Job-killer Willard “Mittens” Romney and the 1% Economy

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

I previously posted about job-killer Willard "Mittens" Romney's false claim of being a job creator in Willard 'Mittens' Romney, the anti-jobs candidate:

[I]sn’t Romney the guy who succeeded in business by laying off thousands of American workers so he could get rich? Why, yes he is! Political Animal – The anti-jobs candidate:

I think Romney’s biggest problem is that the message brings to the fore his key weaknesses — Romney’s record on jobs is atrocious.

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And this is the part of Romney’s record he’s most proud of. Romney slashed American jobs as if his career depended on it — and it did.

Complicating matters, during Romney’s only service in public office, his state’s record on job creation was “one of the worst in the country.” Adding insult to injury, “By the end of his four years in office, Massachusetts had squeezed out a net gain in payroll jobs of just 1 percent, compared with job growth of 5.3 percent for the nation as a whole.”

How bad is Romney’s record? During his tenure, Massachusetts ranked 47th out of 50 states in jobs growth.

Yes, Romney has a simple message: “I’m a successful businessman, I’ll create jobs and fix the economy.” It also comes with an equally simple response: “Mitt Romney is the anti-jobs candidate.”

Now Benjamin Wallace-Wells at New York Magazine examines the career of this successful businessman who was an arbitrage specialist at Bain Capital which bought up distressed businesses, fired its employees and sold off the company's assets to turn a profit. That's what a Vulture Capitalist does. Mitt Romney’s Corporate Idealism — New York Magazine (excerpts):

In his quick, casual reply—corporations are people—Romney had seemed to give something away, though it wasn’t immediately clear what. The press chose to play the episode as a “gaffe,” as ABC’s Jake Tapper described it, a moment in which the weakness in Romney’s political pitch, the gap between his own privileged experience of the world and that of working-class voters, had been exposed.

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The incident, in retrospect, did less to peg Romney as a creature of privilege than it did to reveal something deeper. For Romney, the corporation has long been an object of a certain idealism. It is something he has spent much of his adult life—first as a management-strategy consultant, then as CEO of the private-equity firm Bain Capital—working to perfect, to strip of its inefficiencies until it might function as a perfectly frictionless economic unit. 

The political genuflection to businessmen is so gauzy and generic that praise for a candidate’s private-sector acumen can often sound phony. But Mitt Romney is the real thing. He was, by any measure, an astonishingly successful businessman, one who spent his career explaining how business might operate better, and who leveraged his own mind into a personal fortune worth as much as $250 million. But much more significantly, Romney was also a business revolutionary. Our economy went through a remarkable shift during the eighties as Wall Street reclaimed control of American business and sought to remake it in its own image. Romney developed one of the tools that made this possible, pioneering the use of takeovers to change the way a business functioned, remaking it in the name of efficiency.

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The protests going on at Zuccotti Park now have raised the question of whether that transition was worth it. What emerged from that long decade of change was a system that is more productive, nimble, and efficient than the one it replaced; it is also less equal, less stable, and more brutal. These evolutions were not inevitable. They were the result, in part, of particular innovations developed by a few businessmen beginning a quarter century ago. Now one of them has a good chance of becoming president.

Continue reading Mitt Romney’s Corporate Idealism — New York Magazine.

UPDATE: Governor Goodhair Rick Perry of Texas this morning began pressing Romney to make his tax returns public — a step Romney has refused to take in all of his many previous attempts at public office. (If elected president, it is standard practice to release the president's tax returns. So why should Romney get a pass as a candidate?)