YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio -- The talking points began like the ones echoed for months by state and local Democrats -- the auto bailout, the importance of the middle class -- as they raised the curtain on the 2012 presidential campaign in Ohio.
But today’s visit here by Vice President Joe Biden took a sharper turn, echoing the Obama campaign's new TV spots that blast presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s stewardship of the private equity firm Bain Capital.
And to introduce the vice president at M7 Technologies, a manufacturing company owned by Michael Garvey’s family since 1918, and launch Biden’s “Made in America” tour of the Midwest, the campaign enlisted a labor leader whose manufacturing plant was raided, he said, by the private equity firm Bain Capital and its CEO, Mitt Romney.
“It devastated my family personally,” said Randy Johnson, a former employee of American Pad & Paper Co. (Ampad), a company acquired in 1992 by Romney’s Bain Capital.
The Ampad story is one the Obama campaign likes to tell and retell; it begins with Bain Capital buying the company for $5 million, borrowing on the company’s credit to buy more office-supply manufacturers, then plunging Ampad into bankruptcy, leaving workers with no jobs and stockholders with “worthless shares,” according to a 2007 report in the Boston Globe.
“Bain Capital didn't escape Ampad's eventual bankruptcy unscathed,” the newspaper reported. “It held about one-third of Ampad's shares, which became worthless. But while as many as 185 workers near Buffalo lost jobs in a 1999 plant closing, Bain Capital and its investors ultimately made more than $100 million on the deal.”
Johnson worked at a plant in Marion, Ind., that Ampad purchased two years after Bain’s acquisition of Ampad's Buffalo, N.Y., plant. Jobs, wages and benefits also were slashed at the Indiana plant. Later, after union workers went on strike, Bain closed the plant.
Today Johnson is employed by the United Steelworkers international office in Pittsburgh, and just like the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy employed his emotional testimonial to help defeat Romney when he ran for the U.S. Senate in 1994, Johnson is back on the stump.
“His corporate buyout firm, Bain Capital, bought my plant. They brought in security guards, they fired us all, they walked us out of the building. We saw families devastated, communities devastated by this act. A few were hired back,” Johnson continued. “But when they hired us back, they cut our wages, they cut our benefits, they took our retirement package. … we had people with 35, 45 years. … all this without any warning. We didn’t have time to plan.”
Johnson said his union had no choice but to go out on strike.
“Here’s the bad part,” he said. “In eight short years, Mitt Romney and his buddies took $100 million out of the company …and let it go bankrupt. Not only were communities destroyed, but they left institutions holding the bag.”
Biden referred to the Ampad story in his remarks, then added the story of a steel mill in Missouri that had been in business in 1888. It was purchased by Bain Capital in the 1990s, went bankrupt eight years later after “Romney’s management team” had increased its debt “40 fold to over $533 million,” he continued. “The top 30 executives walked away with $9 million. And Romney and his partners walked away with at least $12 million.”
Biden related Bain Capital’s operation of these companies in Mahoning Valley terms – comparing the job losses Bain caused to the economic devastation here that began 35 years ago with the collapse of the steel industry.
“There’s Obama economics, which values the role of workers in the success of a business, and values the middle class in the success of the economy. A philosophy that believes everyone deserves a fair shot and a fair shake, and everybody should play by the same rules,” Biden said.
“And then there’s Romney economics, which says as long as the government helps the guys at the very top do well, workers and small businesses and communities can be left to fend for themselves.
"Nobody knows better than the people of the Valley the consequences of that kind of philosophy," he said.
"You’ve been through hell and back.”
CHECK BACK for more coverage on Romney’s visit, including reaction from the Republican Party and Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign.
CLICK TO READ excerpts from Biden’s remarks as prepared for delivery.
Copyright 2012 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.