If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business -- you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.Republicans have gone wild over the speech, intentionally misrepresenting what Obama said. "That" is a collective demonstrative pronoun relating to "roads and bridges." Yes, he could have said "those" or "that infrastructure" to be clearer. If Obama's intention was to say that business owners didn't build their own businesses, he would have said, "If you've got a business -- you didn't build it."
But if Republicans are going to carp about this niggling detail in Obama's speech, it's only fair to look at the niggling details of the business that W. Mitt Romney claims makes him qualified to lead this country, Bain Capital. Did he really build that?
I draw upon information on Romney's biography from this Wikipedia entry.
Romney went to public primary school, then attended a prestigious prep school paid for by his wealthy parents. He went to prestigious Stanford for a year, paid for by his wealthy parents. At age 19, during the height of the Vietnam War when men of the same age were volunteering for service or being drafted, Romney went to France for 30 months, presumably at the expense of his wealthy parents and/or the Mormon Church. Romney used four student deferments and a ministerial deferment to avoid serving in Vietnam (in 1969 his high number in the draft lottery kept him safe).
To be fair, being a missionary isn't necessarily draft dodging: all Mormons are expected to go on a mission. The Mormons I've known personally went on missions long after Vietnam was over. To be equally fair, however, the Mormons I know didn't go to France to live in a castle, eat brie and convert Protestants and Catholics to Mormonism. They went to third-world countries to build houses and feed starving kids.
Romney returned to the US and attended BYU, again presumably on his parents' dime. He then went to Harvard Business School. By all accounts Romney wasn't a stellar student (I have to wonder why all those pundits on Fox News aren't after Romney for his college transcripts).
Afterwards Romney went into management consulting. He was eventually hired by Bill Bain at Bain & Company. When Bain wanted to start a new venture in private equity and asked Romney to run it, Romney initially refused. After Bain restructured the deal so there would be no professional or financial risk to Romney, Mitt took the job. That was Bain Capital, Romney's baby.
Romney then went around trying to convince wealthy people to invest in the company. As detailed on this blog, he got about a third of the capital to start Bain from foreign sources, including many investors who eventually wound up in jail or were associated with Salvadoran death squads. I don't believe in guilt by association myself, but it's something that Republicans apparently value highly, because they constantly bring up Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers, two men with whom Obama has only passing association.
Bain Capital's basic business model was explicitly to never do anything on their own: they talked other people into giving them money to perform corporate surgery on troubled companies. Bain bought businesses with borrowed money in highly leveraged buyouts. He then tried to turn them around by changing management practices, reorganizing, firing employees, etc. On several occasions the companies Bain bought went bankrupt after Bain forced them to take out loans in order to pay Bain lots of cash.
Romney never created anything in business from nothing, with his own money, his own ideas and his own initiative. The path for him was always paved by someone else: parents, teachers, professors, the Mormon Church, Bill Bain, wealthy investors, original company founders.
Are there people who do create something from nothing, people who got no help from parents, who got where they are solely through hard work and individual initiative? Yes, but they're extremely rare, and many Republicans would rather these people not be in this country. Take, for example, Harold Fernandez who is now a cardiac surgeon. Originally from Colombia, he entered this country illegally at age 13 on a leaky boat filled with illegal immigrants. He graduated valedictorian of his class and enrolled at Princeton with a fake green card and a stolen Social Security number. But even so, Fernandez didn't do it all alone: he got scholarships that were endowed by wealthy donors who were giving back to Princeton for all that Princeton gave them. Through their generosity, a person of meager means can enjoy the same advantages that Mitt Romney did.
I don't pretend I did it all myself: my parents were borderline poor, so I qualified for about $3,600 dollars in Pell grants over four years. That was almost enough to pay for tuition at a public university at the time. I also had a job and lived at home. My dad often asked to "borrow" a hundred bucks here or there to make ends meet. That small investment the government made in my education resulted in me paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal taxes, a fabulous return on the investment.
My dad, a rabid Tea Partyer, tried 50 years ago to create a business from nothing, but eventually gave up as larger companies squashed him in both building maintenance and real estate. Why? Because to succeed while going truly alone is almost impossible. My dad would hire other guys, but would never partner with them. That doomed him to always staying small. He ultimately went to to work as a bus driver and is now retired on Social Security and a pension from a municipal bus company.
And even the star of Mitt Romney's "You Didn't Build That" ad, Jack Gilchrist, received more than a million dollars worth of government contracts, tax-exempt revenue bonds, and federal Small Business Administration loans.
And, of course, Gilchrist didn't really build that company. His dad did.