Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Bain Capital: the money came from Latin America

Mitt Romney is very rich, and most of that money comes from one source: Bain Capital, a company he founded in 1984 with T. Coleman Andrews III and Eric Kriss. Before that, Romney was just a consultant with Bain & Co., well paid but just a hired management consultant.  Management consultants are not so much experienced business experts, but young MBAs sent out to promote a series of  theories the management consultancy is selling. Bain Capital was started with $37 million in capital, most of it from countries like El Salvador, Panama, Colombia, and Venezuela. (Gee who had excess cash to invest in Colombia in 1984? Think about it!).  It was also the time of the "Latin American Debt Crisis" when elites throughout Latin America were encouraged to "recycle"  American loans into American businesses, and force the middle class and working class of these countries to go into poverty working to pay off the stolen loans.   The biggest investor, or the only one clean enough for Romneys to talk about today, is the Poma family of El Salvador, which at the time owned that country's largest auto dealerships, some hotels, and a real-estate and construction firm.  Let's be clear on this: El Salvador was a small, poor country. Being one of the elite from El Salvador in those days was not like being a Dallas billionaire: it was like being a big shot in Dothan, Alabama.  Yet somehow from this narrow base, the Pomas managed to plunk down $13 million into Romney's company.

The Pomas it turns out, however, aren't so clean.  Not only did they financially support ARENA, the party behind the death squads that murdered tens of thousands in El Salvador in that era, which one might understand as leftist guerillas had kidnapped a Poma; but they were also involved with Cuban exiles, employing men implicated in terrorist attacks in Cuba:

 http://www.cubanet.org/CNews/y98/oct98/27e6.htm

ARENA and the Poma family:

 http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/01/28/444617/-Mitt-Romneys-ties-to-El-Salvadors-death-squad-backers


In short, the Pomas are so political, that one wonders if it was the Reagan administration and the intelligence community that wanted Bain Capital created and Romney was just along for the ride!  That he became very rich from Bain Capital is not proof to the contrary. Samuel Cummings was a CIA analyst who founded a private company to deal in small arms that the military wanted to dispose of. He became a billionaire.

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