The Mitt Romney Obama’s lapdog press doesn’t want you to know

Flopping Aces ^ | 08-09-12 | DrJohn

[Starman417]

Mitt Romney has been called a "vulture capitalist" and even a "murderer" by Obama sycophants and the press does little to disabuse voters of it. CJ gave us ten reasons for liberals to hate Mitt Romney and I'd like to expand even more on that. There's a lot more to Mitt Romney than the Obama press allows.

The Bain Story- the real one

Given the political controversy over private equity and Mitt Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital, it’s worth taking time to ask, how did Bain Capital perform for its investors?

To get some perspective, it’s first worth acknowledging that the average private equity firm has delivered better returns to its investors than those investors would have earned in the stock market. In a recent paper, Bob Harris, Tim Jenkinson, and I estimate that $1 invested in a private equity fund delivered 20 percent more than $1 invested in the Standard & Poor's 500 Index.1 In our sample alone, the outperformance works out to more than $120 billion in additional value to investors. This performance benefited the pension funds, endowments, and other limited partners that invested over this period.

Even in an industry with such strong performance, Bain Capital stood out. During Romney’s tenure, the firm raised five private equity or buyout funds. All five outperformed the typical private equity fund. Four of the five were well into the top quartile of performance.

In other words, Bain Capital and Romney delivered strong results for their customers, better than other private equity firms that on average outperformed the public markets. Today, those customers include the California State Teachers' Retirement System and the Teacher Retirement System of Texas.

Bain Capital also made venture capital investments from other funds in start-ups and other earlier stage companies that are not included in the performance measure mentioned above. Those venture capital investments included successful investments in Staples, Sports Authority, and Gartner Group.

How many jobs did Bain create?

Among Bain Capital’s investments under Romney, the large job creators are clearly Staples and Sports Authority. Both of these were small, young companies when Bain Capital invested in them. Bain invested in Staples when it had only one store, so there were likely fewer than 200 employees at the time. Bain appears to have invested in the Sports Authority when it had fewer than ten stores. Unfortunately, there are no public data to say how many people were employed at that time. At the end of 1998, Staples had more than 42,000 employees, Sports Authority had almost 14,000, Gartner Group had almost 3,000, and Steel Dynamics had over 500. So at the beginning of 1999, when Romney left Bain Capital, these four companies alone employed almost 60,000 total employees. While some of the job growth at Sports Authority came from acquisitions, there is no doubt that these four companies created tens of thousands of jobs over the period.

Fast forward to today. By the end of 2011, Staples had about 89,000 employees. Sports Authority is now a private company. The last time it reported employee numbers, in 2006, it had 14,300 employees. In addition, Gartner Group had over 4,400 and Steel Dynamics had over 6,000 employees. Using the most recently available data, these four companies alone employed almost 125,000 total employees.

Bain Capital also successfully turned around several existing businesses during Romney’s tenure. For example, Bain Capital bought Wesley Jessen Vision Care for $6 million in 1994. It had been a division of Schering Plough and was not profitable. Bain Capital and a new CEO turned it around and sold it to Ciba Geigy for over $300 million in 2001. When it was sold, it appears to have had 2,600 employees. Today, the company is part of Ciba Vision.

Overall, then, the companies Bain Capital funded under Romney have created tens of thousands of jobs using any measure.

Mitt Romney gave away his entire inheritance to charity

[Edgar3]

So, why isn’t the O’Romney campaign trumpeting this?

[Tennessee Nana]

Well there was that woman who was killed in the accident in France when Willard was driving...

[alloysteel]

“So, why isn’t the O’Romney campaign trumpeting this?”

The very thing that has kept so many of us on edge about Romney - he won’t, or does not seem to want to, go for the soft underbelly of all the vulnerabilities of the regime of the Current Occupant of the White Hut.

If the Washington Post doesn’t designate a particualr act of treason or high crimes as a scandal, then - it is not a scandal. This is maddening to the extreme, that criminality is not called by its name, but is excused and/or obfuscated, as the most disinformative statement of all, “everybody does it”.

Everybody does NOT do it. The Democrats think they are “getting even” for the “Swift Boat” revelations about John F. Kerry in 2004. But those charges had a strong basis in fact, including a number of people who were actually observing the activities of John Kerry, and documented, in many instances with pictures and official records besides the statements of the witness to Kerry’s behavior.

Whereas, the Democrats have just cut something out of whole cloth, on the basis of nothing at all, and assign cause to circumstances, when NOTHING other than the passage of time joins the accusation to the outcome. Allegations, innuendos, and suggestions SEEM to connect the act of closing the GST plant, and the wife of Joe Soptic dying as a result - nearly seven years later.

Even CNN called BS on this one.

But the Romney campaign won’t.

[Edgar3]

Yep