Throughout his presidential campaign, presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney has made the case that he’s better suited than President Obama to turn around our nation’s economy, and he’s cited his private sector business experience with Bain & Company and Bain Capital to back up his claims.
However, what Mitt Romney is conveniently neglecting to mention is that his private sector business experience is precisely the kind of vulture capitalism that only destroys jobs, rather than creating them. Take the case of American Pad & Paper (Ampad), a small but successful paper products business that Mitt Romney and his partners at Bain Capital took a controlling interest in, only to merge Ampad with other companies in the industry, piling up debt as they went. Ultimately, the company was unable to keep up with the interest payments on its debt and was forced into bankruptcy, but not before Romney and his partners were able to squeeze out more than $100 million in profit for themselves.
Watch as former employees of SCM Office Supplies Inc., one of the paper products companies purchased by Bain-owned Ampad, explain how Mitt Romney the “job creator” actually destroyed 200 jobs at their company in order to squeeze out more profit for himself and his partners.
President Obama has also weighed in on Romney’s experience in vulture capitalism.
“And when you’re president, as opposed to the head of a private equity firm, then your job is not simply to maximize profits. Your job is to figure out how everybody in the country has a fair shot. Your job is to think about those workers who get laid off and how are we paying them for their retraining?
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And so, if your main argument for how to grow the economy is, ‘I knew how to make a lot of money for investors,’ then you’re missing what this job is about. It doesn’t – it doesn’t mean you weren’t good at private equity, but that’s not what my job is as president. My job is to take into account everybody, not just some. My job is to make sure that the country is growing not just now, but ten years from now and twenty years from now.”
The Obama reelection campaign has also created a new “Romney Economics” website to highlight how Mitt Romney’s vulture capitalism resulted in the destruction of jobs, not the creation of jobs as Romney has asserted. One interesting feature of the Romney Economics website is the ability to see the effects of Mitt Romney’s vulture capitalism on a state-by-state basis. Here in Wisconsin, Alliance Laundry Systems eliminated jobs in Ripon and AMF Bowling closed a bowling center in Milwaukee. At the time, both companies were owned by Bain Capital, which was owned in full by Mitt Romney.
If buying companies and squeezing every cent possible out of them (even if that means cutting jobs) is Mitt Romney’s idea on how to fix America’s economy, then I’ll pass.
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