Well, yeah, but other than that, he did it all on his own:
The up-by-his-bootstraps businessman who stars in an ad for Republican hopeful Mitt Romney seems to have built his business through government-sponsored loans, putting a dent in the campaign’s attack on President Barack Obama’s saying to business owners, “you didn’t get there on your own.”
“My father’s hands didn’t build this company? My hands didn’t build this company? My son’s hands aren’t building this company?” New Hampshire businessman Jack Gilchrist, president of Gilchrist Metal, asks in the ad that’s been making waves since last week.
Reporting by The New Hampshire Union Leader disputed this claim by looking into Gilchrist’s history, revealing that he took over $1 million in government loans since the 1980s, including $800,000 in tax-exempt bonds issued by the New Hampshire Business Finance Authority to build a new manufacturing plant and buy equipment. Gilchrist also admitted to the paper that he took a U.S. Small Business Administration loan of “somewhere south of” $500,000 in the 1980s, and said that to this day about 10 percent of his business comes from defense-related projects.
He’s saying he just got his “own money” back, yet I’m guessing he borrowed a lot more than he paid.
Nobody…..nobody got wealthy all on their own. It requires a vast support system for wealth to grow. The greatest part of that support system is comprised of the workers who sell their labor for meager wages. They create the products and the profits that the wealthy claim as their own. One could even say that a Capitalist is an unnecessary middleman.
Hell, there’s no doubt going back, say to the early 1900’s and even long before that, that the military authority of the West, i.e., Great Britain and its allies (America, France and Germany in particular) enjoyed great success in its colonization of much of the Middle East, The Carribean, parts of Africa, and so on. The thievery of the natural resources of these regions, along with the cheap indigenous labor helped make America filthy rich. The finaciers of these efforts are still part of the 1% of capitalists who fight against us to this very day.
Even if he paid it all back he wouldn’t have been able to earn enough to do so without the starter loans in the first place.