Robert Reich discusses the Bain Capital and related (ahem) "class warfare" issues, and why all of it is hurting Outsourcing Pioneer Willard "Corporations are people, too, my friend" Romney:
"[T]he real issue here isn’t Bain’s betting record. It’s that Romney’s Bain is part of the same system as Jamie Dimon’s JPMorgan Chase, Jon Corzine’s MF Global and Lloyd Blankfein’s Goldman Sachs—a system that has turned much of the economy into a betting parlor that nearly imploded in 2008, destroying millions of jobs and devastating household incomes. The winners in this system are top Wall Street executives and traders, private-equity managers and hedge-fund moguls, and the losers are most of the rest of us. The system is largely responsible for the greatest concentration of the nation’s income and wealth at the very top since the Gilded Age of the nineteenth century, with the richest 400 Americans owning as much as the bottom 150 million put together. And these multimillionaires and billionaires are now actively buying the 2012 election—and with it, American democracy.
"The biggest players in this system have, like Romney, made their profits placing big bets with other people’s money. If the bets go well, the players make out like bandits. If they go badly, the burden lands on average workers and taxpayers."
This is a winning (and, by the way, truthful) narrative, coupling Willard's Bain experience with the larger discussion of the "betting parlor capitalism" that nearly sunk our economy and threatens to buy the 2012 election. Is Willard's the kind of personal and "executive experience" we want in the Oval Office?
BONUS: Vanity Fair has a good feature about Willard's shadowy tax-avoiding offshore bank accounts in Switzerland, Bermuda and the Cayman Islands. Once again we have to ask, "What are you hiding, Willard?"
(Image: "Believe in America, my good man! That, and my inherited wealth, has served me well!")
