Special report: Romney's steel skeleton in the Bain closet (Here we go)

The young men in business suits, gingerly picking their way among the millwrights, machinists and pipefitters at Kansas City's Worldwide Grinding Systems steel mill. Gaping up at the cranes that swung 10-foot cast iron buckets through the air. Jumping at the thunder from the melt shop's electric-arc furnace as it turned scrap metal into lava.

"They looked like a bunch of high school kids to me. A bunch of Wall Street preppies," says Jim Linson, an electronics repairman who worked at the plant for 40 years. "They came in, they were in awe."

What's more, a federal government insurance agency had to pony up $44 million to bail out the company's underfunded pension plan. Nevertheless, Bain profited on the deal, receiving $12 million on its $8 million initial investment and at least $4.5 million in consulting fees.

When a group does this, they are not businessmen, they are punks. I know 4.5 mil sounds like a lot of money, and it is, but at the level Bain was trying to play, it is chump change.

Romney claims to be a business man, a business man takes floundering companies and makes them whole and profitable.

I have been of FR now for over a month, many of my employees know I'm here, have you seen any post attacking the way I run my businesses? My employees could, if they felt they had cause, rip me apart anonymously here, but they haven't, Why? Because I don't Bain them.

I retired from a company that was pillaged by private equity cocksuckers. The founder passed away and left the business to his worthless children who immediately set about selling it so they could invest in a chain of exclusive nightclubs in New York, Miami, Las Vegas and Hollywood where they imagined people would spend $10,000 a year for a membership.

The stupid kids retained no professional help, instead using a lawyer involved with their nightclub ventures and were were short changed millions.

The private equity clowns were fucking useless, a lot of the people working for them had NO previous employment but coincidently all seemed to have gone to Duke or belonged to a certain fraternity. I never saw many of them do much other than goof around on the internet, one particularly brash young man brought in a Playstation 2. At random they would fire people, usually for no apparent reason and usually in a spectacularly unprofessional manner.

In any event they fleshed out a preposterous plan to cease developing our own hardware and highly optimized operating system and to port our software to Linux and run it on roughly the same hardware found in a router or cable box and a completely different platform. This plan amounted to more or less rewriting everything from scratch so that it might run on horribly inferior hardware. This was also based on the belief our customers would actually want to buy this thing.

Around the time they had this mental diarrhea their bosses had their own and instituted a $50,000 bonus for every million dollars of salaries they cut. They began firing people left and right, including just about every last person who might have been able to implement their product line hallucination. Having decimated the hardware and software teams they took the next natural step and outsourced it. For this I had to go to India to train our "overseas team members" on the nuances of our platform so they might port our software that had only ever run on our own proprietary realtime operating system to Linux running on a gutless ARM implementation.

This has yet to produce a shippable product.

Because I had an employment contract with a pre-negotiated severance agreement I could not be fired. When my contract came to an end I decided it was time to retire. On the day I retired the company was bringing in more in revenue from leasing empty office and warehouse space than they were in sales.

As of Dec. 31st all legacy products have been discontinued and the company with only 21 employees is getting into the patent troll business. They actually tried to rehire me to advise them on possible infringements on their patents they might litigate.

I very forcefully declined. In spite of the fact they robbed the founders kids blind I would bet all I have they never realized a profit from this endeavor.

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