Bankrupt Rich?

Um, Mr. President, I was wondering if you could answer a question for me.  See this has been bothering me and I thought, you, being so intelligent could explain it.  Your ads are saying that Mr. Romney made his money by bankrupting companies and laying off the employees. And I heard you say that this was going to be a central part of your campaign. 

So what I want to know is this.  How do you take over companies, bankrupt them and lay off the employees and make a profit?  I mean, I'd really like to know because then I could get rich this way too.  I could accomplish the bankrupting part and I could probably hire someone to do the dirty work of laying off people.  But how do you make money doing that?  Could Romney have actually become a wealthy man this way?  Isn't the first order of business in a bankruptcy that the court takes control from all the owners and appoints a trustee who may arrange for a new management, but former owners get nothing out of the deal except getting the creditors off their backs?  Don't they get the company taken away from them and distributed/reorganized on behalf of the creditors?  So where's the profit?  You plunk down $XXX to buy the company and have $0 when it is bankrupt.  That looks like a loss to me, but since I'm just a dumb businessman, I am not smart enough to figure out these things like a Democrat does.

I do know of the practice where somebody buys a company and sells part of the assets to help finance the purchase.  That's called 'Greenmail' which is considered sharkish.  The word is a play on the term blackmail which means betrayal.  As far as I can tell, greenmail and blackmail have nothing to do with alternative energy or race.  Although there certainly are voters who feel betrayed when the government gives a green company tax dollars which it loses on the way to bankruptcy.  Which reminds me, Mr. President, if Solyndra and those 11 other companies we poured money into which went bankrupt and laid off all their employees, actually made profit for the government, then I'm expecting a tax rebate. And a smart guy like you could really talk about this.

But even if Mr. Romney sold assets, money from the sale would have to be held in the company treasury.  So then if the debt gobbled up that money and exceeded the value of the company causing bankruptcy, that would leave a broke Romney.  So if he made a gazillion dollars, it stands to reason that he actually did turn around some businesses--likely a lot of businesses.  Money doesn't lie.  But of course a business can be still succeed even if only 2/3 of the bets it makes come out positive.  And Mitt probably made some bad bets.  On the other hand, it seems to me, that government can be wrong all the time and still come out winning if it lies and manages to convince enough people. Isn't this true? I mean, that's all I know about it.  But you've been in government almost all the time, like most Democrats, so you'd be the one to answer that.

So if you can just tell us how Romney gets rich by going broke, we the people would really love to hear it.  Because there are a lot of us out here who have the talent to go broke, even when we are trying to avoid it.  But you understand we're pretty dumb.  We still haven't figured out how guys like Charles Rangel got fabulously wealthy when he never had a job except congressman. Or how the lawyers who handle bankruptcies are the only ones who seem to get rich.  Is that what Democrats call being smart?