Posted on 01/10/2012 3:24:25 PM PST by Laissez-faire capitalist
"...Mitt Romney says he saved Bain & Co. but he didn't tell you the day he took over he had his predecessor fire hundreds of employees or the way the company was rescued was with a federal bailout of $10 million dollars. According to the Globe, Romney's company failed to repay at least $10 million dollars to a failed bank and the rest of us had to absorb the loss. Romney, he and others made $4 million dollars in this deal which cost ordinary people $10 million dollars. Mitt Romney - maybe he's just against government when it helps working men and women..."
(Excerpt) Read more at youtube.com ...
Axelrod and the Democrats will be against this type of capitalistic behavior, but any real conservative should be defending it.
Republicans should be pro-business and pro-capitalism.
It is disturbing that we have so many Gingrich supporters on Free Republic who do not understand that. I'm not sure what they are doing on this site.
We can't let Romney or Gingrich
These anti-capitalism socialists should be on the Daily Kos instead.
.
As an adult working in corporate America, I have survived numerous downsizing and participated in acquisitions and mergers. My management team always wanted to do the best they could to make the company stronger (good for shareholders and employees too), and honor the Employees as best we could.
I have participated on boards and had to order downsizing. But approached this task with concern and practicality as a necessity.
But If Bain actually followed the business model of some of the worst of the corporate raiders, I don't think you would approve of those methods. I know I don't.
I want to see the facts - what did they do, and why did they do it? Then I'll know for sure. What I suspect from what I remember from the 90’s and what has been released so far, is that honest business people will not approve of some of the tactics.
At any rate, Newt is right to bring attention to what could very well sink a Romney campaign before it barely gets started. Maybe he could have chosen better words, and maybe his motives aren't the best(I can't read his heart).
I don't consider questioning business tactics of corporate raiders as an attack on Capitalism, any more than I would consider someone questioning a bounty hunter's mistake as being an attack on law enforcement.
I just know the issue needs to be fully vetted before people make a decision on who they support. Peace be with you. God Bless.
Since when did stealing peoples pension funds become a
Right of center argument? Newt is attacking Romney for Vulture Capitalism....last time I checked that is not what I would call conservative!
Exactly, LFC. Bullseye.
Romney cannot win. In fact, of all the elections in his life, he has won only one, and he screwed that up so badly he dropped out rather than lose trying to get re-elected. His replacement was defeated so badly, she's still trying to figure out which way is up.
You have twenty years on me. I’ve been running my business for ten.
Prior to that I worked in the telecom and financial businesses. In each I managed through recessions and mergers. I had one afternoon where I had to call in a department, one by one, and lay them off. And it was the department I started with out of college. I laid off half a dozen guys I knew better than members of my family. It was horrible.
But Mitt was the worst kind of turn around guy. He did not show up to “help.”. He showed up with his consultant buddies, and tore and ripped until the company was completely squeezed. Now some places survive that. Most don’t.
As a governor he was more interested in running for President he was gone most of the time.
Hate doesn’t begin to describe what I feel for this empty suit rich kid.
The ad that will run in this cycle won’t be just the Kennedy cycle ad.
There’s now a much larger question that can be asked and left hanging in the air:
Why is Bain Capital using the Cayman Islands to shield their accounts and funds from US laws?
People who are hard-core libertarians will say “Well, people have a moral right to shield their income and assets from tax laws.”
OK, I’ll yield them that point. I choose where I live in the US, in part, to avoid states with high levels of taxation. I domicile my business in these states to avoid high taxation. What Bain (and other funds) are doing is just an extra-national level of tax arbitrage. In effect, I have no ground upon which to stand to criticize Romney for shielding assets from legal proceedings or taxation, since I’m doing the same thing, only inside the US national jurisdiction.
But in response, I will demand that these defenders of Bain/Romney (and Bain themselves) explain “why the Cayman Islands?” Why not Bermuda? Or the Isle of Man, Wright or other well known, “upstanding” tax havens? The Caymans are hardly the only game in town. There are several well known US publicly traded companies that are domiciled in Bermuda, for example. Some companies are also domiciled in Ireland and Switzerland for tax reasons. Luxembourg is yet another nice location for banking secrecy and tax avoidance.
The only reason I know of to choose the Caymans over more “legit” tax shelter domiciles is that you want to be able to take in money that you otherwise would not be able to under US and other national law(s). eg, someone who shows up at your doorstep and offers you several hundred mil in cash to invest in your fund... from South America. You don’t ask questions, and being that the Cayman bankers don’t ask questions either.... Ta-da, you’re now handling money for a drug cartel. You don’t know this positively, but you can infer it. What you can’t say is that your investors are positively, absolutely NOT drug cartels.
If I were Obama’s campaign hacks, I’d write the ad like this:
“Romney set up offshore trusts for Bain Capital in the Cayman Islands, the preferred banking destination for drug cartels and the Russian mob.”
I don’t have to accuse Romney of actually taking money from these guys. Romney, however, now has the job of proving that he doesn’t... and want to know something?
He can’t. He’d have to open the kimono and show where all his investors are from, and the Bain group of funds/trusts ain’t about to do that. Not until hell freezes over.
Point, set and match for Team Obama.
The people who are vociferously defending Romney and Bain simply don’t know as much as they should before rushing to Romney’s defense. They’re defending Romney and Bain because they think they’re defending capitalism... when what they’re doing is conflating “making money” with capitalism. We don’t think that a bank robber is engaging in capitalism, do we? Even tho the bank robber is going to create a higher economic multiplier by spending the loot he takes from a bank at gunpoint than those deposits would make sitting in the bank, we don’t call that “capitalism.”
These “defenses” of “capitalism” are similar to the same confused and misguided arguments for the bankers committing fraud upon the courts in foreclosure proceedings, or for cooking their books with mark-to-fantasy accounting. The moral of the story is this: Just because someone used their brain to make money does not make them a capitalist. More money is being robbed from the American people by MBA’s with briefcases and laptops than by people with cheap guns in banks or on the street.
Now, I’ll tell people to ask themselves a question one more time, since people leaping to Romney’s defense seem to not be making the connection:
Why has Romney not yet formulated a response strategy to these sorts of attacks yet? This is his THIRD national-level campaign in which these questions will be asked. If he were a normal sort of person, he would have had a slick response in the 2007-2008 campaign cycle - and he didn’t. Let’s say that Willard rode the short bus to school (and being that he went to Harvard for two degrees, this is entirely possible) and it takes him longer to learn what other people learn in one go-round: Why doesn’t he have a canned response set up by this campaign?
The only possible answers are “Willard rode the REALLY short bus to school!” or “He can’t address the issue, he has to deflect and hope it goes away.”
Neither is a qualification for being POTUS.
Now, one more thing here, since people here on FR seem to be so hot-headed about defending “capitalism” from the likes of people like me, telling me that I’m all sorts of marxist and don’t know my ass from a hot rock about capitalism.
I’m going to go on the record and tell people that in 2000, I had an off-shore asset scheme pitched at me by lawyers.
Yes, little ol’ me, former engineer, former farmer, curmudgeon-in-training was pitched a scheme to domicile into an offshore tax haven while remaining a US citizen living inside the US.
These lawyers claimed that not only could I protect my future earnings and capital gains from taxes in the US, but they also claimed that I could “unring the bell” with the IRS - ie, claw back taxes I’d already paid to the IRS (and at that point, I’d already paid a rather hefty sum to the IRS in taxation on non-qualified stock options). This last point is where my bullshit detector started ringing like a nine-alarm fire. When people start lying with numbers, engineers’ BS detectors start ringing. Lawyers think they can bamboozle people with a fog of numeric BS - and they probably can to most people. I eat math and numbers for breakfast. These guys were trying to blow sunshine up my backside with numbers, and engineers get real pissy when people try to do that. They also didn’t know that while I might have a CPA look over our taxes, I do them myself. I don’t throw all our paperwork into a shoebox and dump it on a CPA’s doorstep and say “Call me with the 1040 and the bill.” No, I know the tax law pretty well all by myself and use this in planning my trading, investing and business formation/execution.
I won’t bore people with the details of the scheme, but suffice to say that it depended upon the offshore trust being set up in (drum roll please) the Cayman Islands. It wasn’t just convenient to put it into the Caymans, it *needed* to be in the Caymans.
My spouse and I investigated the scheme with some quiet inquiries to other tax lawyers, a big-name accounting firm that writes “tax letters” as well as the IRS and found out that it was black-letter illegal, but the IRS at that time was too busy doing other things to get frothy about it. The tax letter was going to take the IRS time to take down in court, and they didn’t know how much tax revenue they stood to gain from doing so at that time, so they didn’t pursue the issue at that time.
Lawyers at one of the (then) “Big Six” accounting firms warned us that “one day,” the IRS would make a move on some of these schemes, that the tax letter the lawyers who pitched this scheme at us were using was... tainted and being stretched to fit a situation that it didn’t originally address. It was going to lose in tax court, it was only a matter of time. Further, someone defending the letter in court with their own lawyers was going to basically admitting to the IRS that they were dodging taxes... because no one defends tax letters just for the heck of it on their own dime. When the IRS goes after a scheme like this by taking the tax letter into court, you have to get your money into some other trust or corporate formation, often re-domiciling it somewhere else the IRS isn’t looking. This takes time, and your ability to handle this quickly is limited, since lawyers in foreign countries don’t move as fast as US lawyers do. Or you have to basically confess your evasion, bring your money back onshore and pay up back taxes and penalties.
Suffice to say, we didn’t proceed with this scheme. But I know they exist, I know a little of how they’re structured, and why they choose the Caymans... because it was pitched to me by a fast-talking tax lawyer, two estate planning lawyers and a CPA all in the same room with a Powerpoint presentation they “just happened to have” when we came into their offices on an estate planning issue. Yea, “just happened to have.” That was more BS. The tax lawyer and the slick CPA also “just happened” to be in the estate lawyers’ offices that afternoon. It was just an alignment of the stars that came together to put us into the office that afternoon with all those off-shore specialists. Yea, uh-huh, riiiiiight.
Back to Willard: He’s deluding himself if he thinks that this won’t hit the press in a big way. There’s no way he can defend himself against the incongruous dichotomy of raising taxes in MA while benefitting from offshore tax havens in the Caymans.
Who is seeking refuge on Romney’s candidacy? Stop making idiotic attributions. Obama is a Marxist. He will make all those arguments and IF Romney ends up as the nominee, he will have to defend against such attacks.
What I expect of GOP candidates is no Marxist rhetoric. I don’t expect them to be Marxists just because of the prospect that the target of such attacks has the possibility of facing a real Marxist in the General election.
That's a powerful point. It needs a link and numbers.
RUSH: Bain Capital is in the news, obviously. That’s the investment outfit that Romney helped found. Do you know that, according to the Washington Post... this is from last fall, last October. “According to the Washington Post, Obama raised more campaign money from Bain Capital than Mitt Romney.” Bain Capital has contributed more money to Obama than they have to Romney. Got it right here. “According to the Washington Post,” and actually it’s a secondary story. It’s a Washington Examiner story from last October, but they are citing the Washington Post: “Obama raised more campaign money from Bain Capital than Mitt Romney.” Now, “Romney made his fortune working for Bain Capital, but only raised $34,000 in donations from 18 Bain employees.
Obama, however, has already raised $76,600 from just three employees” at Bain. Now, this was last fall. “Of course Obama can raise money for both his campaign and for the DNC, making it easier to raise more money from fewer donors.” But the bottom line is that for all this talk about Romney and Bain Capital, the majority of Bain Capital’s donations have gone to Obama, not to Romney.
END TRANSCRIPT
I’m gonna have to agree with you on this.
It’s a real shame. This was a great country.
Yours is the rational approach. We have to know how many laudable deals Bain did and how many malicious deals they did where they found ways to bleed excessive profits (via dividends and management fees) out of an acquisition knowing this would bankrupt the company. Thus screwing the other shareholders and forcing the taxpayers to bail out the pension plan (via the Federal agency that does this)
Why didn’t Massachusetts Democrats try to tar Romney with Bain’s activities? Maybe Bain was so clean they couldn’t
How often did Bain pull this stunt where the taxpayers are forced to bail out the pension plan of a Bain acquisition after Bain strips them clean? I’m sure the Obama campaign knows. I would like to know. Maybe this was rare. But if it happened a lot this kills Mitt as a candidate who can beat Obama
“Yours is the rational approach. We have to know how many laudable deals Bain did and how many malicious deals they did where they found ways to bleed excessive profits (via dividends and management fees) out of an acquisition knowing this would bankrupt the company. Thus screwing the other shareholders and forcing the taxpayers to bail out the pension plan (via the Federal agency that does this)
Why didn’t Massachusetts Democrats try to tar Romney with Bain’s activities? Maybe Bain was so clean they couldn’t”
I think I read on another thread that Kennedy did use Bain to defeat Romney for Senate. There was a link, but I did not explore it because it was way past my bedtime.
OK. I clicked the link. It was from hardball YUCK. Anyway there was plenty of knowledge about this because of an article in the Boston Globe. There was an ad used that had people who had lost their jobs saying they would like to see those jobs he created, because there weren’t any in their town.
One ad that was made was not used, because Kennedy was already so far ahead of Romney, it wasn’t needed. But over all it seems that knowledge of Bain was known and played a part in that contest.
The anti-Bain propaganda did not work when Romney got elected governor...maybe they didn’t use it. The economy was better back then. In these depressed times with OWS out there, the anti-Bain charges will stick better. When used by Obama against Romney
Well, even if they used it, he might have been able to counter it, and like you say the politics of the economy back then would have been very different from today.
Even if the majority of Bain capital's companies came out better, if there are some which make Romney look like Gordon Grekco, then I have real doubts that he can defeat Obama. Plus his defense today just equated what Obama did with GM. That means Obamanomics = Romneynomics. It's already over.
I don’t know either, but I bet you’re right...Obama knows.
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