The Latest Corporate Obamist to Be Touted for President by Big New York Media — Deval Patrick

Bain Capital's corporate logo: Vultures, rampant, on a field of bones

Bain Capital's managing director and the Obama circle's choice for next president. "We get the government we deserve in a democracy," Deval Patrick unironically said, according to the original caption (Photograph by John Trotter/MAPS for The New Yorker).

by Gaius Publius

Yet another agent of wealth is being touted as a Democratic Party candidate for president — it seems there's no end of them. This time the candidate is no Mike Bloomberg, with his suspect past, his narcissistic sense of entitlement, and openly limousine lifestyle, but an under-the-radar Democratic governor named Deval Patrick.

Patrick ticks all the boxes. He's loved by the Obama organization, he has that next-Obama feel on the stump, and he's a "moderate" (meaning corporatist) in a year when Third Way organizations are searching hard for a "sounds progressive, serves the donors" candidate to throw against the Donald Trump or Mike Pence wall in 2020.

And now he has the the big New York media pushing his candidacy, firing his big opening salvos for him. Jeffrey Toobin, not a no-name writer, has an absolutely glowing piece about Patrick in The New Yorker. Let's take a look (emphasis mine throughout):

Toobin open this way:

On Election Night last week, Deval Patrick, the former governor of Massachusetts, went out to dinner with his wife, Diane, near their apartment, in Boston’s Back Bay. They propped up their iPads on the table, trying to synchronize their schedules after a hectic couple of months. On weekdays, Patrick had been on the road for his job, as a managing director at Bain Capital, the investment firm founded by his predecessor as governor, Mitt Romney. On weekends, he had travelled to a dozen states, to campaign for Democratic candidates in the midterms, and, in the process, to generate the kind of good will and name recognition that could help him if he chooses to run for President in 2020. Diane, meanwhile, had been winding down her law practice, as a management-side labor lawyer at the major Boston firm Ropes & Gray, where she had recently given up her partnership after working there since 1995. Back at home, after dinner, Patrick took a quick look at the election results, and then turned in early, rising, as is his custom, at dawn, to take stock.

Notice, among the down home details of this warm portrait, these critical facts: Deval Patrick is managing director of Bain Capital. His wife Diane is a labor lawyer, but on the management side, meaning she helps corporations fend off unions.

Toobin clearly doesn't see any of that as a minus, but he should. Bain Capital, worth nearly $100 billion in privately held assets, is an acquirer and destroyer of companies:

In his 2009 book The Buyout of America: How Private Equity Is Destroying Jobs and Killing the American Economy, Josh Kosman described Bain Capital as "notorious for its failure to plow profits back into its businesses," being the first large private-equity firm to derive a large fraction of its revenues from corporate dividends and other distributions. The revenue potential of this strategy, which may "starve" a company of capital, was increased by a 1970s court ruling that allowed companies to consider the entire fair-market value of the company, instead of only their "hard assets", in determining how much money was available to pay dividends. In at least some instances, companies acquired by Bain borrowed money in order to increase their dividend payments, ultimately leading to the collapse of what had been financially stable businesses.

A classic "leveraged buyout" company, a vulture capital operation. Here's what Bain did to Toys 'R' Us in 2018:

Just a few years ago, Toys 'R' Us was an iconic American retailer. Six months ago, it filed for bankruptcy. Two days ago, it announced that all 800 of its American stores, and all 100 of its British ones, are closing or being sold. As many as 33,000 workers could lose their jobs.

What happened to America's biggest toy store?

Simply put, vulture capitalists ate it.

One of those vultures was Bain Capital. Deval Patrick was its managing director, the man in charge, when this occurred.

So why is Jeffrey Toobin writing about him? Maybe because Patrick is much loved by the Obama inner circle:

Patrick would enter the race with one significant distinction: he is a kind of political heir to Barack Obama, and enjoys broad support from people close to the former President. Valerie Jarrett, Obama’s former senior adviser and still a close friend, told me, “Deval would make an outstanding President. He’d make a terrific candidate.” She added, “President Obama and Deval are very much alike in terms of their core values, what drove them into public service, their willingness to lend a hand, the responsibility to give back. I think they share a basic philosophy about what it means to be a good citizen.” Obama and Patrick also have in common roots in Chicago, Ivy League educations, and complicated relationships with largely absent fathers (which both men have chronicled in memoirs that feature youthful pilgrimages to Africa). They espouse a politics of unapologetic idealism, with a largely moderate, center-left orientation. On the stump, both are part teacher and part preacher. “Deval is a very genuine person, a very empathetic person,” David Axelrod, who has been a strategist for Patrick as well as for Obama, told me. “He is a guy who makes people feel comfortable. He’s very principled, you can see that—just like Obama.”

Ignore the adoring prose layered into that paragraph — "They [Obama and Patrick] espouse a politics of unapologetic idealism, with a largely moderate, center-left orientation. On the stump, both are part teacher and part preacher" — and focus on the endorsements. Patrick's "unapologetic idealism" is just not true; both Obama and Patrick are corporatists who serve wealth first. Being "part teacher and part preacher" just means he, like Obama, is a good Elmer Gantry.

As for Patrick being "principled," indeed he is; he's principled "just like Obama," though I'm sure Toobin doesn't mean this as ironically it sounds to any real student of Obama.

Most of the piece is like that — painfully praising, and painfully revealing in a way unintended by Toobin. For example, here's Toobin on why Patrick was opposed to Brett Kavanaugh's nomination:

That afternoon, Patrick and I sat down at a diner in Asbury Park. In Washington, Brett Kavanaugh was being confirmed as a Justice of the Supreme Court, and Patrick explained his opposition to the nomination. “Some of it is very personal,” he said. ... In 1993, Patrick’s brother-in-law was convicted of raping Patrick’s sister, and Diane has talked openly about being a victim of domestic abuse during her first marriage. “I can confirm that the experience of not being believed or having the experience not taken as seriously or treated as seriously is extremely painful,” he said. He spoke with sorrow and emotional distance, and [Toobin couldn't bring himself to write "but"], notably, didn’t denounce Kavanaugh directly, or Trump for choosing him.

Note in this passage the compelling verbal portrait of a man whose sister had been raped, speaking "with sorrow and emotional distance," followed immediately by the lack of condemnation of either the rapist, the radical who nominated him, or the destructive agenda the Kavanaugh court will enact. Toobin's personal access to Patrick ("That afternoon, Patrick and I sat down at a diner in Asbury Park"), his front-and-center self-placement as the writer picked to roll out Valerie Jarrett's front-runner, also stands out. The piece is a paint job, and deaf to its ironies.

None of this means that Patrick won't be a force to be reckoned with in 2020. Both Toobin and David Axelrod attest to Patrick's preacher power on the stump. Toobin: "Soon after Patrick started to campaign, Axelrod got a phone call from his sister Joan, who lives in Massachusetts ... “She had never done anything like this before, but she gets on the phone and says she’s just met Deval and he is incredible. ‘He’s the real deal. You have to come here and work for him.’” ... Patrick beat Reilly by twenty points in the primary."

As a sleeper, Patrick is well positioned to surprise. Be prepared to find him in the running as the race evolves, with both money and power behind him and yes-we-can media angels at his shoulder.

Toobin, closing on a note of swelling church-organ glory, emphasizes Patrick's chosen theme, "hope and kindness":

"It struck me that something is so wrong when we learn to shout our anger and whisper our kindness,” he went on. “We have got to learn to stop being ashamed of being kind." In the church and elsewhere, Patrick left a message of hope and kindness. The question, for Patrick and everyone else, is whether there is a wider audience for it in this fierce and broken political moment.

Is there a place for "hope and kindness" in this "fierce and broken moment"? Let's ask the broken employees of Toys 'R' Us before seeking kindness from Deval Patrick, their destroyer.

GP
 

The Word "Progressive" Means Something-- And It Shouldn't Be Re-Defined By Conservatives And Corporate Whores

The phrase Große Lüge-- Big Lie (a lie so "colossal" that no one would believe that someone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously")-- comes right from Hitler's autobiography, Mein Kampf, although it was his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, who really put the phrase on the map.

If Boehner wanted to make a clumsy attempt to lure some self-identifying progressives into supporting the TPP he might start a front organization and call it the Progressive Coalition For American Jobs. But Boehner didn't distort the truth so infamously this time. It was the White House that started this front organization and called it the Progressive Coalition For American Jobs. Grassroots progressives and Beltway progressives, progressives in the House and progressives in the Senate, all oppose the job-destroying, toxic TPP-- except for the progressives in the Progressive Coalition For American Jobs. After all, their thrown-together website claims the group is made up of “progressives and Democrats committed to leveling the playing field for American workers" and goes on to state that "it's critical that we give the president trade promotion authority and establish the Trans-Pacific Partnership."

There’s something weird about the group, though: No one in the Washington, D.C., progressive community seems to have ever heard of them before.

“Who are they? Are they getting paid? And this group will convince anybody of what?” asked Sen. Sherrod Brown. “There is zero progressive interest in this [trade promotion authority].”

The group’s website provides few details about when the coalition was launched or who’s working for the group. But the team behind the Progressive Coalition for American Jobs includes some of the most senior members of Obama’s campaign team. Lefty site Daily Kos reported Mitch Stewart, the former aide the president tapped to run Organizing For America, and Lynda Tran, the former OFA press secretary are involved. A press release earlier in the week announcing the group came from 270 Strategies, the campaign firm started by Stewart and Obama’s former field director, Jeremy Bird.

Tran told BuzzFeed News the purpose of the group was to boost liberal voices who support the Obama trade agenda.

While there is Democratic support for increasing free trade and the White House has made an effort to placate progressives, arguing any deal will include tough language supporting labor rights and environmental protections, that message hasn’t landed with the left. The Progressive Caucus in the House has released their own set of trade principles arguing that they believe it’s “possible to negotiate a trade agreement that doesn’t replicate the mistakes of the past.” But as it currently stands, House progressives remain diametrically opposed to Obama’s trade agenda.

“If you look at the progressives-- labor unions, activists, online organizations-- who are lined up against the TPP, there are no credible groups left to build a ‘coalition,’” said an aide to a progressive House member, who wasn’t authorized to speak on the record. “The creation of a front group like PCAJ is a sign people pushing for a bad trade deal don’t have the votes to jam the [trade deal] through Congress.”

...With the emergence of the Progressive Coalition For American Jobs, some progressives got the feeling Obama’s allies were trying to flip the script.

“It’s insulting,” said Candice Johnson, spokesperson for the Communications Workers of America, one of the many unions organized against TPP. “You put progressive in your name and that’s going to convince people?”

She called the group “fake,” noting that it includes none of the biggest names in progressive politics in its coalition. Johnson wasn’t alone in that characterization.

“As far as I know, the only thing ‘progressive’ about this so called ‘Progressive Coalition for American Jobs’ is the first word of the group’s name,” said Becky Bond, president of CREDO, the San Francisco-based progressive activist known to tangle publicly with the White House.

...“I have been in the trenches working on TPP from the beginning, and as far as I can tell there is no one in favor of it except big corporations,” Mike Lux, a top progressive consultant in Washington, wrote in an email. “Every progressive group and sector that works on economic issues-- labor, consumer groups, enviros, the online groups, civil rights groups, human rights groups, you name it-- is vehemently against TPP, so I don’t know what progressives are in this group’s coalition.”

So they recruited Massachusetts' ex-Governor, Deval Patrick , who is sometimes considered a progressive, to join up. "Patrick’s involvement," explained the Boston Globe, "is part of the group's recruitment of well-known national Democratic leaders that include former Washington governor Christine Gregoire and former Dallas mayor Ron Kirk. The three will head the group's advisory committee... Part of the Obama administration's strategy is to woo members of the Congressional Black Caucus to get behind the trade deal in hopes of gaining votes for its support when the issue comes before the House. Patrick and Kirk are among the most prominent African-American political figures in the country." And then, yesterday, Politico reported that Bain Capital also recruited the ex-governor. "Bain is as progressive as the Progressive Coalition for American Jobs," one congressmember told me last night. "Governor Patrick might as well be part of both of them!"

Job Creation Isn't The Same As Vulture Capitalism

Romney is an experienced businessman

I doubt that former Reagan Budget Director David Stockman wrote the headline, but the Newsweek article he penned is titled Mitt Romney: The Great Deformer. And if Stockman didn't write the headline, he sure wrote all the reasoning behind it. Last we touched bases with Mr. Stockman was in March when he appeared with Bill Moyers to announce that we've learned no lessons about the dangers of crony capitalism. As every Republican running for office continues to pledge undying fealty to Ronald Reagan, they are willfully forgetting the uncomfortable lesson Reagan found out when he tried the trickle down economics being pushed again today by Paul Ryan and the rest of the GOP hierarchy-- charlatans and flimflam men whose electoral careers are being underwritten by the banksters, the oil companies, the Military Industrial Complex and the insurance companies. When Stockman talks about the financialization of the economy-- and how that produces nothing of value at all-- he sounds almost like David Korten, the economist who most represents the ideas behind the Occupy/99% Movement.

Stockman, a former congressman from Michigan, talked with Moyers about the problems inherent in a Congress financed by special interests. He advocates banning corporate contributions entirely-- and putting a $100 cap on individual contributions. A different kind of Republican than the kind we're hearing about these days, huh? He was very candid with Moyers about how money dominates politics, distorting free markets and endangering democracy: “As a result we have neither capitalism nor democracy. We have crony capitalism.” He shared details on how the courtship of politics and high finance have turned our economy into a private club that rewards the super-rich and corporations, leaving average Americans wondering how it could happen and who’s really in charge. “We now have an entitled class of Wall Street financiers and of corporate CEOs who believe the government is there to do… whatever it takes in order to keep the game going and their stock price moving upward,” Stockman told Moyers.

So when I saw the "Great Deformer" article he had done for Newsweek I was eager to read it. And he didn't disappoint me. "Bain Capital," he wrote, "is a product of the Great Deformation. It has garnered fabulous winnings through leveraged speculation in financial markets that have been perverted and deformed by decades of money printing and Wall Street coddling by the Fed. So Bain’s billions of profits were not rewards for capitalist creation; they were mainly windfalls collected from gambling in markets that were rigged to rise." They use a model of antisocial predation that Romney set up and Romney boasts that his experience at Bain is what qualifies him to be president. He claims to have been an incredibly successful "businessman" and that that someone will make him a great president.

Except Mitt Romney was not a businessman; he was a master financial speculator who bought, sold, flipped, and stripped businesses. He did not build enterprises the old-fashioned way-- out of inspiration, perspiration, and a long slog in the free market fostering a new product, service, or process of production. Instead, he spent his 15 years raising debt in prodigious amounts on Wall Street so that Bain could purchase the pots and pans and castoffs of corporate America, leverage them to the hilt, gussy them up as reborn “roll-ups,” and then deliver them back to Wall Street for resale-- the faster the better.

That is the modus operandi of the leveraged-buyout business, and in an honest free-market economy, there wouldn’t be much scope for it because it creates little of economic value. But we have a rigged system—a regime of crony capitalism-- where the tax code heavily favors debt and capital gains, and the central bank purposefully enables rampant speculation by propping up the price of financial assets and battering down the cost of leveraged finance.

So the vast outpouring of LBOs in recent decades has been the consequence of bad policy, not the product of capitalist enterprise. I know this from 17 years of experience doing leveraged buyouts at one of the pioneering private-equity houses, Blackstone, and then my own firm. I know the pitfalls of private equity. The whole business was about maximizing debt, extracting cash, cutting head counts, skimping on capital spending, outsourcing production, and dressing up the deal for the earliest, highest-profit exit possible. Occasionally, we did invest in genuine growth companies, but without cheap debt and deep tax subsidies, most deals would not make economic sense.

In truth, LBOs are capitalism’s natural undertakers-- vulture investors who feed on failing businesses. Due to bad policy, however, they have now become monsters of the financial midway that strip-mine cash from healthy businesses and recycle it mostly to the top 1 percent.

The waxing and waning of the artificially swollen LBO business has been perfectly correlated with the bubbles and busts emanating from the Fed-- so timing is the heart of the business. In that respect, Romney’s tenure says it all: it was almost exactly coterminous with the first great Greenspan bubble, which crested at the turn of the century and ended in the thundering stock-market crash of 2000-02. The credentials that Romney proffers as evidence of his business acumen, in fact, mainly show that he hung around the basket during the greatest bull market in recorded history.

Needless to say, having a trader’s facility for knowing when to hold ’em and when to fold ’em has virtually nothing to do with rectifying the massive fiscal hemorrhage and debt-burdened private economy that are the real issues before the American electorate. Indeed, the next president’s overriding task is restoring national solvency-- an undertaking that will involve immense societywide pain, sacrifice, and denial and that will therefore require “fairness” as a defining principle. And that’s why heralding Romney’s record at Bain is so completely perverse. The record is actually all about the utter unfairness of windfall riches obtained under our anti-free market regime of bubble finance.

Stockman goes on, in great depth, to prove that Bain's record of self-proclaimed greatness is about "a dangerous form of leveraged gambling that has been enabled by the failed central banking and taxing policies of the state. That it should be offered as evidence that Mitt Romney is a deeply experienced capitalist entrepreneur and job creator is surely a testament to the financial deformations of our times." And that anyone is buying it-- other than the Republican base-- is an even worse testament to the health of our democracy.

#Sensata-- Don't Expect Darrell Issa To Trump Up One Of His Witch Hunts On This One

When far right propagandists can get some traction for whatever made-up nonsensical story-- Obama's wedding ring, Obama arming Mexican dug lords, Michelle Obama forcing kids to eat vegetables-- that starts as chain letters to the low-info GOP base, they can count on Moe Howard Darrell Issa to launch one of his expensive and pointless partisan witch hunts, using the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee exactly the way it was never supposed to be used.

You can rest assured he won't be launching an investigation into Sensata, a Freeport, Illinois company owned by Mitt Romney that is forcing its workers to train their Chinese replacements before firing them and sending their jobs to China, where wages are lower and Romney will make greater profits to hide away from tax collectors. Rich people not paying their taxes by sending their money to Swiss banks and shady offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands, the Bahamas and Luxembourg, isn't something that concerns former car thief Darrell Issa, now the wealthiest person in Congress himself. [Note Obama won Issa's congressional district in 2008 but Steve Israel, the reptilian chairman of the DCCC has given him a free pass to reelection, along with all the worst of the GOP House leaders.]

Following the Mitt Romney business model, Bain Capital, which is still in great part owned by Romney, is moving Sensata, a company that makes high tech sensors and controls for cars and airplanes, to China the day before the election. 170 Illinois workers will lose their jobs and they have begged Romney to intercede on their behalf. There's lots of profit for him in the move so, of course, he's adamantly refused and ignored their desperate entreaties. According to the NY Times Romney remains deeply tied to business decisions like this."

As Bain’s founder, he established its business model, which is to wring the maximum efficiency from a company for the benefit of Bain’s investors, even if that means closing plants, shipping jobs to China, and laying off American workers. That’s how private equity often works, and Bain has done it many times before, sometimes to the benefit of a company’s workers, and sometimes to their detriment.

When Bain first led a buyout of Sensata, in fact, it laid off hundreds of American workers and sent their jobs offshore. As the Times reported, the Labor Department spent $780,000 retraining some of the laid-off employees.

In addition, Mr. Romney’s generous retirement agreement ensures that he continues to profit from the deals and decisions that Bain makes. He owns about $8 million worth of Bain funds that hold 51 percent of Sensata’s shares. If Sensata saves money by closing the Freeport plant, that could add money to Mr. Romney’s trust accounts, now or after the election.

Many conservatives want Mr. Romney to make a full-throated defense of these practices, and hope he explains to Americans that plant closings and offshoring are a natural part of capitalism and can have long-term positive effects for the economy.

But Mr. Romney clearly feels he can’t do that, because the political effect of defending layoffs would be toxic. That’s especially true because his entire campaign is built around accusing President Obama of not creating enough American jobs.

As on so many issues, he is trapped between his past and his politics, unable to defend his career and unable to escape it.

Yesterday, much to the Romney-Ryan campaign's chagrin, Jake Tapper brought the Sensata issue into the mainstream by talking about it on ABC News' This Week.

In December of 2011, the Romney campaign attempted to deal with this conflict by claiming that the candidate shed all of his interests in China at the same time as Romney made “confronting China” a central part of his message, but the truth is that he still holds interests in Bain Capital that make a profit off of investments in Chinese companies, one of which is being sued by Microsoft for piracy of American products.

In September of 2012, the Romney campaign admitted to PolitiFact that Romney was still invested in China. The campaign claims the money is invested through Romney’s blind trust, but even Mitt Romney once warned that blind trusts were a ruse.

In fact, Mitt Romney’s blind trust doesn’t meet federal requirements for a blind trust. It’s called a blind trust because the candidate chooses to call it so, not because it adheres to the federal rules that would qualify it as such.

...On China, Romney is as hypocritical as he has revealed himself to be on most issues of the day. The only thing he seems sure of is that a 20% tax cut starting with the rich will save us all. The rest is nothing but campaign rhetoric often belied by his own actions even as he feverishly and with great neediness to be loved by all proclaims it on the trail.

Tough on China for cheating, but not when he’s making money off of that cheating that steals from American companies? You betcha. Kudos to Jake Tapper for coming prepared with some hard facts today.

I’d like to see the mainstream media discuss the labor conditions that allow Romney’s Chinese investments to be so profitable, given Romney’s utter cluelessness about the working class here (he proclaimed a $19,000 a year job to be a good middle class job) and his belief that the Chinese factory he visited was surrounded by wire to keep wannabe workers out instead of fencing the workers in.

Willard and his boy companion Paul may package their old lies in new feel-good lies, but their history as destroyers hasn't changed

"Fans of mob movies will recognize what's known as the 'bust-out,' in which a gangster takes over a restaurant or sporting goods store and then monetizes his investment by running up giant debts on the company's credit line. . . . When the note comes due, the mobster simply torches the restaurant and collects the insurance money. Reduced to their most basic level, the leveraged buyouts engineered by Romney followed exactly the same business model. 'It's the bust-out,' one Wall Street trader says with a laugh. 'That's all it is.' "

-- Matt Taibbi, in "Greed and Debt: The True
Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital"

by Ken

On Thursday Howie wrote about ""the real Romney story" as set out so elegantly in Rolling Stone by Matt Taibbi ("Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital"), and about the real Paul Ryan story he's been writing about for years now. He pointed out that this is "not something you'll be seeing in Tampa and it's not something the Village will be sharing with the public."

Commenters commented:

"Sorry, no one that I know that is voting for Romney will listen to anything said against him."

"You assume people thinking (I use the word loosely) about voting for Romney can read? Your naivety is astounding."

I've been screaming here since the 2008 election that there had to be consequences when one of our two major political parties and half our political spectrum went totally and unequivocally off the truth standard, with a candidate, Young Johnny McCranky, had a minimum of two positions on every issue, none of which there was any reason to think he believed, and all of which were supported, to the extent that they were supported, by obfuscations and outright lies.

Not surprisingly, having discovered that there was no price to pay for having every word out of the mouth of everyone of your speakers be a lie, for the ensuing four years they've made this a cornerstone of their conversation with the American public. And what reason is there to expect anything different in this campaign season?

Actually, it turns out that there is a modified tone to Republican rhetoric. No, not in the direction of truthfulness. It's more like a new overlay of lies on top of the old layers of lies. Indeed, Matt T himself has now written that "Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan Speeches Make Me Miss George Bush." He misses the clarity of the bygone Bush-Cheney-Rove era, when GOP orators knew what to do: "you bashed welfare queens and free-riders, told tearful stories of fetuses composing operas in the womb, and promised to bomb America's enemies back to the Stone Age."

So we've got Paul Ryan, whose "conservative cred derives almost entirely from his strike-hard-strike-first-no-mercy-sir reputation as a ruthless chainsawer of all government-funded 'waste,' including sacred-cow entitlements like Medicare," in Tampa "spend[ing] half his speech doing a Ted Kennedy impersonation, talking about the 'obligation we have to our parents and grandparents,' pitching his party as the defender of a beloved government entitlement program! 'The greatest threat to Medicare,' he said, 'is Obamacare, and we're going to stop it.' Then, like the Unknown Comic, who used to switch bag-faces mid-routine, he moved right back into his young-Barry Goldwater act, bashing entitlements and the 'supervision and sanctimony of the central planners.' "

"Are you confused yet?" Matt asks. Well, he thinks the delegates may have been just a little too, when "he railed against Obama's health care program, calling it 'two thousand pages of rules, mandates, taxes, fees, and fines that have no place in a free country,' and got the sought-after applause, but Matt swears it was "tempered just a bit" as his audience "slowly remembered that Ryan's running mate had not only proposed but implemented an extremely similar health care program in Massachusetts."

But both nominees, Matt says, "spent most of their time in their speeches slithering, Catherine-Zeta-Jones-in-Entrapment style, around their own records." Among the many things that didn't get mentioned was both nominees' awkward history on abortion. On this issue Ryan, as on budget cuts, "made himself famous by going further than other pols were willing to go," but not in Tampa. Willard's history as an outspoken pro-choice moderate (who "spoke glowingly of his mother's support of abortion rights in his 1994 Senate race against Ted Kennedy"), similarly went unmentioned.

So what did they talk about? The line that astonished me most from Mitt's speech was this one, where he talked about the changes Americans "deserved" and should have gotten during Obama's presidency:

You deserved it because you worked harder than ever before during these years. You deserved it because, when it cost more to fill up your car, you cut out moving lights, and put in longer hours. Or when you lost that job that paid $22.50 an hour, benefits, you took two jobs at $9 an hour…

Are you kidding? Mitt Romney was the guy that fired you from that $22.50 an hour job, and helped you replace it with two $9 an hour jobs! He was a pioneer in the area of eliminating the well-paying job with benefits and replacing it with the McJob that offered no benefits at all. One of the things that killed him in the Senate race against Ted Kennedy were Kennedy ads that reminded voters that Mitt's takeovers resulted in slashed wages and lost benefits. He was exactly the guy that eliminated that classic $22.50 manufacturing job, like in the case of GST Steel, where Bain took over with an initial investment of $8 million, paid itself a $36 million dividend, ended up walking away with $50 million, and left GST saddled with over $500 million in debt. 750 of those well-paying jobs were lost.

What kinds of jobs were left for those fired workers to look for? Well, in the best-case scenario, you might have found one at Ampad, another Bain takeover target, where workers had their pay slashed from $10.22 to $7.88 an hour, tripled co-pays, and eliminated the retirement plan.

So a guy who eliminated hundreds of $22 an hour jobs and slashed hundreds more jobs to below $9 an hour blasts Barack Obama for not giving you the better life you deserved, after you lost your $22/hour job and had to take two $9/hour jobs. Are we all high or something? Did that really just happen?

We keep hearing about these armies of fact-checkers who have now taken center-stage in the campaign, but whose only role, clearly, will be to discredit Democrats as the Republicans flash their "free pass on lies" cards.

I don't know how, but somehow the message has to get out, notwithstanding the abundant evidence that Americans don't want the truth, that they believe they have a God-given right not to have to handle the truth. But just as it's impossibly galling to listen to PRyan, a man who doesn't have a moral bone in his rotting carcass, pontificate about the moral foundation of America, Willard has to be made to pay a price for his shameless lies in presenting himself as the last great defender of the free-enterprise system. In the face of the clever spin the lying liars of the Right have come up with to defend career his history of gross financial predation -- you know, their wailing about how he's being blamed for his success -- somebody's got to be talking about what that "success" consisted of.

Which brings me to the point I really wanted to make today. In that earlier piece of Matt T's, "Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital," he provided as clear an account as I've encountered of Willard's version of "free enterprise":

The reality is that toward the middle of his career at Bain, Romney made a fateful strategic decision: He moved away from creating companies like Staples through venture capital schemes, and toward a business model that involved borrowing huge sums of money to take over existing firms, then extracting value from them by force. He decided, as he later put it, that "there's a lot greater risk in a startup than there is in acquiring an existing company." In the Eighties, when Romney made this move, this form of financial piracy became known as a leveraged buyout, and it achieved iconic status thanks to Gordon Gekko in Wall Street. Gekko's business strategy was essentially identical to the Romney-Bain model, only Gekko called himself a "liberator" of companies instead of a "helper."

Here's how Romney would go about "liberating" a company: A private equity firm like Bain typically seeks out floundering businesses with good cash flows. It then puts down a relatively small amount of its own money and runs to a big bank like Goldman Sachs or Citigroup for the rest of the financing. (Most leveraged buyouts are financed with 60 to 90 percent borrowed cash.) The takeover firm then uses that borrowed money to buy a controlling stake in the target company, either with or without its consent. When an LBO is done without the consent of the target, it's called a hostile takeover; such thrilling acts of corporate piracy were made legend in the Eighties, most notably the 1988 attack by notorious corporate raiders Kohlberg Kravis Roberts against RJR Nabisco, a deal memorialized in the book Barbarians at the Gate.

Romney and Bain avoided the hostile approach, preferring to secure the cooperation of their takeover targets by buying off a company's management with lucrative bonuses. Once management is on board, the rest is just math. So if the target company is worth $500 million, Bain might put down $20 million of its own cash, then borrow $350 million from an investment bank to take over a controlling stake.

But here's the catch. When Bain borrows all of that money from the bank, it's the target company that ends up on the hook for all of the debt.

Now your troubled firm -- let's say you make tricycles in Alabama -- has been taken over by a bunch of slick Wall Street dudes who kicked in as little as five percent as a down payment. So in addition to whatever problems you had before, Tricycle Inc. now owes Goldman or Citigroup $350 million. With all that new debt service to pay, the company's bottom line is suddenly untenable: You almost have to start firing people immediately just to get your costs down to a manageable level.

"That interest," says Lynn Turner, former chief accountant of the Securities and Exchange Commission, "just sucks the profit out of the company."

Fortunately, the geniuses at Bain who now run the place are there to help tell you whom to fire. And for the service it performs cutting your company's costs to help you pay off the massive debt that it, Bain, saddled your company with in the first place, Bain naturally charges a management fee, typically millions of dollars a year. So Tricycle Inc. now has two gigantic new burdens it never had before Bain Capital stepped into the picture: tens of millions in annual debt service, and millions more in "management fees." Since the initial acquisition of Tricycle Inc. was probably greased by promising the company's upper management lucrative bonuses, all that pain inevitably comes out of just one place: the benefits and payroll of the hourly workforce.

Once all that debt is added, one of two things can happen. The company can fire workers and slash benefits to pay off all its new obligations to Goldman Sachs and Bain, leaving it ripe to be resold by Bain at a huge profit. Or it can go bankrupt -- this happens after about seven percent of all private equity buyouts -- leaving behind one or more shuttered factory towns. Either way, Bain wins. By power-sucking cash value from even the most rapidly dying firms, private equity raiders like Bain almost always get their cash out before a target goes belly up.

This business model wasn't really "helping," of course -- and it wasn't new. Fans of mob movies will recognize what's known as the "bust-out," in which a gangster takes over a restaurant or sporting goods store and then monetizes his investment by running up giant debts on the company's credit line. (Think Paulie buying all those cases of Cutty Sark in Goodfellas.) When the note comes due, the mobster simply torches the restaurant and collects the insurance money. Reduced to their most basic level, the leveraged buyouts engineered by Romney followed exactly the same business model. "It's the bust-out," one Wall Street trader says with a laugh. "That's all it is."

#

Will The Etch-A-Sketch Work?

The Mormons and financial predators behind Romney-- each group for its own transparent reasons-- spent nearly 100 million dollars to help their awkward throwback of a candidate overcome the weakest Republican field in the history of that party. Now the Mormons and predators are gearing up to raise at least another billion dollars to win over a very few swing voters in Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, New Mexico, Virginia, Wisconsin, Colorado, Iowa, Nevada and New Hampshire. But forget about swing voters and independents for one moment. Even Republicans don't trust Romney and they don't like him either (though he's starting to bond with even the craziest of them now). But as one GOP candidate after another-- ones who were trusted and liked-- discovered, the Romney limitless spending Death Star gets the last word.

This week's Village Voice rolled out another extensive examination of Romney's Achilles Heel, "Mitt Romney, American Parasite. It's a theme that didn't work-- at least not well enough-- for his Republican opponents in the long drawn out primary. But if Obama is going to have a second term, it has to work for those swing voters in Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, New Mexico, Virginia, Wisconsin, Colorado, Iowa, Nevada and New Hampshire. Less than a quarter million people watched the video version of the story (above) that Gingrich's Sheldon Adelson (Mafia)-financed SuperPAC released. It's good-- watch it if you haven't-- but Obama has to do better. The Voice piece is subtitled, "His Years at Bain Represent Everything You Hate About Capitalism." Obama's team has to figure out how to make that relevant to swing votes in some states that can be pretty difficult for Democrats. Romney has used his years at Bain-- which made a lot of money for a small handful of very wealthy people-- as his launching pad for his political career. This isn't what your brother-in-law is going to be hearing on Hate Talk Radio or on Fox. It's going to be up to all of us to understand this story well enough to explain it to... well, our brothers-in-law.

His specialty was flipping companies-- or what he often calls "creative destruction." It's the age-old theory that the new must constantly attack the old to bring efficiency to the economy, even if some companies are destroyed along the way. In other words, people like Romney are the wolves, culling the herd of the weak and infirm.

His formula was simple: Bain would purchase a firm with little money down, then begin extracting huge management fees and paying Romney and his investors enormous dividends.

The result was that previously profitable companies were now burdened with debt. But much like the Enron boys, Romney's battery of MBAs fancied themselves the smartest guys in the room. It didn't matter if a company manufactured bicycles or contact lenses; they were certain they could run it better than anyone else.

Bain would slash costs, jettison workers, reposition product lines, and merge its new companies with other firms. With luck, they'd be able to dump the firm in a few years for millions more than they'd paid for it.

But the beauty of Romney's thesis was that it really didn't matter if the company succeeded. Because he was yanking out cash early and often, he would profit even if his targets collapsed.

...[Romney] mounted his career in politics, setting his sights on the biggest target in Massachusetts: the U.S. Senate seat held by Ted Kennedy
.
There were early signs that he might topple the Kennedy dynasty. Much like today, Romney was pitching himself as a commander of the economy, a man with the mastery to create jobs. Yet he suffered an affliction common to those atop the financial food chain: He assumed that what was good for him was good for all. Call it trickle-down blindness.

In the midst of that 1994 campaign, one of Romney's companies, American Pad & Paper, bought a plant in Marion, Indiana. At the time, it was prosperous enough to be running three shifts.
Bain's first move was to fire all 258 workers, then invite them to reapply for their jobs at lower wages and a 50 percent cut in health care benefits.

"They came in and said, 'You're all fired,'" employee Randy Johnson told the Los Angeles Times. "'If you want to work for us, here's an application.' We had insurance until the end of the week. That was it. It was brutal."

But instead of reapplying, the workers went on strike. They also decided the good people of Massachusetts should know what kind of man wanted to be their senator. Suddenly, Indiana accents were showing up in Kennedy TV ads, offering tales of Romney's villainy. He was sketched as a corporate Lucifer, one who wouldn't blink at crushing little people if it meant prettying his portfolio.

Needless to say, this wasn't a proper leading man's role for a labor state like Massachusetts. Taking just 41 percent of the vote, Romney was pounded in the election. Meanwhile, the Marion plant closed just six months after Bain's purchase. The jobs were shipped to Mexico.

Yet Romney didn't learn his lesson. He seemed incapable of noticing that his brand of "creative destruction" left a lot of human wreckage in its wake. Or that voters might see him as more scumbag than saint.

Just a few months after being hammered by Kennedy, he set fire to another company.

The move was classic Bain. Before buying Georgetown, Romney had purchased the Armco steel mill in Kansas City, Missouri, which had been in business for more than 100 years.

"We were setting a lot of records for production at that time," says employee Steve Morrow. "We were making a lot of money because we were getting profit sharing."

Bain combined Armco with the mill in Georgetown and foundries in Tempe, Arizona, and Duluth, Minnesota, to form the newly christened GS Industries.

Romney purchased Armco with just $8 million down and borrowed the rest of the $75 million price tag. Then he issued bonds-- basically IOUs-- to borrow even more to pay himself and his investors $36 million.

Within a year, he'd already made four times his initial investment while barely lifting a finger. But he'd also run up a staggering $378 million in debt on GSI's tab.

Steel is an infamously cyclical business, a worldwide commodity prone to the same wild price fluctuations as oil. The Kansas City plant forged parts for equipment used in mining gold and copper, leaving it susceptible to the instability of those markets as well.

Yet the smartest guys in the room thought they could run the plant better than the people setting production records.

"They were getting rid of old managers and hiring new managers that didn't have any steel experience," Morrow says. "Some of the guys were nice guys and everything, but they didn't have a clue what was going on."

Many of the new supervisors were ex-military, people who believed that grown men and women are best motivated by punishment. Before Bain, says Morrow, "everybody got along."

Afterward? "They wanted to run the plant like a disciplinary environment. They wanted to discipline people for getting hurt on the job. They wanted to put us in an environment like a war, where we were always fighting with them."

Romney was charging GSI $900,000 a year in management fees to run the company. The Kansas City mill received $900,000 worth of ineptitude in return.

Although Bain borrowed $97 million to retool the plant so it could also produce wire rods, it left the rest of the facility to rot.

To save costs, Bain went miserly on everything from maintenance to spare parts and earplugs. Equipment deteriorated. Because the new managers didn't know how to repair it, "they'd want to rent a new piece of equipment out instead of maintaining what we had," Morrow says. The waste and inefficiency was breathtaking.

Bain's plan all along was to streamline the company into greater profitability, then reap the rewards with a public stock offering. But the exact opposite was happening. Even Roger Regelbrugge, whom Bain installed as CEO, knew the debt was crushing GSI from within, according to Reuters. If a public offering didn't materialize, the company would collapse.

Steel was about to enter a periodic downturn. Countries around the world were locked in a war of tariffs and government-subsidized production, creating a glut and driving down prices. Romney's strategy of the flip was never meant to endure difficult times.

Workers saw the end coming; they were particularly worried that Bain was badly underfunding their pension plan. So they went on strike in 1997, bringing a traditional Rust Belt flair to the festivities by littering the streets with nails and gunning bottle rockets at security guards.

When it was all over, the steelworkers union agreed to wage and vacation cuts in exchange for extra health and pension safeguards should the plant close.

Yet GSI was now hemorrhaging money, says David Foster, the union official who negotiated the deal. He claims that Bain cursed the company by placing its own interests above those of customers or long-term stability.

"Like a lot of private equity firms, Bain managed the company for financial results, not production results," Foster says. "It didn't invest in maintenance or immediate customer needs. All that came second to meeting monthly financial goals."

It would take a few more years of bleeding, but GSI eventually fell to bankruptcy.

The Kansas City mill closed for good; 750 people lost their jobs. Worse, Romney had shorted their pension fund by $44 million. The feds were forced to cover the difference, while workers saw their benefits slashed in bankruptcy court.

The battered Georgetown plant and the foundries in Arizona and Minnesota ultimately were bought out of bankruptcy by new companies. Their workforces were halved.

Still, Romney walked away unbruised. All that debt was technically GSI's, not Bain's. Because he'd repaid himself and his investors just months after the purchase, Romney pocketed millions for running the company into the ground.

"They were clever and ruthless enough to pay their own investors back at a really high return rate," Foster says.

This was the beauty of Romney's racket. Even if he killed a company-- and he tended to kill them fairly often-- he still made out, leaving others to take the hit.

On the campaign trail, Romney describes his work at Bain as resurrecting distressed companies. In this version, he's the white knight lifting troubled firms from the precipice of failure.

Not true.

Private equity companies like Bain rarely buy anything but profitable firms for one compelling reason: The patient must be healthy enough to be force-fed all that debt. So it's something of a misnomer for Republican opponents to slur him as a "vulture capitalist."

"Romney is not a vulture capitalist, as Rick Perry says, since vultures eat dead carcasses," notes Josh Kosman, who has written about the private equity business for 15 years. He's "more of a parasitic capitalist, since he destroys profitable businesses."

...Yet [Romney's defenders] seem strangely incurious about the ruin he has delivered across the country. Take Kansas City, for example.

The Armco plant closing involved more than the torching of 750 jobs, Morrow says. Contractors and suppliers collapsed. Workers' children and widows lost health care and pension benefits. And while Bain received millions in tax breaks-- paid for by the very people left holding the bag-- Romney walked away millions richer.

So one might forgive everyday Americans for feeling they're on the wrong end of a rigged game, one where the wealthy always win-- no matter how inept-- and the little guy is left to hack through the debris.

Bain is a private company, meaning it has no obligation to reveal its practices. It has never made public a list of companies it has purchased (nor would Bain or the Romney campaign comment for this story).

So in January, the Wall Street Journal did its best to piece together Romney's track record, reviewing 77 investments made under his direction. It turned out that nearly one in three of the companies experienced severe financial trouble. One in five wound up in bankruptcy.

The more telling figure: Of Romney's 10 biggest moneymakers, he ultimately destroyed four of them, leaving bankruptcy judges to clean up the mess.

As Foster sees it, Romney was an early pioneer of gaming the system. It would take another decade before large banks used many of the same principles to detonate the mortgage industry.

"The great irony is that his entire management experience at Bain Capital is buying companies and loading them up with debt and then looting the balance sheet," Foster says. "It's the very model that drove the American economy off the cliff then left other people to manage the wreckage."

...[I]f Romney played the friendly politician, kindness wasn't his specialty at Bain. Rewarding CEOs with huge bonuses, he was generous to ranking executives. Yet he tended to treat those below his pay grade as little more than machinery.

Romney has claimed to have created 100,000 jobs at Bain and says that providing work for Americans was a primary company goal.

He cites Domino's, Sports Authority, and Staples, companies that added jobs after Bain bought in.

But Bain bought Domino's just months before Romney left to run the Salt Lake City Olympics, meaning someone else created those jobs. And he didn't manage Staples or Sports Authority; Bain was a minority investor.

By Romney's logic, any large investor-- say, the Texas teachers' pension fund-- also creates hundreds of thousands of jobs. The boast is so foolish that his campaign has since backed away from it.

Even Kaplan admits that private equity firms rarely create jobs. Workers are seen as costs, and costs are the enemy. According to Kosman, Romney was in truth among the most heinous job-killers of them all.

While writing his book, Kosman conducted an interview with a Bain managing partner. The man told him that when Bain was about to buy a company, its partners would hold a meeting. "He said that about half the time [they] would talk about cutting workers," Kosman says. "They would never talk about adding workers. He said that job growth was never part of the plan."

That claim was buttressed by the Associated Press, which studied 45 companies bought by Bain during Romney's first decade. It found that 4,000 workers lost their jobs. The real figure is likely thousands higher, since the analysis didn't account for bankruptcies and factory and store closings.

...Romney refuses to discuss most of the companies he purchased at Bain, nor will he release his tax records from those years. As a result, voters are left to make their own call on his catalog of creative destruction-- and what he might be like as president.

Romney has professed his admiration for Ronald Reagan. But judging by his business history, the president he most resembles is Vladimir Putin. Romney has devoted his life to ensuring that every last penny rises to a few hands at the top. And like Putin, he has never shown much concern for the countrymen he tramples along the way.

"The word 'oligarchy' comes to mind," says Michael Keating when asked to envision a Romney presidency.

Keating is a former business consultant and executive at Bertelsmann, a multinational investment firm that operates in 63 countries. He asserts that men like Romney "hide their antisocial actions behind a rhetoric of free-market capitalist platitudes. But in the end, it's all about the bottom line-- and only their own bottom line..."

"I don't think Romney is so much dangerous as he is unimaginative," Keating adds. "And in the world we live in, that amounts to the same thing."

Pants On Fire-- In this Case, Mitt Romney's Well-Pressed Jeans

I retired from Warner Bros before Bain formed a consortium of "investors" to come in and take over the company. AOL's Steve Case and his cronies had pretty much pillaged it and left it on the side of the road heaving; Bain was there for whatever could be picked off the bones. It was painful, even from afar, to watch one of the iconic companies of the country being utterly destroyed for the ruthless greed of the vulture capitalists Mitt Romney had forged into an ugly weapon. I hope you already watched The King of Bain, but it's just a fraction of the story.

This is hardly the first time I've told the story, so unless you're new here, you already know that I was a Warner Music divisional president. I ran Reprise Records. The key to running a record label, like running almost any business, is to balance short-term viability with long-term investment. Without a successful short term, you're out of business. Without a successful long term, you have no future. When Bain came along, the decision was made that there would be no future.



Investing in the future, like developing new artists, costs money. But Bain wanted to drain every available cent out of the company and into their own pockets. No future-- not for the employees, not for the artists, not for actual investors (as opposed to the predators) and, in this case, not for our nation's culture. They killed a company that took decades to build and that was interwoven in the dreams of countless people, generations of people. But Mitt Romney and his cronies had different dreams, dreams of sociopathic, unrelenting greed. Ari Berman at The Nation hammered out some of the unsavory details Friday:

In recent days Mitt Romney has strenuously defended his tenure at Bain Capital, lauding his former employer as a classic success story of free-market capitalism and lambasting his opponents on the left and right for practicing the “bitter politics of envy.”

In his New Hampshire primary speech, Romney claimed that “President Obama wants to put free enterprise on trial” and “turn America into a European-style entitlement society.” In Romney’s telling, Obama relies on government for his solutions, while Mitt draws his inspiration from the power of the free market. There are winners and losers in the free market, this argument goes, and it’s not the government’s job to determine who they are. At a recent debate, Romney said that government “by and large…gets in the way of creating jobs.”

But a closer look at Bain’s record under Romney reveals that the company relied on the very government subsidies that Romney and Tea Party conservatives routinely denounce as “crony capitalism.” The Los Angeles Times ran a big story yesterday about Bain’s investment in Steel Dynamics, which received $37 million in subsidies and grants to build a new plant in DeKalb County, Indiana. An analyst at the Cato Institute called it “corporate welfare.”

Romney has recently pointed to Steel Dynamics as one of his success stories at Bain, including in a new ad, which contributed to the 100,000 net jobs he’s claimed to have created at the firm (an incorrect figure he’s subsequently had to walk back). He never mentions that government subsidies played a major role in ensuring that success.

If the gentlemanly Berman doesn't come out and call Romney a flat-out liar, Paul Krugman has no such compunctions. Yesterday he penned an unambiguous blogpost, Untruths, Wholly Untrue, And Nothing But Untruths, pointing out that Romney is "running a campaign so dishonest that it makes Bush look like a model of truth-telling."

I mean, is there anything at all in Romney’s stump speech that’s true? It’s all based on attacking Obama for apologizing for America, which he didn’t, on making deep cuts in defense, which he also didn’t, and on being a radical redistributionist who wants equality of outcomes, which he isn’t. When the issue turns to jobs, Romney makes false assertions both about Obama’s record and about his own. I can’t find a single true assertion anywhere.

And he keeps finding new frontiers of falsehood. The good people at CBPP find him asserting, with regard to programs aiding low-income Americans, that

What unfortunately happens is with all the multiplicity of federal programs, you have massive overhead, with government bureaucrats in Washington administering all these programs, very little of the money that’s actually needed by those that really need help, those that can’t care for themselves, actually reaches them.

which is utterly, totally untrue. Administrative costs are actually quite small, and between 91 and 99 percent of spending, depending on the program, does in fact go to beneficiaries.

At this rate, Romney will soon start lying about his own name. Oh, wait.

And that was right on top of Krugman's Friday column correcting Romney's idiotic, if self-serving, assertion that America is just like-- or at least should be run just like-- a corporation. The key to Romney's campaign is his assertion that "what we need to fix our ailing economy is someone who has been successful in business."

In so doing, he has, of course, invited close scrutiny of his business career. And it turns out that there is at least a whiff of Gordon Gekko in his time at Bain Capital, a private equity firm; he was a buyer and seller of businesses, often to the detriment of their employees, rather than someone who ran companies for the long haul. (Also, when will he release his tax returns?) Nor has he helped his credibility by making untenable claims about his role as a “job creator.”

But there’s a deeper problem in the whole notion that what this nation needs is a successful businessman as president: America is not, in fact, a corporation. Making good economic policy isn’t at all like maximizing corporate profits. And businessmen-- even great businessmen-- do not, in general, have any special insights into what it takes to achieve economic recovery.

Why isn’t a national economy like a corporation? For one thing, there’s no simple bottom line. For another, the economy is vastly more complex than even the largest private company.

Most relevant for our current situation, however, is the point that even giant corporations sell the great bulk of what they produce to other people, not to their own employees-- whereas even small countries sell most of what they produce to themselves, and big countries like America are overwhelmingly their own main customers.

Yes, there’s a global economy. But six out of seven American workers are employed in service industries, which are largely insulated from international competition, and even our manufacturers sell much of their production to the domestic market.

And the fact that we mostly sell to ourselves makes an enormous difference when you think about policy.

Consider what happens when a business engages in ruthless cost-cutting. From the point of view of the firm’s owners (though not its workers), the more costs that are cut, the better. Any dollars taken off the cost side of the balance sheet are added to the bottom line.

But the story is very different when a government slashes spending in the face of a depressed economy. Look at Greece, Spain, and Ireland, all of which have adopted harsh austerity policies. In each case, unemployment soared, because cuts in government spending mainly hit domestic producers. And, in each case, the reduction in budget deficits was much less than expected, because tax receipts fell as output and employment collapsed.

Now, to be fair, being a career politician isn’t necessarily a better preparation for managing economic policy than being a businessman. But Mr. Romney is the one claiming that his career makes him especially suited for the presidency. Did I mention that the last businessman to live in the White House was a guy named Herbert Hoover? (Unless you count former President George W. Bush.)

And there’s also the question of whether Mr. Romney understands the difference between running a business and managing an economy.

Like many observers, I was somewhat startled by his latest defense of his record at Bain-- namely, that he did the same thing the Obama administration did when it bailed out the auto industry, laying off workers in the process. One might think that Mr. Romney would rather not talk about a highly successful policy that just about everyone in the Republican Party, including him, denounced at the time.

But what really struck me was how Mr. Romney characterized President Obama’s actions: “He did it to try to save the business.” No, he didn’t; he did it to save the industry, and thereby to save jobs that would otherwise have been lost, deepening America’s slump. Does Mr. Romney understand the distinction?

America certainly needs better economic policies than it has right now-- and while most of the blame for poor policies belongs to Republicans and their scorched-earth opposition to anything constructive, the president has made some important mistakes. But we’re not going to get better policies if the man sitting in the Oval Office next year sees his job as being that of engineering a leveraged buyout of America Inc.

But leave it to Steve Benen to come up with an awesome list of Romney's Top 10 lies... of this week.

1. Romney told voters in New Hampshire, “I know what it’s like to worry whether you’re gonna get fired. There were a couple of times I wondered whether I was going to get a pink slip.”

That’s not true.

2. Romney argued in a debate, “[W]hat unfortunately happens is with all the multiplicity of federal programs, you have massive overhead, with government bureaucrats in Washington administering all these programs, very little of the money that’s actually needed by those that really need help, those that can’t care for themselves, actually reaches them.”

This is the exact opposite of the truth.

3. After winning the New Hampshire primary, Romney said of the president, “He lost our AAA credit rating.”

In reality, it was congressional Republicans who were responsible for the downgrade.

4. In the same speech, Romney said of Obama, “He apologizes for America”

Romney’s still lying.

5. Romney told a debate audience why he didn’t seek re-election as governor: “That would be about me. I was tryin’ to help get the state in best shape as I possibly could. Left the world of politics, went back into business.”

He’s lying-- Romney didn’t re-enter the private sector after leaving the governor’s office; he transitioned to a presidential campaign.

6. Romney talked about savings he’d find in the budget: “[T]he number one to cut is Obamacare. That saves $95 billion a year.”

Actually, that’s backwards. Repealing the Affordable Care Act would cost the nation billions and increase the deficit.

7. Romney argued that the Dodd-Frank financial regulatory bill “makes it harder for community banks to make loans.”

No, it doesn’t.
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8. Romney argued during a debate, “[I]n the business I had, we invested in over 100 different businesses and net-net, taking out the ones where we lost jobs and those that we added, those businesses have now added over 100,000 jobs.

That’s so blatantly untrue, the Romney campaign has started moving the goal posts.

9. After being pressed on ads being run by his Super PAC, Romney said, “With regards to their ads, I haven’t seen ‘em.”

Romney then proceeded to recite the attacks in the ad, almost verbatim, making clear he’d both seen and memorized the ad.

10. Campaigning in New Hampshire, Romney insisted “European-style welfare” countries end up with a system that “creates poverty.”

Not only is that wrong, but when asked to support his statement, Romney lied and pretended he never said it.

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.

Pope Pius Baloney XIII

Newt and other Republicans, frustrated with Romney's impenetrably slick Teflon® exterior, have called him a liar before, but this weekend [see video above] Newt let loose on the GOP front-runner and aloof, condescending Mormon bishop at an official Republican Party debate on national TV. Previously, Newt was just looked at as a misfit grousing because Romney was getting the best of him.

“He’s not telling the American people the truth. It’s just like his pretense that he’s a conservative,” Mr. Gingrich said on CBS’s The Early Show. “I just think he ought to be honest to the American people and try to win as the real Mitt Romney, not try to invent a poll-driven, consultant-guided version that goes around with talking points.”

The volume of Mr Gingrich’s complaining has gotten louder and louder each day.

At a stop in Marshalltown, Iowa, on Monday, Mr. Gingrich complained that he has been “Romney-boated,” a reference to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ads that helped derail Senator John Kerry’s presidential campaign in 2004.

Appearing on CNN’s Piers Morgan Tonight on Monday, Mr. Gingrich repeated his complaints about Mr. Romney’s refusal to disown the negative ads being run by a “super PAC” supporting his campaign.

“If he would be willing to just be man enough to say, ‘You know, this is my negative campaign and I admit it,’ I’d be a lot happier,” Mr. Gingrich said. “What I find very frustrating, and frankly irritating,” he said, is someone who “wants to run for president of the United States who can’t be honest with the American people.”

...“Here is my simple tag line: Somebody who will lie to you to get to be president will lie to you when they are president."

Not exactly the most trustworthy of organizations when it comes to calling out Republicans on their lies, even FactCheck.org was stunned by the stream of bullshit flowing off the ABC stage Saturday night and the NBC stage Sunday morning. "Less than 12 hours after the ABC News/Yahoo! debate in Manchester ended, the Republican presidential candidates were at it again-- debating on NBC’s Meet the Press. As they did the night before, the candidates at times distorted the truth on a variety of topics, including Medicare, job creation, gasoline prices and environmental regulations."

And of course it isn't only Romney who lies virtually every time he opens his mouth. ABC News fact-checked its own debate with this pack of liars, and the report was... well, just what one should expect from a gaggle of Republican stooges. From the Romney Big Lie about creating jobs at Bain instead of killing them to Santorum's eye-popping ethics violations and Perry's inchoate, barely decipherable nonsense, not one of these guys, other than perhaps Ron Paul, allows truth to get in the way of what how he wants to present his talking points.

The Romney lies about being a job creator, instead of the more accurate description as a jobs cremator, have a special place in my heart, since Bain used the Romney model to destroy my old company, Warner Bros Records. Matt Negrin reports for ABC that he continued to advance false claims on Saturday night.

Newt Gingrich raced out of the gate in tonight’s debate by being skeptical of Mitt Romney’s claim that Bain was responsible for creating 100,000 jobs, and he pointed to scrutiny of the firm in a recent New York Times article and a documentary.

In response, Romney repeated a familiar talking point-- that Bain, under his leadership, was responsible for creating 100,000 jobs at companies in which it invested. Romney was asked tonight if the 100,000 jobs are discounting the number of jobs that were lost at companies backed by Bain. He said the figure includes “both” and that it’s a “net” tally. He rattled off some talking points on companies that added jobs, like Sports Authority and Staples.

Bain was not the sole investor in Staples (which Romney said added 90,000 jobs) nor Sports Authority (which he said added 15,000). In 2002, for example, Staples founder Tom Stemberg wrote on CNN Money that Bain “gave us a boost.” Though the company also had help from two other firms. Sports Authority, too, was started with financial help from a few other investors.

Democrats were quick to respond to Romney’s claim tonight. In an email to reporters, the party pointed to a number of quotes the candidate has made years ago about that figure-- including this part from a 1994 Boston Globe article: ”In a telephone interview late yesterday, Romney dismissed the characterization of Staples and his other investments as streamlining, saying that what he has done is ‘build and grow businesses,’ not shrink them. He asserted that there is no way to calculate whether jobs have been lost or gained economy-wide as a result of his ventures, and noted his 10,000-job figure simply measures what happened to employment at companies in which Bain invested.”

FactCheck.org checked Romney’s 100,000 jobs claim earlier this week and found it to be “unproven and questionable.”

Rick Santorum, standing to Romney’s left on the stage, was asked early in the debate whether his comment that the United States doesn’t need a CEO (it needs a leader) was directed at Romney; he confirmed that, yes, it was.

And speaking of Santorum, the dust-up over his character as one of Washington's sleaziest operators was interesting. His behavior as a bribe-taker in office and a corrupt lobbyist as soon as he was defeated by Pennsylvania voters is pretty standard fare among Republicans, and it can be expected that he would be pounded a lot more heavily if he were debating a Democrat. But he still managed to lie his ass off and come out looking as bad as Romney.

During the debate, Ron Paul and Rick Santorum sparred over Santorum’s ethics record. Who characterized it more accurately?

Moderator George Stephanopoulos asked Ron Paul about this ad, which the Texas congressman’s campaign will begin airing in South Carolina on Monday:



The ad accuses Santorum of corruption and states that he took the most money from lobbyists of any member of Congress, during his time in Washington.

Paul stood by the ad tonight, noting that the “corruption” allegation originally came from an independent group. Santorum protested that the group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), had leveled “ridiculous” charges against him and that CREW disproportionately makes such charges against conservatives.

Both are (mostly) right.

On the topic of lobbyist cash: Santorum did receive the most contributions from lobbyists and lobbying groups in the 2006 election cycle, when he lost to Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.), according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Santorum’s objection-- that the total was based on PAC donations-- is partly true. Center for Responsive Politics counts both PAC and individual (over $200) donations, according to its listed methodology.

On the topic of corruption, CREW did file a complaint against Santorum, and it did list Santorum on its “most corrupt” members of Congress list in 2006. But the complaint was never taken up by the Senate Ethics Committee and Santorum lost his reelection campaign, as noted in this ABC News story. CREW’s complaint alleged that a loan violated the Senate gift rule and that Santorum appeared to have traded legislative action for donations. Santorum did write a letter to Pennsylvania newspaper protesting the allegations.

As for CREW’s partisanship: Santorum is probably right about CREW’s reputation among Republicans, but the group focuses its criticism on both parties. Its current “most corrupt” list includes 10 Republicans and four Democrats.

When Santorum made the list, in an election cycle marked by GOP ethics scandals, the list included 21 Republicans and four Democrats.

One more great big Romney lie everyone noticed early in the debate: his claim that no states want to ban contraceptives. Technically, no state does, but hundreds of Republican Party officials do all over the states-- including, oddly enough, Romney himself!

Romney backed Mississippi’s ultimately failed (it was voted down in a referendum) Personhood Amendment, which if passed would have defined life as having begun at the point of conception.

Such language “could potentially ban common forms of contraception like the birth control pill, as well as prevent a pregnant woman experiencing complications that threaten her life or health to obtain safe abortion care,” Molly A.K. Connors wrote in New Hampshire’s Concord Monitor.

In 2005, Romney, then the governor of Massachusetts, vetoed a bill meant to expand emergency access to the “morning after pill.” The law would have required hospitals to offer the pill to rape survivors and allowed for certain state-sanctioned pharmacists to sell it without asking for a prescription.

“The bill does not involve only the prevention of conception: The drug it authorizes would also terminate life after conception,” Romney wrote, defending the veto in this op-ed piece.

For his part, Santorum has often spoken out against the Supreme Court’s ruling in Griswold vs. Connecticut (1965). That decision, which stated that the constitution protected “the right to privacy,” was inspired by an ultimately overturned state ban on contraception.

Santorum and many anti-Abortionists feel that the ruling paved the way for Roe v. Wade.

The Griswold case, he said yesterday, “created a new Constitutional right, which in my opinion is judicial activism.”

So while it would be unfair to say Santorum wants to ban contraception, he has been and remains a vocal opponent of the most prominent court ruling in its favor.

Meanwhile right-wing bloggers are on suicide watch over the incompetence of their preferred lunatic fringe candidates to take on the craven Willard and today's tweets from rightist Dan Riehl portend a seriously disillusioned base.