General Discussion

The Romney angle is useful in providing a familiar name, but the stress shouldn't be solely on him: the problem wasn't just that he was bad. The problem was that he was typical.

What Bain did had become standard operating procedure for corporate raiders, leveraged buy-outs, and what has become called the private equity market. There were dozens - hundreds - of people just like Romney pulling the same tricks and making the same kinds of deals.

Those hundreds of dealers absorbed and gutted thousands of companies, and destroyed hundreds of thousands of good-paying jobs. Not because the companies were "troubled" as often claimed, but just because they weren't sending as much money skyward as Wall Street's analysts thought they were able to.