Harvesting defeat
by digby
Everybody’s talking about Romney saying that Bain “harvested” profits from companies it took over, which is a very evocative image. He said:
Bain Capital is an investment partnership which was formed to invest in startup companies and ongoing companies, then to take an active hand in managing them and hopefully, five to eight years later, to harvest them at a significant profit…
But David Corn makes what I think is the bigger point at the end of his article about it:
In this clip, Romney mentioned that it would routinely take up to eight years to turn around a firm—though he now slams the president for failing to revive the entire US economy in half that time.
I suppose they could try to make the argument hat “fixing” a company is more complicates than turning around the economy of the richest country in the world.
This isn’t to say that the administration did everything it could to get that job done. But I think we can all agree that it was a very big job. Maybe even bigger than getting Staples in shape for profit harvesting. In fact, it is so much bigger that I would guess Mitt’s “experience” in turning around Staples is completely irrelevant to the qualifications for president. In fact, at this point, I’m willing to say that anyone who’s run a Vulture Capital firm might automatically be disqualified.
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