Mitt Romney was twitted for saying “Corporations are people, my friend.” But it gets better. According to this morning’s New York Times:
A few years after Mitt Romney graduated from Harvard Business School, he returned to share a simple, timeworn lesson … Invited to give a presentation on balancing work and family, he began by telling students that they were like multinational corporations…
Note -- not even the “small businesses” or “mom ‘n’ pop stores” that politicians like to pander to, but supranational profit-driven mega-entities, whom you cannot really accuse of “off-shoring”, since spiritually they are already far off-shore: conscienceless, owing loyalty neither to person nor nation, treating labor simply as a cost, like trash-collection.
And woe betide any sentimental fool who allows his family to simply romp about in Dickensian anarchy, or who values his children “off the balance sheets”, in and of themselves! For then, something terrible may happen:
“Your children don’t pay any evidence of achievement for 20 years,” Mr. Romney said. But if students failed to invest sufficient time and energy in their spouses and children, their families could become “dogs” -- consultant-speak for drags on the rest of the company.
It is then that the CEO comes up against a decision he dreads to take, but which he faces up to manfully. He calls little Timmy into his den, and softly closes the door.
Well, young fellow, I see where you have failed yet again to qualify for the Little League. And your grades -- we’ll, we won’t go into that. And that baseball through the window … Candidly, Timmy, you’ve been taking up more than your fair pie-slice of my quality-time billable hours.
Son, I’ll be square with you: I have been very fond of you…. on occasion … but it is time for this family to downsize.
[Note: That last paragraph is not a quote, but satire. I think… The others are all too real. You can look it up.]
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We picture the scene as Mitt Romney and his merry band of buyout artists seized control of Dade International. Anxiously, uncertain of their future, the workers all crowd into the company cafeteria, where the New Boss, trim and impeccable, holds the microphone. With calm and steely gaze, he surveys his new though purely temporary underlings, and thinks how much less crowded this cafeteria will be before long.
And like Gordon Gecko’s address in similar circumstances, the Big Guy manages to win over the suspicious crowd. “I think of you all as family,” he says…
When Mitt Romney says he regards you as family -- be very afraid.
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Further details on how his scams work here:
The bottom line:
Under Romney’s leadership at Bain, which spanned from 1984 to 1990 and from 1992 to 1999, at least five companies eventually filed for bankruptcy after being acquired by the private equity firm. In some of those cases, investors still made a profit as workers lost their jobs. Even more troubling to some, Bain arguably drove some companies to the ground by taking on more debt to give investors dividends earlier.
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[Update] We never anticipated having to spring to the defense of Romney’s honor, but in all conscience we now must do so.
An absolutely scurrilous rumor is circulating on the Web, to the effect that, in his younger days, Mitt Romney sold one of his extra unneeded spare children into slavery to raise capital for a credit-default-swap buyback scheme. Nothing could be further from the truth !
The child -- it wasn’t even the first-born -- was simply offered as collateral for a rather large loan essential for a brilliantly worked-out plan to swap prepackaged subprime supermarket-chain subordinated debt for securities calibrated to the precise gyrations of a contingency fund which -- well, no matter the details. The point is, Mitt won the bet, and got to keep the kid. All the little Romneyoids are present and accounted for, with at most one or two minor exceptions.
[Update 14 Jan 2012]
Response from a Nobel-prize-winning economist:
No, It's Not a Corporation, Doofus
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