Drop Those Mittens, Jumbo!
If you’re someone who votes Republican, before the primary season begins, let me tell you about my experience with Mitt Romney.
In 1989 I went to work for a little company called MediQual. It had been founded by an academic with a noble purpose: to gather objective data about hospital patients’ treatment and outcomes, and then apply statistical regression analysis to it. This enabled researchers and clinicians to identify-for any disease-which specific treatments were mathematically correlated with reduced costs and the best patient outcomes. In a word, armed with a huge nationwide database, MediQual could tell doctors-conclusively-what worked and what didn’t.
The problem was that our founder was an academic; he had no idea how to run a business or market this great idea. The company’s fortunes see-sawed through expansions and layoffs, but we never seemed able to grow much beyond a hundred people.
So in 1993 the founder stepped aside in favor of a new CEO with more of a business background. The new guy, Eric Kriss, had been a founder of the Boston investment firm Bain Capital, and had just finished a three-year stint as Assistant CFO for Massachusetts’ Republican governor Bill Weld. I guess it sounded promising at the time.
Like any money-hungry venture capitalist, Kriss wasted no time raping MediQual. Within three years he had pushed the founder off the board of directors, replaced all senior and most middle managers with his close friends, created glossy new packaging and marketing fluff for our main product, and sold the company for $35 million to a huge drug conglomerate. His resume lists that as a successful “turnaround”.
During that time, one of Kriss’ henchmen gently suggested I find a new job: by advertising an opening for my current position. It appeared in the Boston Globe’s jobs section on the middle Sunday of a two-week road trip I’d taken. Needless to say, that was when I moved on to something (much) better.
Back at the company formerly known as MediQual, the pharmaceutical company used our data and analysis tools to find new ways to market their drugs, and abandoned the mission of reducing the cost and advancing the overall state of healthcare. So much for making the world a better place.
Then, having lined his pockets and those of his chosen friends, Eric Kriss immediately flipped everyone the bird and went back to work in state government. He was chosen for the top finance position in Massachusetts by a new governor: an old friend of his by the name of Mitt Romney.
Mitt Romney and Eric Kriss are two rotten apples from the same tree. They comprised two of the three partners who had founded Bain Capital in 1984. Currently managing companies worth no less than $65 billion, the company’s Wikipedia article states, “Bain Capital turns a profit on floundering corporations by buying them at low cost, stripping away any projects that aren’t profiting or that lack potential, and laying off any excess workers.”
They realize that profit by quickly flipping those companies and getting the hell out, lining their pockets and leaving chaos and devastation in their wake.
Mitt Romney has a net worth of a quarter billion dollars and has never had any connection to the working (and non-working) class that represents the overwhelming majority of America… Other than laying them off in droves, of course.
But beyond that, what’s truly appalling is that he amassed that immense fortune not through his own merits, but by taking over vulnerable companies, gutting them, slapping a fresh coat of paint on them, and flipping them before anyone figures it out, in the largest bait-and-switch game in history.
Maybe that’s your idea of the American dream, but it’s obvious to me that Romney’s trademark slash-and-burn management style makes him wholly unsuited for the office of the President of the United States. The man in charge of the public trust needs to be worthy of that trust, and Mitt Romney is not.