Editor:

Mitt Romney, the likely Republican nominee, has $250,000,000. He made that money with a corporate entity called Bain Capitol, a corporate raider that buys companies, manipulates their stock, breaks them up and sells off the pieces for huge profits. Unfortunately, those profits come at a cost of hundreds of thousands of lost jobs.

A recent local example of how this works is Wausau Papers in Mosinee. The company is owned, in part, by a New York based hedge fund, Starboard Investment group. Starboard executive Jeffrey Smith stated that the company is undervalued on Wall Street, and selling the company would allow investors to make more money. Wausau Papers did sell its printing and writing division, with a loss of 450 jobs. They are considering selling their specialty division, with 400 more jobs lost.

If they sell the entire company, many thousands of jobs will be lost. That will have a serious affect on the local economy in so many ways, including Wisconsin’s logging industry. The New York investors will make lots more money, while Wisconsin workers pay the price. It used to be understood that the economy is best served if we all have jobs. How did Corporate America forget that?

Romney continues to receive a seven figure income from Bain Capital, on which he pays only 15 percent capital gains tax. That is why he is refusing to reveal his tax returns. He does not want you to know that he pays less than half the tax rate that you do. You pay a 35 percent rate on your income if you are lucky enough to have anything left over to pay taxes on. Forty-three percent of us do not. In one of their ludicrous clown show debates, Romney stated that he enjoyed firing people. When a group of women were telling him about their fruitless efforts to find jobs, he said “I’m looking for a job too.” A multimillionaire utterly without any understanding of working class America’s problems. And unconcerned!

If you don’t like his position on an issue, wait a minute, it will change to match his listener’s desires. He has refined fence straddling and flip-flopping to an art form. He is utterly without convictions on anything, except his desire for more money and to be elected president.

Romney states that corporations are people too. They are not, and cannot be allowed to shovel millions of dollars into election campaigns, which will overwhelm the democratic process.

There is a petition drive for a constitutional amendment to eliminate that. Go to website sanders.senate.gov/savingdemocracy to sign the petition.

Barrie Johnson, Exeland