Mitt Romney, The Great Destroyer of American Jobs

From The Daily Beast -- January 6, 2012:

New Anti-Romney Video Attacks Bain Capital Work

By Peter J. Boyer

An ex-Romney adviser is unleashing a half-hour attack video blasting Mitt’s work at Bain Capital. A pro-Gingrich super PAC just scooped it up.

The effort to derail Mitt Romney’s presidential quest heightened dramatically on Friday when a super PAC associated with Newt Gingrich outbid all comers for the rights to a scathing 30-minute attack video depicting Romney as a greedy, job-killing corporate raider “more ruthless than Wall Street.”

In a season filled with negative ads and rhetorical crossfire, the striking feature of the film, aside from its mini-documentary length, is its authorship. The film was made by Jason Killian Meath, a former associate of Romney’s top strategists, Stuart Stevens and Russ Schriefer. Meath had worked for the Romney campaign in 2008, creating much of the ad content for that failed effort. He left Stevens and Schriefer’s firm, SSG, in 2010. Meath declined to comment on his project, referring inquiries to the pro-Gingrich PAC Winning Our Future.


“We’re going to release a short, 27-minute film that is well-documented, and tells the real story of Mitt Romney at Bain Capital—and it’s not a pretty story,” says Rick Tyler, an adviser to the Gingrich-supporting PAC.

The video, called When Mitt Romney Came to Town, is a slick production focusing on Romney’s tenure as CEO of Bain Capital, a private investment firm.


The movie begins with a cinematic tableau of Americana, as the narrator intones, “Capitalism made America great. Free markets. Innovation. Hard work. The building blocks of the American dream. But in the wrong hands, some of those dreams can turn into nightmares.”

A shot of an American flag, waving in the breeze is replaced by gathering storm clouds, as the narrator continues: “Wall Street’s corporate raiders made billions of dollars. Their greed was matched only by their willingness to do anything to make millions in profits … nothing spared. Nothing mattered but profits. This film is about one such raider and his firm.”

At that point, a black-and-white photograph of Romney appears on the screen, as the narrator alleges that “Romney took foreign seed money from Latin America” to exploit “dozens of American businesses” and the “thousands of employees that worked there.”

“A story of greed,” the narrator intones. “Playing the system for a quick buck. A group of corporate raiders, led by Mitt Romney. More ruthless than Wall Street. For tens of thousands of Americans, the suffering began when Mitt Romney came to town.”

According to four sources familiar with the project, the film was commissioned by Barry Bennett, a conservative activist who was once chief of staff for Ohio Republican Congresswoman Jean Schmidt. Bennett is now at the Alliance for America’s Future, a Virginia-based group whose principals include Mary Cheney, daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney.

When Mitt Romney Came to Town focuses on four case studies of Bain’s acquisitions—a Florida-based company called UniMac, which produced commercial laundry equipment; KayBee Toys; the electronics company DDI; and AmPad, an Indiana-based office-supply producer. The key result of these transactions, the film asserts, was “spectacular returns” for Bain through “stripping American businesses of assets, selling everything to the highest bidder, and often killing jobs for big financial rewards.”