Today in Mitt Romney Is Terrible

David Corn for Mother Jones—New Romney Video from 1985 Shows Mitt Romney Saying Bain Capital Would "Harvest" Companies for Profits:

Mother Jones has obtained a video from 1985 in which Romney, describing Bain's formation, showed how he viewed the firm's mission. He explained that its goal was to identify potential and hidden value in companies, buy significant stakes in these businesses, and then "harvest them at a significant profit" within five to eight years.

Transcript: Bain Capital is an investment partnership which was formed to invest in startup companies and ongoing companies, then to take an active hand in managing them and hopefully, five to eight years later, to harvest them at a significant profit.

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The fund was formed on September 30th of last year. It's been about 10 months then. It was formed with thirty-seven million dollars in invested cash. An additional fifty million or so of what I'll call a call pool, which is money that we can call upon if the deals are large enough that they require more than a two or three million dollar initial investment. Why in the world did Bain and Company get involved in this kind of a business? We're not particularly noted for having years and years of experience in financing. Three reasons.

We recognized that we had the potential to develop a significant and proprietary flow of business opportunities. Secondly, we had concepts and experience which would allow us to identify potential value and hidden value in a particular investment candidate. And third, we had the consulting resources and management skills and management resources to become actively involved in the companies we invested in to help them realize their potential value.

This would probably be as good a time as any to recommend "Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital," of which you should definitely read every last stinking, infuriating word, if you haven't yet read it.

Asked for comment on this newly unearthed video, current Republican candidate for the US presidency and former corporate raider Mitt Romney was quoted as saying: