Thursday, February 6, 2020

WALL STREET PLUNDERS AND PLUNDERED WELL FOR MITT ROMNEY - HE MADE HIS MILLIONS SCREWING THE AMERICAN WORKER!



Romney’s Bain Capital Profited Billions by Bankrupting American Workers

Republican U.S. Senatorial candidate Mitt Romney greets supporters at the Columbus Day parade in Worcester, Mass., Monday, Oct. 10, 1994. Romney was facing U.S. Senator Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., in November's election. (AP Photo/C.J. Gunther)
AP Photo/C.J. Gunther
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Sen. Mitt Romney’s (R-UT) investment firm Bain Capital profited billions between 1992 and 1997 by collecting huge dividends for investors that eventually resulted in layoffs for thousands of American workers.
In 1984, Romney helped co-found Bain Capitol, which made a series of investments in small and medium-sized American companies, only to turn a profit for investors and leave American workers without a job.
Most prominent are five companies that Romney’s Bain Capital invested in, reaping a profit for himself and investors, and then left to bankruptcy, layoffs, and closure. AOL Finance reported in 2012 on the financial devastation that Romney’s Bain Capital put American workers through.
In 1992, Romney’s Bain Capital invested $5 million in American Pad & Paper and walked away with $100 million in dividends. Nearly 400 American workers in Marion, Indiana, were laid off in the process, and in 2000, the small company filed for bankruptcy.
“I really feel he didn’t care about the workers. It was all about profit before people,” a former worker at the plant, Randy Johnson, told People’s World in 2012.
Johnson said of the layoffs which began in the mid-1990s after AMPAD, acquired by Romney’s Bain Capital, bought the paper company:
They quickly fired every single employee. They walked the fired workers out of the building. Handing them applications as they left, telling the workers if they wanted to work for the new company, they were welcome to apply.
Similarly, Romney’s Bain Capital made an investment in Dade Behring, a manufacturing company that provided supplies for the medical diagnostics industry, of about $415 million in 1994. Romney secured $1.78 billion in dividends for investors while the company filed for bankruptcy and laid off 2,000 American workers in Deerfield, Illinois; Glasgow, Delaware; Westwood, Massachusetts; Miami, Florida; and Puerto Rico.
A number of former Dade Behring employees recalled to the New York Times how their lives were upended when their employers were acquired by Dade at the behest of Romney’s Bain Capital:
Cost-cutting became a mantra inside the company. After his employer, DuPont, was bought by Dade, William T. Mowrey, a field engineer, said his generous pension plan was replaced by a 401(k); his salary was cut by $1 an hour, costing him $2,000 a year in income. When he filed for overtime, he said, his new bosses refused to pay it. “They were just trying to milk as much out of us as they could,” he said. [Emphasis added]
Mr. Mowrey, now 54, quit. Many workers, like Mr. Shoemaker, the Dade employee in Westwood, and his wife, a temporary employee at the same plant, did not leave on their own terms. When they lost their jobs in 1997, they had to abandon plans to buy their first home together. “It created a lot of stress,” said Mr. Shoemaker, 59, who had earned more than $80,000 a year. [Emphasis added]
Romney’s Bain Capital also invested $47 million in the DDI Corporation in 1997 and profited nearly $90 million before the company filed for bankruptcy and laid off 2,100 American workers. In another case, Romney’s Bain Capital invested $60 million in GS International in 1993, securing $65 million in profits before the company went bankrupt in 2002 and laid off 750 American workers.
One of Romney’s most destructive investments for American workers came when Bain Capital purchased Stage Stores in the late 1980s with a $5 million investment before taking the company public in 1996.
In 2000, after Romney’s Bain Capital profited at least $184 million, Stage Stores went bankrupt and close to 6,000 American workers were laid off with more than 300 store locations closing. Almost all of Stage Stores closed in Indiana, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and some 50 stores closed across Texas.
Only after new management took over Stage Stores, long after Romney’s Bain Capital’s involvement, did the retail company begin growing again.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder


Explaining why Mitt Romney really voted to convict Trump



Mitt Romney didn't just shoot inside the Grand Old Party's tent by voting for one article of impeachment against President Trump.  The Utah senator became a heretic to the very people who once supported him, financially and electorally.
The vote for conviction goes beyond mere policy disagreement, such as the proper tax rate for depreciation recapture.  It goes beyond refusing to defend your party head.  What Romney did was lob a M67 into the center of the Republican Party, intended for everyone from Ted Cruz to Susan Collins to lifelong GOP member Ethel Grannysmith in Boca Raton, before retreating to the warm fastness of media approbation.
In some sense, Romney's yea for constitutional extraction wasn't a surprise.  Despite auditioning for the role of Foggy Bottom chief and petitioning for a presidential imprimatur for his Senate run, Romney hasn't been quiet about his disapproval of Trump.  He has openly denounced the president's behavior on more than one occasion, including calling Trump's actions on Ukraine "wrong and appalling" last fall.
Hating the president doesn't warrant impeachment.  So why did Romney join with Democrats to oust a popular leader in his party?
It's true that in lifestyle and appearance, the two couldn't be more different.  Trump is a twice-divorced former celeb and erstwhile tabloid fixture.  Romney is a square-toed financier whose extended family photo looks as if it was cribbed from a how-to Puritan handbook circa 1638.  Trump can't properly cite verses from Corinthians; Romney can extemporaneously give a step-by-step account of Christ's chiliastic return.
But even the personal abysm between Trump and Romney doesn't fully explain why the Mormon senator, who is so moderate and risk-averse that he probably wouldn't put chocolate milk in his cereal for fear of breaking convention, voted for the Democrat-drawn impeachment article.  No, Romney's support for conviction wasn't an indictment of the president at all, and not just because Trump was formally acquitted.
Like his fellow Trump critic on the right, Rep. Justin Amash, Romney's ire isn't about the man occupying the Oval Office.  It's not about presidential misconduct, inappropriate behavior, abuse of power, degrading the office, or any other euphemism for gauche etiquette the Acela-riding media like to fill their reporting with.
It's about the unconscionable act of voters: electing Donald Trump.  Mitt Romney regards the presidency as a rarefied space, where only the best, brightest, and most articulate men may enter.  Trump got there while boasting about his libidinousness.  He insulted the political class by calling them stupid, incompetent, venal, and wholly self-interested.  He mocked his presidential rivals with belittling nicknames, many quite clever and deserved.
And voters accepted it, some begrudgingly, putting the WWE Hall of Famer in the White House.  Mitt Romney wasn't voting for Trump's impeachment as much as he was voting to obviate the electoral will of millions.
The Romney-Amash comparison many journalists are now making is fitting.  Rep. Amash, who left the Republican Party in a huff last 4th of July, joined House Democrats in voting for Trump's impeachment.  "Mitt Romney — and Justin Amash — deserve a lot of respect for doing the right thing when it was hard," declared Vox founder Ezra Klein.  "Every Republican in Congress knows that Donald Trump is guilty," professed CNN's Keith Boyken.  "Only one (Justin Amash) was willing to say that in the House, and Trump forced him to leave the party.  Now one (Mitt Romney) has said that in the Senate, and history will judge the rest for their cowardice."
Even Max Boot, another former Republican, recognized Romney's and Amash's synchronistic Trump enmity.  But, as with Romney, the source of Amash's angst isn't Trump — it's Republican voters who don't share his love of Hayek and the untrammeled flow of people and capital across borders.  "It's been disheartening because the first few years while I was in Congress, I did feel like we were making progress in shifting the dialogue toward limited government and economic freedom and individual liberty," Amash lamented in an interview last summer.
Trump's focus on illegal immigration, more reciprocal trade, and cultural pugilism doesn't jibe with the classical liberalism of Milton Friedman.  But,it did with Republican voters in 2016.  Amash can't forgive their libertarian impiety.
Likewise, Romney tries to hide his contempt for the average GOP voter behind a veneer of salt-and-peppered elder statesmanship.  But he's just as petty and small as those he gets on his tiptoes to look down upon.
Former staffers on the Romney campaign are rebuking their former boss, saying he's "motivated by bitterness and jealously."  That's somewhat true, but it's not the full story.  As much as Romney craves hero status among the Georgetown set, he hates that the very people who backed his presidential run also stood behind a vulgar reality TV host.
The difference is that Trump won.  Romney will never forgive Republicans for making that happen.


Mansour: Mitt Romney Stabbed American Workers in the Back Long Before He Stabbed Trump

EVANSTON, IL - AUGUST 21: Protesters outside the offices of Bain Capital demonstrate against the company on August 21, 2012 in Evanston, Illinois. The demonstrators are angry with Bain Capital's plans to move to China 165 jobs from the Sensata Technologies plant in Freeport, Illinois. Workers from the plant delivered …
Scott Olson/Getty Images
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Mitt “Pierre Delecto” Romney is enjoying an outpouring of “strange new respect” from the media today after voting with the Democrats to impeach President Trump.
Thanks to Mitt, the Democrats get to claim that their impeachment show trial was “bipartisan.” Anyone who has followed Mitt’s career could have seen this betrayal coming. This isn’t the first time he’s behaved like a bitter sanctimonious weasel when it comes to Donald Trump.
Four years ago, Romney used his clout as the Republican Party’s 2012 nominee to gather the media to Salt Lake City with great fanfare to hear his thoughts on the 2016 race just days before the crucial Michigan primary. But Mitt didn’t use his encore on the national stage to endorse a candidate. No. He just wanted the whole world to hear him deliver an 18-minute speech trashing the hell out of his party’s then-frontrunner Donald Trump.
If his anti-Trump jeremiad helped Hillary Clinton, Romney and the GOP establishment didn’t care. They had already written off Trump by that point. They would rather lose than win with him. As I wrote at the time, Mitt Romney was the GOP establishment’s St. George sent out to slay the Trump dragon.
He failed then, but he’s been trying ever since. Today was just the latest and most egregious attempt.
But long before Romney stabbed Trump in the back, he stabbed the working class voters that Trump brought to the Republican Party.
First, let’s recall that Romney lost the 2012 election in large part because he couldn’t win over white working class voters.
That wasn’t an accident. It was by design. An August 2012 op-ed by Matthew Continetti in the Washington Free Beacon outlined the Obama campaign’s “voter suppression” strategy “to disillusion white voters without degrees in the Rust Belt and Mountain West.” Obama calculated that these working class voters would make Romney president if they voted Republican by the same 30-point margin as they did in 2010, but if they were demoralized and alienated by the GOP candidate, they would hand the election to Obama by simply sitting it out.
And that’s exactly what happened. It wasn’t very difficult to turn working class voters against the “King of Bain,” the man who perfected the art of the leveraged buyout which cannibalized industrial towns across America.
Romney did his best to recast himself as a venture capitalist, but the real business of the company he co-founded, Bain Capital, was private equity.
Bain made a killing for their shareholders by buying out American companies, loading them with debt, bankrupting them, shuttering their factories, and shipping those jobs overseas. Unfortunately for the GOP establishment, the American electorate is not a libertarian think tank worshipping at the Church of Ayn Rand.
Let’s take a look at the billions Bain made off of American misery. Here are five examples, conveniently bullet-pointed by Lauren Bloom in a 2012 article at TheStreet.com:
  • American Pad & Paper: Bain invested $5 million in the small paper company in 1992, and reportedly collected $100 million in dividends on that investment. AMPAD went bankrupt in 2000, laying off 385 employees.
  • Dade Behring: Bain Capital invested $415 million in a leveraged buyout in 1994, borrowed an additional $421 million, and ultimately walked away with $1.78 billion. Dade filed for bankruptcy in 2002, and 2,000 workers lost their jobs.
  • DDI Corporation: Bain Capital reportedly invested $46.3 million in 1997, reaping $85.5 million in profits and an additional $10 million in management fees. When the company later went bankrupt, 2,100 workers were laid off.
  • GS International: In a somewhat less profitable transaction, Bain Capital invested $60 million in 1993 and received $65 million in dividends. This company, too, went bankrupt in 2002, and 750 workers lost their jobs.
  • Stage Stores: Bain invested $5 million to purchase the company and took it public in the mid-’90s, reaping $100 million from stock offerings. Stage filed for bankruptcy in 2000, and 5,795 workers reportedly were laid off.
Of course, the Democrats ran one ad after another showing the Americans who lost their jobs to make Mitt filthy rich as their factories were shuttered and shipped to China. After seeing those ads, nothing could induce me to vote for this globalist plutocrat who destroyed the Rust Belt towns of my childhood. Fortunately, I now live in heavily blue California, so my refusal to vote for Mitt had no bearing on Obama’s eventual victory.
If the demonization of Bain Capital wasn’t enough to finish Romney off in the eyes of working class voters in 2012, his “47 percent” comment did the trick. When you trash half of the electorate – a group that includes senior citizens living on fixed incomes, active duty military, school teachers, police officers, and blue-collar Reagan Democrats – as freeloaders who don’t contribute to the country, that isn’t just bad retail politics, that’s downright offensive.
Ironically, the Americans who sent Donald Trump to the White House in 2016 were the same voters Mitt Romney insulted and repelled in 2012.
The forgotten men and women of the Rust Belt, who suffered the most at the hands of globalist vulture capitalists like Romney, became the heart and soul of the MAGA movement.
The voters in Romney’s native state of Michigan rejected him in 2012. They voted for Trump in 2016.
Voters in Wisconsin—home of Mitt’s running mate Paul Ryan—rejected Romney in 2012. They voted for Trump in 2016.
Voters in the coal and steel towns of Pennsylvania rejected Romney in 2012. They voted for Trump in 2016.
Voters in the mill towns of Ohio rejected Romney in 2012. They voted for Trump in 2016.
Mitt Romney didn’t just lose in 2012. He shrank the Republican Party. Trump, on the other hand, brought in a whole group of voters who had been sitting on the sidelines or voting for Democrats.
As the president said in his State of the Union address last night, Trump’s America is in the midst of a “blue collar boom.” The proof is in the pudding. The majority of Americans are feeling record high optimism about the economy because they are experiencing it. Private payrolls are up. Unemployment is at historic lows. The U.S. trade deficit has shrunk for the first time in six years, and the deficit with China fell nearly 18 percent last year.
That’s what we call “winning.” It’s something Mitt doesn’t understand.
Rebecca Mansour is Senior Editor-at-Large for Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Tonight on SiriusXM Patriot channel 125, which broadcasts live weeknights from 9:00 p.m. to midnight Eastern (6-9:00 p.m. Pacific). Follow her on Twitter at @RAMansour.

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