This will be a short post. Mainly to get this riveting and well written piece by award-winning Ohio journalist, Pete Kotz, out in the conversation:
Mitt Romney, American Parasite.
It struck me as I sat munching my low budget meal at the Burgermaster that Romney's cheap one liners about "saving" America were an astonishing proposal to it's citizens. Especially since he has been proposing to us that he will "save America" when in fact, it's his behavior along with his company Bain Capital which has helped to destroy our country and it's workers.
I know that you are thinking you already knew this but as I read Kotz' piece I realized we mostly assume that Romney was dealing with shakey companies. Not true.
"We were doing very good," says Sanderson, president of Steelworkers Local 7898. "The plant was making money and we had good profit-sharing checks, and everything was going well."
What's worse is that Romney's working model is really the working model which has brought our pensions and real estate values to a standstill. His was a scheme simply to extract as much money as possible from blindsided workers and their companies.
His formula was simple: Bain would purchase a firm with little money down, then begin extracting huge management fees and paying Romney and his investors enormous dividends.
Of course, his Republican brethren could only see the vulture part, but this writer, I think, rightly sees Romney as something much worse: a parasite.
"When Bain Capital took over, it seemed like everything was being neglected in our plant," says Sanderson. "Nothing was being invested in our plant. We didn't have the necessary time to maintain our equipment. They had people here that didn't know what they were doing. It was like they were taking money from us and putting it somewhere else."
Romney likes to make us think about his pioneer roots in the West but actually as Kotz points out this wooden political candidate trying to load up his 21st century resume is really "was an early pioneer of gaming the system."
It will soon be up to voters to see through the fog of money and the postering of power. I hope that Romney doesn't win if for no other reason than a man should not be allowed to disregard the workers who make his job possible. A man should not be allowed to lead when his real skill is deception and we so desperately need transparency.
Kotz' article published in the Seattle Weekly this week is going to stay with me a long time. And helps me see more clearly through the smiling politician with his pretty blonde wife to The Joker who would off shore all of us ... if he needed to.