in a column in Wednesday's Washington Post titled Romney’s Bain games
His first paragraph is short and to the point:
My daughter has not yet reached her ninth birthday, but I already have her pegged for a job at Bain Capital.
That is because she is very good at
“Tiny Tower,” a business-simulation game that millions of people are using their iPhones and tablets to play capitalist, attempting to build ever larger towers with ever more businesses that generate ever more coins and “tower bux.”
She successfully owns a dozen businesses in this game. Milbank puts this in context in two paragraphs:
But in this game it doesn’t matter what type of business she operates — only that she operates it with maximum efficiency, firing and evicting her “bitizens” at will and benefiting from the help of “VIPs” to bring her more business and accelerate construction.
The game is devoid of business ethics; the goal is to maximize value by boosting output. Tiny Tower functions, in other words, strikingly like Bain Capital did under Mitt Romney.
Milbank is focusing in particular on Bain's gaining a 25-fold profit on its investment in an Italian yellow pages company, profits moved through Luxemburg to avoid paying taxes, and a company that later collapsed.
It is incredibly pointed column, and by a major voice within The Village, the conventional wisdom of Washington DC political commentary.
This is not typical Milbank snark. It is worth reading.
He bluntly questions whether Romney has operated with any sense of ethics. That is pretty pointed.
I will push fair use and quote one more paragraph, offered after acknowledging that how Romney has been able to have such a low tax rate on his income without breaking any loaws:
The question is whether such things are fair, or whether Romney has exploited a system that allows rich people like him to get richer at the expense of less wealthy taxpayers — Italian, in the most recent case, or American, in other cases. Of more concern is that, as president, Romney would further expand the advantages of fellow rich people.
Read the column, especially the conclusion.
Pass it on.