Another video has come to haunt Mitt Romney.
Liberal magazine Mother Jones—which dropped the now-infamous 47 percent video—posted footage from 1985, showing the then-CEO of Bain Capital describing his business strategy. It includes buying undervalued companies and planning, within five to eight years, to “harvest them at a significant profit.”
The latest video may prove to be another headache for Romney. Democrats have long argued Romney’s actions at Bain demonstrated he did not care about American workers and that he frequently outsourced jobs at companies that were being restructured or sold off.
The latest video was recorded at an event celebrating the 25th anniversary of Bain and was given to Mother Jones by a former employee of the venture capital film.
Team Romney released a statement in response to the video. “In addition to starting new businesses, Mitt Romney helped build Bain Capital by turning around broken companies, creating and saving thousands of jobs,” said campaign spokesperson Amanda Henneberg. “The problem today is that President Obama hasn’t been able to turn around our economy in the same way.”
On Thursday’s PoliticsNation, Mother Jones‘ David Corn told host Al Sharpton that in some ways the video wasn’t surprising.
“This is how private equity people talk,” said Corn. “They look at companies, not in the long run—you know, how to build something, say, the way Steve Jobs built Apple—how it can be part of a community, and go on and on and create jobs, and survive and thrive. They look at companies as sort of profit opportunities.” Michelle Cottle, of Newsweek/Daily Beast, said the video paints “unfortunate imagery” for Romney. “Of course people are going to jump on [the video],” she said, adding that, “Romney himself has made job creation and his ability to do that central to his entire candidacy.” Team Obama referred to the video in an-email to the media on Thursday. It included a remark from Randy Johnson, a former worker at Ampad, which went bankrupt after Bain’s involvement. “Today’s video confirms what I and other workers fired by Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital already know: that Romney’s business experience was never about creating jobs,” said Johnson. “Romney’s own words prove that his focus was putting profits before people from the very beginning, ‘harvesting’ companies to make a ‘significant profit’ for himself and his investors.”
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