Mitt Romney’s Scourge of Private Equity Vampirism

Last updated on February 8th, 2013 at 02:15 am

We like people who contribute to our society, people who build, who create goods and services, who create jobs. We have a word for people who suck the life’s blood out of others: vampires. Vampires are parasites. Vampires do not sparkle. We don’t like vampires. We want to protect ourselves from them.

If private equity’s icon, Mitt Romney, wants to know why he is liked far less than Barack Obama, he has only to look in the mirror. He is not a likeable person. If he wants to know how much less liked he is: In a new USA Today-Gallup, the Washington Post reported Sunday, “President Obama crushed Romney — 60 percent to 30 percent — on the question of which of the two was more likable.” The Post goes on to say that,

Things were no better in April, a Washington Post-ABC News poll found an even larger gap, with 64 percent of those surveyed describing Obama as the friendlier, more likable candidate, and only 26 percent saying that about Romney.

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Why don’t people like Mitt Romney? Because like a vampire, Mitt Romney uses people. He sucks them dry, making what was theirs his, and tosses their husks aside and moves on to another.

In his career at Bain Capital, Romney did not create jobs. He didn’t found any companies that would hire people and drive the economy. He fired people. He likes to fire people. He likes to outsource jobs. Romney did not and does not create any goods or services. He creates wealth – for himself.

Romney has not positively benefitted society. Not in any discernible way, shape, or form. Romney has benefitted himself at the expense of others.

What is there to like? Mitt Romney is a wrecking ball. He wrecks businesses, he wrecks lives. People don’t like people who destroy rather than create. Throughout history, people who destroy rather than create are villains. Romney is a villain. We want Thor to win, not Loki.

The Romney campaign can come back with excuses like this:

“We’re not going to win a personality contest. It’s not an election for class president. It’s who can best solve the problems of the country,” said Romney’s pollster, Neil Newhouse. “Likability isn’t fixing the economy or helping the middle class make ends meet.”

But…

As the Post titles their article, this is Mitt’s problem. He only pretends it isn’t because he knows there is nothing he can do about it.

Nor has this unlikable, walking gaffe machine done anything to convince people he can solve the problems of this country, unless he means to do it like he ran Bain, by firing people, outsourcing jobs, and destroying lives.

I don’t think that’s what most of us want in a president. John MacIntosh “a partner at Warburg Pincus, a leading global private equity firm, where he worked from 1994 to 2006 in New York, Tokyo and London” wrote a piece Saturday for CNN’s Election Center. Being a guy who once did what Romney did, MacIntosh says to Romney: “Mitt, tell the full story of your business career.”

Romney won’t, and the reason is obvious if you read MacIntosh’s piece. Romney the private equity capitalist isn’t a producer of jobs, a potential savior of the American economy; he is a destroyer of worlds.

This is what MacIntosh would have Romney admit to:

I made most of my money from buying and selling a dozen or so companies with other people’s money; mostly uninteresting mid-sized companies that nobody particularly wanted; and I got to keep 20% of the difference between the purchase and sale price plus any cash I could take out while I owned them.

Romney says his experience at Bain qualifies him to be president, But MacIntosh explains exactly how Romney ran Bain. Pray he does not run our country like this because to a man like Romney, we are just a means to a Mitt-friendly end:

Unfortunately everything worth doing can be overdone and sometimes I went from taking risks that were already there to making risks that weren’t. Why? Because the company I wanted to buy was too boring, too well run, or too expensive to give me a decent chance of making real money unless I increased the level of risk. And this risk, usually excessive borrowing that I forced the company to take on (usually so that I could buy it) was borne by the company and its employees, customers and vendors with occasionally dire consequences.

There is nothing pretty or wholesome about what Romney did at Bain; did to people; how he destroyed businesses, jobs, and lives, in order to have cash to stuff into his pockets or to make $10,000 bets or to squirrel away overseas where it could be hidden from the IRS. Vampires act this way: not American presidents.

We want Abraham Lincoln the Vampire Hunter. We don’t want the vampires. Lincoln was value-added, whether he killed vampires or not. Vampires are parasites, feeing off humanity. That is exactly what Romney did at Bain. He fed off people. Used them. Sucked them dry. Discarded them when they were was nothing left to benefit Mitt Romney.

And he didn’t add the money he made back into our economy. He didn’t create jobs with it. What people saw trickling down was Mitt pissing on them from his foreign-funded, tax-sheltered, government-subsidized throne.

When MacIntosh writes for Mitt, “ I wasn’t very nice. I always acted in my own economic interest, I quantified everything, I thought creatively about what could be done (not what should), I treated people as means not ends, and I regularly did to others what I would never want done to myself, my friends or my family” Americans should take heed. This is not a man we want running our country. The United States government is not the position for a CEO; it is not there to enrich the man who runs it.

The employees of a company exist to serve the interests of those who run the company: people like Mitt Romney. But the president of the United States exists to serve the people in whom political power rests – the People. Not his bank accounts, not his portfolio, not his foreign tax havens or his vacation homes, and not his ambition.

Let Romney buy some other country and bleed it dry. Ours country is not for the likes of economic parasites like Mitt Romney. We don’t need Romney; we don’t want Romney. Vampires aren’t welcome in these parts.

Now, if anyone has any holy water, throw it now, before it’s too late.

Image: Boston Globe

Hrafnkell Haraldsson

Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen’s Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.