TIL

More or less.

Bain (with Romney at the helm) became masters of the leveraged corporate buyout. That means they use loans to purchase a company. Those creditors would be paid back through bain’s revenue which is made up of management fees from the companies it bought. Then Bain would send in managers to make the company look awesome by boosting revenue and reducing expenses. (You can recognize this when private equity buys something and suddenly one guy is doing the work of four - while the assets are liquidated around him.) Bain uses this performance to say to creditors - look how awesome they’re doing - give us a loan! So they take out an enormous loan and pay all of that money to themselves and let the former shell of the company collapse around them.

The horribly shitty thing about it is everyone talks about capitalism like it is zero-sum. That’s really not true - economies work together and create new wealth out of our labors. Well, Bain is zero sum. Their money comes from taking from others. That kind of business is fucking evil. Bain is fucking evil. Mitt Romney is fucking evil. People who associate with him (the Mormon Church that enabled him, the Republicans that idolized him) are a mixture of fucking evil and stupid.