Jesse Eisinger of ProPublica reports on Mitt Romney’s history with Bain Capital:
In 1996, an investment group including Bain Capital, the firm then run by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, sold the consumer credit information business Experian to a British retailer, making a $500 million profit.
Eisinger goes on to detail the shadier aspects of that deal and the lawsuits that followed. Feel free to wade through that if you like. I just want to highlight what I think is even worse: Mitt Romney once owned Experian.
Experian is one of the big three credit-rating agencies. Credit-rating agencies rule your life.
Your “credit score” is used to determine how much more than Mitt Romney you will have to pay for mortgages and car loans and other forms of credit. It may also be used to charge you more than Mitt Romney is charged for insurance and other goods and services. And it may be used to deny you employment. The credit-rating business model is based on your score being both inaccurate and inadequate — deliberately so, or else the protection racket they’re running wouldn’t work. And yet the credit-rating agencies are largely unchecked and unrestrained in their ability to restrict your freedom and the freedom of every other American.
The good news for the credit-rating dependent (i.e., everyone) is that the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau is beginning to rein-in the unchecked abuses of the credit-rating agencies. The bad news is that if Mitt Romney is elected president, he will likely de-fund and de-fang the new agency, letting Experian, Equifax and TransUnion run their protection racket without having to worry about their “scores” being accurate.
Mitt Romney once owned Experian. Mitt Romney once owned freaking Experian.
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