Tonight on Rachel Maddow David Corn let the world know that Mitt "fuck the 47 percent" Romney performed his now notorious stand-up act at the Boca Raton mansion of Marc Leder last May. No, I never heard of him either. But it's worth knowing that Leder is exactly the kind of person who is underwriting most of Romney's campaign. Here's how the NY Times described Leder in a Jan. 2012 story:
Like many deal makers, though, Mr. Leder, 50, is virtually unknown outside financial circles. But from his headquarters in Boca Raton, Fla., he presides over a multibillion-dollar private empire. He is a practitioner of a Wall Street art that helped define an age of hyperwealth, and which has now been dragged into the white-hot spotlight of presidential politics: private equity. NY Times
The Times article notes that Marc Leder has Romney to thank for his job, since it was a visit to Bain Capital in 1995, when Leder was a senior VP at Lehman, that led him to pursue a career in private equity. He created Sun Capital and obviously learned well from Romney, since, like his hero, Leder has a history of buying, gouging, and destroying companies—and then benefiting from their failures.
In recent years, a large number of the companies that Sun Capital has acquired have run into serious trouble, eliminated jobs or both. Since 2008, some 25 of its companies — roughly one of every five it owns — have filed for bankruptcy.
One of those companies was Friendly's, the restaurant chain, which Sun Capital acquired in 2007. As the economy, and the restaurant's profitability, went south at the same time, Leder engineered a bankruptcy that cut jobs and eliminated the pensions of workers who had been with Friendly's for decades.
The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, the federal agency that helps safeguard corporate pensions ... accused Sun Capital in bankruptcy court filings of using the bankruptcy to shift Friendly’s pension burden onto the agency.
Longtime employees got zilch, as Sun Capital grew into an $8 billion firm. Leder probably didn't even invite the laid-off workers to his big bash:
It was as if the Playboy Mansion met the East End at a wild party at private-equity titan Marc Leder's Bridgehampton estate, where guests cavorted nude in the pool and performed sex acts, scantily dressed Russians danced on platforms and men twirled lit torches to a booming techno beat.
The divorced Sun Capital Partners honcho rented a sprawling beachfront mansion on Surf Side Road for $500,000 for the month of July. Leder's weekly Friday and Saturday night parties have become the talk of the Hamptons—and he ended them in style last weekend with his wildest bash yet. NY Post
Hey Values Voters! Just sayin'.
I can see why Leder and his pals need Romney in the White House. He's obviously paying too much in taxes, which is cutting into his job creation, if said job involves sex acts. I see a Carl Hiaasen novel in the near future.