Romney's Days At Bain Showed Him To Be A Greedy Ruthless Corporate Raider... And A Dangerous Sociopath

On yesterday's Today Show Newt tried to explain the difference between capitalism and the kind of vulture capitalism practiced by Mitt Romney and Bain. "They apparently looted the companies, left people unemployed and walked off with millions of dollars. Look, I'm for capitalism, I'm for people who go in to save a company... If somebody comes in, takes all the money out of your company, and then leaves you bankrupt while they go off with millions, that's not traditional capitalism." New York Tea Party fanatic-- last year's Republican candidate for governor-- Carl Paladino is in New Hampshire campaigning for Newt Gingrich... and against Romney, who is being supported by the New York Republican Party Establishment.

“I thought it was absolutely stupid,” he said. “It’s not the will of the rank and file Republicans, the rank and file want change, they don’t want any more plastic Republican leadership that keeps eating at the trough like all the rest of these bureaucrats we’ve put there in the past.”

He has no love for the rest of the GOP field, who he says will soon melt away in favor of Newt.

“As we narrow the candidates there’s Newt because all the rest of them are toast,” he said. “Ron Paul’s going to get on the mother-ship and go back to the mother planet. You got Huntsman, he’s going to go live in China. Perry wants a job, he’s going to go the shooting range and hang around there awhile. I mean this is nonsense-- it’s all bullshit.”

Huntsman in particular rubbed him the wrong way by speaking Chinese on stage in the previous debate.

“‘Oh, the Chinese are so strong,’ what the fuck is wrong with these people?” he said. “He should move to China.”

Meanwhile, as Greg Sargent pointed out in the Washington Post, the "Romney claims about Bain and jobs [are] collapsing under scrutiny." And that's important-- not in the GOP primary, where it isn't a real concern, but in the general election, where it will be the #1 concern of independent and swing voters. The Romney economic model was deadly-- a "jobs cremator," as Debbie Wasserman Schultz put it, making herself useful for a change. And now the mainstream media is paying attention. Mitt must've flipped out yesterday when he saw this widely distributed AP report:

Romney has never substantiated his frequent claim that he was a creator of more than 100,000 jobs while leading the Bain Capital private equity company. His campaign merely cites success stories without laying out the other side of the ledger-- jobs lost at Bain-acquired or Bain-supported firms that closed, trimmed their workforce or shifted employment overseas. Moreover, his campaign bases its claims on recent employment figures at three companies-- Staples, Domino’s and Sports Authority-- even though Romney’s involvement with them ceased years ago.

By that sort of charitable math, President Barack Obama could be credited with creating over 1 million jobs even though employment overall is down about 2 million since he came to office. But Romney accuses Obama of destroying jobs while using a different standard to judge his own performance-- cherry-picked examples that leave everything else out.

"As we’ve seen previously," Sargent continued, "the Romney campaign regularly continues telling its preferred falsehoods even after getting called out on them. The question is whether the particularly ludicrous nature of this one will make telling it so much of a liability that the Romney camp will drop it for political reasons, which I suppose would be better than nothing."

Even GOP Central, the Wall Street Journal, was forced to admit the predatory nature of Romney's tenure at Bain and concluded that the high rate of difficulties suffered by firms invested in by Bain "could undermine a central thrust of Mr. Romney’s campaign message: that his private-sector experience building companies makes him the best candidate to turn around the ailing U.S. economy."

Bloomberg's news service went with a similar story yesterday-- devastating to Romney's patently false claims of being a "good" businessman who will use his experience to fix America's ills.

For months, Mitt Romney has seldom been challenged on his claim that his leadership at Bain Capital LLC offers evidence that he knows how to create jobs. That has ended as his Republican rivals are accusing him of exploiting companies and firing workers in a quest to make millions.

"Those of us who believe in free markets and those of us who believe that, in fact, the whole goals of investment is entrepreneurship and job creation, would find it pretty hard to justify rich people figuring out clever, legal ways to loot out a company," former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich told reporters in Manchester, New Hampshire, yesterday, ahead of the state's Jan. 10 presidential primary.

Gingrich's charges will be amplified in South Carolina, the next primary state, with a 30-minute, independently produced television advertisement bought by a political action committee run by his former aides called "Winning Our Future" and funded by his supporters, according to Rick Tyler, a senior adviser to the PAC and former Gingrich campaign spokesman. The trailer for the ad posted on a website calls Romney a "corporate raider" and says he's akin to others on Wall Street who are motivated primarily by greed.

The Gingrich attack, which was echoed during the weekend by other Republican presidential hopefuls, marks the first time the field of a half-dozen candidates has taken aim at the presumed front-runner on this issue. Romney, who ran unsuccessfully for the nomination in 2008, won the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses by eight votes and is the favorite to win the New Hampshire primary.

Gingrich is seeking to stop Romney's momentum before the Jan. 21 South Carolina primary and the Florida contest on Jan. 31. Enhancing the Gingrich-aligned PAC's ability to run the documentary is a $5 million donation to Winning Our Future from Sheldon Adelson, a longtime supporter of the former speaker. That contribution was confirmed yesterday, on condition of anonymity, by a person close to Adelson, chairman of Las Vegas Sands Corp.

Tyler said no date has been scheduled for when the ad will run in South Carolina.

"Mitt Romney is not a capitalist," Tyler said. "He is a predatory corporate mugger. If you ever wonder why so many manufacturing jobs are overseas, you need to look no further than Mitt Romney. He can claim thousands of jobs created, only those jobs were created in Mexico and Southeast Asia."

...Former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum questioned whether Romney's business background prepared him for the presidency during a debate in Manchester on Jan. 7. And former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman Jr. blasted Romney's ties to Wall Street in a Jan. 6 interview with Bloomberg News.

Gingrich's Super PAC is doing a better job than the Democrats in bringing Romney's business record to the attention of the American people. Here's the latest weak tea from the DNC. They should try this one over again with a more creative, less tepid director. No need to be afraid of using words like "plundering" or starting the process of explaining to voters what the word "sociopath" means.



UPDATE: Art

ThinkProgress put out a lovely poster this morning we decided to share with you. There's also a high resolution version.