I never thought I would post something like this...

I never thought I would post something like this, but these are strange days indeed. As you know, I don't like Obama. Yet I'm asking you to watch an Obama campaign ad about Bain Capital.

Then again: Why shouldn't I embed this video? An earlier post featured a similar (but better) anti-Bain video created by the Newt Gingrich campaign, even though the idea of voting for Newt makes my stomach churn.

If your stomach does similar gymnastics when you hear Obama's name, I can sympathize. My purpose here is not to argue in favor of our failed president; in fact, I'm not really here to talk about Mitt Romney. This video raises an issue that goes beyond one election.

The question before us is simple: Just who or what is destroying America?

Everywhere you go on the internet, you run into right-wing ideologues who screech about the dangers of socialism or "collectivism." These propagandists have the citizenry enraged about a mythical menace, even though our real problems have a different origin. The true conspirators are not Marxists or socialists or fascists or Jews or Muslims or any of the other red herring distractions that the propagandists wave before our eyes. I wouldn't even say that the conspirators are capitalists, at least not industrial capitalists.

We suffer from the predations of a cabal of vampire grifters who want to make millions without making things.

Bain exemplifies the vampire grifter mentality. What drove Romney and his comrades is the same psychopathic greed that turned Wall Street into a mad, doomed casino in which the great banks treated clients as marks. Just as the bankers destroyed investors by selling short, Mitt's company used borrowed money to buy healthy American companies and suck them dry.

These people call themselves "capitalists," but that's not the right word. Capitalism is not capitalism when it profits from a hari-kiri business plan. 

The best recounting of how Bain operates comes to us by way of a blogger called Green Eagle:

First of all, let's set one thing straight.  People keep calling Bain a "venture capital" firm.  This is false.  Venture capitalists find enterpreneurs and finance their compainies, hoping to make money when the enterpreneurs flourish.  That's not what Bain did.  What Bain did was to buy existing, often quite successful companies, strip them of everything but the wiring in the walls, and leave them to their fate, which was often bankruptcy.  The difference between a venture capitalist and Bain is the difference between a partner and a parasite.

The first is Armco Steel, a 100 year old Kansas City company that, when Romney bought them, was  setting production records.  Romney paid $8 million for this company, in addition to a borrowed $75 million, which became Armco's debt, not Bain Capital's.  He then immediately issued more bonds in the company's name and used the money to pay himself and his investors $36 million- four and a half times what they had just paid for the company.  In the process, within one year, he had saddled this formerly successful company with $378 million dollars in debt.

To cut costs, Bain stopped all company expenses, routine maintenance, equipment, safety- everything.

Within a few years, Armco Steel was out of business.  750 people lost their jobs, only to discover that Romney had removed $44 million from their pension fund; money which had to be made up by American taxpayers.   Workers lost their severance pay and promised health care benefits, and saw the bankruptcy court slash their pensions by $400 a month.  But all of the debt belonged to Armco, and Romney walked away with millions of dollars, having stolen many times his purchase price long before he let this firm collapse.

The Armco deal is just one example of Bain in action. Bain itself is just one coven of vampire grifters. There are others.

What's destroying this country is a conspiracy of affluent brutes. The conspirators pretend to be patriots, but if America were a woman, these guys would rather rape her than marry her. The anti-businessmen who control all of the GOP (and too much of the Democratic party) ultimately want to strip mine this country. They intend to end the American experiment and replace it with a new form of feudalism.

Just to prove that I'm not blind to Obama's Wall Street ties, here's an anti-Obama ad from a Romney front group. The ad is both accurate and misleading. Wall Street did support Obama heavily in 2008; that's no secret. And it's no secret that Obama has bent over backwards to please those investors. Nevertheless -- and this is the part that the right won't tell you -- many of those bankers later turned on Obama and funded the Tea Party.

The interesting question is: Why did they turn on Obama? What more could they have asked from him? Was there some way of selling out his base that Obama somehow managed to overlook?