General Discussion

highplainsdem

(49,004 posts) Sat Jan 28, 2012, 07:22 PM Jan 2012

Aww, poor little Mittens had to rough it sitting on old mahogany chairs at Staples board meetings

I'm sure everyone felt so sorry for him after hearing about how difficult those days were for him...

http://prospect.org/article/mom-and-pop-bain-capital

Mom-and-Pop Bain Capital

ORLANDO, FLORIDA—Mitt Romney just can't drop his phony everyman act, and he added a new spin on it Friday night: the struggling young businessman.

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Romney included a new narrative of hardship at a rally hosted inside a pant factory plant in Orlando on Friday night. He began by railing against the government before discussing the early parts of his career as a vulture venture capitalist:

"Let me tell you the difference between what happens in the real economy—the private sector—and when government is practicing crony capitalism, playing by their own set of rules. You see, when we first helped Staples (the office superstore) get started, we raised about $5 or $10 million, to get that first store going. The government put in $500 million into Solyndra. And our offices, by the way, were in the back of a shopping center, an abandoned shopping center. We had all old furniture. I remember these chairs we had for the board meetings; they were these mahogany hide chairs. We sunk so deeply you had to have an athletic body to get out of them."

That must have only seemed like roughing it compared to the throne Romney sat on at Bain Capital. When consulting firm Bain & Company tasked Romney with spinning off a new private equity venture in 1983, he raised $37 million in funds to launch the new group the next year, hardly the type of budget to describe a group meeting in back alleys and sitting on leftover furniture purchased from Goodwill.

-snip-