Romney and Bain....a little deeper look.

[TeyshaBlue]

Enlightening discussion of predatory capital.

Mitt Romney: American Parasite
http://www.dallasobserver.com/2012-04-19/news/mitt-romney-american-parasite/

[boutons_deux]

"Ann Romney ... told ABC that "it's our turn now" to assume the presidency."

... another kind of "entitlement culture" that doesn't bother the Repugs and conservatives in the least.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5h-RFBsZuRcW5KAhBauFHTR0lj9lA?docId=2d39907accec4658a 713244f3d1aca6d

[boutons_deux]

"Romney has repeatedly claimed to have created 100,000 jobs at Bain, and says that providing work for Americans was a primary company goal."

He Lies

A Bain guy said "no". The primary goal was to make money for Bain and its investors.

[TeyshaBlue]

Yeah, boutons. We can read the article.

[RandomGuy]

I am generally a fan of venture capital, but the cases they cited were pretty... damning to a man who says that he was a shiny knight who always managed things better than previous owners.


But if critics are quick to disregard Romney's triumphs, defenders are equally swift to rationalize his catastrophes. They'll note that for all Romney's bankruptcies, most were rescued by new companies and survive today. It's the final dollar tally that matters.

Yet they seem strangely incurious about the ruin he's delivered across the country. Take Kansas City, for example.

The Armco plant closing involved more than the torching of 750 jobs, Morrow says. Contractors and suppliers collapsed. Workers' children and widows lost health care and pension benefits. And while Bain received millions in tax breaks — paid for by the very people left holding the bag — Romney walked away millions richer.

So one might forgive everyday Americans for feeling they're on the wrong end of a rigged game, one where the wealthy always win — no matter how inept — and the little guy is left to hack through the debris.

So in January, The Wall Street Journal did its best to piece together Romney's track record, reviewing 77 investments made under his direction. It turned out that nearly one in three of the companies experienced severe financial trouble. One in five wound up in bankruptcy.

The more telling figure: Of Romney's 10 biggest moneymakers, he ultimately destroyed four of them, leaving bankruptcy judges to clean up the mess.

As Foster sees it, Romney was an early pioneer of gaming the system. It would take another decade before large banks used many of the same principles to detonate the mortgage industry.

"The great irony is that his entire management experience at Bain Capital is buying companies and loading them up with debt and then looting the balance sheet," Foster says. "It's the very model that drove the American economy off the cliff, then left other people to manage the wreckage."

.

Leverage, loot, dump.

Not exactly the kind of skill one wants in a president.

[Yonivore]

You know, some people don't see Barack Obama's involvement with ACORN and their extortionist suits against banks to make bad loans under the Community Reinvestment Act as much different.

Arguably, that eventually had a larger, more negative impact on the economy than Bain Capital making decisions, unpopular to you but, that gave their investors an 88% annual return on their investment.

It was their company, right?

It was their money, correct?

I know, it's a sad story. As sad as the 20,000 employees put out of work by Obama's Gulf drilling moratorium.

[elbamba]

Why would a company that was doing so well sell to Bain?

This story was a hack piece as far as I can tell. Comparing what Bain did to Enron is not only incorrect but its a complete lie. Bain did nothing illegal, Enron cooked its books. Could not get past page 1.

[TeyshaBlue]

I am generally a fan of venture capital, but the cases they cited were pretty... damning to a man who says that he was a shiny knight who always managed things better than previous owners.



Leverage, loot, dump.

Not exactly the kind of skill one wants in a president.

I think the article was trying to point out that this was not venture capital. Vulture capital, maybe.

[TeyshaBlue]

Why would a company that was doing so well sell to Bain?

This story was a hack piece as far as I can tell. Comparing what Bain did to Enron is not only incorrect but its a complete lie. Bain did nothing illegal, Enron cooked its books. Could not get past page 1.

The article took pains to repeatedly state that what Bain did was legal. It's a hack piece in regards to what, exactly?

[Yonivore]

Are we suffering a steel rod shortage?

And, while I have absolutely no knowledge on the matter, I wouldn't be surprised to learn the Steelworkers Union at Georgetown Steel was intransigent about some concession Bain asked for, and so, Bain said fuck 'em.

Yep, I'd bet there's a union story in there somewhere...but, I could be wrong.

[TeyshaBlue]

Are we suffering a steel rod shortage?

And, while I absolutely no knowledge, I wouldn't be surprised to learn the Steelworkers Union at Georgetown Steel was intransigent about some concession Bain asked for, and so, Bain said fuck 'em.

Yep, I'd bet there's a union story in there somewhere...but, I could be wrong.

Read the article again for the answers you apparently missed the first time thru.

[elbamba]

Like I said, comparing Bain to Enron on page 1. Whether the writer says what Bain did was legal 10 times. Impling that Bain and Enron are similar in any way is dishonest. Why raise Enron at all if you are giving an informative piece on Romney's work at Bain?

[boutons_deux]

Yoni, brings up CRA as a huge issue, just like he said CRA caused the housing bubble/burst.

Nobody can force the banks to do anything, as we see in the post-2008 period when they have basically refused to help the underwater buyers, nor accept responsibility for their criminally fraudulent (non)paperwork (MERS).

The only people who talked about CRA were assholes like Yoni blowing smokescreens for the real culprits.

The banks and private lenders DID LEND at sub-prime rates to "red line" areas. And CRA didn't force them to lend.


btw, here's the Repugs protecting TBTF:

House Republicans Serve The Banks By Voting To Repeal Key Anti-Bailout Provision

The House Financial Services Committee voted along party lines to repeal the section of the law that allows the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp to liquidate large, failing financial institutions seized by the government.

This authority was included in the law in an attempt to avoid the type of market chaos and government bailouts that followed the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 by giving the government a mechanism for better controlling the breakup of a financial giant.

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/04/19/467404/republicans-repeal-anti-bailout/

[Yonivore]

Read the article again for the answers you apparently missed the first time thru.
Okay. Done. (Actually, I didn't finish ... again)

First thing that strikes me, that I missed the first time around:


In other words, people like Romney are the wolves, culling the herd of the weak and infirm.
Sounds to me like that's an appropriate activity for a venture capitalist.

The story is a one-sided smear job. Hell, it's title gives that away...there was never going to be anything in that story that was fair-minded to Bain Capital or Romney. I stopped after finishing the part about Georgetown Steel and GSI.

Did the story's author ever get around to offering the other side of the story? Anyone at Bain interviewed? Did they interview the previous owners at Georgetown Steel about how the sale was negotiated?

Was Georgetown Steel really as fiscally sound as the laid off worker claimed? I wouldn't trust that story to tell the truth about it. Does that author have anything nice to say about any venture capitalist firms? Hell, he bills himself as a critic of the profession.

Everything said by the worker is taken, uncritically, and at face value about all the bad things Bain Capital did to them.

What about all the successful companies acquired and owned by Bain Capital? How does Bain decide which ones to bleed and which ones to nurture? I'm sure there's a formula.

One that gave Bain Capital investors an 88% annual return on their investments.

That's success.

[ChumpDumper]

ACORN:rollin:rollin:rollin

[ChumpDumper]

Okay. Done. (Actually, I didn't finish ... again):rollin:rollin:rollin

[TeyshaBlue]

Okay. Done. (Actually, I didn't finish ... again)

First thing that strikes me, that I missed the first time around:


Sounds to me like that's an appropriate activity for a venture capitalist.

The story is a one-sided smear job. Hell, it's title gives that away...there was never going to be anything in that story that was fair-minded to Bain Capital or Romney. I stopped after finishing the part about Georgetown Steel and GSI.

Did the story's author ever get around to offering the other side of the story? Anyone at Bain interviewed? Did they interview the previous owners at Georgetown Steel about how the sale was negotiated?

Was Georgetown Steel really as fiscally sound as the laid off worker claimed? I wouldn't trust that story to tell the truth about it. Does that author have anything nice to say about any venture capitalist firms? Hell, he bills himself as a critic of the profession.

Everything said by the worker is taken, uncritically, and at face value about all the bad things Bain Capital did to them.

What about all the successful companies acquired and owned by Bain Capital? How does Bain decide which ones to bleed and which ones to nurture? I'm sure there's a formula.

One that gave Bain Capital investors an 88% annual return on their investments.

That's success.

Again, if you'd finished the article, you would have the answers to these new questions.

[TeyshaBlue]

Like I said, comparing Bain to Enron on page 1. Whether the writer says what Bain did was legal 10 times. Impling that Bain and Enron are similar in any way is dishonest. Why raise Enron at all if you are giving an informative piece on Romney's work at Bain?

Because, the operational results were largely the same....bankruptcy, liquidation, and job elimination whilst siphoning off a nice little compensation package if you were on top.

[boutons_deux]

I quoted a story earlier from a takeover broker who said Willard Gecko's word was worthless.

Willard Gecko would bid high, scaring off other buyers. Having won, would then not pay the bid amount, knocking off tons of $Ms for "problems".

Sounds like the Willard Gecko we know now. Will say ANYTHING in any situation.

[Winehole23]

metonym? personification? synecdoche? all seem to fit...

[Winehole23]

there's a sort of tacit prosopopeia, posters posters can always attempt to hide their real feelings, if accidentally expressed, under the broad skirts of parody :



it was an impersonation, where's your sense of humor?

[TeyshaBlue]

Whom?

[Yonivore]

Again, if you'd finished the article, you would have the answers to these new questions.
I doubt it. I'm having trouble believing what I've read so far.

Unless you're going to tell me Romney authored this, under a pseudonym, as some sort of self-flaggelating confession; I didn't see any value in continuing beyond the first page.

It's kind of like reading a treatise on Israel written by the Iranian President. The guy is an activist, with an ax to grind over venture capitalists.

There's nothing to see. Obama has already destroyed more industries and more jobs than Romney would ever hope to.

[TeyshaBlue]

You have to approach it with a bit of an open mind. I'm not advocating that you digest every word as gospel, but there are nuggets of good info in here if you're not predisposed to ignore what you don't want to hear.

[TeyshaBlue]

And why the fuck are you couching this v Obama? It's an article largely about predatory capital...a story that Romney happened to star in for a few chapters.

[Spurminator]

Stop criticizing our benevolent job creators.

[CosmicCowboy]

I don't advocate what Bain did. There were a lot of abuses and those guys made obscene amounts of money. Mix a company like Bain with a junk bond King like Milken at Drexel Burnham and somebody is damn sure gonna get screwed. No doubt Romney's a smart motherfucker, though.

[boutons_deux]

Willard Gecko is a dumb mofo.

He probably hired smart lawyers and finance guys to do the gut/technical work. Willard Gecko probably stuck with the simple Big Picture negotiations.

[CosmicCowboy]

You are completely full of Boushit.

[Yonivore]

You have to approach it with a bit of an open mind. I'm not advocating that you digest every word as gospel, but there are nuggets of good info in here if you're not predisposed to ignore what you don't want to hear.
I don't like wasting my time on what is clearly a partisan hit piece.

I would encourage the people who lost their jobs to Bain Capital's parasitic practices to not vote for Romney. That's the best I can offer.

Frankly, I have no problem with a company that provides and 88% return on investments and can claim corporate successes such as Dunkin' Donuts and AMC theaters and Staples.

[greyforest]

everyone here should go watch enron: smartest guys in the room

[Nbadan]

Your 2012 GOP Presidential nominee...

http://vizfact.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/wall-streets-mitt-romney-bain-capital.jpg

[possessed]

Your 2012 GOP Presidential nominee...

http://vizfact.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/wall-streets-mitt-romney-bain-capital.jpg

You're just pissed because there's a similar picture floating around of Obama with his homies. Well... Instead of flashing cash they have food stamps. But still...

[Winehole23]

David Stockman, himself a erstwhile Blackstone wheeler dealer, pulls back the curtains and lays the wood to the Romney mythos:


Bain Capital is a product of the Great Deformation. It has garnered fabulous winnings through leveraged speculation in financial markets that have been perverted and deformed by decades of money printing and Wall Street coddling by the Fed. So Bain’s billions of profits were not rewards for capitalist creation; they were mainly windfalls collected from gambling in markets that were rigged to rise.

Mitt Romney was not a businessman; He was a master financial speculator who bought, sold, flipped, and stripped businesses. (Charles Ommanney / Getty Images)
Nevertheless, Mitt Romney claims that his essential qualification to be president is grounded in his 15 years as head of Bain Capital, from 1984 through early 1999. According to the campaign’s narrative, it was then that he became immersed in the toils of business enterprise, learning along the way the true secrets of how to grow the economy and create jobs. The fact that Bain’s returns reputedly averaged more than 50 percent annually during this period is purportedly proof of the case—real-world validation that Romney not only was a striking business success but also has been uniquely trained and seasoned for the task of restarting the nation’s sputtering engines of capitalism.

Except Mitt Romney was not a businessman; he was a master financial speculator who bought, sold, flipped, and stripped businesses. He did not build enterprises the old-fashioned way—out of inspiration, perspiration, and a long slog in the free market fostering a new product, service, or process of production. Instead, he spent his 15 years raising debt in prodigious amounts on Wall Street so that Bain could purchase the pots and pans and castoffs of corporate America, leverage them to the hilt, gussy them up as reborn “roll-ups,” and then deliver them back to Wall Street for resale—the faster the better.

That is the modus operandi of the leveraged-buyout business, and in an honest free-market economy, there wouldn’t be much scope for it because it creates little of economic value. But we have a rigged system—a regime of crony capitalism—where the tax code heavily favors debt and capital gains, and the central bank purposefully enables rampant speculation by propping up the price of financial assets and battering down the cost of leveraged finance.

So the vast outpouring of LBOs in recent decades has been the consequence of bad policy, not the product of capitalist enterprise. I know this from 17 years of experience doing leveraged buyouts at one of the pioneering private-equity houses, Blackstone, and then my own firm. I know the pitfalls of private equity. The whole business was about maximizing debt, extracting cash, cutting head counts, skimping on capital spending, outsourcing production, and dressing up the deal for the earliest, highest-profit exit possible. Occasionally, we did invest in genuine growth companies, but without cheap debt and deep tax subsidies, most deals would not make economic sense.


http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/10/14/david-stockman-mitt-romney-and-the-bain-drain.html

[boutons_deux]

"maximizing debt, extracting cash, cutting head counts, skimping on capital spending, outsourcing production, and dressing up the deal for the earliest, highest-profit exit possible"

but TB and ilk said Gecko was all about CREATING JOBS! :lol TB :lol

And Gecko swears he knows how to create jobs from his business experience. :lol

Gecko, Ryan, Repugs, TOTAL FRAUDS, like nearly all the "pure" conservatives here.

[TeyshaBlue]

"maximizing debt, extracting cash, cutting head counts, skimping on capital spending, outsourcing production, and dressing up the deal for the earliest, highest-profit exit possible"

but TB and ilk said Gecko was all about CREATING JOBS! :lol TB :lol

And Gecko swears he knows how to create jobs from his business experience. :lol

Gecko, Ryan, Repugs, TOTAL FRAUDS, like nearly all the "pure" conservatives here.




I posted the OP, idiot. Unlike you, I can see various angles to a particular story/event.

It's called intellectual honesty, you fucking hack. http://homerecording.com/bbs/images/smilies/facepalm.gif

[boutons_deux]

I posted the OP, idiot. Unlike you, I can see various angles to a particular story/event.

It's called intellectual honesty, you fucking hack. http://homerecording.com/bbs/images/smilies/facepalm.gif

Tell us again how many Bs of jobs Gecko created. And of course, please limit yourself to when Bain was the controlling owner, not some passive investor.

[TeyshaBlue]

Tell us again how many Bs of jobs Gecko created. And of course, please limit yourself to when Bain was the controlling owner, not some passive investor.

I've already provided examples to back my premise. You were bitch slapped into oblivion and, predictably, you tried to move the goal posts as well because you lack the cognitive ability to think critically.

[TeyshaBlue]

and lol @ billions. Keep trying, bot.

[TeyshaBlue]

Again, this is why nobody at ST takes you seriously.

[boutons_deux]

TB :lol

TB can't see "Bs" as prosaic licence with "exaggeration for the effect of ridiculing TB" :lol

TB, true believer, aka faith-based fantasy, in all things Bain and Gecko/Ryan :lol

[TeyshaBlue]

TB :lol

TB can't see "Bs" as prosaic licence with "exaggeration for the effect of ridiculing TB" :lol

TB, true believer, aka faith-based fantasy, in all things Bain and Gecko/Ryan :lol

lol at getting bitch slapped again and hiding in a huge straw fort.
Pathetic. Fucking coward.