Mitt, Mormons, and Money

Growing up in a family with ties to founders of the Mormon Church, I learned at an early age a little about the church’s teachings. I read Mormon comic books that claimed humans in the Garden of Eden used to live to the age of 900. I learned that God, in his wrath, had turned Cain black for killing Able, which is why, until 1978, the church banned those of black African descent from the Mormon priesthood. I also learned that when you die, if you had lived a righteous life, you got your own planet to rule in celestial bliss. As a ten-year-old, I must admit that last idea did have some appeal. I personally wanted to take over Mars, but figured some Mormon insider had probably long ago claimed the red planet for his own. Fortunately, my sanity was saved by the fact that my exposure to these ideas was cursory, as only my father was Mormon and not an active one at that. This translated into a rather lackadaisical religious upbringing, which made it easier to later reject organized religion.

God Bless America—and Private Equity

Admittedly, I feel the same way about the two-party system. But at least one useful byproduct of the primaries is the opportunity they offer the candidates to occasionally tell the truth about each other. There’s a certain pleasure in watching former House speaker Newt Gingrich—who knows something about lucrative consulting contracts—target Mitt Romney’s predatory business career as a venture capitalist. Gingrich’s criticism of Romney’s investment firm, Bain Capital, as a looter of companies for its own aggrandizement is a right and obvious one. It’s also a strategy Gingrich played to great benefit in his South Carolina primary victory, tapping into the sort of raw disaffection for moneyed America that percolates among the Tea Party crowd.

Romney’s firm often cannibalized companies, using venture capital to take over other companies, which, in turn, became leverage for other takeovers, all the while reaping millions in stock sales and management fees. Bain Capital’s $5 million investment in American Pad & Paper (Ampad), for example, translated in 7 years (1992- 1999) into a $100 million-plus revenue gold mine for the firm’s partners and investors. However, Ampad was left saddled with debts, went bankrupt, its stock valueless, with hundreds of workers out of jobs. Apparently, even “losing” is a win for today’s masters of private equity.

Romney learned the strategic formula he brought to Bain Capital from Bruce Henderson, a one-time Bible salesperson and founder of the Boston Consulting Group. As a consultant, Henderson preached a kind of modern-day Taylorism, touting “scientific management” principles based on what the editors of the Harvard Business Review call “sharp-penciled analytics” geared to reducing costs and increasing efficiency.

The Henderson cost-cutting model routinely translated into, among other things, firing “excess” workers. The idea was that after a few years these restructured companies could then be sold at great profit. Rather than working as hired outside advisors, as most management consultants had traditionally done, Romney also promoted the idea of consulting firms taking a controlling interest in companies. Hence, the era of the corporate raider or, as some more accurately describe it, vulture capitalism.

It’s Just Business as Usual

In his zeal to portray Romney’s business career as less than stellar, Gingrich was not about to attack the integrity of the “free enterprise” system. But the latter was exactly how Romney and fellow Republicans took Gingrich’s criticisms. Actually, it makes sense that they would do so. To Romney and fellow Republicans, capitalism is sacrosanct. What better defense, then, of their world of avarice than to say it was all just business as usual?  “If you have ‘creative destruction’ in capitalism, which has always been a part of capitalism, it becomes a little disingenuous to take on Bain Capital,” said former Utah governor and fellow Mormon son of a silver-spoon-family, Jon Huntsman.

It’s always easy to wax philosophical when you’re one of the winners, like Huntsman and Romney. If you eat a Big Mac from McDonald’s, thank the Huntsman family and their global chemical corporation for the container it’s packaged in. For Romney, of course, son of an automaker CEO and Michigan governor, class privilege has reared its head at every juncture.

Ironically, while Tea Party conservatives criticize Romney for the blatant opportunism of his shifting political views, at another level Romney is the most consistent of politicians, at least when it comes to serving his class. As a first-year college student at Stanford, Romney felt compelled to protest campus anti-draft activists. Of course, that didn’t prevent him from later seeking a religious deferment as a Mormon missionary to France. In Paris, Romney got to experience firsthand the events of May 1968 when millions of French workers and students rose up against the De Gaulle regime. True to his upper-class roots, Romney remained unresponsive to the struggles of the French working class whose “anti-Americanism” over the Vietnam War annoyed him. Instead, he spent his days dutifully going door-to-door trying to interest the locals in the Book of Mormon.

The elite business culture Romney inhabits is a world where thoughts about social injustice remain abstract and calculated. It is a culture inhabited by insulated country club sensibilities and attitudes of social entitlement taken as a grant from the heavens. In this world extreme wealth seems to bestow rights unto themselves—as in the right to acquire political power— where politics is a kind of gentlemen’s game, one only the privileged and connected are qualified to play.

Predictably, Romney views such talk about class as “divisive.” But it is Romney who is the divider, separated as he is from average folks by a career devoted to the fanatical pursuit of wealth. Yet, as an elite investor he has produced nothing (there’s no such thing as a venture capitalist whose job is to create jobs) beyond a long trail of financial deals and a smokescreen of justifications that this rigged financial system is somehow right and fair.

At a time when the Occupy Wall Street movement has put a spotlight on class inequality, the theatrics of American electoral politics are being shown for the stage-managed game they are. Wall Street interests are all over this election, whether as White House insiders or as advisors to the current crop of right-wing millionaires aspiring to the Republican nomination. In the case of Mitt Romney, Mr. .01% offers Americans the chance to put a corporate plutocrat directly in power.

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Mark T. Harris is a Portland, Oregon-based writer. He is a great, great, great grandson of Orson Pratt, an early leader of the Mormon Church. Orson’s brother Parley Pratt was the great, great grandfather of Mitt Romney. Parley Pratt was the great, great, great grandfather of Jon Huntsman. However, Harris promises none of this will influence his vote in 2012.