Romney’s Goal for Companies Bain Acquired: “Harvest Them at Significant Profit”

by Robert Reich

Here’s a video of Romney in his early years at Bain, explaining his purpose in  acquiring companies was to “harvest them at significant profit.”

No one should be surprised. After all, Bain Capital wasn’t in the business of creating jobs. It was in the business of creating profits.

The two goals aren’t at all the same — as  Americans whose jobs have been eliminated or whose wages and benefits have been cut know all too well.

For years, higher corporate profits have come at the expense of fewer jobs and lower wages. Business leaders and financiers have been “harvesting” like mad, leaving most Americans behind in the dirt.

Romney’s main selling point to voters is his so-called “business experience.” Yet America can’t afford this sort of “business experience” in the White House.

To the contrary, we need someone who doesn’t see the economy as profits to be harvested, but as people who need more and better jobs.

In 2012 that person is Barack Obama, not Mitt Romney.

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Robert Reich is Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. He has written eleven books, including The Work of Nations, which has been translated into 22 languages; the best-sellers The Future of Success and Locked in the Cabinet, and his most recent book, Supercapitalism. His articles have appeared in the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. Mr. Reich is co-founding editor of The American Prospect magazine. His weekly commentaries on public radio’s "Marketplace" are heard by nearly five million people.
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