are traders and moochers. No one else. Much like the companies he liquidated this country and its assets are ripe for privatization and seizure. As Romney/Gekko esque Richard Gere said in Pretty Women “I want to build things damnit, Im tired of selling and destroying”. Romney didn’t build that-he has never built anything in his career.
kbusch says
The anecdote was striking though in that Bain did not refocus the company at all on succeeding in the new marketplace in which they found themselves. It is as if doing so would have distracted them from the main task which was extracting as much lucre out of KB Toys as quickly as they could.
Christopher says
…does he really expect to get out of Obama’s misplaced antecedent in “you didn’t build that”? That’s become the whole theme of the campaign! Usually a gaffe just gets a couple days news and then we move on.