Former White House social secretary Desiree Rogers is nothing more than a vulture capitalist who, as CEO of Johnson Publishing, is laying off hundreds of workers so that she and a clutch of greedy investors can walk away with the profits. Another way of putting it would be that she was brought in to help save a struggling African-American company. But the Obama campaign has taught us a new way to talk about capitalism.
So Rogers, like Mitt Romney, is just a “corporate raider.” Just as Romney targeted weak steel companies while at Bain Capital, Rogers has knowingly entered a failing industry–print media–to suck out whatever she can before leaving an African-American owned company in ruins. She claims–according to the corporate journalists at Crain’s–that she is trying to save the company. But we all know the truth of how the private sector works.
Like other corporate recidivists, Rogers never has to suffer the consequences of her failures. When she worked for President Barack Obama, she disgraced herself by inviting a convicted felon to a state dinner and allowing gate crashers to slip past the Secret Service. An ordinary person–a member of the 99%–would have been fired on the spot. But Rogers, clearly a member of the 1%, soon became CEO at Johnson.
Johnson has recently “outsourced” many operations and sold key assets, such as its historic building on Michigan Avenue in Chicago. Rogers is working hand-in-hand with big banks–like JPMorgan Chase, which lost billions in shady trades just a few weeks ago–to extract every ounce of profit at the employees’ expense. She hides behind the fact that Johnson is privately held to avoid disclosing the company’s actual revenues.
For the Obama administration, this is nothing new. After all, it was an Obama bundler, Jonathan Lavine, who succeeded Romney at Bain and actually implemented the job cuts that the Obama campaign has blamed on Romney. Even as it does all it can to demonize and destroy private business, it is happy to cash checks from Wall Street. No doubt Obama himself has a Wall Street job lined up for 2013–a vulture-capitalist-to-be.