Escalating his attack on Mitt Romney and Bain Capital, President Obama charged yesterday that "Romney and Bain put profits ahead of losses."
Obama released two Bain Private Placement Memoranda (PPMs) prepared for investors during Romney's tenure. Obama found the documents "disturbing" and "mean-spirited."
"They reveal that Romney and Bain employed the lure of profits to entice investors," Obama claimed. "Their sole promise to investors was a good return on investment. In their pitch to investors, Bain completely ignored combating global warming, fighting childhood obesity, and helping homeowners with underwater mortgages.
"Even worse, Bain and Romney accepted only those investors willing to pay Bain's asking price. Ability to pay was Bain's sole criterion for accepting investors. Bain made no attempt to achieve ethnic, racial, gender, or sexual preference balance among their investors," Obama continued.
"Bain was in business to make money," Obama declared. "Their PPMs prove it. Bain and Romney were blinded by greed. Had they been willing to incur large losses, they could addressed issues that most concern hard-working middle class Americans, such as helping hard-working middle class Americans struggling to pay texting overcharges for their hard-working middle class children.
Obama contrasted his experience as a community organizer with Romney's concern about profits. "I was trying to improve the lives of everyone in the community. The only time I focused on money was when our grants needed renewal."
Obama said working for a profit making organization is poor training for a president. "The president's job is to finance deficits, not to maximize profits. Moreover, it's the president's job to assure that everybody in the country has a fair shot by providing government programs that don't work.
"Applying the private sector's heartless logic of cost/benefit would decimate government programs," Obama stated. "For example, federal job training programs would appear absurdly inefficient until you consider how virtuous these programs make us feel about our good intentions."