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.
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!
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.
Will these Democrat OWS type points (’Greed’,’Getting rich’ ) resonate with Republican primary voters or will they backfire? It seems to me that the specific points made on this sound just like what anyone can hear on MSNBC very-night. I hope the other candidates don't start bragging that they are part of the other 99%ers
Alternatively since Romney is bragging about creating jobs in the private sector any job destruction he was involved with is relevant to this debate.
A conservative would need to split hairs to side with Romney on this one issue. Why do so when that is the only history of Romney that they can agree with him about?
Especially considering Romney is looking to stick a knife in all our backs.
To Hell with Romney and the horse he rode in on!
I would urge EVERYONE (especially you Romney supporters AND those that have gone off the deep end thinking that Newt is attacking Capitalism) to watch the video at the bottom of this page:
http://legalinsurrection.com/2012/01/selling-out-capitalism-in-the-defense-of-romney-and-bain/
This is ONLY ONE of the troublesome Bain issues that MUST be vetted NOW. If we don’t do it now, you know that it will ALL come out later!
This company is dead. I didn't kill it. Don't blame me. It was dead when I got here. It's too late for prayers. For even if the prayers were answered, and a miracle occurred, and the yen did this, and the dollar did that, and the infrastructure did the other thing, we would still be dead. You know why? Fiber optics. New technologies. Obsolescence. We're dead alright. We're just not broke. And you know the surest way to go broke? Keep getting an increasing share of a shrinking market. Down the tubes. Slow but sure.
You know, at one time there must’ve been dozens of companies makin’ buggy whips. And I'll bet the last company around was the one that made the best goddamn buggy whip you ever saw. Now how would you have liked to have been a stockholder in that company? You invested in a business and this business is dead. Let's have the intelligence, let's have the decency to sign the death certificate, collect the insurance, and invest in something with a future.
“Ah, but we can't,” goes the prayer. “We can't because we have responsibility, a responsibility to our employees, to our community. What will happen to them?” I got two words for that: Who cares? Care about them? Why? They didn't care about you. They sucked you dry. You have no responsibility to them. For the last ten years this company bled your money. Did this community ever say, “We know times are tough. We'll lower taxes, reduce water and sewer.” Check it out: You're paying twice what you did ten years ago. And our devoted employees, who have taken no increases for the past three years, are still making twice what they made ten years ago; and our stock — one-sixth what it was ten years ago.
Who cares? I'll tell ya: Me. I'm not your best friend. I'm your only friend. I don't make anything? I'm makin’ you money. And lest we forget, that's the only reason any of you became stockholders in the first place. You wanna make money! You don't care if they manufacture wire and cable, fried chicken, or grow tangerines! You wanna make money! I'm the only friend you've got. I'm makin’ you money.
Take the money. Invest it somewhere else. Maybe, maybe you'll get lucky and it'll be used productively. And if it is, you'll create new jobs and provide a service for the economy and, God forbid, even make a few bucks for yourselves. And if anybody asks, tell ‘em ya gave at the plant.
Danny Devito/Garfield speech from 'Other Peoples Money'
There is the instrument of our destruction. I want you to look at him in all of his glory, Larry “The Liquidator,” the entrepreneur of post-industrial America, playing God with other people's money.
The Robber Barons of old at least left something tangible in their wake — a coal mine, a railroad, banks. This man leaves nothing. He creates nothing. He builds nothing. He runs nothing. And in his wake lies nothing but a blizzard of paper to cover the pain. Oh, if he said, “I know how to run your business better than you,” that would be something worth talking about. But he's not saying that. He's saying, “I'm going to kill you because at this particular moment in time, you're worth more dead than alive.”
Well, maybe that's true, but it is also true that one day this industry will turn. One day when the yen is weaker, the dollar is stronger, or, when we finally begin to rebuild our roads, our bridges, the infrastructure of our country, demand will skyrocket. And when those things happen, we will still be here, stronger because of our ordeal, stronger because we have survived. And the price of our stock will make his offer pale by comparison.
God save us if we vote to take his paltry few dollars and run. God save this country if that is truly the wave of the future. We will then have become a nation that makes nothing but hamburgers, creates nothing but lawyers, and sells nothing but tax shelters. And if we are at that point in this country, where we kill something because at the moment it's worth more dead than alive — well, take a look around. Look at your neighbor. Look at your neighbor. You won't kill him, will you? No. It's called murder and it's illegal.
Well, this too is murder — on a mass scale. Only on Wall Street, they call it “maximizing share-holder value” and they call it “legal.” And they substitute dollar bills where a conscience should be. Dammit! A business is worth more than the price of its stock. It's the place where we earn our living, where we meet our friends, dream our dreams. It is, in every sense, the very fabric that binds our society together.
So let us now, at this meeting, say to every Garfield in the land, “Here, we build things. We don't destroy them. Here, we care about more than the price of our stock! Here, we care about people.
Jorgenson/Gregory Peck speech from 'Other Peoples Money'