The real issue: Romney’s profits from job-killing

Romney’s various claims and excuses about many monetary issues are all over the papers and Internet. When did he leave Bain Capital and when did he tell the truth about it? Was it in early 1999, as he has asserted multiple times? Was it in late 2002, when Bain Capital still listed him as sole stockholder, CEO and director? Is the distinction claimed by the Romney campaign between outsourcing and offshoring a distinction without a major difference? Was he really paid $100,000 a salary in 2000, 2001, and 2002 for doing absolutely nothing?

Also in the news are the reports of Romney’s offshoring of his money, to Swiss banks, to the Cayman Island, to a supposedly “blind” trust.

So Romney and his firm have been offshoring either jobs or money or both.

But whether or not Romney was an active participant in the Bain decisions about offshoring or not, the underlying question, which no one seems to have asked yet, is whether or not he profited and continues to profit from the outsourcing, offshoring, and bankruptcy-causing activities of Bain Capital.

Whether or not Romney went into the office of Bain Capital during those activities and since, whether or not he was actually managing the firm, it seems he was happy to pocket the results of Bain’s vulture capitalism. We’ve never heard complaints from Romney, even while he is busy denying that he had anything to do with those politically problematic decisions, about the financial results of those decisions, about the money he had packed away overseas, in show horses, in political campaigns, and elsewhere.

Romney and his campaign apparently think that if he wasn’t making day-to-day decisions, then he has no responsibility for anything that happened. But have you heard him offering to give back any money he made from Bain while they were outsourcing, offshoring, and driving companies into bankruptcy? Has he volunteered to refund the money looted from workers’ pension funds by Bain?

Romney is happy to profit from vulture capitalism, but he certainly doesn’t want any voter to think he himself was a vulture. And if he wasn’t the one flapping the wings, then he thinks he can and should evade responsibility for killing companies, jobs, and pension funds and then feasting on the carrion.

Photo: AP