}

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Romney economics


Mitt Romney famously declared that he enjoys firing people. As head of Bain Capital, he fired a lot of people and destroyed their lives. This video from the Obama campaign highlights Romney’s destruction of Kansas City's GST Steel. The clip description tells the story:
Kansas City's GST Steel had been making steel rods for 105 years when Romney and his partners took control in 1993. They cut corners and extracted profit from the business at every turn, placing it deeply in debt. When the company eventually declared bankruptcy, workers not only lost their jobs but were denied their full pensions and health insurance, and the government was forced to step in and provide a bailout.
So, Romney destroyed a century old business, destroyed people’s jobs, destroyed their health insurance, destroyed their pensions—he destroyed people’s lives. Romney, of course, made a lot of money destroying these people’s lives—and countless other lives throughout the country. And now, Romney wants to do to the entire US economy what he did to the people of Kansas City's GST Steel.

Romney would be a disaster for the United States. As a super-rich member of the corporate elite, he has absolutely no understanding of the needs, let alone the difficulties, of ordinary, mainstream Americans who work hard for a living. But he loves firing them!

America must tell Romney there’s no job for him.

3 comments:

d said...

I saw this video this morning too, and it was really well-done. Not your normal sensationalist "attack ad" that can easily be responded to with a pithy ad. It was an accounting of what happened, as viewed by the people affected.

I can only hope that undecided voters watch it...

Roger Owen Green said...

”We are not going to beat Barack Obama with some guy who has Swiss bank accounts, Cayman Island accounts, owns shares of Goldman Sachs while it forecloses on Florida and is himself a stockholder in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac while he tries to think the rest of us are too stupid to put the dots together and understand what this is all about.” - Newt Gingrich

Arthur Schenck said...

I thought the same thing about it, d, and here's something neither of you—or anyone else—has ever heard me say: I agree with Newt Gingrich (thanks for the quote, Roger).

Romney is, of course, trying to push back, arguing that he was no longer running Bain Capital when it destroyed GST Steel—which conveniently ignores the fact that he set the process in motion, as well as the fact that as a shareholder he was still personally enriched by the destruction of those people's lives. It also ignores the thousands of other lives that he helped destroy in order to gain more wealth for himself. This ad, it seems to me, is a great pointer toward the kind of person Romney is, and it isn't an image of a nice, benign person.