Posted on 01/11/2012 7:43:12 AM PST by Comrade Brother Abu Bubba
Negative ads are rolling out about Mitt Romney's tenure at Bain Capital, trying to paint him as the sort of privileged money guy who created the financial meltdown.
opponents are lining up to attack him over his time as head of Bain Capital, in case you haven’t heard. They’re going to accuse him of bankrupting companies, throwing people out of work, and generally behaving like Gordon Gekko, the amoral Michael Douglas character from the flick “Wall Street.” "Greed is good"
“If he ends up looking more like an opportunist who profited for the few, instead of a man who created jobs for the many, it’s hard to imagine his poll numbers won’t drop,” write Politico’s Reid Epstein and Jim VandeHei.
(Excerpt) Read more at csmonitor.com ...
The Democrats will come out with an ad where Gordon Gekko formally endorses Mitt Romney. Conservative Republicans should beat the Democrats to the punch. Knock out Mitt Gekko, NOW.
BS
Romney used Bain to raid workers pension funds then stuck the government (US taxpayers) with the bill. If criticism of that is anti-capitalist then I guess I am not a capitalist.
Go Newt!
The problem with attacking Romney about what he did at Bain is that it has caused conservatives (real ones) to do the unthinkable - defending Romney.
Romney has enough of which to be critical, starting with Romneycare, which is anti-free enterprise. It’s stoopid to be attacking him for when he actually practiced capitalism.
Sorry, not interested in going OWS at this time. I’ll check back when conservatives reappear on this topic.
The Democrats will do what they always do. They would like nothing better than to parade out Bain Capital as a failure of capitalism to take the edge off how ObaMao, Bwaney Frank, George Soros and company have really screwed up the country since taking over congress in 2007.
Stick to ObamaCare = RomneyCare. That's a strategy which actually makes sense.
I think the whole meme of “Gingrich’s attacks on Romney’s Bain activity are leftist class warfare” is bogus. Venture capital is not based on production, but on taking advantage of good marketing and overly-cheap financing costs. It thrived during the late 90s and 2000s because Greenspan—government—kept financing costs artificially low. This spawned excessive speculatory activity in financial markets that caused market participants to not properly price risk.
So all a VC did was take a company private, issue huge amounts of debt to generate cash, pay itself that cash via a “dividend,” and then sell the company out in an IPO. Any logical measure would say the VC people just made the company less valuable, because it just squandered its capital and screwed over debt holders in the process. But because of Greenspan’s artificial cap on interest rates and his huge continuous flood of money into the markets, the stock market would tend to buy back the company at more than they sold it to the VC in the first place. The process was this: At the time the private equity guys took a company private, the stock of money was at X. In a few years, because of Greespan, the stock of money was at X + Y, where Y is a large postiive number. That excess money, Y, sitting around, has to be thrown somewhere, so it was thrown into all manner of crazy things like sub-prime, IPOs, etc.
And the bond market, characterized for most of the era by a massive Fed-induced credit bubble, was stupid enough to let the VC guys do it.
This is not how capitalist economies ought to operate, or would operate, under normal conditions.
Sorry, not interested in going OWS at this time. I’ll check back when conservatives reappear on this topic.Yes, but only a goofball of the highest order--a world-class master of goofballishness--would conflate OSW boilerplate anti-capitalism with Willard's lies about his activities at Bain compared with the actual history of Bain Capital: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2831075/posts
What a load of garbage. Venture capital primes the pump of capitalism and of the economy. Nothing Romney did is wrong or anything other than classic capitalism.
I think the whole meme of “Gingrich’s attacks on Romney’s Bain activity are leftist class warfare” is bogus. Venture capital is not based on production, but on taking advantage of good marketing and overly-cheap financing costs. It thrived during the late 90s and 2000s because Greenspan—government—kept financing costs artificially low. This spawned excessive speculatory activity in financial markets that caused market participants to not properly price risk.ftw! Also see: http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/how-many-cheers-bain_616558.html?nopager=1
Bain Capital started out as a venture capital firm. That’s the Staples and Sports Authority era, which DID create jobs. We use Staples for our business office supplies, and will continue to do so. They’re very good to us.
But then Bain Capital morphed into a leveraged buyout firm. Think Henry Kravitz. Their targets were usually strong companies (often with a strong cash position) that were undervalued in the market. They looted these companies, and destroyed jobs.
This mixed record of Bain Capital is confusing to many, and is being used to confuse many more. Learn the facts, and don’t be confused!
Oh shut up, read the above post and stop defending Bernie Madoff Romney.
It’s a sad day when conservatives feel they have to defend disgusting greedy men like Mitt Romney.
Stuff your left-wing anti-capitalism crap up your DU ass. When you become a real conservative and not just an anti-Romney hack get back to me.
Troll.
Here's news for you: They already tried that in Pennsylvania in the 2010 U.S. Senate election against Pat Toomey. They bought wall to wall advertising and sunk millions into blaming Pat Toomey for the market meltdown. They even put those ads on conservative talk radio. The Gekko-Toomey ad aired so often that I can still recite it to you word for word.
Toomey was an investment banker in the Bain Capital era. It worked so well that Joe Sestak, then a sitting Democrat congressman, cruised to an easy win as Pennsylvania's Junior Senator.
“Venture capital is not based on production, but on taking advantage of good marketing and overly-cheap financing costs.”
Yeah, why stop at the VC:s? Why not simply define pretty much all business activity as somehow vaguely immoral because... it uses fed-printed money (yuck!). That´s the “conservative” ticket right there.
What´s next - the labor theory of value as the foundation of GOP economic policy?
“That excess money, Y, sitting around, has to be thrown somewhere, so it was thrown into all manner of crazy things like sub-prime, IPOs, etc.”
Yea, IPO:s and Sub-prime - all the same. Yessiree.
Stuff your left-wing anti-capitalism crap up your DU ass. When you become a real conservative and not just an anti-Romney hack get back to me.Yes, I am anti-Romney, and I call you out for being pro-Romney as you imitate Romney's own conflation of capitalism with the anti-capitalist activities of Bain Capital with "capitalism". Thank you for confirming that you are not a befuddled goofball; rather, you are conscious of your Willardism and hatred for all things conservative.
I’m not sure most people will recognize your post as sarcasm.
“I call you out for being pro-Romney as you imitate Romney’s own conflation of capitalism with the anti-capitalist activities of Bain Capital with “capitalism”.”
Yes, we all know that taking advantage of ‘good marketing’ and ‘cheap financing’, or (G*d forbid!) firing people, is something that Hayek and Friedman would have been dead set against.
...
Oh, wait.
This bull simply has to stop - or Socialism will indeed be the law of the future, not because of Obama, but thanks to the blindness of those ‘conservatives’ who will reach for any weapon at hand.
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