When Mitt Romney Came to Town

[travelbug]

This is a short (28 minute) documentary on Mitt Romney's history of raiding corporations...how many people he put out of jobs and how much money he made doing it. Mitt Romney is a sociopathic piece of shit.

When Mitt Romney Came To Town

[witchcurlgirl]

It's an attack ad posing as a documentary. That was financed by Gingrich's PAC, it's textbook typical Gingrich. You don't fuck with Newt, he's hard to match for vicious.

By all accounts, Newt Gingrich is about to get pummeled in New Hampshire, after just getting pummeled in Iowa. The former Speaker, once flying high as the national GOP front-runner, was brought low with a disappointing fourth place finish in Iowa. With John Huntsman and Ron Paul duking it out for the second and third place finishes, he'll likely also place fourth in New Hampshire, in large part due to a barrage of Mitt Romney SuperPAC funded ads.

Many following the New Hampshire primary expected the weekend debates would have changed the game. Surely the uber-aggressive Gingrich was going to gut Romney faster than a corporate raider guts a Mid-western factory. What happened to the Gingrich vs Romney Rumble in the Granite Jungle we were all expecting to see on Saturday and Sunday?

Newt's unexpectedly restrained performance proves that the former speaker is as complex, inscrutable, and fascinating a character as exists on the modern political scene. But could this really be happening? Could Newt be walking meekly into another drubbing in New Hampshire, turning the other cheek, perhaps inspired by his new found Catholicism?

In a word: No. Gingrich may be Shakespearean, but he's less Iago than Godfather. His icy demeanor this weekend in the face of the rage that we know is bubbling inside of him reminded me a famous scene from the movie -- a scene that sums up a certain concept of honor, of revenge, and of negotiation. In it, Singer Johnny Fontaine asks the Godfather for help landing a leading role in an upcoming film. The Godfather agrees and dispatches consigliere Tom Hagen to Hollywood in order to make studio head Jack Woltz "an offer he can't refuse." Hagen presents Woltz with a generous offer. The Godfather will finance the entire movie if only Woltz casts Fontaine in the role. Woltz angrily refuses. One morning shortly thereafter, Woltz wakes up to find himself and his bed drenched in blood. He pulls back the covers to find the severed head of his prized racehorse.

Newt made Romney a generous offer. If Mitt would call off the Super PAC, Newt would stay positive and run an "ideas-oriented campaign." Mitt refused and even taunted Gingrich, saying: "This ain't bean-bag," in the "Meet the Press" debate over the weekend, in essence telling Gingrich to grow a pair. Well, this week Mitt woke up next to a horse's head.

On Monday, all became clear. Gingrich was smug and restrained over the weekend because he knew that the first missiles were ready to launch. Las Vegas billionaire Sheldon Adelson had contributed $5 million to Gingrich's Super PAC, Winning Our Future. $3.5 million dollars worth of ads were going up in South Carolina. But more importantly, Winning Our Future had bought the rights to a 30-minute documentary about the job-killing destruction wrought by Mitt during his time at Bain Capital.

Judging by the trailer, this thing is a doozy. It calls Romney "more ruthless than Wall Street" and includes devastating first-hand testimonials. One woman looks directly into the camera and says of Mitt: "I feel that is the man that destroyed us." Another says: "That hurt so bad to lose my home because of one man that's got 15 homes." It's bad. But will it matter?

In some ways, the trailer for "When Mitt Came to Town" has actually rallied conservatives to Romney's side. Many of the same conservatives who trash Romney regularly found the criticisms of Bain Capital and the corporate chop-shop method of money-making antithetical to their party's blind worship of the "free enterprise" gods. In fact, although the Super PAC ads and the documentary could well depress Romney's poll numbers, it's unlikely at this point that anyone but Mitt will end up with the nomination.

Nevertheless, outside of the deluded GOP echo chamber where teachers, firefighters, and civil servants are overpaid leeches protected by cigar chomping union bosses and where, in the infamous words of one GOP congressman, it takes $200,000 per year to feed your family, this ad is devastating. It cuts to the very core of what makes Romney precisely the wrong candidate for the age of the Tea Party/Occupy Wall Street political duopoly. In fact, the ad swipes at the argument that Romney has been making consistently and that has kept him in the catbird seat, that Romney is the most electable candidate. The privileged corporate raider who enriched himself by laying off workers in Midwestern swing states doesn't seem particularly electable.

Gingrich is, in the classic Gingrichian style further developed by Karl Rove, attacking Romney where he is strongest: electability. If that means, as is likely, that Gingrich loses the primary but succeeds in mortally wounding Romney for the general election, well, that's OK with Newt, because this isn't really about the country, and it's not really about the Republican Party. It's about Newt Gingrich -- and it's about revenge.

The full impact of the Newtron Bomb hasn't really even been felt yet. We've only seen the trailer. To go back to the Godfather analogy, Mitt hasn't really seen the horse's head yet, but a few drops of blood on his silk sheet let us know what's coming. Make no mistake: this movie will be utterly, totally devastating. Its impact isn't primarily targeted to the GOP electorate, but it will go right to the heart of Mitt's general election chances. Gingrich is basically using the movie to call Romney out as such an evil, greedy, cold-hearted, rapacious robber-baron that he turns the stomach of his fellow Republicans. This is like getting thrown out of a strip bar for treating the dancers as sexual objects. It's like getting thrown out of a hot dog eating contest for gluttony. Newt hopes to scream at the general election voter that Mitt is such an unbelievably heartless, cold, greedy person that the party that calls ketchup a vegetable and wants to throw people off unemployment during the worst recession since the Great Depression finds him heartless.

Only a Republican can make this argument. Democrats wouldn't have the stomach to paint such a harsh image and immediately would be blasted as anti-capitalist, redistribution-loving, socialists if they attempted to. Americans are looking for heroes right now, and they are looking for villains. The president has failed to be the hero that Democrats were hoping for, but if Gingrich can successfully paint timid Romney as the caricature of the rapacious robber baron villain, he might drive disappointed voters straight back into the arms of Obama.


http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/...n-bomb/251168/

[MohandasKGanja]

I was reading an analysis yesterday about Bain, Mitt's company.

In one example, they raised venture capital and bought distressed companies at bargain basement prices. Then, they got them to go IPO a couple of years later, with Bain getting a huge check each time. Five of these companies went belly up (Chapter 7) a few years later (over leveraged). But Bain made something like $850 Million, and Mitt got $250 Million, collecting a bunch of money up front from the stock sales.

[witchcurlgirl]

Newt Gingrich, meet Michael Moore!

The 29-minute video “King of Bain” is such an over-the-top assault on former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney that it is hard to know where to begin. It uses evocative footage from distraught middle-class Americans who allege that Romney’s deal-making is responsible for their woes. It mixes images of closed factories and shuttered shops with video clips of Romney making him look foolish, vain or greedy. And it has a sneering voice-over that seeks to push every anti-Wall Street button possible.

Here’s just a sampling of what Romney and Bain Capital, which he once headed, is accused of: “Stripping American businesses of assets, selling everything to the highest bidder and often killing jobs for big financial rewards . . . high disdain for American businesses and workers . . . upended the company and dismantled the work force; now they were able to make a handsome profit . . . cash rampage . . . contributing to the greatest American job loss since World War II . . . turn the misfortune of others into their own enormous financial gain.”

The video ends with a crescendo of images of despair, with voices of the victims adding emotional punch: “A lot of lives were ruined . . . he took away our livelihoods . . . he took away our future . . . he destroyed a lot of homes . . . it all gets back to greed.” (Irritatingly, few of these ordinary citizens are identified.)

The video is reminiscent of the devastating series of attack ads released by then-Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) that derailed Romney’s Senate campaign in 1994. In fact, we’d swear some of the people interviewed for “King of Bain,” who are identified as working for Ampad in Marion, Ind., are the same as those interviewed for the Kennedy ads at SCM, which Ampad acquired. They just look two decades older. (We have embedded a collection of the Kennedy ads at the end of this column.)

Let’s take a look at some of the claims in “King of Bain.” The video clip above is from a 60-second commercial aired by “Winning Our Future.” The full video can be found here. As we will demonstrate, at least some of the interviews of ordinary citizens appear to have been conducted under misleading pretenses and have been selectively edited to leave a false impression.

The Facts

First of all, it is a stretch to portray Romney as some sort of corporate raider, akin to Carl Icahn (whose image is briefly seen). Bain Capital initially was in the business of providing venture capital — seed money — for start-ups, such as Staples. Then it moved to the more lucrative business of private equity, in which Bain won control of firms, reorganized them and then sold them for profit. (Our colleague Suzy Khimm earlier thisweek did an excellent job of explaining the two sides of Bain Capital.)

Private equity deals, such as leveraged buyouts in which the company borrows lots of debt, can be more rewarding but also more risky. Some of those deals went bad for Bain, which sometimes happens in finance, though the company usually made money anyway. New York magazine, which the film cites as a source, recently ran an excellent profile of Romney in which it explored Romney’s pioneering role in the then-emerging field of private equity. Private equity revolutionized American business, demanding efficiencies (which can mean layoffs) and helping place much more emphasis on increasing shareholder value.

The movie pejoratively claims that the “Bain Way” was shorthand for being able to “turn the misfortunes of others into their enormous financial gains.” Bain Capital was actually an offshoot of Bain & Company, a consulting firm, and the “Bain Way” refers to its heavily analytical and data-driven approach to problems.

It’s beyond the scope of this column to assess whether the changes in American capitalism brought about by private equity ultimately are good or bad for the American economy. (Here’s a good primer.) But we can assess whether the four specific deals highlighted by the film are depicted with accuracy.

The closure of the UniMac plant in Marianna, Fla.

(3:17 mark)

In the film, three former employees of UniMac, which makes commercial washing machines, appear to suggest that quality went down under Bain Capital’s management and that a plant in Marianna, Fla., was closed because of Romney’s actions.

But the chronology is all jumbled. Bain Capital bought the business from Raytheon in 1998, and Romney left Bain a year later to run the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. In 2005, Bain sold UniMac (also called Alliance Laundry) to a Canadian entity known as Teachers’ Private Capital. The factory was moved from Marianna to Ripon, Wisc., in 2006, after Bain’s involvement ended — a fact made clear on the Web site of a laundry repair business co-owned by the people featured in the film.

In fact, Mike Baxley, who was interviewed for the film, said that he and his partner had “absolutely no idea” that the interviews were for a film about Romney and Bain. He said they thought they were being interviewed for a documentary about the factory closing.

“They said they wanted to know what it was like when the factory closed down,” he said, and he, his partner and his partner’s wife agreed to interviews after “they flashed a little money at us.” (Baxley, a Republican who said he had not yet thought much about the nomination contest, declined to reveal the amount.)

After watching “King of Bain” at The Fact Checker’s request, he said: “We were pretty shocked. Our quotes were seriously taken out of context. There is a real lack of facts.”

Indeed, Baxley, Tommy Jones and Tammy Jones barely mention Romney and Bain as they talk about their angst about the factory closing; the narrator of the film inserts suggestions that Romney was responsible.

The film suggests that UniMac is out of business, but Baxley noted that UniMac is still going strong at its new headquarters in Wisconsin. He said that the same upper management team ran the company during the course of the various investments by outside partners such as Bain, and that Bain appeared to have little involvement in UniMac’s management.

The bankruptcy of KB Toys

(8:00 mark)

Here again, the chronology is off. Bain Capital did not buy KB Toys until late 2000, more than a year after Romney left for the Olympics. But the film states, “Romney and Bain bought the 80-year-old company in 2000, loaded it with millions in debt.” It then attributes the failure of KB Toys in 2008 to that debt load, without noting that a horrible retail environment wiped out a number of chains, particularly toy stores.

Then the film runs a snippet from a 2010 Romney appearance at Emory University, making it appear as if he is talking about KB Toys when he speaks of “creative destruction.” (This is not a Romney phrase but an economic term referring to the creation of new technologies.) The film does not include the rest of Romney’s remarks on the importance of helping people transition from jobs in outmoded industries to new ones.

The bankruptcy of DDi

(10:10 mark)

The segment tries to tie Romney to Wall Street games-playing by focusing on allegations that Lehman Brothers pumped up the stock of DDi, allowing Bain Capital to sell its shares for big gains, even while an Lehman analyst had misgivings about the Orange County electronics maker.

According to an Aug. 26, 2003, account in the Orange County Register, which the film cites as a source, Bain Capital under Romney’s leadership invested $46 million in DDi in 1997. It sold many of its shares for at least $93 million and received a $10 million management fee, but the newspaper said Bain retained a 14 percent stake in the firm that was wiped out when DDi filed for bankruptcy during the dot-com bust. (The film suggests Bain had sold all of its shares, saying it had “dumped the rest.”)

Lehman Brothers in 2003 paid $80 million to settle charges by the Securities and Exchange Commission that its bankers had tainted stock recommendations in five instances, including recommendations for DDi. But the SEC did not say that Bain had done anything wrong. Romney, who again was by then involved in the Olympics, also invested some of his own money in DDi and sold it before the stock crashed, the Boston Globe reported in 2003.

The film, while focusing on the 2,200 jobs that were lost during the technology bust, does not mention that DDi emerged from bankruptcy proceedings and is currently thriving.

The demise of the Ampad facility in Marion, Ind.

(12:55 mark)

Finally, the film comes to a case that directly involves Romney. As mentioned before, this transaction formed the core of Ted Kennedy’s ad war against Romney, and the interviews in those ads are raw and on point. Clearly, people in Marion are still angry at Bain’s role in the demise of the facility there.

Bain assembled Ampad (formerly American Pad & Paper, supposedly the creator of the legal pad) through what is known as a “roll-up strategy,” in which similar companies are purchased in the same industry. One of these companies was the writing product firm SCM, based in Marion, which was purchased in 1994. The efficiencies of scale at first proved a success, and Bain made a fortune — some $100 million, according to the Globe.

But the company floundered — ironically because of price pressure from companies such as Staples, which was started with help from Bain. Ampad filed for bankruptcy protection in 1999 but still exists today as part of Esselte Corp.

One former Ampad employee claims Romney has 15 homes, which is simply not correct; he or his wife appear to have three homes (though worth almost $20 million), according to PolitiFact.

Moreover, without evidence, the film claims that “tens of thousands” of people have lost their jobs because of actions taken by Romney and Bain Capital. We have taken Romney to task for claiming he helped create “100,000 jobs,” and this is an equally unfounded claim.

The Pinocchio Test

Romney may have opened the door to this kind of attack with his suspect job-creation claims, but that is no excuse for this highly misleading portrayal of Romney’s years at Bain Capital. Only one of the four case studies directly involves Romney and his decision-making, while at least two are completely off point. The manipulative way the interviews appeared to have been gathered for the UniMac segment alone discredits the entire film.



Four Pinocchios





Four Pinocchios for ‘King of Bain’ - The Washington Post

[McJag]

I don't care what it is-it is effective. Romneys chickens have come home to roost. He will not be elected.

[witchcurlgirl]

Propaganda usually is effective. Otherwise, no one would use it. Who cares what's true?


I like the 'Romney speaks French' attack ads myself. It says so fucking much about Americans in 30 seconds. An international statesman with the ability to speak more than one language? Preposterous!

[MohandasKGanja]

]Or the "Huntsman speaks Chinese" ads. What I want to know is who speaks better Chinese - Huntsman or Witchcurlgirl?

[YOUTUBE]0PsJvLVoOq4[/YOUTUBE]

[witchcurlgirl]

Huntsman hands down. My Chinese is terrible. Truly. It's a really tough language.

[Sojiita]

I hope it is Romney vs Obama. Hell Obama won't need any attack ads of his own-he can just use these. "See?-even is fellow Republicans hate his guts." I love how they are tearing eachother apart while Obama can just sit back.

Where is Romney's spine?

[McJag]

I hope it is Romney vs Obama. Hell Obama won't need any attack ads of his own-he can just use these. "See?-even is fellow Republicans hate his guts." I love how they are tearing eachother apart while Obama can just sit back.

Where is Romney's spine?

Long ago sold to the Mormon Church. That family loving church that bans any non-Mormon or non-dues -paying Mormon from the wedding.

[twitchy2.0]

"By 1983, Hayes was 23 and back in the Boston area, raising a 3-year-old daughter on her own and working as a nurse’s aide. Then she got pregnant again. Single motherhood was no picnic, but Hayes said she had wanted a second child and wasn’t upset at the news. “I kind of felt like I could do it,” she said. “And I wanted to.” By that point Mitt Romney, the man whose kids Hayes used to watch, was, as bishop of her ward, her church leader. But it didn’t feel so formal at first. She earned some money while she was pregnant organizing the Romneys’ basement. The Romneys also arranged for her to do odd jobs for other church members, who knew she needed the cash. “Mitt was really good to us. He did a lot for us,” Hayes said. Then Romney called Hayes one winter day and said he wanted to come over and talk. He arrived at her apartment in Somerville, a dense, largely working-class city just north of Boston. They chitchatted for a few minutes. Then Romney said something about the church’s adoption agency. Hayes initially thought she must have misunderstood. But Romney’s intent became apparent: he was urging her to give up her soon-to-be-born son for adoption, saying that was what the church wanted. Indeed, the church encourages adoption in cases where “a successful marriage is unlikely.” Hayes was deeply insulted. She told him she would never surrender her child. Sure, her life wasn’t exactly the picture of Rockwellian harmony, but she felt she was on a path to stability. In that moment, she also felt intimidated. Here was Romney, who held great power as her church leader and was the head of a wealthy, prominent Belmont family, sitting in her gritty apartment making grave demands. “And then he says, ‘Well, this is what the church wants you to do, and if you don’t, then you could be excommunicated for failing to follow the leadership of the church,’ ” Hayes recalled. It was a serious threat. At that point Hayes still valued her place within the Mormon Church. “This is not playing around,” she said. “This is not like ‘You don’t get to take Communion.’ This is like ‘You will not be saved. You will never see the face of God.’ ” Romney would later deny that he had threatened Hayes with excommunication, but Hayes said his message was crystal clear: “Give up your son or give up your God.”
Not long after, Hayes gave birth to a son. She named him Dane. At nine months old, Dane needed serious, and risky, surgery. The bones in his head were fused together, restricting the growth of his brain, and would need to be separated. Hayes was scared. She sought emotional and spiritual support from the church once again. Looking past their uncomfortable conversation before Dane’s birth, she called Romney and asked him to come to the hospital to confer a blessing on her baby. Hayes was expecting him. Instead, two people she didn’t know showed up. She was crushed. “I needed him,” she said. “It was very significant that he didn’t come.” Sitting there in the hospital, Hayes decided she was finished with the Mormon Church. The decision was easy, yet she made it with a heavy heart. To this day, she remains grateful to Romney and others in the church for all they did for her family. But she shudders at what they were asking her to do in return, especially when she pulls out pictures of Dane, now a 27-year-old electrician in Salt Lake City. “There’s my baby,” she said.
In the fall of 1990, Exponent II published in its journal an unsigned essay by a married woman who, having already borne five children, had found herself some years earlier facing an unplanned sixth pregnancy. She couldn’t bear the thought of another child and was contemplating abortion. But the Mormon Church makes few exceptions to permit women to end a pregnancy. Church leaders have said that abortion can be justified in cases of rape or incest, when the health of the mother is seriously threatened, or when the fetus will surely not survive beyond birth. And even those circumstances “do not automatically justify an abortion,” according to church policy.
Then the woman’s doctors discovered she had a serious blood clot in her pelvis. She thought initially that would be her way out—of course she would have to get an abortion. But the doctors, she said, ultimately told her that, with some risk to her life, she might be able to deliver a full-term baby, whose chance of survival they put at 50 percent. One day in the hospital, her bishop—later identified as Romney, though she did not name him in the piece—paid her a visit. He told her about his nephew who had Down syndrome and what a blessing it had turned out to be for their family. “As your bishop,” she said he told her, “my concern is with the child.” The woman wrote, “Here I—a baptized, endowed, dedicated worker, and tithe-payer in the church—lay helpless, hurt, and frightened, trying to maintain my psychological equilibrium, and his concern was for the eight-week possibility in my uterus—not for me!”
Romney would later contend that he couldn’t recall the incident, saying, “I don’t have any memory of what she is referring to, although I certainly can’t say it could not have been me.” Romney acknowledged having counseled Mormon women not to have abortions except in exceptional cases, in accordance with church rules. The woman told Romney, she wrote, that her stake president, a doctor, had already told her, “Of course, you should have this abortion and then recover from the blood clot and take care of the healthy children you already have.” Romney, she said, fired back, “I don’t believe you. He wouldn’t say that. I’m going to call him.” And then he left. The woman said that she went on to have the abortion and never regretted it. “What I do feel bad about,” she wrote, “is that at a time when I would have appreciated nurturing and support from spiritual leaders and friends, I got judgment, criticism, prejudicial advice, and rejection.”"


source: The Dark Side of Mitt Romney | Politics | Vanity Fair


The guy's a douche.

[sluce]

There is an 80 year old women at my gym and I love talking to her. Last night she said she thought it would be kind of cool if Romney was elected because then in her lifetime she would have seen a Catholic, a Muslim and a Mormon as President. I told her that Obama is not Muslim and she was crushed. She said she had hoped he really was because it would so nice to see her fellow Americans being open minded. I asked what she thought of a woman or gay President. She said "both would be great if they could fix this problem we are having right now - you know, no one having money". I love talking to Lois.

[olivia]

It's wrong, but I'm feeling a smug sense of glee over watching Newt work his black magic on another Republican. Yes, it's propaganda. But more to the point, Mitt is basically out for Mitt...and the Mormon church. He hasn't voiced a single concern for the current state of the USA except he does love business.

His rule in Massachusetts was financed by the democrat before him who raised taxes, though Mitt proudly took all the credit. What makes Mitt think he can run the USA like a business? Is he really looking at the state of things here or is he staging a hostile take-over because he received a personal vision from the Mormon god that this is his destiny?

[MohandasKGanja]

It's wrong, but I'm feeling a smug sense of glee over watching Newt work his black magic on another Republican. Yes, it's propaganda. But more to the point, Mitt is basically out for Mitt...and the Mormon church. He hasn't voiced a single concern for the current state of the USA except he does love business..

It is amazing to see how things have degenerated. I think that Gingrich did want to run an ideas/issues-oriented campaign. In the first two debates, he would openly chide the moderators for asking questions that he thought pitted the candidates against each other.

But he has been brutalized by Romney and he is swinging back with everything he's got. It will be interesting to see how that evolves.

Also, Romney is the last person that can complain about this treatment. He pulled a lot of phone bank dirty tricks on McCain and Huckabee in the 2008 primaries. McCain and Huckabee were so pissed that they ganged up on him in the debates and lit into him for what he was doing. It was a pretty brutal takedown of Romney in a public venue, and I think it's one of the reasons his 2008 campaign started to fade rapidly. He basically looked like an underhanded dirtbag.

The Republican business elites funding Romney's campaign have got to be pretty furious. Because wrapping the primaries up as soon as possible will allow them to save money and build up a war chest for the general election. And it looks like that isn't going to happen any time soon. However, if Romney cleans up in South Carolina, it probably is all over.

[travelbug]

It's going to be very interesting to see how this plays out in the South, where a lot of people say they want Obama out of office (for the typical anti-black, anti-Democrat reasons spoken in code, of course). But a lot of these people are Christians who firmly believe that Mormonism (or whatever it's called, Mormonosity?) is a cult. So, if Romney is the nominee, are they going to vote for the black/socialist/possibly Muslim guy or the guy who's in a cult? Which is worse? And so now there's also this stuff coming out about Romney being a job destroyer instead of a job creator. And it is pretty easy to see that he has absolutely no empathy for the lower and middle class. And on top of that, he treats animals disrespectfully.

So if Newt is the nominee, he's got that baggage of being a total hypocrite of having an affair with a congressional staffer while going at Clinton with all guns aimed for the Lewinsky affair. And being kicked out of the House for ethics violations. And being one of the primary architects of NAFTA, which was the beginning of the jobs being sucked out of America in the name of higher corporate profits.

Santorum - he's just crazy. I don't think the majority of Americans are going to want to be under his theocracy where he thinks everything is a sin. And he's got absolutely NO game when it comes to the economy. All he talks about is morals.

I think Romney will end up as the nominee (maybe) but he is definitely not going to resonate with the majority of Americans; he can't relate to the lower and middle class at all. This is going to be a very interesting election for sure.