Via Greg Sargent, this Reuters piece is a must read:
The young men in business suits, gingerly picking their way among the millwrights, machinists and pipefitters at Kansas City’s Worldwide Grinding Systems steel mill. Gaping up at the cranes that swung 10-foot cast iron buckets through the air. Jumping at the thunder from the melt shop’s electric-arc furnace as it turned scrap metal into lava.
“They looked like a bunch of high school kids to me. A bunch of Wall Street preppies,” says Jim Linson, an electronics repairman who worked at the plant for 40 years. “They came in, they were in awe.”
Apparently they liked what they saw. Soon after, in October 1993, Bain Capital, co-founded by Mitt Romney, became majority shareholder in a steel mill that had been operating since 1888.
It was a gamble. The old mill, renamed GS Technologies, needed expensive updating, and demand for its products was susceptible to cycles in the mining industry and commodities markets.
Less than a decade later, the mill was padlocked and some 750 people lost their jobs. Workers were denied the severance pay and health insurance they’d been promised, and their pension benefits were cut by as much as $400 a month.
What’s more, a federal government insurance agency had to pony up $44 million to bail out the company’s underfunded pension plan. Nevertheless, Bain profited on the deal, receiving $12 million on its $8 million initial investment and at least $4.5 million in consulting fees.
Basically, what Bain Capital did to GS Technologies and their workers is a miniature model of what they want and have been doing to America- extract the resources, enrich themselves, loot the Federal treasury, then tell the people there is no money left and we’re going to have to cut your pensions, your SS, and your medical care while they run off to overseas tax havens to deposit their loot while chanting about job creation and free markets. Bain and Mitt Romney pocketed $8 million for the price of a community, all these workers pay and benefits and pension, and $44 million in federal money.
At least some people are starting to notice.
freelancer
Mitt Romney, the Shock Doctrine candidate.
Valdivia
Glad the media is finally focusing on it. But because some ‘journalist’ from the NYT is publishing a gossipy book about how much the Obama marriage is Michelle yelling at everyone I guess we’re in for a week or two of that crap. Ugh.
Hunter Gathers
But I’ve been told that Obama and Romney are both pawns of the billionaires, and I should overlook things like evil bigotry and economic crankery and support Ron Paul. You know, for Freedom. And silver coins I can use at the Gas ‘N Sip.
Jennifer
As I said in comments here yesterday or the day before, I foresee a general election with a new ad featuring guys like these rolling out every week or two, talking about how much Romney profited on each deal by killing off businesses and jobs and raiding pension funds. Within a couple of months, he won’t be able to go anywhere without being heckled and booed.
Violet
That’s a powerful ad. I like the observation that Mitt Romney may create jobs, but not very many of them are in America.
@Hunter Gathers:
Saw my first Ron Paul t-shirt on someone today. Young guy, early to mid-twenties. Looked maybe like he was from a family of Indian immigrants, which got me wondering how ethnically diverse Ron Paul’s followers are. I saw him in a Whole Foods.
Nutella
What John said plus this: Those millwrights, machinists and pipefitters were making useful things and they got the shaft. Mitt and his nasty crowd have never made any useful thing or performed any useful service. All they have done is destroy companies and people and extract all the money, leaving the husks of factories and communities for us to deal with.
I despise these people in the same way I despise the patent trolls. They are parasites stealing from productive workers and should be taxed and regulated into oblivion.
trollhattan
1. Hostile LBO takeover
2. Suck new acquisition dry
3. …?
4. Profit!
Should work quite fine for the whole nation.
BGinCHI
O dn’t want to go all Karl Marx on everyone, but this is straightforward capitalism without regulation. The “pure” capitalists are their own worst enemies. Given half the chance they will kill the golden goose. The system needs a regulator to survive.
This is what is so wrong with the “regulation stifles growth and economic development” meme.
I’m amazed at how much the general discourse ignores this. Wait. No I’m not.
trollhattan
@Violet:
Perfect, given Whole Foods is owned by a Randian whackdoodle.
Why buy free-range chickens when you can have free-market chickens?
BGinCHI
@BGinCHI: Should read “I don’t…” Geez. Typing failure, how does it work?
Mnemosyne
@Valdivia:
I remember the same stories going around about Hillary Clinton when she was First Lady.
I did believe the story that Hillary threw a lamp at Bill when he finally ‘fessed up about Monica because, really, can you blame her?
Amir Khalid
I read the Reuters story, and the song Youngstown kept playing in my head.
Chuck Butcher
My father was Chief Engineer for Marion Power Shovel. You might remember them if you look at the transport crawler for SaturnVB and later rockets. Yes, and cranes and shovels from back of your yard to – woa, that’s frickin huge…
A corporate raider started nosing around, so Dad put himself on the market and was gone within a month. Marion’s problem, if you will, was that its assets were worth more than its stock. It didn’t take long for Marion to cease to exist, the remains – mostly the name plate and ownership of patents and drawings were purchased by another company. The jobs – oh well.
Yeah, this happened in the pre-historic era of the later ’60s, you know when the only thing happening was hippies…
Valdivia
@Mnemosyne:
I saw somewhere the book was coming out and saw HuffPo (where else, right?) prominently quoting from the book about how Michelle and Rahm tensions, and you can just see how this is going to rivet the village. I see also that is intended to make the Obama inner circle look in disarray when we have seen them and thought of them as super disciplines.
Judas Escargot
“Hello, we’re from Bain Capital, and we’re here to help.”
Anyway, it’s good to see this long-overdue framing getting some traction. Low-info conservatives love to glibly recite “Gubbmint should be run like a bidness” like some sort of mystical incantation. The best antidote to this is to show how the MBA/corporate* mindset is what’s actually causing many of our current problems in the first place.
(*) I won’t say ‘business’… business actually involves building/creating/providing useful things.
hildebrand
@Violet: The whole youth Ron Paul movement is based on three things: One – a craving for some kind of pseudo-anarchist, ‘fuck the authorities’ rebellion. Two – legal dope. Three, that they would likely be on the front lines should another war pop up explains their agreement with his isolationism. I have spoken to far too many of the Paulistas on campus and I can guarantee that they know precious little about his actual positions, they just want to be able to ‘do whatever they want’ whilst not putting themselves in harms way.
I usually find some vaguely eloquent way to explain that they need to stop being such selfish bastards, and to remember that human beings live in community and thus need to work with one another for the good of said community.
Cassidy
@Hunter Gathers: You forgot that Ron Paul is more liberal than Obama because he doesn’t want to fight wars in the ME.
WereBear (itouch)
These people couldn’t run a business. They can’t come up with ideas, build anything, or create a market. They are looters and thugs; in suits.
Canuckistani Tom
@BGinCHI:
I’ll take ‘lack of sleep and new baby’ for $500, Alex
Quicksand
@BGinCHI:
I’m thinking there may be some extenuating circumstances…
EDIT: beaten!
chrome agnomen
guy is still industrial grade ignorant, though. quote: “i detest obama. anybody who is willing to put a predatory capitalist in office deserves to get obama.”
BarbCat
@trollhattan: I believe Bush-Cheney followed the Bain business model you recited, with America as their asset. That formula worked great.
moonbat
This is the drumbeat that needs to sound from here to November. The company that Romney profited from and STILL profits from is nothing more than a corporate vulture that destroys companies, feeds on their carcasses and sends their jobs overseas, while allowing our government to pick up the bill. Just commit it to memory and spout it every time someone tells you that Romney is the “serious” business candidate.
Canuckistani Tom
@Chuck Butcher:
I know the name. Steam shovels, excavators, basically any vehicle with treads except tanks, right?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Power_Shovel_Company
Hill Dweller
@chrome agnomen:
I guarantee he couldn’t explain why he dislikes Obama(publicly, anyway). And if he tried to, it would be some sort of crazy conspiracy theory he read online.
JPL
@Valdivia: Where did you read that? I’m sure corporate media will run with a story about the angry black lady but I haven’t heard anything.
chrome agnomen
@Hill Dweller:
in my experience, very few right wingers can explain any of their positions. they all boil down to the tried and true “shut up, that’s why”
Tonal Crow
@hildebrand: Don’t forget to tell them about Sec. 3 of this. Paul claims he’s for Liberty, but he’s really for tyranny labelled as Liberty.
Mnemosyne
@Valdivia:
Wait wait wait. You mean to tell me that there were people that Rahm Emmanuel didn’t get along with? Rahm “that’s fucking retarded” Emmanuel was not, in fact, universally beloved by everyone who came in contact with him?
Well, that’s certainly stop-the-presses news. Who knew that someone almost universally referred to as “abrasive” might get into conflicts with others?
(Obviously, I’m not mocking you, I’m mocking HuffPo.)
Scott
@Amir Khalid: I think you meant Allentown but, yeah, I hear the song also.
WereBear (itouch)
That’s because their brains literally don’t work right; they don’t allow the different parts to mesh so it’s a car without a transmission.
Read The Authoritarians by Altemeyer. Online, free. Explains wingnuts better than anything else I’ve seen.
JPL
@Valdivia: the google tells me that Michelle is releasing a book in April about the White House Garden so I’m sure that will take precedence with MSM.
Valdivia
@JPL: saw the summary about the book at HuffPo politics by Sam Stein and some other guy. I walked away feeling it was going to be turned into what you said.
ETA: it’s by Jodi Kantor.
@Mnemosyne: exactly! but if you read the piece they are making it out to be this drama laden thing and the center of it is Michelle. I mean, really?
ChrisNYC
This election is going to be crazy. I watched an old 2008 GOP primary debate — the one where they all ganged up on Romney. Man, what core he has is cold and nasty. He was just blank eyed lashing at them. He seems like he’s totally dropped that this time around, for now at least, but I think that’s what he is. I think in a strange way he’s the perfect opposite to Obama. (And I think Obama will win. FTR.)
Amir Khalid
@Scott:
I did indeed mean Youngstown, by the Boss. Although I am aware that Allentown is a steel town like Youngstown.
MikeJ
I love that movie about Bain.
JPL
@Valdivia: I just now went to Huffington… ugh…
here’s the link to the NYTimes article
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/07/us/politics/michelle-obamas-evolution-as-first-lady.html?hp
Valdivia
@JPL: I am sick from it and I really have to wonder, why did these aides talk to this woman? it’s just the worse gossipy thing and totally made out to fit the Dems in Disarray narrative
ETA thanks for that link will check it out now.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@ChrisNYC:
Before going into politics, Obama was a low-paid community-organizer. Before going into politics, Romney was a highly-paid community-demolisher. One of them struggled to build a sense of community amongst the jobless and the hopeless, the other made big bucks bringing joblessness, hoplessness and despair to previously viable communities.
Not Sure
@Chuck Butcher: I believe Danny DeVito made a movie about this in the 1980s called “Other People’s Money.” One of his better ones.
Irving
Quick shout out: Andy Sullivan, one of the co-authors of the article, is my cousin. He’s also the front man for Dirty Bomb, which recently wrote a rock opera about Jack Abramoff, and is a wicked awesome dude.
JPL
@Valdivia: from the nyt..
They didn’t even have bo so postponing the trip makes no sense.
Valdivia
@JPL: I see that the NYT article is a little more subtle while the HuffPo piece is really out to make this all about a drama queen with expensive tastes and out of pace with political pros. You can see how it’s going to be reported
ETA yes that part makes no sense to me. I just think this is going to play very badly in the way the Village will just make Michelle out to be a witch
Chuck Butcher
@Canuckistani Tom:
Considerably more than tracks, Dad still has the plaque from SAE for design excellence for the tallest (by a huge margin) self-erecting mobile truck crane. Walking draglines are not technically tracked vehicles and are the biggest. At about 9yrs I got to run a dragline, operator’s hands on controls – of course.
The world’s largest mobile land structure is the transporter. That thing was fascinating to be a detatched part of and its scale amazed (beyond real expression) a kid.
The Wiki could use some fixing, but I’m not interested enough to do all the documentation.
Davis X. Machina
@JPL: Sounds like a smart lady. FLOTUS is a sweet gig only if you’re slightly dim. It drove Rosalynn Carter nuts, IIRC.
JPL
@Valdivia: Did u see this
S
then two paragraphs down
did she or didn’t she…
Suffern ACE
@Irving: Small world. I went to college with Andy. He was an awesome dude then, but with longer hair, for sure.
Suffern ACE
@JPL: I don’t see how it couldn’t be both. Also-too, the senior advisers – were they actually aware that Hillary was doing more than just “selling” that legislation? Michelle seems to be talking about selling it to the public, not actually lobbying and sitting on the committee writing it.
Scott
@Amir Khalid: Your right! I forgot about the Springsteen song. Interesting that they are still relevant years after being written. Things never change.
WereBear (itouch)
When there was all the fuss about Bo (they should have gotten a shelter dog!) there was an article I wish had gotten more coverage. It was with the dog breeder.
She related that she had no qualms about his placement because the First Lady stated that she knew her girls meant well, but the bottom line was that Mom would be the one to make sure his needs were met. “So,” Michelle asked. “What does he need?”
Can’t see that lady in the Huffpo piece. So I call crap.
Linda Featheringill
@JPL:
I googled Obama marriage trouble and found items from 2009, 2010, and 2011. It seems to be a recurring theme.
If they have a real relationship, they will fight sometimes.
In the 20th Century, First Ladies who did not scream and yell developed cancer. Michelle deserves better.
JPL
@Suffern ACE: After reading the NYTimes, I’m sure her enemies will make it more negative and the media will play along with it. Remember when she said she had never been so proud of America and the media made it sound like she didn’t like America before. That’s a valid concern I have.
Chuck Butcher
Corporate raiders are nothing new and the only real defense a company that wants to continue to exist has is to start buying its own stock to drive its price up. If it is upside down in stock value/assets, that’s gonna be real difficult to do. Being upside down in that respect isn’t a business problem, depending on the business, but it does mean raiders are gonna swarm.
Something like MPS operates in a low margin, low production number, high labor, high infrastructure, high end product evironment. It isn’t sexy as a stock and what it takes to do business means you’ll have huge assets.
Irving
@Suffern ACE: …we all had more hair back then. :)
Quarks
@JPL: The article looks poorly sourced, too — only a couple of aides on record, and none of them close enough friends to be saying much, with the close friends mostly saying, “Well, turns out, living in the White House with everyone monitoring your every move and discussing your weight, your clothing and whether or not you ate a freaking hamburger is stressful as hell. Who knew?”
As far as unhappy First Ladies go, Betty Ford ended up an alcoholic, Jackie Kennedy and Mary Lincoln had to watch their husbands get assassinated, and Mary Appleton Pierce went into a deep depression and hid in the upper rooms of the White House, never coming out (to be fair that was in reaction to the death of her child.) Michelle Obama has nothing on this so far.
gogol's wife
@JPL:
Jodi Kantor is a hack. She probably looks down on Kitty Kelley and Rona Barrett but how is she different?
Mark S.
I don’t think these guys would be as mad if they learned that Mitt pays a lower percentage in taxes than they do. It warms peoples’ hearts when job creators are richly rewarded. It’s what makes this country great.
Anne Laurie
@Davis X. Machina:
Heck, living in that fever swamp (literal as well as metaphorical) damn near killed poor Abigail Adams, and from what I’ve been able to gather Martha Washington couldn’t wait to get out of there, either. Apart from possibly Dolly Madison, the only women who seemed to have enjoyed being FLOTUS are the Marie Antoinette types — Julia Grant, Jackie Kennedy, Nancy Reagan…
Hill Dweller
I read the NYT piece(I refuse to give HuffPo the hit), which is contradictory in places, and it wasn’t that bad. Bristling at the confinement of the White House and advocating for your spouse seems like a natural reaction to me.
Sure, the author is a soulless hack, who will sensationalize things for better sales, but Michelle is popular, and people like her. I don’t see this hurting her.
Nutella
@JPL:
It’s a particularly silly line to claim the Obamas aren’t getting along. Every time you see a picture of the two of them together, they’re looking at each other with moony eyes like teenagers.
I’m sure they have their private disagreements but if they’re not a solid couple they are remarkably good actors.
JC
In the longer term view, I’m still waiting for George Carlin to be wrong.
Seriously though, Bain is really the story of the last 30 years. Greed is good.
I mean, if the public elects these guys, who will ACTUALLY raise taxes on the lower and middle class, in order to give the millionaires more money, will we deserve what we get?
JPL
@Hill Dweller: Thanks..I sure appreciate your opinion because after the media attacked her on the campaign trail in ’08, I had doubts. I like the way you think.
Jesse Ewiak
This stuff will kill Romney. Not even the laying off people part, but the last sentence in the article.
“Mitt Romney made millions off buying a steel mill and closing it, then made the government bailout the worker’s pensions.”
Danny
So republicans are finally gonna go all in and nominate Gordon Gecko for president? Gutsy move! But why are they going for a boring, mormonized version of Gordon Gecko? He’s lacking all the bad boy charisma of the original.
WaterGirl
@Valdivia: I read the NYT article. It was gossipy, for sure. But really, if the worst they can say is that she is fiercely supportive of her husband and upset when things aren’t going well, well, I don’t think that’s too bad.
Anyone who already likes MIchelle will be fine knowing she’s not perfect. And anybody who already has a negative opinion, well they will run with this, but they already had a negative position.
Now if the article said she was lazy and never worked out and she ate cheeseburgers and fries every day in private while she talked about eating right, well, I think that could damage her.
The article, while not particularly flattering, doesn’t say anything about Michelle that I find out of character. It is kind of surprising, though, that everybody would gossip like that about the president. About his wife, no less! I am willing to bet that he is not happy about that.
cmorenc
@Nutella:
Part of the problem is that the practical threshold for what the examiners at the US Patent and Trademark Office consider a patentable advancement over known prior art in a given field, including what is sufficiently a sufficiently “nonobvious” variation on existing art, is shockingly low. Most examiners have such an overburdened incoming caseload of applications that they often lack the time to adequately research or consider what’s known and obvious and what’s not in a particular field, especially outside their narrow range of concentration. Though I’ve lost the patent number citation, there actually are a couple of patents that have issued for engines which amount to classic perpetual motion machines (which are supposedly unpatentable); that’s just the most blatant example of sloppily considered patent examinations.
Also, there’s the nearly incomprehensible writing style in which patents are couched. Have you ever tried to read a patent on even a fairly simple-seeming device? Have you ever tried to research patents in a given area of technology? The Patent Office regulations governing the longstanding style in which patents MUST be written is monstrously, needlessly convoluted and arcane, completely independent of the degree of complexity of the technological invention itself. The rules purportedly are to promote crisply clear delineation and understanding of what the claimed patentable elements of the invention are, but instead create such a mess of dense, tangled syntax that it is impossible for most people who are not experienced patent attorneys to intelligently wade through it, and the extent of the patent depends far more on how clever the drafter is in finely nuancing his wording than on the extent to which the technology represented actually represents meaningful innovation.
I speak as someone who initially thought this would be an exciting area of law to practice with my degrees in computer science and electrical engineering, and I actually practiced for a year with a patent law firm and passed the PTO patent bar exam (which is extremely difficult, picayune, and hypertechnical). However, I realized this wasn’t for me, and I preferred writing software to the deadly dull writing and parsing of patent applications. Yecch!
ruemara
@Valdivia: I read the article and she doesn’t come off angry, just insistent. In fact, she comes off as very progressive and not really interested in bullshit politics. It’s a lot better than you’d think.
JC
For some other 1 Percenter education, there is a great travel article.
b-psycho
@Tonal Crow: It’d surely be nice if Paul got a question about that in the next debate.
ChrisNYC
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: There’s that. There’s also another part.
I’ve been sort of studying Mitt. He makes these weird “mistakes” — to the Des Moines Register board he was talking about how sucky Iowa weather is and pining away for Palm Springs (!). At an Iowa town hall in a factory, where the audience was working people, he started his comments by saying, “This looks like the company Ann’s father owned.” The thing about his being heh heh “unemployed.”
Anyway, I don’t think these things are mistakes really — I think he does that stuff to establish the power relationship. Intentionally or not, he’s reminding people, constantly, that he’s better, above them, and, I guess, that they should listen to him. Fits well with the ‘big swinging dick’ business world he came out of.
So that’s my Mitt psychoanalysis.
rikyrah
really like the tags
A Conservative Teacher
Romney left Bain Capital in February 1999 to serve as the President and CEO of the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympic Games Organizing Committee, which he then promptly saved from bankruptcy. This guy was let go in 2001, after Romney left.
I guess the lesson from this story is that the world needs more people like Mitt Romney- if we could have cloned him and kept him in charge of Bain, this guy wouldn’t have lost his job. Thankfully Romney is here to save America from bankruptcy.
Thanks for bringing up this story- I never previously realized how amazing Mitt actually is.
Larkspur
That description reminds me of something.
Oh, now I remember! It sounds kind of like a scene from Imperial Life in the Emerald City, with similar results, although far fewer explosive devices and such-like.
toschek
I like Michelle, and I don’t think the article was too bad or dems in disarray or whatever. Those aides all have their own axes to grind, whatever. Michelle didn’t come off poorly at all IMO if you actually read the whole piece at the nytimes site.
Rahm, Gibbs and Jarret however come across as the jerkoffs that they are, and the anonymous aides they quoted for the most part are petty little tools.
I wonder how much of Obama’s recent displays of backbone are due to Michelle? More credit to her if that’s the case.
Sometimes I wish Michelle was president, but then I always wanted Elizabeth Edwards to run too because she was awesome.
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: You just nailed the perfect description of Obama vs. Romney.
Micheline
@A Conservative Teacher: Is this snark?
PurpleGirl
@Hunter Gathers: Romney isn’t a pawn of the billionaires… he’s one of billionaires pulling the strings.
Valdivia
@WaterGirl:
I agree. The HUffPo piece on the other hand was just atrocious.
Valdivia
@ruemara:
I started with the HuffPo piece which gives a different impression. The NYT piece is something else as you and others have said. I think the Obamas make a great team.
mclaren
@Hunter Gathers:
There, fixed that for ya.
ThresherK
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: More amusing: Mitt’s dad made a go of it running American Motors. I’d love to sell popcorn to the time travel movie where Mitt and Bain Capital get into the position to vulturify AMC right out of existence.
Mitt would do it in someone else’s heartbeat, as his is undetectable by medical science.
Can you imagine trying to run American (Can I borrow a cup of GM’s old engines?) Motors! The company which was able to spend upwards of $25k every year to redesign its models. The company which was forced to dangle 0% financing in front of the buying public during several years of the 1970s.
The fruit rotted far from that tree.
WaterGirl
@Valdivia: Thanks for the warning on the Huff Post piece. I will skip that one.
R-Jud
@JC: Pretty astonished to see us on that list:
Tucked in between Moganshan, China and “Space”, of course.