Protesters affiliated with the “Occupy” movement held a demonstration Friday outside the offices of Bain Capital, the Boston-based private equity firm once run by former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney.
“Frustrated with Mitt Romney’s frequent and false claims of success in job creation, unemployed workers and community leaders will gather Friday at noon to expose the real Romney record on jobs and the economy,” MassUnited, the group organizing the protest, said in a statement.
“The public education campaign will launch with a protest and mass leafleting drive outside the Boston headquarters of Bain Capital – the site of many of Romney’s most heinous job-killing endeavors.”
Romney’s time at Bain Capital first became a political football in 1994 when he mounted a challenge for the U.S. Senate seat held by Democrat Ted Kennedy. Since then, both Democratic and Republican opponents have criticized Romney’s involvement with the firm, which sometimes downsized companies in an effort to make them more efficient.
Efforts to highlight Romney’s connection with Bain are seen as a cornerstone of the White House’s political strategy against the Republican front-runner.
“The second aspect of the campaign to define Romney is his record as CEO of Bain Capital, a venture capital firm that was responsible for both creating and eliminating jobs,’’ Politico reported in August. “Obama officials intend to frame Romney as the very picture of greed in the great recession — a sort of political Gordon Gekko.”
One person involved with the protest at Bain said organizers are not affiliated with Obama’s re-election effort or the Democratic Party.
A person involved with the protest said organizers are not affiliated with Obama’s re-election effort or the Democratic Party, but this isn’t the only incident of Occupy protesters targeting a Republican politician. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor was forced to cancel a speech at the Wharton School of Business on Friday morning after Occupy Philadelphia activists staged a demonstration there.
Romney has long defended his time at Bain Capital and says the experience taught him valuable lessons about the economy.
“When I was at Bain Capital, we invested in about 100 different companies. Not all of them worked,’’ he said during a presidential debate this summer. “But I’m very proud of the fact that I learned about how you can be successful with an enterprise, why we lose jobs, how we gain jobs and overall, in those 100 businesses we invested in, tens of thousands of jobs, net-net, were created.’’