Mother Jones releases new Romney video

Mother Jones released a new video that offers a rare unmediated view of Mitt Romney's early business career with the private equity firm Bain Capital.

Mother Jones asserts, "This short clip offers a glimpse of Romney when he was at the start of his private equity career and saw businesses as targets of opportunity that could be harvested for the benefit of his investors, not as long-term job creators or participants in a larger community."

Unlike Mother Jones' previous secret video, this clip doesn't offer injurious revelations. It does, however, reaffirm the well-reported idea that while Mitt Romney was CEO of Bain Capital, job creation was not his foremost priority.

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Romney describes Bain's modus operandi:

"Bain Capital is an investment partnership which was formed to invest in startup companies and ongoing companies, then to take an active hand in managing them and hopefully, five to eight years later, to harvest them at a significant profit." 

Romney's use of "harvest" suggests he is less concerned with employing middle and working class Americans, and more interested in returns for investors.

When asked about the video, Romney spokeswoman Amanda Henneberg told the National Journal:

"In addition to starting new businesses, Mitt Romney helped build Bain Capital by turning around broken companies, creating and saving thousands of jobs. The problem today is that President Obama hasn’t been able to turn around our economy in the same way.”

But to hear the Wall Street Journal tell it, "Creating jobs also wasn't the aim of Bain or other private-equity firms, which measure success by returns produced for investors."

The clip is from a 1985 speech, though it's unclear where Romney is speaking or who the audience is.

Mother Jones obtained the clip from a former Bain & Company employee who had received the footage as part of Bain & Company's 25th anniversary celebration.

Here's the video's transcript:

"Bain Capital is an investment partnership which was formed to invest in startup companies and ongoing companies, then to take an active hand in managing them and hopefully, five to eight years later, to harvest them at a significant profit…The fund was formed on September 30th of last year. It's been about 10 months then. It was formed with $37 million in invested cash. An additional $50 million or so of what I'll call a call pool, which is money that we can call upon if the deals are large enough that they require more than a $2 or $3 million dollar initial investment. Why in the world did Bain and Company get involved in this kind of a business? We're not particularly noted for having years and years of experience in financing. Three reasons. We recognized that we had the potential to develop a significant and proprietary flow of business opportunities. Secondly, we had concepts and experience which would allow us to identify potential value and hidden value in a particular investment candidate. And third, we had the consulting resources and management skills and management resources to become actively involved in the companies we invested in to help them realize their potential value."