While CEO of Bain Capital, Mitt Romney said the firm "harvested" the companies in which it invested to produce a "significant profit," according to a new video obtained by Mother Jones.
The video of Romney, who made the remarks in 1985, was part of a CD-ROM produced in 1998 to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Bain & Company. In the video, Romney says, "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."
Bain Capital is in business to make a profit for its investors, so there's nothing eye-popping about promoting that fact. Financial buyers like Bain supply young companies with capital and connections, but will restructure operations and fire employees if necessary. Romney has touted his previous employer as a serious job-creator during his campaign for the presidency, saying the firm helped create "over 100,000 jobs." The statistic, which relies on some of the firms in which Bain invested, is difficult to actually prove -- it seems to include jobs created years after Bain made initial investments in companies.
Previous videos obtained by Mother Jones and The Huffington Post show Romney at a May fundraiser saying that 47 percent of Americans see themselves as "victims" who are "dependent on government." The leaked recordings have hurt the Romney campaign in swing state polls.
HuffPost's Ryan Grim and Hunter Stuart compared Bain Capital's strategy of acquiring beleaguered companies to the business model of Tony Soprano. (See video below.)
Read the full article at Mother Jones.
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