Mother Jones released some more Romney video today. This time it’s footage of Romney, circa 1985, laying out Bain Capital’s business philosophy. The clip was included on a CD-ROM that was created to commemorate Bain & Co.’s 25th anniversary and which was provided to David Corn by a former Bain employee. Romney has repeatedly pointed to his business experience and role at Bain as proof he can rev up the US economy and create more jobs than Obama can, but the vintage video confirms what many have been saying all along: that job creation was not the point of Bain. Young Mitt says the goal of the company was to buy stakes in undervalued companies and then “harvest them at a significant profit” years later.
The Obama campaign responded today by sending out a statement from Randy Johnson, a former worker at Ampad, the office supply company Bain acquired in 1992, proceeding to fire hundred of workers.
Today’s video confirms what I and other workers fired by Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital already know: that Romney’s business experience was never about creating jobs. Romney’s own words prove that his focus was putting profits before people from the very beginning, ‘harvesting’ companies to make a ‘significant profit’ for himself and his investors – even if it meant investing in companies that shipped American jobs to China. Any other explanation Romney puts forth about this ‘private sector’ experience or understanding of the ‘real economy’ are just empty words from a man desperately trying to rewrite the past in order to win an election.
The Romney campaign responded by trotting out its standard line about the candidate’s time at Bain. “In addition to starting new businesses, Mitt Romney helped build Bain Capital by turning around broken companies, creating and saving thousands of jobs,” Romney campaign spokesperson Amanda Henneberg told the National Journal. “The problem today is that President Obama hasn’t been able to turn around our economy in the same way.” As David Corn pointed out today, 1985-era Mitt Romney said it could take up to eight years to turn around a company. Now the candidate is willing to give the president less than four years to turn around the entire US economy.
