Yep, we’re getting an idea about what the 2012 campaign will be all about (from the Obama campaign]:

“I never thought of what I do for a living as job creation….The primary goal of private equity is to create wealth for your investors.”

-Marc B. Wolpow, former managing partner at Bain Capital, the firm where Mitt Romney was CEO, who worked closely with Romney for nine years Los Angeles Times, 12/3/11

The Obama campaign has released a new video about a paper products company in Marion, Indiana:

I really feel in my heart people need to know what Mitt Romney did to Marion, Indiana in nineteen ninety-four.

The average person in the Marion area would say that they were middle income to lower income. But we had good jobs that you could raise a family on.

The plant that I worked at was right over here.

SCM produced office supply products. We made tablets, file folders, index cards, calendars, anything that you could use in an office or around the household. It was a lot of work, but you felt like you’d really accomplished something.    

I really can’t explain it, my hands can explain it for all these calluses, but when you make a product and you know it’s the best that you can do it felt good.

Good paying job with good benefits, I loved working with the people I worked with. I thought I was settled in for life.

[1994] Until early July workers were employed by SCM, an office products supplier, but then the company was sold to Ampad.

One day we had a job, the next day we didn’t.

We’d been bought and sold in the past. We never had a problem. We were always a business that had value.

Then when Bain Capital bought us and Ampad come in that, that was a whole different story. They put armed guards up at the doors, did not look at anyone, did not speak to anybody, then told us we were all fired.

I understand if you gotta cut back, lay off someone, that’s part of the business. We’ve accepted that over the years when we were there, but you don’t come in and just take everything everybody’s got and destroy a business. And that’s what they did. we were a nice, strong, healthy company. We were making money and for them to just come out from nowhere and shut the place down, it was devastating.

When Ampad bought the former SCM plant it abruptly fired all three hundred and fifty workers. the union says it reduced wages and benefits.

First thing they did was knock the pay down.

We got people in here, uh, that went back wages that they made fourteen years ago.

Took our benefits, we didn’t have anymore retirement. And Bain, Mitt Romney, they did not care about us as workers. They were looking at the mighty dollar.

When I look at that clipping that I have in the paper of the closing, that’s where it all started for me. This was the worst day of my life. At the time all this happened I was pregnant, had two kids at home and I just lost my job.

From week to week I didn’t know what I was gonna do, I was barely getting by, groceries were thin.

When SCM shut the doors that was the first time I ever been in the system with the food stamps. Then I had to get on Medicaid. It was just, it was rough. But I did it.

You did it, but you had to.

I had no choice ’cause I had my babies, my babies depended on me. That was the most degrading thing, I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s there for a reason, but I never in my whole life ever think I would have to resort to that because I wasn’t raised like that. My parents instilled in me you give it a hundred and ten percent of whatever you do in life. So when you’re not raised with getting public assistance that was very devastating to me.

As a leader, ’cause that was my job, too, when you have to sit there and watch people’s faces and they’re looking to you for the answers and they just break down. And it, it’ll choke you up. It’s real.

I had my electricity turned off and my heat turned off and they were threatening to take my car. I was scared. I mean, it, it affects every aspect of your life.

As for Ampad’s side of this story: No interviews, no response, no reaction, no comments, nothing at all.

That’s what I was just told, I’m just doing what I’m told.

To me Mitt Romney takes from the poor and the middle class and gives to the rich. He’s just the opposite of Robin Hood.

And just think, we’re talking about just the companies, but how many businesses associated with those companies, how many mom and pop shops, how many restaurants, how many little bars and things like that around these plants, how many small communities were devastated? It didn’t just stop, you know, with the worker.

It makes me sick to my stomach when I sit there and watch Mitt Romney tell the American people about how he creates all these jobs.

They’re not jobs for a middle class person. I mean, you would have to work his job and two other jobs just to maintain.

You can tell by the way he acts, the way he talks, he doesn’t care anything about the middle class or the lower class people.

Mitt Romney’s philosophy for doing business is to take over companies just to get some money, then dump the business no matter what. And if that’s his approach to American economy I can’t imagine it being very pretty for the workers. Every person that’s on the lower scale right now wants to work to the middle income, and they’ll work their tail off in this country to do it. And if Mitt Romney’s in charge I don’t know whether they’re going to get the opportunity at all.

Think about that sequence. Buy a company, take $100 million in profit from that company, then dump it, watch the social safety net kick in as the company fails, and then complain about the the burden of that social safety net on everyone. There’s a parasite here all right, it’s just not the workers.