A new book by one of Mitt Romney’s former business partners at Bain Capital, scheduled to be the featured New York Times Magazine cover story on Sunday,argues that inequality is good.

CHUCK COLLINS, Bob Keener, bob at wealthforcommongood.org
http://99to1book.org
Collins, a long-time inequality activist was certainly born into the 1%. He went to the same high school as Mitt Romney — and is the great-grandson of Oscar Mayer. His brand new book is called, “99 to 1: How Wealth Inequality is Wrecking the World and What We Can Do About It.”

Collins said today: “Inequality is destroying everything you care about. Whether you care about public health, education, civic society, sports, business — inequality is making things worse. And unless we interrupt the process, this destruction will keep increasing. We’re in an inequality death spiral, where concentration of wealth and power is enabling the wealthy and powerful to rig the rules to make themselves more wealthy and powerful — at the expense of everyone else. This is why the 1% versus 99% lens is so
meaningful to people. It reflects their lived reality.”

Collins was recently on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal:
http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/305321-4

Background:
Paul Krugman “Rich Guy Says We Should Be Grateful For His Wealth”

Dean Baker recently wrote the piece “Mitt Romney’s Partner in Crime: Ed Conard’s Unintended Consequences,” which states: “Did Conard really miss the story of Fabrice Tourre (a.k.a. ‘Fabulous Fab’) the Goldman Sachs mortgage trader who put together collaterized debt obligations that were designed to fail and then hawked them off on unsuspecting clients? Does he not know about the flash traders who make fortunes by designing sophisticated programs that allow them to front-run major trades? (This means that they can detect major trades and jump in ahead, thereby capturing some of the profit.) …

“How much has the pharmaceutical industry profited from using its political power to get Congress to give it ever longer and stronger patent monopolies? We now spend almost $300 billion a year on prescription drugs that would cost us around $30 billion in a free market. …

“Conard and Romney’s own industry provides an excellent example of using political power to promote private wealth. One of the major ways that private equity companies make money is by taking advantage of the tax deductibility of interest. Private equity companies typically load the firms they buy with as much debt as possible. This is because the interest payments on debt are tax deductible and they don’t really care if the company ends up going bankrupt. They expect a substantial portion of their firms to go into bankruptcy.”