…and why you have to work two $9/hour jobs today — jobs you have IF YOU’RE LUCKY.
Matt Taibbi: The line that astonished me most from Mitt’s speech was this one, where he talked about the changes Americans “deserved” and should have gotten during Obama’s presidency:
You deserved it because you worked harder than ever before during these years. You deserved it because, when it cost more to fill up your car, you cut out moving lights, and put in longer hours. Or when you lost that job that paid $22.50 an hour, benefits, you took two jobs at $9 an hour…
Are you kidding? Mitt Romney was the guy that fired you from that $22.50 an hour job, and helped you replace it with two $9 an hour jobs! He was a pioneer in the area of eliminating the well-paying job with benefits and replacing it with the McJob that offered no benefits at all. One of the things that killed him in the Senate race against Ted Kennedy were Kennedy ads that reminded voters that Mitt’s takeovers resulted in slashed wages and lost benefits. He was exactly the guy that eliminated that classic $22.50 manufacturing job, like in the case of GST Steel, where Bain took over with an initial investment of $8 million, paid itself a $36 million dividend, ended up walking away with $50 million, and left GST saddled with over $500 million in debt. 750 of those well-paying jobs were lost.
What kinds of jobs were left for those fired workers to look for? Well, in the best-case scenario, you might have found one at Ampad, another Bain takeover target, where workers had their pay slashed from $10.22 to $7.88 an hour, tripled co-pays, and eliminated the retirement plan.
So a guy who eliminated hundreds of $22 an hour jobs and slashed hundreds more jobs to below $9 an hour blasts Barack Obama for not giving you the better life you deserved, after you lost your $22/hour job and had to take two $9/hour jobs. Are we all high or something? Did that really just happen?
I don’t know if we’re all high, but I’m beginning to suspect the entire GOP, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, and every one of their supporters. It’s as if Romney is having some fun at the expense of The Help, like he’s saying, “Look what I did to all of you — and your Obama cannot fix it! [insert creepy robo-laugh here]“
A powerful ad featuring Mike Earnest, a former employee of Ampad in Marion, Indiana, where he describes a cruel trick that was played on the employees shortly before all three shifts at the Marion plant were laid off en masse one day.
Mike Earnest: Out of the blue one day, we were told to build a 30 foot stage. Gathered the guys, and we built that 30 foot stage, not knowing what it was for.
On Screen: Mitt Romney and Bain Capital purchased the paper plant.
Mike Earnest: Just days later, all three shifts were told to assemble in the warehouse.
On Screen: The company was profitable, with three shifts working.
Mike Earnest: A group of people walked out on that stage and told us the plant is now closed and all of you are fired. I looked both ways. I looked at the crowd and ah, we all just lost our jobs. We don’t have an income.
On Screen: “there’s little question he made a forture from businesses he helped destroy.” — New York Post 2/19/11
Mike Earnest: Mitt Romney made over a 100 million dollars by shutting down our plant and devestated our lives. Turns out that when we built that stage it was like building my own coffin, and it just made me sick.
On Screen: If Mitt Romney wins, the middle class loses.
It takes a special kind of cruelty to get people to build you a stage so you can use it to tell them that their life, as they’ve known it, is over. It’s like saying “Fuck you!” with a extra big flourish, like kicking them in the head, don’t you think?
It’s almost like a not very funny prank. Oh, right…
In May, the Obama campaign put out a 5-minute web video on Ampad. Shortly after, ABC News commented on what information Bain Capital left out of its many, subsequent Ampad defenses:
[I]n 1999, Bain was actually the largest single shareholder of Ampad. In addition, as of 1999, three Bain executives were sat on Ampad’s board of directors. [...] one of the big box retailers putting pressure on Ampad was a company Romney often holds up as a Bain success story — the office supply giant, Staples.
In a 2008 Boston Globe article headlined, “As Bain slashed jobs, Romney stayed to side,” reporter Robert Gavn writes that Ampad “became squeezed between onerous debt that had financed acquisitions and falling prices for its office-supply products. Its biggest customers — including Staples — used their buying power and access to Asian suppliers to demand lower prices from Ampad.” The article also notes that Romney sat on the Staples board of directors during the period of Ampad’s slide into bankruptcy, which occurred in 2000.
Take a profitable American company, take out numerous loans against it and pocket the money; now make it compete against low-wage Asian companies (that you may have an interest in) to supply other businesses you own — and fire the employees when it can’t compete; finally close down the company in bankruptcy (can’t compete, heavily in debt) and walk away with an overall profit for yourself.
Romney knows “why jobs come and why they go,” and now, according to Mitt Romney’s and Bain Capital’s formula for success, so do we.
Fox News and Mitt Romney, as representatives for the one percent, rely on the Republican base voters to be not only dumb and uninformed, but self-hating as well. How else do you explain support (by people who aren’t wealthy) for the idea that fair wages and benefits for working Americans is “greed”? This morning, Ed Gillespie, an adviser to Mitt Romney, told Fox News host Chris Wallace that Scott Walker winning in Wisconsin would mean:
“I think the statement to big labor and to big government employee unions, government worker unions is that you can’t be too greedy,” Gillespie explained. “You need to understand that times are tough and a lot of these legacy costs that you imposed are due for some reforms and some restructuring.”
It’s interesting that Romney’s adviser calls it ‘greed’ when unions and workers want to preserve their wages and benefits. Especially when you consider the tactics of vulture capitalism, practiced by Mitt Romney during his time at Bain Capital, on long-term employees of companies acquired by Bain (fire them, hire some back at lower wages). Support for this kind of thinking will turn us into a third-world economy yet. Here’s proof: the WSJ reported this week that flat wages in the US are helping a manufacturing rebound:
The wage lag is a key factor contributing to the rebounding competitiveness of U.S. industry. A recent uptick in factory employment and the return of some production to U.S. shores from abroad both added jobs that probably otherwise wouldn’t exist. But sluggish wages also are squeezing workers’ incomes and spending. That, in turn, hurts retailers who target middle-income earners and restrains the vigor of the economic recovery. “The U.S. has held manufacturing wages in check while there has been strong wage growth in China and moderate wage growth in Mexico,” says economist Gordon Hanson of the University of California, San Diego, referring to two of the U.S.’s biggest lower-wage competitors.
China and Mexico’s wages are growing while U.S. wages are shrinking. Apparently that’s the only way corporations who got rich on American soil are willing to bring jobs back to American soil. Soon everyone will have a job, if they’re not too “greedy” and are willing to work for $1.00 a day.
WHAT THE REPUBLICAN PARTY STANDS FOR TODAY—————————–—
On “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace asked a series of pointed questions to House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Austan Goolsbee, the former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers for President Obama, but there was one question in particular that stood out for me. “You know, it’s not just a question of vision, it’s also a question record because of these men have served in office and have records in office. So, let’s take a look at that. Mitt Romney was governor of Massachusetts for four years, Congressman Ryan. And during that time, Massachusetts ranked 47th of the 50 states in job creation. The only reason the unemployment rate went down [was] because so many people left the work force — more than any other state in the country except Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina. Is that a record to be proud of?” […] The larger point, of course, is that we’re looking at a campaign dynamic without a modern precedent, especially for a governor running for the White House. In 2000, George W. Bush said, “Look at what I did in Texas.” In 1992, Bill Clinton said, “Look at what I did in Arkansas.” In 1980, Ronald Reagan said, “Look at what I did in California.” And in 2012, Mitt Romney is saying, “Look at what I did at Bain Capital.” – Steve Benen
Former Bain Executive: Romney bears the blame for Ampad layoffs — In 1994 Romney sidestepped questions related to the plant’s layoffs by saying he was on a leave of absence from the company at the time during his run for Senate. Romney’s explanation is similar to that he recently used to deflect recent Democratic criticism of Bain layoffs at GTS Steel, saying he had already left to run the Olympics when Bain acquired the company. But according to a 2002 interview with former managing director of Bain Capital Marc Wolpow, Romney was directly responsible for Ampad’s layoffs. Wopow and a fellow Bain partner sat on the board of directors of Ampad, and were responsible with carrying out the Bain business plan that caused the layoffs. “My job was to maximize the profits to Bain Capital’s partners from the Ampad transaction,” Wolpow told the Globe in 2002. Wolpow said Romney was responsible for the business plan carried out by Bain in Indiana.”Mitt’s employees executed that transaction,” he said. “We carried out the business plan. He was CEO of the firm.” ”I reported directly to Mitt Romney … You can’t be CEO of Bain Capital and say, `I really don’t know what my guys were doing.” Wolpow said that to maximize profits, Bain “implemented an aggressive plant closing and cost-cutting program.” — Buzzfeed
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North Carolina pastor: Send LGBT people to concentration camps to die — Pastor Charles Worley of the Providence Road Baptist Church in North Carolina recently told his congregation that LGBT individuals should be rounded up and detained in camps until they’re all dead. […] “…Build a great, big, large fence — 150 or 100 mile long — put all the lesbians in there. Fly over and drop some food. Do the same thing for the queers and the homosexuals, and have that fence electrified so they can’t get out, feed em, and you know what, in a few years, they’ll die out…” — Raw Story
Group calls on Kentucky church to give up tax exemptions over anti-Obama sermon — Americans United for Separation of Church and State has filed a complaint with the IRS over a preacher in Kentucky who told his congregation to vote President Barack Obama out of office this November. “Religious leaders have every right to address public issues, but they cannot turn their tax-exempt ministries into political action committees,” Rev. Barry W. Lynn, Americans United executive director, said. “If houses of worship want to be partisan and dive into electoral politics, they ought to give up their tax exemptions.” — Raw Story
Still Palin! The Topeka Capital-Journal reports that robocalls made by Sarah Palin to influence the outcome of the Republican U.S. Senate primary in Texas were actually going to voters in Kansas. The reporter described the call: “Hello, Texas!” she blasted into my ear. “I’m Sarah Palin.” – Political Wire
Another dazzling display of Romnesia: Mitch Daniels says we’re in ‘peacetime’ – “Well, you know, he’s been the president of this nation for the three years in which we have drifted ever closer to the biggest peacetime crisis we may have ever faced. There’s no doubt it. It’s a mathematical certainty. [...] To me the central question of this election is why such an administration deserves a second chance.” The fact that Mitch Daniels apparently has forgotten we are at war in Afghanistan—even though he served in the White House when we began the war more than a decade ago—is a fitting tribute to the Romnesia that has infested the Republican Party. – Jed Lewison
WHAT THE PRESIDENT / DEMOCRATS STAND FOR ————————————
The President’s ‘to do’ list for Congress / Twitter live chat today – Do you have questions about the President’s plan? On Tuesday, May 22nd at 12:00 p.m. ET, we’re holding a special session of White House Office Hours on Twitter to answer your questions. Here’s how you can join:
Right now, you can ask your questions on Twitter with the hashtag #WHChat
Follow the Q&A live through the @WHLive Twitter account
So, what’s on the to-do list? Here are the items at a glance. You can learn more and check out videos at WhiteHouse.gov/todolist
“This is not a distraction, this is what this campaign’s going to be about,” Obama said, contrasting his record with Romney’s record as a businessman and their proposed policies. “I’ve got to think about those workers in that video just as much as I’m thinking about folks who’ve been much more successful,” Obama said in a reference to his campaign ads attacking Bain’s record at two shuttered companies that resulted in laying off workers and closed plants. […] “His main calling card for why he thinks he should be president is his business experience,” Obama said of Romney. “He’s not going out there touting his experience in Massachusetts. He’s saying I’m a business guy and I know how to fix it, and this is his business. And when you’re president, as opposed to the head of a private equity firm, your job is not simply to maximize profits,” Obama said. “Your job is to figure out how everybody in the country has a fair shot.” Obama took yet another dig at Romney. “If your main argument for how to grow the economy is, ‘I knew how to make a lot of money for investors,’ then you’re missing what this job is about,” Obama said. — Roll Call
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Paul Krugman: Romney’s business experience wouldn’t help him as president — “Yes, he made a lot of money. He made a lot of money in ways that were often not good for workers… And it is also totally important to point out, as President Obama just did, what a President needs to do is not what you need to do if you’re trying to make a bunch of money for private equity for investors. Slashing spending at times like these is a terrible thing, it makes the economy much, much worse… I think the way to phrase it is, this is not a stimulus — although it is — but as a ‘we need those school teachers, we need those fire fighters, we need those police officers.’ We are starving essential public services. There are potholes in our roads.” – Raw Story
Poll: Americans Want to Eat the Rich – Is President Obama’s populist-tinged contrast with Mitt Romney effective? If you pay attention to today’s WashingtonPost poll, it probably is. The poll asks which is the bigger problem: unfairness in the economic system that favors the wealthy, or over-regulation of the free market that interferes with growth and prosperity? Fifty-six percent of Americans say unfairness, 34 percent over-regulation. – Daily Intel
Obama Super PAC enlists Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, Jon Huntsman, and Sarah Palin on Romney’s time at Bain Capital:
LOL Hypocrisy: “I’m very surprised that President Obama went down this road.” – Newt Gingrich, in an interview with CNN, on criticizing Mitt Romney’s record at Bain Capital. Gingrich, of course, led the attack during the GOP primary. – Political Wire
Here’s the kind of ‘job creation’ your average social issues, gun-toting, Bible-thumping, tea partying conservative voter has been supporting all these years (and continues to support):
Before Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital bought the rambling SCM factory in Marion, Ind., it was running three shifts a day, making hanging file folders and other office supplies. But on July 5, 1994, everything changed.
The new owner, American Pad & Paper, owned in turn by Bain Capital, told all 258 union workers they were fired, in a cost-cutting move. Security guards hustled them out of the building. They would be able to reapply for their jobs, at lesser wages and benefits, but not all would be rehired.
“We were told they bought the assets, not the union or the [labor] contract,” recalls Randy Johnson, who at the time worked as a machine operator and was a union shop steward. The workers – some the third generation in their families to have jobs there – eventually went on strike, and Bain closed the factory 5-1/2 months after acquiring it.
[...] “I was on the negotiating committee for the union, and we had to give up and give up until we could give no more,” Ms. Huffman recalls. “They tried to make the working conditions not very good.” AmPad began moving automated machinery out of the factory soon after acquiring it. “I think they were planning on shutting the plant down,” she says. “We were union, and they did not want that.”
Bain Capital bought AmPad in 1992 for $5.1 million. It borrowed heavily, boosting AmPad’s debt from $19.8 million in 1994 to $443.7 million in 1995, and Bain charged it tens of millions in fees. Bain took the firm public in 1996, making tens of millions more. AmPad, still saddled with debt, filed for bankruptcy in 2000. It has since reemerged as a private firm, based in Dallas.
Seeking to combat charges from the Obama campaign that Bain Capital extracted value from companies it purchased by firing employees and cutting benefits, Mitt Romney’s released a web video profiling Steel Dynamics, one of the companies that Bain invested in.
But as Think Progress reports, there are two problems with Romney’s portrayal of Bain’s assistance in Steel Dynamics:
1) Fort Wayne Journal Gazette reported at the time (via Nexis), that Bain was just one of eight financiers for the project — hardly the lone white knight; and
2) the video touts Romney’s “private-sector” team, the company was successful thanks, in part, to big government subsidies and grants — $37 million from the state of Indiana and DeKalb County. And as the Los Angeles Times reported in January of this year, the county even raised taxes on residents to help fund the mill.
Was there a happy ending? For Bain Capital there was. Bain walked away with a $85 million profit, financed in large part by corporate welfare.
…“The story of Bain and Steel Dynamics illustrates how Romney, during his business career, made avid use of public-private partnerships, something that many conservatives consider to be ‘corporate welfare.’”
Bain invested $18.2 million in Steel Dynamics in 1994. Five years later, it sold its stake for $104 million, walking away with $85 million profit.
So did Romney create jobs while he was at Bain Capital? If you count the jobs previously held by high-seniority workers who were laid off when their unions were busted, and whose jobs were replaced with minimum-wage-no-benefits workers, then you could probably say: sure – those were “jobs” that were “created.”
This has been a decades-long process, created and brutally enforced by the GOP, using social wedge-issues for the necessary political support, combined with an Orwellian concept called trickle-down to soothe the masses during all the union busting and off-shoring. And we hardly missed receiving decent wages with all the easy credit being shoved our way. When the new normal became lower wages here (unions are Satan’s work!) and manufacturing in other countries, then profit for profit’s sake became both the morality and the patriotic spirit of the USA. Workers were disposable and CEOs were free to pocket all the profit. And here we are today. Complain, and it’s called being jealous of other people’s success – class warfare!
This is how the middle class died. Mitt Romney and Bain Capital are just two familiar faces of that death. Fundamentalist Christians are the third.
Thirty years ago, the U.S. underwent a shift — from an economy that grew in a way that lifted all segments of society, to an economy that gives heavy preference to the wealthy. That’s the broad story of the last three decades, but as Krueger pointed out, policy has a role to play. The trend abated temporarily in the 1990s, when the country returned to an era of fairly uniform income growth distribution. That all changed for most people, and their lost income has instead trickled up the ladder. Read more…
On “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace asked a series of pointed questions to House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Austan Goolsbee, the former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers for President Obama, but there was one question in particular that stood out for me. “You know, it’s not just a question of vision, it’s also a question record because of these men have served in office and have records in office. So, let’s take a look at that. Mitt Romney was governor of Massachusetts for four years, Congressman Ryan. And during that time, Massachusetts ranked 47th of the 50 states in job creation. The only reason the unemployment rate went down [was] because so many people left the work force — more than any other state in the country except Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina. Is that a record to be proud of?” […] The larger point, of course, is that we’re looking at a campaign dynamic without a modern precedent, especially for a governor running for the White House. In 2000, George W. Bush said, “Look at what I did in Texas.” In 1992, Bill Clinton said, “Look at what I did in Arkansas.” In 1980, Ronald Reagan said, “Look at what I did in California.” And in 2012, Mitt Romney is saying, “Look at what I did at Bain Capital.” – 
The President’s ‘to do’ list for Congress / Twitter live chat today – Do you have questions about the President’s plan? On Tuesday, May 22nd at 12:00 p.m. ET, we’re holding a special session of White House Office Hours on Twitter to answer your questions. Here’s how you can join:
