With all the talk lately about Bain Capital and how Romney is a "capitalist", it occurred to me that America has a very distorted view of capitalism. Romney is not a capitalist and what Bain Capital does is not capitalism. The business model used by Bain is not Venture Capital but Vulture Capital. They aren't investors, they are pirates.
Capitalism is when a person or group invests in a business with the intention to grow it into a profitable operation so that the profits can be returned to the investors upon the success of that business. Very simplified, investors purchase shares of the business and share in the profits after all the expenses are paid. The investors then use their capital gains to invest in other businesses and the cycle continues. That's capitalism.
From those investments, businesses grow, people are employed, families are fed, capital is earned and people may become wealthy. That's the model that gave us the strongest economy in the world and what became known as the American middle class. It's the model that was born from the regulations arising from the era of the Robber Barons wherein America learned that monopoly was counter-productive for a good economy. Those controls put in place assured that the opportunity for wealth was available for all Americans. For most of the twentieth century, that was the Capitalism we enjoyed. (It's what the Republicans now refer to as "socialism").
But sometime in the Reagan era and into the twenty-first century, capitalism (along with free enterprise) was distorted and twisted into an ugly, greedy monster that devoured businesses (generally small, successful or barely surviving), stripped the meat from them, and spit out the bones, leaving a trail of waste behind.
Romney's Capitalist business model is to use investors' money to purchase an existing business, sell everything of value, mortgage or sell the real estate, lay off the employees, sell the brand name and patents, and pocket all the profits. Very often what was left was nothing but waste and the company was bankrupt.
There was no investment, no growth, no value added. They don't create a new business, they looted an existing one much like Blackbeard the Pirate didn't explore new territories, He hijacked a merchant ship, killed or captured the crew and took the cargo, sold it, and pocketed the proceeds. His crew made out like... well... bandits and so did Blackbeard. The Bain Capital model is more akin to Blackbeard's than Capitalism.
Mitt Romney refers to himself as a "Capitalist" and the media goes along with it. I don;t blame them, this has been an accepted definition of capitalism for the last nearly forty years. They probably don't know better. But he's not a Capitalist. He's a Corporate Looter. If he was black and wore a hoodie, it would be considered looting and he'd go to jail for it. The difference is, what he does is legal and even subsidized with the discounted fifteen percent tax on "capital gains". The fact is he can sell off the assets of a company and leave it in bankruptcy while escaping with a "profit". There are no regulations in place to prevent that kind of corporate looting. Romney's Bain Capital has no legal responsibility to the jilted shareholders or the short-changed creditors and suppliers that were left holding the bag. It was all legalized looting.
So, I get angry when Romney refers to himself as a capitalist and what he does as capitalism. It's none of the above. He's an anti-capitalist. He's a Corporate Raider, a pirate, a Blackbeard. He's only one of many but he's the only one that running for President so I single him out. Collectively, none of them are capitalists and until we restore the US to true capitalism along with the regulations that keep it in place, we'll be the victims of Corporate Pirates like Mitt "Blackbeard" Romney.