newjerseynewsroom.com

BY MICHAEL HAYNE

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

COMMENTARY

Captain Capitalist and corporation BFF, Mitt Romney, is all about business (accept telling you what that business is).

His entire campaign has been waged on good hair and apparent sharp business acumen. Mittie Rich can boast all he wants about his keen understanding of the private market and one that allowed a patrician son of privilege to lay off thousands of middle-income earners by leveraging relatively solvent companies and footing an enormous profit, which he then stashes in foreign tax shelters for a bainy day.

But Romney is ultimately a sneering, soulless vulture capitalist who uses all of the lying and cheating skills he learned in business school to bring mixed market capitalism to its very knees. Let's face it, here: Romney is such a wall street insider that whenever he gets a rectal exam, Wall Street feels a chill.

But Romney appears to really be milking this "screw the 47 percent" mentality after suggesting he would strongly consider for Treasury Secretary John Thain, the former CEO of Wall Street investment bank Merrill Lynch who now heads CIT Group. Thain is of course best remembered as the doofus, bloated fat cat who notoriously spent $1.22 million to redecorate his office using shareholder money, which included a $35,000 commode. Unless one is crapping gold bricks, an ordinary toilet would have sufficed.

After Merill Lynch was sold to Bank of America as part of the bailout during the economic abortion, Thain took over CIT Group Inc., which evidently received $2.3 billion dollars from TARP in December of 2008. At CIT Group Inc., he was awarded a pay package of $500,000 in cash, $2.5 million of restricted CIT stock with a holding period of one year, and $3 million in stock restricted for three years. The Peter Principle was huge in 2009 and Thain was its poster boy. But hey, surely Thain can beat that.

From Think Progress:

According to a new book by former Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation chairwoman Sheila Bair, when the CEOs of America’s major banks came to Washington to discuss the much-reviled $700 billion bank bailout in 2008, the first question asked by Thain was “if his compensation was going to be cut.” Upon Thain’s departure from Merrill Lynch, the New York Times’ Floyd Norris wrote, “The departure of John Thain from Bank of America provides another reminder of how Wall Streeters have come to see themselves as entitled to pay that would seem excessive even if their companies were not failing.

And since Romney won't stand for his poor 1 percenters being forced to buy only 1 Ferrari per household, he's pledged to repeal the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, which included a provision that imposed placing restraints on executive compensation at financial institutions. I cringe when I think of the amount of corporate welfare that will be doled out if Thain were to become Treasury Secretary. Well, at least he wouldn't need a $35,000 commode since he would now be crapping all over the middle-class and poor.

Michael Hayne is a comedian/VO artist/Columnist extraordinaire. . Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.

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