Willard Romney, The Guy That Fired You

The always insightful Matt Taibbi on Willard "I Like To Fire People" Romney's acceptance speech:

"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?"

The idea that "The Guy That Fired You" is a "job creator" on the side of the working man and woman is one of the most strained, if not ludicrous, constructions the Rethuglicans are trying to foist on the American people. His whole life has been about making huge financial gains regardless of the consequences to Joe Lunchbucket, parking those gains in tax havens overseas, refusing to come clean on his taxes with the American people, and lying about his policies that would cause further damage to middle and working class families. That's why they're running a despicable, diversionary campaign of racial resentment and unprecedented falsehood - and why they have to be defeated at all costs.

Vids of the Day

The lovely Elizabeth Banks on Willard's problem with women:



And the consequences of Willard's Bain Capital vulture capitalism:

Retired Retroactively Romney Clarifies Things

We're all-videos, all-the-time today. Here's one from the Obama Truth Team mocking one Willard "Retired Retroactively" Romney's lawyerly word salad "clarifying" things about his Bain Capital retirement days. Love the Insp. Clouseau-evoking music throughout and the woman's laughing and saying "That sounds very suspicious" starting at about :45. Ouch. That's gotta hurt, Willard.

Something To Hide, Willard?

"The Obama people keep on wanting more and more and more. More things to pick through, more things for their opposition research to try make a mountain out of and to distort and to be dishonest about. We’re going to put out two years of tax returns." -- That's Willard "Believe in America, But Don't Pay Any Taxes" Romney on today's Fux and Friends. Despite the likes of fellow right-wingers George "Quill" Will and Wee Willie Kristol telling him to release all his taxes and fess up to his Bain role, Willard insists on sounding like someone with something to hide. Maybe that's because he is. We're guessing he paid no taxes in multiple years, he was drawing salary from the company he "retired retroactively" from, he somehow managed to bend the law to get a $100 million IRA, and some of his investments overseas would, um, raise eyebrows. How's that for a start?

Retroactive Retirement

You can add the term "retired retroactively" to the growing list of risible Rethuglican word salads invented to divert the villager media and rubes in the Rethug base. We have former Enron stooge, former RNC chair and advisor to Willard "Offshore Mitt" Romney Ed Gillespie to thank for using that term to describe Offshore Mitt's status in the years 1999-2002, when Offshore Mitt was supposedly "retired" from Bain Capital while running the Salt Lake City Olympics, but continued as sole owner, president and CEO of Bain, according to SEC filings, and documents filed in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Or as Balloon Juice's John Cole put it:

"In other news, immediately after hearing the phrase 'retroactive retirement,' Penn State University officials began drafting paperwork to retroactively retire Paterno and Sandusky in 1997 so as to avoid any civil litigation related to the Nittany Lion child rape regime."

As Andrew Sullivan said the other day, he's not waving, he's drowning.

Sunday Reading -- We Feel Your Bain

Two excellent articles on why the Obama campaign is right to target Willard "Believe in America, But Invest Overseas" Romney's bidness history at Bain Capital, and his overseas tax shelters, as part of a larger policy narrative:

-- Vanity Fair's James Wolcott talks about the most recent Obama killer ad, "Firms":

"What's brilliant about 'Firms' isn't so much the way it mails home the irony of Romney murdering 'America the Beautiful' with his toneless, tuneless voice on the soundtrack as info flashcards remind us of all the jobs Bain Capital shipped overseas and how much money Romney's stashed in tax havens such as Bermuda and the Cayman Islands, though it is a clever, damaging juxtaposition that takes Romney's chief asset as a candidate--his halo of executive achievement--and hangs it around his neck like a choke collar. Very Rovian, that."

-- NY Times' Paul Krugman writes on the tie-ins the Obama campaign is working on:

"[Romney's] policy proposals amount to a radical redistribution of income away from the middle class to the very rich; he’s also being highly dishonest about budgets and just about everything else. How to make those true facts credible? By associating them with his business career, which involved a lot of profiting by laying off workers and/or taking away their benefits; his personal finances, which involved so much tax avoidance that he’s afraid to let us see his returns before 2010; his shiftiness over when exactly he left Bain."

That squealing you hear from the Very Serious People and the Romney munchkins? It just means the campaign is working. Keep pouring it on!

Quote of the Day -- Bain Capital Edition

Josh Marshall at TPM analyzes the corner Willard "Corporations Are People" Romney has been backed into:

"Romney had absolutely nothing to do with Bain after 1999, no responsibility for anything it did, barely even knew what it did. Only he was the owner, the Chairman of the Board and the CEO. At least according to all the official documents, many of which he signed. Only he wasn’t any of those things, says Romney.

"Partisans can be walked through the arguments of how this might be true, just as you could explain what John Kerry meant by saying he was for a bill before he voted against it. But it still makes no sense. And doubling down on nonsense makes you look silly and trapped. That’s especially dangerous for someone already saddled with a reputation for shifting his stories and positions to suit the moment."

And the media? Romney-leaning, "both-sides-do-it" pundits and fact-checkers (like the Kaplan Daily's pathetic Glenn Kessler) always can be counted on to miss the forest for the trees.

Another of Willard's Falsehoods Exposed

The Boston Globe is reporting today that serial prevaricator Willard "I'll Say Anything" Romney has been misrepresenting his time at Bain Capital as CEO and sole stockholder by three years. According to the story, weird Willard left Bain in 2002, not in 1999 as he's claimed, which would mean that he was involved in the bankruptcy and layoff of workers after 1999, an important fact that he was trying to hide.

Once again (and tomorrow we'll have a wrap-up of the lies he's told just in the last week), Willard can't seem to tell the truth about something that's easily fact-checked. He's counting on a lazy Beltway media to glide over the story and instead focus on whatever shiny object his campaign can distract it with. But the cascade of questions about his finances, taxes, and core beliefs continue, and the steady production of lies from him and his campaign won't work in the end.

Quote of the Day I

"Just to be clear, outsourcing is only one source of the huge disconnect between a tiny elite and ordinary American workers, a disconnect that has been growing for more than 30 years. And Bain, in turn, was only one player in the growth of outsourcing. So Mitt Romney didn’t personally, single-handedly, destroy the middle-class society we used to have. He was, however, an enthusiastic and very well remunerated participant in the process of destruction; if Bain got involved with your company, one way or another, the odds were pretty good that even if your job survived you ended up with lower pay and diminished benefits.

"In short, what was good for Bain Capital definitely wasn’t good for America. And, as I said at the beginning, the Obama campaign has every right to point that out." -- Paul Krugman in the NY Times (our emphasis).

Willard, Bain Capital, and Offshore Accounts

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!")

Monday Reading

This morning, E.J. Dionne discusses the damage being done to Outsourcing Pioneer Willard "I Like Firing People" Romney by the Bain Capital ads being run in battleground states, while the Rethugs' squeal "anti-capitalism!":

"In the country as a whole, 23 percent said they viewed Romney more positively because of his experience 'managing a firm that specializes in buying, restructuring and selling companies,' while 28 percent said this made them view Romney more negatively. But in this year’s 12 battleground states, many of which have gotten a heavy run of the anti-Bain ads, only 18 percent viewed Romney’s business experience positively; 33 percent viewed it negatively. Obama led Romney by three points nationally but by eight in the battlegrounds.

"This is disturbing news for Romney, who hoped his business experience would be an unalloyed asset. The numbers also underscore voter resistance to the core conservative claim that job creation is primarily about rewarding wealthy investors and companies through further tax cuts and less regulation. Americans are not anti-business, but they are skeptical that everything that is good for corporations is also good for their employees, and for job creation itself." (our emphasis)

The rule of thumb that should be followed here is, if the other guy's squealing, keep doing what you're doing to keep him squealing (the louder the better to attract more attention).

Sunday Cartoon

(click to enlarge)



(Garry Trudeau, via gocomics)

Even More "Willard Romney, Job Creator"

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More "Willard Romney, Job Creator"

Nice read in the NY Times, which serves as a good bookend to the Kaplan Daily's piece the other day on Willard "Outsourcer-in-Chief" Romney's "job creating" career at Bain Capital:

"Mr. Romney’s experience at Bain is at the heart of his case for the presidency. He has repeatedly promoted his years working in the 'real economy,' arguing that his success turning around troubled companies and helping to start new ones, producing jobs in the process, has prepared him to revive the country’s economy. He has fended off attacks about job losses at companies Bain owned, saying, 'Sometimes investments don’t work and you’re not successful.' But an examination of what happened when companies Bain controlled wound up in bankruptcy highlights just how different Bain and other private equity firms are from typical denizens of the real economy, from mom-and-pop stores to bootstrapping entrepreneurial ventures.

"Bain structured deals so that it was difficult for the firm and its executives to ever really lose, even if practically everyone else involved with the company that Bain owned did, including its employees, creditors and even, at times, investors in Bain’s funds."

The whole piece is worth a read. This is the point the Democrats need to make as often as they can, especially with Willard touting his bidness experience as his main qualification for the presidency: Willard's Bain Capital experience was all about making handsome profits for the partners, not about saving or creating jobs.

Willard Romney: Outsourcer-in-Chief

This is a front-page piece in today's Kaplan Daily that's causing quite a stir in the political world today. It's a fairly extensive discussion of the extent to which Willard "I Like to Fire People If I Can't Outsource Them" Romney's Bain Capital experience was investing in outsourcing jobs overseas. As the lying, trust fund hypocrite that he is, Willard has been running around the country talking about how he's the man to stop job losses from, among other things, outsourcing to cheap labor markets overseas.

Look for more of this based on more media exposure of this kind.

Attacking Mittens' "Job Creator" Record

We've noted before that most of the Beltway media is running with Rethuglican talking points that the attacks on weird Willard "Mendacious Mittens" Romney's claim to have created jobs in his private equity days is somehow an attack on (pick one) private equity / Bain Capital / free enterprise. Moreover, the Rethugs and their media allies would have us believe that the attacks are not working. The problem is, much to their chagrin, they are working.

The Los Angeles Times has an article that points out that in Ohio, for example, 47% of likely voters believe that private equity firms are after profits for their investors, usually at the cost of employee pensions and jobs. A somewhat similar result occurred with voters in Florida.

So while the Rethugs and the Beltway media want the Dems to fight with one arm behind their back, the Dems should stay on the offensive and continue to demonstrate the essential dishonesty in Mendacious Mittens' central campaign claim to have been a "job creator."

Fair Game

For weeks now, Rethuglicans and their friends in the Beltway media have been misrepresenting the Obama campaign's attack on Willard "Corporations Are People" Romney's record in the private sector. The Rethugs et al want to portray it as an attack on "private equity," or "Bain Capital," or even the free market system. In truth, it's an attack on Willard's oft-repeated claim to have been a "job creator" in the private sector. But you wouldn't know that in listening to talking heads on cable, or reading "centrist" pundits in the major papers. Even some craven Dems like Cory "Snooker" Booker and Harold "Junior" Ford, Jr. have joined in on the reverse spin to shield Willard on his job creation claims.

Peter Fenn (an old high school classmate) has an article in U.S. News and World Report that urges the Obama campaign to stick with the aggressive questioning of Willard's "job creating" credentials:

"It is up to the Obama campaign to make it clear what Romney did and did not do at Bain Capital—he made money, and lots of it; he did not engage in a job creation enterprise. He availed himself of foreign tax shelters in Switzerland and the Cayman Islands to avoid U.S. taxes. He used tax loopholes to enrich himself and his friends with the carried interest deduction. This is all fair game. This is a far different 'business' record than Mitt Romney would like voters to be examining."

Exactly. When you hear Rethugs and their friends in the media arguing against this approach for the Obama campaign, you know it's hurting them.

Willard Romney, Numbers Man

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Romney and Bain - A Rethug Compilation

When you hear Etch-A-Sketch Willard's campaign and Rethugs whine about how Dems talking about Willard's job destruction record at Bain is an attack on the free enterprise system, remember this:

Willard, Job Destroyer

During the Rethuglican clown show this past winter, some Rethuglicans (namely Poot Gingrich and Oops Perry) dared to get into plutocrat human replica Willard "Scissorhands" Romney's career as a vulture capitalist at Bain Capital. Since plutocrats bankroll the Rethuglican/New Confederate Party, that was a bridge too far, and Poot and Oops were told to cool it.

With the general election campaign underway, Willard's record at Bain Capital -- especially as it related to his oft-claimed role as a "job creator" -- is fair game, and the subject of a hard-hitting video by the Obama campaign, and it's a good one. Enjoy.