There’s a subplot in the movie “Pretty Woman” that serves as
an apt metaphor for the business careers of George Wilkin Romney and
his son Willard Milton “Mitt” Romney. The Edward Lewis character, played
by Richard Gere, is in the same line of work that was once Mitt’s. His
business buys the stock of ailing companies up to a majority stake,
using money from investors and banks. Once these companies are under his
control, they are then broken up and sold off piece by piece for a
profit.
Lewis’s firm is trying to do this to a Los Angeles shipbuilding company whose exec is played by the venerable actor Ralph Bellamy. At a dinner meeting—which includes the star of the film, Julia Roberts—Bellamy’s character mentions once encountering Lewis’s father, Carter, who turns out to have been estranged from his son before his death. The scene subtly suggests father disapproved of son for more than just being kicked out of college.
It’s pure speculation what the elder Romney thought of his son’s business in comparison with his own career as an auto executive. But their divergent paths illustrate how the once all-powerful manufacturing sector that produced men like George Romney for public office gave way to the all-powerful financial sector from which Mitt springs.
George Romney knew how to work with his hands, whether on his parents’ potato farm in Idaho or in his father’s construction business after his family sold the farm and moved to Salt Lake City. He also knew debt and deprivation in the Glasgow slums during his Mormon mission to Scotland in the late 1920s and in the hardships his family faced during the Great Depression.
Read more: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/romney-capitalism/
Lewis’s firm is trying to do this to a Los Angeles shipbuilding company whose exec is played by the venerable actor Ralph Bellamy. At a dinner meeting—which includes the star of the film, Julia Roberts—Bellamy’s character mentions once encountering Lewis’s father, Carter, who turns out to have been estranged from his son before his death. The scene subtly suggests father disapproved of son for more than just being kicked out of college.
It’s pure speculation what the elder Romney thought of his son’s business in comparison with his own career as an auto executive. But their divergent paths illustrate how the once all-powerful manufacturing sector that produced men like George Romney for public office gave way to the all-powerful financial sector from which Mitt springs.
George Romney knew how to work with his hands, whether on his parents’ potato farm in Idaho or in his father’s construction business after his family sold the farm and moved to Salt Lake City. He also knew debt and deprivation in the Glasgow slums during his Mormon mission to Scotland in the late 1920s and in the hardships his family faced during the Great Depression.
Read more: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/romney-capitalism/
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