By Gendanken
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| Image courtesy of southpark.wikia.com |
Over a decade ago, the geniuses of
South Park popularized a little known legend in sound theory known
as the “brown note.” It’s a pitch that when played at infrasonic ranges well
bellow 20hz will cause humans to lose control of their bowels and, quite
frankly, defecate and soil their unmentionables.
Science has proved this note doesn't exist and therefore
slumbers away in the shadowy realm of superstition and lore. However, I say unto
you, such a note does exist and the human ear is prey to its birth every 5
seconds, beating its nasty fist on the delicate film of the human eardrum every
time Mitt Romney says “Jobs.”
That a man like Romney--who has perfected the art of the
“leveraged buyout’ where equity firms like Bain Capital target and buy out a
struggling company and force it to pay for its own purchase—that he is now
speaking to the American people about the importance of “jobs” is a hypocrisy wicked enough to crush bowels.
A leveraged buyout, or LBO, is a shill where debt is treated
as currency and people like Romney can actually squeeze dividends from a giant
liability hole that doesn't exist even as paper, where the first fat trimmed
off the cut is the workers, their pensions, and their health insurance to
improve the value of that company before selling it, a practice that leaves, by necessity, a nasty trail of layoffs
and bankruptcy.
Why aren’t Americans livid?
The author now professes her ears burn at Romney’s baying about
struggling Americans living in so and so, how he ate donuts with such and such
at a diner in Canton where a poor widow poured out her dear little heart about
being unemployed and how she now has pinworms because she can’t afford health
insurance and how awful it made him feel that such a thing as a widow with
pinworms even exists in God’s country. Who wouldn't soil themselves knowing
that this man, who now cares so much about unemployed widows suffering worms, grew
up in Bloomfield Hills? It’s an affluent suburb in Michigan, among the top 5
wealthiest cities in the nation, where
he attended a middle school that had archways and giant manicured lawns
sprinkled with sculptures. Isn't middle
school supposed to be a rite of passage where adolescence is ground in the jaws
of social inequality and failure? For the bulk of humanity, middle school is a
jungle, not a golf course. It’s where little boys and girls learn the gimmick
of survival so they don’t grow up to stand in front of an Iowa state fair and
bleat ignorant stupidities about “Corporations
are people, my friend.” Because, and I quote :
“Of course they are,”
Romney said. “Everything corporations
earn ultimately goes to people. Where do you think it goes?”
Not to that widow in Canton, my friend, and it certainly
won’t rid her of worms. According to an article for the Rolling Stone written
by Josh Kosman, the World Economic Forum came out with a study showing that of
all the big buyouts that have taken place since the ‘80s, the biggest job cuts anywhere occur about the third year
after an LBO and not in companies
that have otherwise broke on their own and never been
leveraged. This is because a buyout really isn't buying anything, but simply acquiring some thing to weaponize into a debt-churning machine that spits out
returns to the investor spinning the wheel.
It’s like paying someone to steal your lunch money.
It’s quite insulting, really: the goal is not to create jobs
at all, but to expand profit.
The key to that profit is debt, and to generate the returns
that Bain Capital became famous for under Romney’s administration, the
fundamental rule is that you always create as much debt as possible while
investing as little capital as possible, reducing the personal risk to the
“investor” while increasing as much interest as possible on the cheap loan.
This means there really is no investment, per se, and therefore, no real
economic value is actually generated; all resources are swallowed up paying off
debt and if that company has no real assets to help cushion the ‘adjustment
period’ for the long term, you've just given that widow in Canton the starring
role in a Titanic where she gets to watch an ocean of blackness slowly swallow existence.
Before writing this, the tortured author sought to distance
herself from the mealy rhetoric that boring liberals cut teeth on when it comes
to Republicans. However, as much as she wanted to like the little boy who sat
on George Romney’s lap and read newspapers as a toddler, the same little boy
who walked up to shake Santa’s hand like a gentleman, there is no getting over the nausea of
watching a waxed corporate hound pretend he cares about suffering Americans
looking for work. And there is no pill that can tighten one’s anus every time
that prick says the word “jobs.”
The Bain of Romney’s existence is his private equity firm,
and I look forward to another four years of fresh underwear.
