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The romance between Romney and Monsanto began back in 1977, when the recently minted Harvard Law and Business School graduate joined Bain, the Boston-based consulting firm launched in 1973, the same year Monsanto became one of its first clients. One of Bain’s founding partners, Ralph Willard, described to the Boston Globe in 2007 how “Romney learned the technical aspects of the chemical business so thoroughly that he sounded as if he had gone to engineering school instead of business school,” and that Monsanto executives soon began “bypassing” him to go directly to Romney.

John W. Hanley, the Monsanto CEO at the time, has said how “impressed” he was with the 30-year-old Mitt. Hanley became so close to Romney that he and Romney’s boss Bill Bain devised the idea of creating Bain Capital as a way of keeping Romney in the fold. Unless Mitt was allowed to run this spin-off venture firm, Hanley and Bain feared, he would leave. Hanley even contributed $1 million to Romney’s first investment pool at Bain Capital. Monsanto’s Hanley is in fact the only business executive outside of the Bain founding family to so shape Romney’s career—jumpstarting the two companies, Bain & Company and Bain Capital, that account for all but two years of Romney’s much-ballyhooed business experience. Bain and Romney whispered in Monsanto’s ear until 1985, when Hanley’s successor Richard Mahoney says he “fired” them and when Romney moved on to Bain Capital.

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It's not clear how much Romney knew about these depraved acts in the late 1970s, but as noted above, the strategy he helped cook up was certainly smart, in a reptilian, money-making sort of way: Quietly skitter away from the now toxic (in PR terms) chemical industry, selling old business lines as fast as possible, and invest the proceeds in a new, shiny, positive-sounding field called "biotechnology." And specialize in "feeding the world," which sounds a hell of a lot nicer than dumping carcinogenic gunk in creeks. The strategy was by no means as obvious as it now seems in hindsight: Monsanto was exiting a steady, established business, industrial chemicals, in favor of a highly speculative and new one, ag biotech. But it worked brilliantly—by the time those PCB revelations came out in 2002, Monsanto could plausibly protect its image by saying, that was all in the past; we don't make those kinds of chemicals anymore.

Of course, in its new, Bain-ified manifestation, Monsanto 2.0 remained quite ruthless in its pursuit of profit. As Barrett puts it, the metamorphosis merely meant "trading one set of environmental controversies for another."

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Originally posted by DREAMTROVE:

I see Obama as a cultist ideologue bent on the destruction of humanity as we know it.

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Originally posted by chrisisall:
See, this is the heart of it all for this election: Obama is a lazy opportunistic weasel, and Romney is a filthy scumbag.
I'll vote weasel over scumbag; at least a weasel has a pulse.

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Originally posted by AURaptor:

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Originally posted by chrisisall:
See, this is the heart of it all for this election: Obama is a lazy opportunistic weasel, and Romney is a filthy scumbag.
I'll vote weasel over scumbag; at least a weasel has a pulse.

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The weasel literally wants to destroy this country.

And Romney is a saint compared to Obama.

You guys are frelling nuts.

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Originally posted by DREAMTROVE:

I see Obama as a cultist ideologue bent on the destruction of humanity as we know it.

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Originally posted by AURaptor:
And Romney is a saint compared to Obama.

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Originally posted by Storymark:

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Originally posted by DREAMTROVE:

I see Obama as a cultist ideologue bent on the destruction of humanity as we know it.

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Okay, when did PirateNews hack DT's account?

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Originally posted by DREAMTROVE:
I think Romney is an opportunist crook who is in it for money and personal power. I don't think that Obama cares about that. I think they're different people with different but equally fatal flaws. I also think they answer to the same team of ruling power players and influence peddlers.

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