You’re welcome.
You wrote: “...Then we get to category three where Bain acquired a company. Stripped out tens of millions in management fees while raiding the pension plans. These pension plans were then bailed out by the Feds. So the taxpayer actually paid for Bain’s profits. These companies went bust.”
Yep! See this from legalinsurrection.com (hot links are embeded at the link below):
Bain drip drip drip
Posted by William A. Jacobson Friday, January 6, 2012 at 4:34pm
http://legalinsurrection.com/2012/01/bain-drip-drip-drip/
It’s so frustrating, the failure of conservative media and Republican campaigns to vet Mitt Romney’s Bain days.
Instead of hiring cartoonists to turn Newt into Marvin the Martian, National Review should have been digging deep into the public filings, court filings, and the financial history of the companies Bain acquired and sold. You better believe there isn’t a court document or SEC filing which the Obama campaign hasn’t digitized and analyzed.
Maybe there is nothing damaging, but my gut tells me otherwise. That Romney inexplicably refuses to release his tax returns should have leading conservative pundits screaming warnings at the tops of their lungs; instead we get psycho-babble comparing Newt to Ahab seeking the Great White Mitt.
In Bain drip drip I noted a NY Times article about Romney’s post-Bain deal participation.
Now Reuters has a damaging story about how one of the companies bought by Bain left the feds to deal with underfunded pensions, Special report: Romney’s steel skeleton in the Bain closet:
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….
Apparently they liked what they saw. Soon after, in October 1993, Bain Capital, co-founded by Mitt Romney, became majority shareholder in a steel mill that had been operating since 1888.
It was a gamble. The old mill, renamed GS Technologies, needed expensive updating, and demand for its products was susceptible to cycles in the mining industry and commodities markets.
Less than a decade later, the mill was padlocked and some 750 people lost their jobs. Workers were denied the severance pay and health insurance they’d been promised, and their pension benefits were cut by as much as $400 a month.
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.
Not illegal, part of that “creative destruction” thing. I get it. And I’m sure there is plenty of blame to go around. My concern is we’re only hearing about it in drips. You can be sure Team Obama is holding the good stuff back.
[....huge snip.....]
The OWS prelims will be a powder keg to blow up Romney’s candidacy if he becomes the nominee. The Bain activities and Romney’s association with it will be the poster boy for corporate greed. They will hang everything Bain represents around the Republican neck and it will sink everything we have worked for since Zer0 took office. We will be like the little woman who said, “We had to load up the U-Haul because we done lost our home.”
Newt has been blasting Romney on all this. Better it happen now than with Obama. Obama+OWS are salivating at Mitt running against Bammy
Bain is an albatross for Mittens