THE ROVING
EYE Blood on the (Bain)
tracks By Pepe Escobar
This is the moment everyone was waiting
for in the 2012 US presidential campaign; the
hardcore drawing of first blood.
Whatever
one's judgment on Nobel Peace Prize winner and
warmonger US President Barack Obama, technically
this
is an absolute masterpiece of political
advertising. It deserves an Oscar for sound
editing alone.
It may be over the top - as
it strives for maximum, compressed, Hellfire
missile political impact; but the ad's charges are
fundamentally correct. Republican presidential
contender and corporate cyborg Mitt Romney was
involved in practices that outsourced jobs and
contributed to enlarge the ranks of US
unemployment. There
couldn't be a more sensitive theme in a US
electoral year.
Romney's frantic response
stressed he was never responsible for any of it
because he had already left his Bain vulture
capital firm at the time (he was one of the
co-founders).
Not really. Independent US
websites such as Mother Jones and Talking Points
Memo pursued the story - and even mainstream media
picked it up with relish. These are the money
quotes from a Boston Globe article:
Government documents filed by Mitt
Romney and Bain Capital say Romney remained
chief executive and chairman of the firm three
years beyond the date he said he ceded control,
even creating five new investment partnerships
during that time.
Romney has said he
left Bain in 1999 to lead the Winter Olympics in
Salt Lake City, ending his role in the company.
But public Securities and Exchange Commission
(SEC) documents filed later by Bain Capital
state he remained the firm's "sole stockholder,
chairman of the board, chief executive officer,
and president."
Also, a Massachusetts
financial disclosure form Romney filed in 2003
states that he still owned 100 percent of Bain
Capital in 2002. And Romney's state financial
disclosure forms indicate he earned at least
$100,000 as a Bain "executive" in 2001 and 2002,
separate from investment earnings.
The
timing of Romney's departure from Bain is a key
point of contention because he has said his
resignation in February 1999 meant he was not
responsible for Bain Capital companies that went
bankrupt or laid off workers after that date.
[1]
Translation, if any was needed;
the Republican candidate to become the next
president of the United States lied.
I'm not a crook -
retroactively Undeterred - or in classic
headless chicken fashion - the Romney campaign
came up with a response that has already become a
new American pop hit; Romney had "retired
retroactively" to 1999, according to spokesman Ed
Gillespie.
There's no evidence though that
Romney "retroactively" returned the
US$100,000-a-year salary he received while
"retired".
From a legal point of view,
CEOs are where the buck effectively stops. It
doesn't matter if they are full-time managers,
part-time managers or even retroactively retired
managers.
Here's what one of Romney's own
partners at Bain Capital - from 1993 to 2007 - had
to say about this:
"Mitt's names were on the documents
as the chief executive and sole owner of the
company." The partner was asked - again - if
Romney was the CEO of Bain Capital from 1999 to
2002. His answer; "Legally, on documents, I
suppose, yes."
Once again in the words
of his own partner, Romney remained as CEO while
negotiating the terms of a juicy exit; "We had to
negotiate with Mitt because he was an owner of the
firm."
So here we have a certified member
of the 1% who made a huge fortune with leveraged
buyouts that ended up destroying the value of
different companies, cost a vast number of jobs
and ultimately eroded the US economic base - while
he squeezed a juicy commission out of it all; he's
now running a presidential campaign against, in
his own words, the "Obama economy", the source of
all evils, while promoting himself as a savvy
business man who can create jobs.
Yet how,
with a straight face, can Mitt Romney swear that
he's responsible for absolutely nothing that
happened at his vulture capital gig after 1999,
while he insists that absolutely everything that
happened after January 2009, when Obama took
charge of the Bush-era total economic and
financial disaster, is the president's fault?
And how, with a straight face, can Romney
swear again and again he was not accountable for
anything that happened at his firm even when he
remained as its CEO; what kind of accountable
president would that be?
And then, when
he's caught lying, the best he can come up with is
an extended Nixonian "I'm not a crook" moment in
the form of a blitzkrieg of every US network and
cable station in sight.
For large swathes
of US voters though, Mitt as tax cheat is a label
now inscribed in stone. Waves of converging
punditry are adamant that the only way to remedy
the disaster would be for him to release his tax
returns for the past 12 years. There's no evidence
he will do it - because that could probably,
overwhelmingly, confirm the Obama campaign ad.
Yet this political Hellfire missile goes
way beyond Mitt and Bain. Mitt Romney the
unaccountable corporate cyborg couldn't be a more
graphic representation of the Masters of the
Universe - the key financial engineers of the
destruction of the US economy and the American
middle class, while the wealthy are lavishly
sheltered from every storm. Welcome to the land of
the un-free, home of the bravely unaccountable.
Notes: 1. For Boston
Globe article, see here
2. See here.
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