Bain Capital is the 25 years of ‘leadership’ in business Mitt Romney thinks qualifies him to handle the economy. Look at the chart below, bankruptcy and over 5,000 Americans put out of a job. But don’t shed a tear; after all, Bain and Romney turned a tidy profit from each one of these fetid deals. What’s astounding is that the shameless Romney is proud of his ‘Gordon Gekko’ past as a ruthless corporate raider, the foundation of his estimated $250 million fortune that allows him to run for president today.
Mitt Romney is so far out of touch with the way most Americans live, he actually thinks you can pick and choose among health insurers when the truth is most Americans have only one choice, and that’s through their job. Aside from the fact that health insurance is an unnecessary encumbrance and expense and single-payer would be cheaper and better, only millionaires like Romney can ‘doctor shop’ in the way he describes. The upside of this, though, is that the Mittster finally revealed his true feelings about firing people — he really likes it. As Scott Keyes at Think Progress notes:
During a campaign event in Nashua, New Hampshire this morning, Mitt Romney told the crowd, “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me.” The remark came as the Romney discussed purchasing health care services at a Nashua Chamber of Commerce event:
ROMNEY: I want people to be able to own insurance if they wish to, and to buy it for themselves and perhaps keep it for the rest of their life and to choose among different policies offered from companies across the nation. I want individuals to have their own insurance. That means the insurance company will have an incentive to keep people healthy. It also means if you don’t like what they do, you can fire them. I like being able to fire people who provide services to me. If someone doesn’t give me the good service I need, I’m going to go get somebody else to provide that service to me.
Here’s Romney’s ‘clarification’ of his “I like to fire people” remark, from the Boston Globe:
“I don’t want to live in a world where we have Obamacare telling us which insurance we have to have, which doctor we can have, which hospital we go to,” Romney said at the press conference. “I believe in the setting as I described this morning where people are able to choose their own doctor, choose their own insurance company. If they don’t like their insurance company or their provider, they can get rid of it.”
Romney proves how out of touch he is once again; most Americans who aren’t rich have health insurance corporations telling them what doctors they can see and what hospitals they can go to. In Canada, with single-payer health care, you truly can pick your own doctor and hospital, within reason. As to his line that you can get rid of your insurance company or health care provider, I suggest Mitt work a real job where your company has one insurer — you either take it or do without. There isn’t a lot of competition in health care services or fees for the Great Unwashed.
Then there’s this, from American Politics Journal, an anti-Romney video done by hard right-wingtips:
Clint Eastwood is an old-fashioned conservative, and he seems to be nearly sane. Even though Republicans drool over Clint — after all, he’s an actor who plays tough guys, just like John Wayne — I doubt they’ll pay attention to this.
Below, an embarrassing Christmas video put together by Newt Gingrich’s New Hampshire staff, nabbed from AlterNet. On one hand, Newtie getting the GOP nomination would dead-cinch insure Obama’s reelection, since Gingrich is nothing but a shambling fountain of bullshit, bombast and bad ideas guaranteed to turn off most voters; on the other, his gag-inducing lies and distortions, along with his moronic history lessons and numb-null nitwittery such as this video would be hard to take for an entire election season. (The gnome in green with the pointy hat just has to be his NH campaign manager.)
Most people have never heard of Franny Beecher, but he was lead guitarist for Bill Haley and His Comets, the first hit rock band that promoted itself as a rock band in 1955. Beecher has always been underrated and rarely mentioned among great rock players, but his combination of jazz, blues and country-swing in his solos helped establish the rock guitar sound, and I think he was the first rocker to use a Gibson Les Paul. He’s 89 now and retired from playing, but he had a unique approach in his day and he’s indisputably one of founding fathers of rock music. The first video is what Franny was playing with Benny Goodman when he started his career in 1948; the second is the well-known “Rock Around the Clock” with his unforgettable and original guitar solo.
As usual, Mitt Romney is talking straight out of his rump here. Junior Bush just did this for eight years and collapsed the economy and dunderhead Romney wants to try it again. Einstein (and I don’t mean ‘Norman’) said trying the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity; by that definition, Romney’s a raving, drooling, wet-his-pants lunatic. As it is, I don’t think most American voters are going to fall for this Republican malarkey again, and I hope I’m right.
By Andy Sullivan and Greg Roumeliotis
Reuters
January 6, 2012
(Reuters) – It was funny at first.
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. […]
Overall, Bain made at least $12 million on the steel company it created by merging the Kansas City mill with another in South Carolina before the new entity declared bankruptcy in 2001. Bain also collected an additional $900,000 a year through 1999 for management consulting services, public filings show.
Oh, and what about Romney’s vaunted 160-page, 59-point plan to create jobs? To boil it down, it would cut taxes for the rich (like the Romney family, for example) and soak the poor, adding as much as $1,000 to the tax burden of those earning $10,000 to $20,000 per year, and $800 to those in the $40K to $50K bracket, and not guarantee a single job. It would also raise the deficit. As when the Mittster was at Bain Capital, his plan would make money for him and his millionaire friends and screw everyone else. The Boston Globe does the rundown here:
By Bobby Caina Calvan
Boston Globe
January 06, 2012
Taxes would fall for the country’s wealthiest and rise for some of the poorest under the tax plan proposed by former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, according to an analysis released yesterday by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.
The reduced government revenue could widen the country’s budget deficit by at least $180 billion, according to the analysis of Romney’s 59-point, 160-page economic plan. […]
Under a Romney presidency, most of the current tax system would remain intact, although he would permanently do away with the estate tax and lower the corporate rate from 35 percent to 25 percent.
He would also make permanent the George W. Bush-era tax cuts that are scheduled to expire at the end of the year.
While millions of households would see tax cuts, thousands of poor Americans would see their tax bills rise, by an average of $1,000, because of changes to child and earned income credits.
Those making more than $1 million a year would get a tax cut of about $150,000 — amounting to about half of the total tax cuts he proposes, according to Howard Gleckman, a fellow at the Urban Institute and editor of the Tax Policy Center’s budget policy blog, “TaxVox.’’
