Is Bain Capital a Venture Capitalist or a Vulture Capitalist firm?

I don’t know enough about Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital to know whether Rick Perry’s ad and Newt Gingrich with these two out takes of his 28 minute documentary, When Mitt Romney Came to Town are on target or just doing a political hack job.

That said, I do know that, if someone has millions at their disposal and the only “good” they recognize is quick, massive profits, they can legally wreck companies and people’s lives, stripping the cash from corporate carcasses just like a vulture strips the flesh from dead bodies. This is all possible because Wall Street and its corporate raiders have helped (bribed) Congress in crafting laws making it easy to do if you have the capital needed to start the snowball rolling down hill.

For instance, if you find a corporation that is not rapidly growing, a corporation with cash and valuable assets, and with a decent pension fund; you can legally use that company’s own asset sheet, including the cash in the employee pension fund, as collateral for a highly leveraged loan to buy the corporation. With that debt load now on the corporate books, the raiders fire much of the workforce, off-shore the jobs to low labor countries or just live off of existing inventory, and sell off any remaining valuable assets. This makes the corporation suddenly “appear” to be highly profitable. The stock prices soar. At this point, before the debt load $hit hits the fan, the raiders sell their interest in the corporation. They have put next to none of their own money into the deal, they have “created nothing of value”: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/287707/battle-bain-capital-michael-walsh to the company or the country, yet they pocket tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars.

Since the four firms analyzed in Gingrich’s film clearly fall into the Vulture Capitalism model, and everything the film states is true; Bain Capital is at least partly a Vulture Capital firm. What of Bain’s successes? Did they intentionally create real-world value in some companies they acquired, or did an aggressive management manage to pull the fat back out of the fire and reorganize the company after Bain extracted their millions and moved on? I don’t know. But before we buy Romney’s claim that he knows how to create jobs, don’t you think we ought to find out the truth regarding Bain’s job destruction vs. creation record?