Tornado Alley (PROG)

[BOREALIS]

Mitt Romney's Life Story: Lying, Stealing, Destroying Jobs

Mon Oct 15, 2012 at 02:00 PM PDT
by Armando

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. -

Former Reagan Budget Director David Stockman
[ http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/10/14/david-stockman-mitt-romney-and-the-bain-drain.html ]

David Stockman was the former Reagan budget director. He went to a life of LBO "artist." He first becme well known for telling the truth about Reagan's voodoo economics and was 'taken to the woodshed' for his frankness.

In this article, Stockman puts together Mitt Romney's 'great' business career with the polices that allowed for it and which he wants to double down on. Stockman wrote:

[W]e 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. [...][T]he vast outpouring of LBOs in recent decades has been the consequence of bad policy, not the product of capitalist enterprise.

Stockman then demonstrates how Mitt Romney did it:

The startling fact is that four of the 10 Bain Capital home runs ended up in bankruptcy, and for an obvious reason: Bain got its money out at the top of the Greenspan boom in the late 1990s and then these companies hit the wall during the 2000-02 downturn, weighed down by the massive load of debt Bain had bequeathed them. In fact, nearly $600 million, or one third of the profits earned by the home-run companies, had been extracted from the hide of these four eventual debt zombies.

Mitt was a a scammer. Consider the C.R. Anthony deal:

the “transformative” C.R. Anthony deal was a bull-market scam. Almost immediately, results headed south. After growing 4 percent during the year of Bain’s quick 1997 exit, same-store sales turned to a negative 3 percent in 1998 and negative 7 percent in 1999, and were still falling when Stage Stores Inc. filed for bankruptcy shortly thereafter. The company hemorrhaged $150 million of negative cash flow during 1998-99—that is, during the two years after Bain and Goldman got out of Dodge City.

Bain Capital subsequently claimed the company was “a growing, successful and consistently profitable company during the nine years we owned it” but then immediately ran into “operating problems.” That was a doozy by any other name but typical of the standard private-equity narrative that confuses speculators’ timing with real value creation on the free market. The fact is, the bad inventory and vastly overstated assets that took the company down did not suddenly materialize out of the blue during the 24 months after Bain’s exit: they were actually the result of financial-engineering games from the very beginning.

This was Mitt Romney's business - the bust out, Good Fellas style. Great for him and his partners. Bad for America. A Mitt Romney presidency would be the same writ large.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/10/15/1144927/-Mitt-Romney-s-Life-Story-Lying-Stealing-Destroying-Jobs