By GREGORY N. HEIRES
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney likes to tout his experience in the private sector when he tells voters he would create millions of jobs and turn around the economy if elected.
But a look at the dark side of his track record as head of Bain Capital — the private equity firm he started with the help of funders linked to death squads in El Salvador — suggests that this is a lie.
Yes, Bain Capital has turned around troubled companies. But earlier this year, the Romney campaign was forced to back away from its candidate’s claim to have created 100,000 jobs at Bain. And the closer Election Day comes, the faster Romney runs from the firm’s ugly history of mass layoffs, outsourcing, bankruptcies and ruined lives.
Romney tried to distance himself from Bain’s pattern of economic destruction by saying he left the company in 1999 to run the Olympics in Salt Lake City. Yet Bain’s official filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission list him as CEO through 2002, so he bears responsibility for their destructive policies.
And Romney continues to profit personally from Bain Capital, thanks to a severance deal that provides him with millions of dollars every year. The fortune he amassed at Bain gives him the personal economic freedom to make a run to look after the interests of the 1 percent (including himself) in the White House.
Romney puts forth the bogus claim that he is a job creator while criticizing the jobs record of his Democratic opponent, President Barack Obama. True, unemployment remains stubbornly stuck at 8 percent. But the independent Congressional Budget Office concluded that Obama’s economic stimulus created at least 3.3 million jobs, while Romney’s Republicans in the U.S. Congress set up roadblocks to prevent Obama from further significant action.
With Romney directly in charge, Bain Capital earned $2.5 billion for its investors in 77 deals, according to the Wall Street Journal. Twenty-two percent of those cases resulted in bankruptcy filings or plant closings, some of them with huge job losses.
A New York Times analysis of 40 Bain-controlled U.S.-based companies from 1984 to 1999 found that at least seven wound up in bankruptcy. Bain investors earned $400 million in four of the bankruptcies.
Bain’s job-killing business practices led to the loss of 1,700 jobs at Dade International, a medical supply company; 3,500 at KB Toys and 750 at GS Industries, according to the ThinkProgress website.
But one wonders whether the human misery caused by Bain Capital concerns its founding investors, who were handpicked by Romney.
By one estimate, El Salvadoran families with ties to death squads provided $6.5 million of the $37 million that allowed Romney to establish Bain Capital.
“I came to Miami to find partners that would believe in me and finance my enterprise,” Romney said at a dinner party in the 1970s.
Among the investors he mentioned that evening was Ricardo Poma, whose family backed the right-wing ARENA party headed by death squad leader Roberto D’Aubuisson, who ordered the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero. Romero was gunned down as he celebrated Mass the day after he urged government soldiers to put down their arms. D’Aubuisson’s death squad also raped and murdered three Maryknoll nuns and a churchwoman.
Perhaps the story of Bain is that naked capitalism and morals simply don’t mix. Do we really want a president who prefers profits over people — someone who actually says corporations are equivalent to people?
Said Marc B. Walpow, a former managing partner at Bain who worked closely with Romney, “I never thought of what I do for a living as job creation. The primary goal of private equity is to create wealth for your investors.”
This article is reprinted from the September 2012 edition of Public Employee Press, the official publication of DC 37, AFSCME (AFL-CIO), representing 120,000 public employees in the City of New York.
