I remember all the “buy it, loot it, shut it down” games that were perpetrated by folks like Mittens. The press and the Dems haven’t forgotten either.
With the economy in the bucket leading up to the next election, there will be no shortage of real people that lost their retirement to appear on Obama’s re-election ads. Many will blame Mittens personally for ruining their lives.
The GOP race is playing right into oBama’s hand, all according to plan.
You are spot on. This was ONE of several strategies used by companies like Bain. If it was profitable, they would buy and grow and keep, or downsize, or loot and sell - whatever was needed. Ultra capitalists, remorseless with no invested emotion. Who cares if 'it's been in the family for 5 generations' or 'it's the mainstay of the town' or even 'they have worked there all their lives.'
The stupid kids retained no professional help, instead using a lawyer involved with their nightclub ventures and were were short changed millions.
The private equity clowns were fucking useless, a lot of the people working for them had NO previous employment but coincidently all seemed to have gone to Duke or belonged to a certain fraternity. I never saw many of them do much other than goof around on the internet, one particularly brash young man brought in a Playstation 2. At random they would fire people, usually for no apparent reason and usually in a spectacularly unprofessional manner.
In any event they fleshed out a preposterous plan to cease developing our own hardware and highly optimized operating system and to port our software to Linux and run it on roughly the same hardware found in a router or cable box and a completely different platform. This plan amounted to more or less rewriting everything from scratch so that it might run on horribly inferior hardware. This was also based on the belief our customers would actually want to buy this thing.
Around the time they had this mental diarrhea their bosses had their own and instituted a $50,000 bonus for every million dollars of salaries they cut. They began firing people left and right, including just about every last person who might have been able to implement their product line hallucination. Having decimated the hardware and software teams they took the next natural step and outsourced it. For this I had to go to India to train our "overseas team members" on the nuances of our platform so they might port our software that had only ever run on our own proprietary realtime operating system to Linux running on a gutless ARM implementation.
This has yet to produce a shippable product.
Because I had an employment contract with a pre-negotiated severance agreement I could not be fired. When my contract came to an end I decided it was time to retire. On the day I retired the company was bringing in more in revenue from leasing empty office and warehouse space than they were in sales.
As of Dec. 31st all legacy products have been discontinued and the company with only 21 employees is getting into the patent troll business. They actually tried to rehire me to advise them on possible infringements on their patents they might litigate.
I very forcefully declined. In spite of the fact they robbed the founders kids blind I would bet all I have they never realized a profit from this endeavor.