Free Republic

While accusing presidential candidate Mitt Romney of cutting a swath through American industry during his time as a private equity executive, the White House was working with another private equity firm with long-standing Washington ties to save jobs in the Northeast, according to a story in the Wall Street Journal.

The ad is certainly gripping and emotional. It is also, however, completely wrong. The company was shut down in 2001. Romney left Bain in 1999, long before the plant closing, to run Winter Olympics. Two years is an eternity in the business world. Blaming Romney for decisions made two years after the left the company is at best disingenuous. However, there was a political power-player serving as a director of Bain at the time of the company's bankruptcy and layoffs--Jonathan Lavine. Lavine joined Bain in 1993. He is currently Managing Director and Chief Investment Officer. He is also a major...

The Obama campaign is out with a new two-minute attack ad, hitting Mitt Romney on his past at Bain Capital. The ad, set to run in Pennsylvania, Iowa, Ohio, Virginia and Colorado, plays up the “vulture capitalism” angle. “It was like a vampire,” says a former GS Steel worker named Joe Cobb. “They came in and sucked the life out of us.” The Romney campaign is expected to push back aggressively on what they view as a major distraction from the president’s disastrous economic record. It shouldn’t be terribly hard. The bankruptcy and layoffs occurred in 2001, two years after...

Mark Levin spent part of his first hour playing Milton Friedman clips and explaining why Romney’s position on minimum wage is wrong, to educate the man and us. But as you’ll see in his monologue below, it frustrates him very much that he feels he has to do so. He starts by playing a clip of Romney today that he was very much unimpressed with, which then turned into this amazing monologue where he explained why he is frustrated with Romney’s lack of conservatism. This is a MUST LISTEN. Here is a partial quote from his monologue but you should...

“You’ve got to stop the spread of crony capitalism. [Obama] gives General Motors to the UAW. He takes $500 million and sticks it into Solyndra. He stacks the labor stooges on the NLRB so they can say no to Boeing and take care of their friends in the labor movement. . . . He has to bow to the most extreme members of the environmental movement. He turns down the Keystone pipeline, which would bring energy and jobs to America. “My view is capitalism works. Free enterprise works. . . . There’s nothing wrong with profit, by the way. That...

Romney Parks Millions in Offshore Tax Haven By MATTHEW MOSK, BRIAN ROSS (@brianross) and MEGAN CHUCHMACH (@megcourtney) Jan. 18, 2012 Although it is not apparent on his financial disclosure form, Mitt Romney has millions of dollars of his personal wealth in investment funds set up in the Cayman Islands, a notorious Caribbean tax haven. A spokesperson for the Romney campaign says Romney follows all tax laws and he would pay the same in taxes regardless of where the funds are based. As the race for the Republican nomination heats up, Mitt Romney is finding it increasingly difficult to maintain a...

...“We’ll make that decision on Saturday,” [Perry] said on ABC’s This Week. “It’s our intention to win SouthCarolina and go forward from there. But to try to plan out your campaign months in advance, I think is a little bit of a stretch.” The governor, who trailed in the Iowa caucuses and in the NewHampshire primary, said Sunday that his service in the AirForce will play well with the Palmetto State’s large veterans population. He has also tried to gain votes by attacking front-runner MittRomney as a “vulture” capitalist, a phrase that conservative commentators say sounds like an attack on...

The on-again, off-again battle over how to tax the compensation of private equity managers may be on again, thanks to the confluence of two seemingly unrelated events. The first is the controversy over the role of Bain Capital, the investment partnership whose founders included Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney. The second is the disclosure by another firm, The Carlyle Group, of how its top executives are compensated. Both have heightened the focus on what these outfits do and how they are taxed. Bain and Romney, of course, have come under withering criticism from Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry, who allege...

http://www.webcasts.com/kingofbain

Earlier today, the Politco reported that while campaigning in South Carolina, Newt Gingrich appeared to be backing off his attacks on Mitt Romney's career at Bain Capital. But spokesman R.C. Hammond has just sent around the following email denying any backing off: Newt 2012 released the following statement from Press Secretary R.C. Hammond responding to misleading reports on an exchange Newt Gingrich had with a voter in Spartanburg, SC regarding Mitt Romney’s record at Bain Capital (during which the phrase “I crossed the line” was never uttered from Newt, despite the headline from Politico): “This issue at hand is neither...

On the heels of his decisive victory in the New Hampshire primary, Mitt Romney took the attacks on his private sector record used by GOP rivals and turned them against President Obama. Romney’s critics have accused him of destroying jobs in order to increase profits for his investment firm, Bain Capital, but speaking Wednesday on CBS, Romney said that what he did was no different from the Obama administration’s auto industry bailouts. “In the general election I’ll be pointing out that the president took the reins at General Motors and Chrysler – closed factories, closed dealerships laid off thousands and...

"...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...

Lately, Bain founder and GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney has found himself in a spirited defense of the private equity industry, doing all he can to spin decades of data which confirm, without failure, that PE Leveraged Buy Outs are nothing but "efficiency maximizing" transactions whose only goal is the "maximization" of EBITDA in the pursuit of dividend recap deals, IPOs or outright sales, while loading up the company with untenable amounts of leverage. All this with a 3-5 year investment horizon, which ignores the long-term viability of a company and seeks to streamline (read fire as many as possible)...

In the Republican presidential candidate debates this weekend, Mitt Romney repeated his claim that he is an effective leader who created a "net net" of 100,000 jobs while he was working in the private sector. But three recent reports, by the Los Angeles Times, the Associated Press and by Fact Check.org, the nonprofit nonpartisan project run by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania say that the Romney campaign has yet to offer convincing proof to back up the claim. ... It hardly seems plausible to suggest that he created the positions that make up the current...