Donald Trump said this of Mitt Romney: "He's going to turn this country around. He's going to create jobs like you haven't seen for many, many years." Let’s examine the irony and the falseness of this statement.
As a founder and head of Bain Capital, Romney was focused on earning profits for his company and investors. In pursuit of these profits, some of the companies in which Bain invested made money by being left intact. But 22% of the companies acquired by Bain Capital filed for bankruptcy and were dissolved, or dismantled by Bain and sold off in pieces to foreign buyers, with an additional 8% closing their doors and losing all of Bain’s invested funds in the process.
So, while 70% of the companies did fine, the lives, savings, and careers of tens of thousands of people employed by those failed or dismantled companies were irreversibly destroyed. thinkprogress.org reported on one such company: “…one company, Worldwide Grinding Systems…went belly up after Bain invested in it. The company not only lost 750 jobs, but the federal government had to come in to bail out its pension fund, while Bain walked away with millions in profits.”
Romney in 2011 claimed he had created over 100,000 jobs through Bain Capital. As the company history has become more publicized, he has whittled this job creation claim down to a few thousand. So much for turning the country around and creating jobs like we’ve never seen. But Trump is right: Romney did create jobs like we’ve never seen because those jobs were created in places like China and India.
Besides, what kind of job creation can you expect from Romney who famously said "I like being able to fire people who provide services to me. You know, if someone doesn't give me a good service that I need, I want to say, 'I'm going to go get someone else to provide that service to me." He was talking about healthcare providers but it still displays his mindset. People are at his disposal which certainly makes them disposable. He likes to fire people, period.
As for Donald Trump being his surrogate, let’s examine the wisdom of this choice in greater detail. His “Apprentice” TV show in its two versions follows the same formula: 18 contestant “employees” vie for a “job” with Trump. His own job is to find reasons to fire 17 of them before he “hires” the remaining candidate. Every week he speaks his signature line “You’re fired”. So, we have a wealthy surrogate who specializes and exhults in weekly televised firing of “employees” trying to sell us a presidential candidate who callously robbed hundreds of thousands of people of their jobs all in the name of profits for Bain Capital and its investors.
If the Obama campaign were as smart as their candidate is reputed to be, it would put out video ads juxtaposing Trump with his fantasyland claim about Romney creating new jobs with a graphic of all the jobs Bain Capital destroyed and a recurring video of Trump repeating “You’re fired.” Hey, Obama campaign: if you need someone to put this campaign together for you, I could use a job.