In an all too familiar tale, during its heydays, when Mitt Romney and his posse rode into town on behalf of Bain Capital, someone’s dream was going to get crushed, usually a lot of someones. Hopes and aspirations are swiftly snuffed out.
“I don’t think Mitt Romney is a bad man. I don’t fault him for the fact that some companies win and some companies lose. That’s a fact of life,” Randy Johnson, laid off by Mitt in 1994, said at the 2012 Democratic National Convention last night. “What I fault him for is making money without a moral compass.”
David Foster, a steelworker, describes the pattern. Mitt’s Bain bought the company he worked for, loaded it with debt, forcing it into bankruptcy, then fired hundreds of workers. Mitt and his Bain cohorts made out like, well, bandits.
Cindy Hewitt talked about Romney walking away with $249 million after shutting down the plant where she worked.
After workers are laid off, a few are rehired at much lower pay, without benefits or pensions. Then plants are eventually shuttered.
Bain Capital released a statement last night after the three workers spoke at the convention: “Bain Capital grows companies and improves their operations,” the statement said. “It is disappointing to watch the distortion of our record and the political hyperbole that often occurs during campaigns. We are extremely proud of our employees and management teams who have grown over 80 percent of the more than 350 companies in which we have invested over 28 years.”
Yeah, right.
The worst of Romney’s sins is not that he is a stiff lying machine with no core belief besides making money. It is that he killed so many American jobs, devastated so many families and laid waste to so many communities while getting immensely wealthy. He hid his income in off-shore tax havens.
As we speak, Mitt is still refusing to release more than a couple of years of his taxes. What we know from 2010 release is not pretty. His tax rate is a lot lower than any middle class family. He hides his money in Swiss bank accounts and in the Cayman Islands.
So, here we are and Mitt is the Republican Party’s challenger to President Obama. Mitt says he wants to do for the rest of America what he had done for all those communities over so many years.
Will we let him?
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