by Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash

Here comes Mister One Percent. Mitt the Twit Romney. He used to be a leveraged buyout specialist, which was what these private equity guys were called before they got ashamed of the name.

Leveraged buyout means you put a company in debt, and use the money you extract from it to partly buy the company. You also use this debt to pay yourself huge fees and get tax benefits. Basically you're looting the company, which is why many leveraged buyouts end in bankruptcies. The excuse these guys use for what they do is that they bring “efficiency” — one of those meaningless hide-my-hypocrisy phrases like “free market” and “collateral damage.”

So Mitt Romney is a dyed-in-the-wool Wall Streeter, engaged in one of its most egregious practices. He also has money stashed away in the Cayman Islands, may still have a Swiss bank account, has helped export jobs overseas, and is building an elevator for his cars. His wife drives a couple of Cadillacs, and he pays 15% in taxes.

He is what one may safely call a caricature of a Wall Street fraudster. The perfect plutocrat. So obviously slumming among us hoi polloi that he comes off as awkward. And he also happens to be a serious serial liar.

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