attacking Capitalism?

[Yuri Zhivago]

[..] what makes it so dangerous to Romney, it seems to me, is that the Bain Brahmin didn't just fire thousands of working class people in restructuring and in closing companies. He made a

ing unimaginable fortune doing it. That's the issue. Other Republicans can speak about the need for free markets in a sluggish economy. But with Romney, we have a singular example of someone who made a quarter of a billion dollars by firing the white middle and working class in droves in ways that do not seem designed to promote growth or efficiency, but merely to enrich Bain.

Here's the New York Post, for Pete's sake, making the case last year against the shifty Wall Street games of Bain:

Romney's private equity firm, Bain Capital, bought companies and often increased short-term earnings so those businesses could then borrow enormous amounts of money. That borrowed money was used to pay Bain dividends. Then those businesses needed to maintain that high level of earnings to pay their debts...

* Bain in 1988 put $5 million down to buy Stage Stores, and in the mid-'90s took it public, collecting $100 million from stock offerings. Stage filed for bankruptcy in 2000.

* Bain in 1992 bought American Pad & Paper (AMPAD), investing $5 million, and collected $100 million from dividends. The business filed for bankruptcy in 2000.

* Bain in 1993 invested $60 million when buying GS Industries, and received $65 million from dividends. GS filed for bankruptcy in 2001.

* Bain in 1997 invested $46 million when buying Details, and made $93 million from stock offerings. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2003.

Romney's Bain invested 22 percent of the money it raised from 1987-95 in these five businesses, making a $578 million profit.

[..] if Romney comes across as the man who made a fortune off this kind of Wall Street maneuvering, he becomes a symbol and a focus for all the roiling populist discontent out there. When he is responsible for someone losing her house, the contrast with his multiple mansions and private beach gets a little de trop. One ad with one victim could be poison.

Of all the jobs he liquidated, moreover, many are in the American heartland. And his response to the people in this documentary - white working class heartland Americans, the GOP base - is that they are merely envious of his achievements. They don't come off that way in the ad. They come off as bewildered, betrayed and sure that Romney's goal in all this was merely, solely to make money for himself - the kind of money that most Americans cannot even compute.

I simply cannot imagine a worse narrative for a candidate in this climate; or a politician whose skills are singularly incapable of responding to the story in any persuasive way. This ad is powerful. Romney has already seen a drop in South Carolina. I suspect he'll drop some more. And I suspect once the potency of this line of attack is absorbed by the GOP establishment, there will be some full, if concealed, panic.

http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/01/yes-romney-could-lose.html​

nah, attacking [Unwelcome language removed], who perverted Capitalism

 

[Cicero]

Actually a great many people will admire him for his business competence. In this economy? With the utterly incompetent Obama stumbling around in his clown shoes

ing about capitalism while raking in money from Wall Street? A competent businessman with a non-nonsense outlook is appealing to many voters.

Again leftwingers fail to grasp that right of center voters have no need to worship their candidate and declare him a living saint. Only leftwingers have that sort of fixation . . . the kind that convinces them that it would be a really, really great idea to vote for a fellow with a paper thin political resume at the national level and no history of leadership of management skills . . . like Obama.

Enjoy.

 

[Boca]

That's peanuts

Let's see...people bought stock (equity) in companies that went bankrupt after a few years. What about those that bought bonds in GM? Who screwed them? And how about a half billion poured into Solyndra that went bankrupt in a few weeks or maybe months? Can anyone say Swiss bank accounts?

 

[Yuri Zhivago]

Actually a great many people will admire him for his business competence. In this economy? With the utterly incompetent Obama stumbling around in his clown shoes

ing about capitalism while raking in money from Wall Street? A competent businessman with a non-nonsense outlook is appealing to many voters.

Again leftwingers fail to grasp that right of center voters have no need to worship their candidate and declare him a living saint. Only leftwingers have that sort of fixation . . . the kind that convinces them that it would be a really, really great idea to vote for a fellow with a paper thin political resume at the national level and no history of leadership of management skills . . . like Obama.

Enjoy.

when your nurse Ratchet comes back ask her who is A.Sullivan and who owns New York Post.
Enjoy, between the medications....

 

[Dawg]

sashy.......Bain used Private $..........you're GOD 'O' uses Taxpayers $......

see the difference?

probably not

 

[Yuri Zhivago]

Let's see...people bought stock (equity) in companies that went bankrupt after a few years. What about those that bought bonds in GM? Who screwed them?

GM management?
Ever wonder, con, with limited grasp on human process of thinking , if GM went totally bust, what would bond holders get?

 

[Yuri Zhivago]

sashy.......Bain used Private $..........you're GOD 'O' uses Taxpayers $......

see the difference?

probably not

you probably right, New York Post owned by Murdoch is totally clueless.
And don't forget to explain to voters that Bain did O'K firing people and bankrupting companies, please

 

[Dawg]

Bain either saved companies and or had no choose but let them go under........happens all the time in America, has happened for hundreds of years...........unless the housing gains return, how long can you continue to sell furniture no one has a need for?

Have you fired/laid-off any employees? Are you Sashy Bain?

GD the liberals, they speak w/shiite in they mouths.

 

[Yuri Zhivago]

Bain either saved companies and or had no choose but let them go under........happens all the time in America, has happened for hundreds of years...........unless the housing gains return, how long can you continue to sell furniture no one has a need for?

Have you fired/laid-off any employees? Are you Sashy Bain?

GD the liberals, they speak w/shiite in they mouths.

Just because you live in a cave does not mean nobody else gets furniture...................................................................

Houses are still sold, remodelings are still done , young still get married and old sofas and mattresses do not last forever, i.w.t.

 

[Huskyoverlord]

Let's justify every wal street scumbag and our crumbling system so we can all look at each other when the end comes with our thumbs up our asses and our dicks in our hands total awesomeness. Business should and need to fail like the forest needs to burn to bring about new fresh growth and some forward thinking companies are like the old trees that surived. When you invest money into nothing that what you get in return. When you invest in making things and employing people you get monetry rewards as well as moral rewards.

 

[Boca]

GM management?
Ever wonder, con, with limited grasp on human process of thinking , if GM went totally bust, what would bond holders get?

Uhhh....they would have a claim to the assets as debtholders. In a restucturing, which it was, they would have received equity. They were strongarmed by a criminal regime before the matter went to the bankruptcy court. Their investment, for some there life savings, was effectively STOLEN from them and given to unions in the form of ownership.

Your avatar says it all.

 

[Lukey]

If the company went public and then went bankrupt, that isn't (necessarily) Bain's fault. He's already debunked the claims in Newt's film (lets see what he has to say about these Post claims):

We've been keeping regular track of claims made about Mitt Romney's business history over at our Mitt Meter, but today's video "documentary" from the Gingrich-affiliated Winning Our Future PAC requires its own post. The ominous music, deep-voiced narrator and tales of worker woe were all to be expected. But I also thought that the video would get most of its basic facts correct (and then cover them in innuendo). I was wrong.

The video titled When Mitt Romney Came to Town discusses several Bain Capital companies that eventually went bankrupt or were shut down. What follows is a series of errors:

UniMac

UniMac was a Marianna, Fla.-based laundry equipment manufacturer that had been around for more than 50 years. A former worker is quoted in the video as saying: "They pulled everybody together and told us we were being sold to Raytheon, which in turn turned out to be Bain." The worker adds that quality control was sacrificed, saying: "I just wish they'd left us alone in the early 90s... at the end they just decided to shut the doors."

The reality, however, is that Raytheon (RTN) and Bain weren't the same thing. And Bain wasn't involved in the early 1990s. Raytheon agreed to purchase UniMac in 1994, and later merged it into a broader commercial laundry unit that also included facilities in Wisconsin and Kentucky. Raytheon then sold that unit four years later to Bain Capital for $358 million, alongside another private equity firm.

Bain would then hold onto the company until December 2004, when it sold it to a Canadian pension system's private equity division for $450 million. The Florida plant and some others would close under the Canadian firm's stewardship, not under Bain's, in October 2005. Moreover, Romney left Bain Capital in 1999, although he retained a financial interest.

The UniMac section also quotes a NY Magazine story about Romney saying that his Bain colleagues had a "high disdain" for "sloppy" American workers. It insinuates that these were Romney's Bain Capital colleagues working on UniMac, but it actually referred to Bain & Co. consultants from decades earlier.

KB Toys

"Romney and Bain bought the 80 year-old company in 2000." Again, Romney left Bain in 1999 and had no operational role thereafter. It is true that he remained an investor, but so did dozens of university endowments, private foundations and pension systems. None of them played a part in Bain's investment decisions or portfolio company management.

The video also plays a video of Romney speaking at Emory University in 2010, and suggests that he refers to the ultimate failure of KB Toys as "creative destruction." This is taken completely out of context. Romney's Emory comment was pulled from a 45-minute interview that never once mentioned KB Toys. Instead, he was discussing broader economic productivity issues.

DDI Corp.

The video discusses the DDI Corp., a printed circuit board maker that Bain first acquired (alongside several other PE firms) in 1996. It suggests that "Romney and Bain" began firing DDI employees just before taking it public, including 275 Colorado workers. Again, there is a timing problem. Those Colorado employees were let go in early 2000, after Romney left Bain. The IPO also occurred after Romney had left.

The filmmakers later acknowledge that Romney had left Bain prior to the IPO, but then use a 13D filing to "prove otherwise." Fortune has reviewed the filing, which does place Romney on the management committee of a Bain fund that controlled DDI shares. Bain has insisted, however, that Romney had no operational role at Bain after leaving -- with a source telling Fortune that Romney's departure for the Olympic Games was hasty, and that the fund management committee listing was just a legacy signatory role that involved no actual decision-making capabilities.

More importantly, DDI didn't file for bankruptcy until two years after its IPO, and two years after Bain had already sold all of its shares. The video insinuates that Bain knew the company was in trouble when it "dumped" its shares in 2001, but gives no evidence to support its claim.

 

[GordonGecko]

ALL the Democrats have to do now with Bain?


Is quote Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry.

 

[Lukey]

ALL the Democrats have to do now with Bain?


Is quote Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry.

I have news for you GG, if the economic malaise continues Romney can argue that these kinds of harsh capitalist moves are exactly what are needed to clear out the dead wood in our economy and free up capital for new (more profitable) endeavors. No amount of leftist spin is going to change the fact that no one gets rich by killing viable businesses...

 

[Dawg]

wondering if any dem/lib investors invest in Bain?

maybe they only invest in Gorebal's

 

[NCmusicman]

No, Obama will not be allowed to bring his socialism/stalinism/marxismcommunism to America... he was stopped in 2010.

ABO 2012.