The Cellar - Election 2012

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Quote:

Originally Posted by BigV (Post 825732)

What do you think it is a reaction to?

Instead of digging myself into a hole, I tried to do some quick research on Bain Capital along with positive and negative commentary.

I concede that my "reactionary" comment would only apply to a small amount of businesses that Bain worked with, notably manufacturing businesses. My point with those are recognizing the outsourcing and automation that has happened, and will continue to happen to the US manufacturing sector. Basically, foreign labor and machines are much cheaper than US labor, therefore manufacturing jobs will outsource or automate. Regardless of anyone's view on capitalism, which I will get to later, this will happen and there is nothing we can do stop it. That explains my reactionary comment.

Overall, what I have gotten out of this, is that the agreements and disagreements with Bain Capital depend on how we view "modern capitalism".

Do we value overall wealth over anything else (I see this as trickle-down theory)? In that case, Bain Capital was successful since they, overall, increased capital and jobs for the companies they took over.

Or, do we not value overall wealth over anything else (union jobs, benefits, etc.)? In that case, Bain Capital was very harmful to local communities and businesses.

I disagree with Bain because I see this new modern capitalism as a system that promotes wealth inequality and justifies it by claiming that everyone is better off when overall wealth is higher. On the other hand, the tactics used by Bain have become mainstream, therefore, they were simply just ahead of the curve.

Also, I am aware of how they would sometimes basically make money off a dying company but how often would that be? I'm guessing it couldn't happen all the time or else why would anyone allow them to buy them?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Griff (Post 825769)

I'd say that is essentially true. The Dems shouldn't allow Bain to be passed off as a venture capital company though. They need a less loaded term for vulture like maybe maggot. ;) A venture capital company risks money supporting new start ups rather than stripping the bones of weak companies, that is, creating jobs not eliminating them.

How about 'scavenger'? Scavengers lurk around for something dead or dying to eat (failing companies) and take in what's left of it. Then they crap it back out in the form of something potentially good and exactly how and where they crap will determine whether it is successful (nutrients for the soil/plants) or just a stanky pile (on your head).

Quote:

Originally Posted by piercehawkeye45 (Post 825775)

Companies aren't usually owned by the rank and file employees. If the owners were offered a tidy sum, they might take it, and console themselves over the destruction of their company with piles of money.

Or there are hostile takeovers.

I have no idea either, but companies usually stick close to a business model and we've seen some of Bain's work.

The concept of mergers and acquisitions (leveraged buyouts) can go either way. If the purpose of an M&A company is only to make a profit, then companies are disassembled because its pieces are worth more than the company's stock value. That occurs when a company's management is bad (ie General Motors, Chrysler, Kodak).

If the purpose of an M&A company is to make better products and companies, then companies are either disassembled or reorganized to make the economy productive. In this case, profits are a reward; not the objective.

The movie Working Girl (Harrison Ford, Melanie Griffith, Sigourney Weaver) demonstrated leveraged buyouts rechanneled into a productive concluson. What would be a destructive M&A redirected into creating a healthier organization.

KKR (Kohlberg Kravis Roberts) used high yield capital markets to merge RJR and Nabisco into one company. Then sell off parts to repay the debt. IOW KKR did nothing to make the economy or either company prosper. Simply earned massive profits by moving capital around. Incurring massive debt meant liquidity used to enrich the new management while mortaging future profits. Playing money games on a popular myth - a big company is more productive when made even bigger. In reality, a bigger company only ends up with more layers of management. And a massive debt where none existed. IOW how to print money.

Some examples of the resulting destruction include Regal movie theaters, Denny's, Toys-R-Us, and Harmon stereo. Most were profitable for the M&A investment firm. Were either destructive or did nothing for the targetted companies.

Kohlberg eventually had a fallout with Kravis and Roberts because KKR was making money at the expense of large companies (ie RJR Nabisco). And was not earning profits by merging small firms that could profit from being merged with a compatible firm. Mergers and aquisitions can do good for small, existing firms by doing what venture capital does for startups. M&A gets a bad reputation when it mortgages companies (incurs long term debt) for the short term benefit of investors.

Ryan, Rand and the Bible

Just some funny video of Paul Ryan being asked about his love of Ayn Rand by a Catholic activist.

http://dangerousminds.net/comments/p...about_ayn_rand

Ayn Rand has a saving grace: she was anticollectivist, and she could tell people why. Good strong individualism there.

The Real Romney

Quote:

Op-Ed Columnist
The Real Romney
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: August 27, 2012 666 Comments

The purpose of the Republican convention is to introduce America to the real Mitt Romney. Fortunately, I have spent hours researching this subject. I can provide you with the definitive biography and a unique look into the Byronic soul of the Republican nominee:

Mitt Romney was born on March 12, 1947, in Ohio, Florida, Michigan, Virginia and several other swing states. He emerged, hair first, believing in America, and especially its national parks. He was given the name Mitt, after the Roman god of mutual funds, and launched into the world with the lofty expectation that he would someday become the Arrow shirt man.

Romney was a precocious and gifted child. He uttered his first words (“I like to fire people”) at age 14 months, made his first gaffe at 15 months and purchased his first nursery school at 24 months. The school, highly leveraged, went under, but Romney made 24 million Jujubes on the deal.

Mitt grew up in a modest family. His father had an auto body shop called the American Motors Corporation, and his mother owned a small piece of land, Brazil. He had several boyhood friends, many of whom owned Nascar franchises, and excelled at school, where his fourth-grade project, “Inspiring Actuaries I Have Known,” was widely admired.

The Romneys had a special family tradition. The most cherished member got to spend road trips on the roof of the car. Mitt spent many happy hours up there, applying face lotion to combat windburn.

The teenage years were more turbulent. He was sent to a private school, where he was saddened to find there are people in America who summer where they winter. He developed a lifelong concern for the second homeless, and organized bake sales with proceeds going to the moderately rich.

Some people say he retreated into himself during these years. He had a pet rock, which ran away from home because it was starved of affection. He bought a mood ring, but it remained permanently transparent. His ability to turn wine into water detracted from his popularity at parties.

There was, frankly, a period of wandering. After hearing Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side,” Romney decided to leave Mormonism and become Amish. He left the Amish faith because of its ban on hair product, and bounced around before settling back in college. There, he majored in music, rendering Mozart’s entire oeuvre in PowerPoint.

His love affair with Ann Davies, the most impressive part of his life, restored his equilibrium. Always respectful, Mitt and Ann decided to elope with their parents. They went on a trip to Israel, where they tried and failed to introduce the concept of reticence. Romney also went on a mission to France. He spent two years knocking on doors, failing to win a single convert. This was a feat he would replicate during his 2008 presidential bid.

After his mission, he attended Harvard, studying business, law, classics and philosophy, though intellectually his first love was always tax avoidance. After Harvard, he took his jawline to Bain Consulting, a firm with very smart people with excessive personal hygiene. While at Bain, he helped rescue many outstanding companies, like Pan Am, Eastern Airlines, Atari and DeLorean.

Romney was extremely detail oriented in his business life. He once canceled a corporate retreat at which Abba had been hired to play, saying he found the band’s music “too angry.”

Romney is also a passionately devoted family man. After streamlining his wife’s pregnancies down to six months each, Mitt helped Ann raise five perfect sons — Bip, Chip, Rip, Skip and Dip — who married identically tanned wives. Some have said that Romney’s lifestyle is overly privileged, pointing to the fact that he has an elevator for his cars in the garage of his San Diego home. This is not entirely fair. Romney owns many homes without garage elevators and the cars have to take the stairs.

After a successful stint at Bain, Romney was lured away to run the Winter Olympics, the second most Caucasian institution on earth, after the G.O.P. He then decided to run for governor of Massachusetts. His campaign slogan, “Vote Romney: More Impressive Than You’ll Ever Be,” was not a hit, but Romney won the race anyway on an environmental platform, promising to make the state safe for steeplechase.

After his governorship, Romney suffered through a midlife crisis, during which he became a social conservative. This prepared the way for his presidential run. He barely won the 2012 Republican primaries after a grueling nine-month campaign, running unopposed. At the convention, where his Secret Service nickname is Mannequin, Romney will talk about his real-life record: successful business leader, superb family man, effective governor, devoted community leader and prudent decision-maker. If elected, he promises to bring all Americans together and make them feel inferior.

Joe Nocera is off today.
A version of this op-ed appeared in print on August 28, 2012, on page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: The Real Romney.

666 Comments

After all that, the devil has his say.

Poor David.

His mythological analogies in politics are rejected by his readers,
so he turns to what ? a biography of the GOP :D

So we've been seeing a fake Romney this whole time?! Lies and calumny!

Saw this on Facebook. It resonates with me.
Attachment 40364

Wow. That's a brilliant quote.

Also, re: The Real Romney - very funny. This line in particular made me laugh out loud:

Quote:

His ability to turn wine into water detracted from his popularity at parties.

So apparently Paul Ryan's speech has gotten a lot of criticism for flat out lying. I'm going to watch it next eating break, but wow.

Quote:

So I am impressed, in a bad way, that Ryan thought he could just brazen it through. But it is also impressive that, at least in the short run, parts of the press are responding as they must in an era when politicians don't care. That is, they're not simply quoting "critics" about things Ryan made up. They are outright saying that he is telling lies. For instance:

The Washington Post's Glenn Kessler, with the headline, "Ryan misleads on GM plant closing in hometown."

A more omnibus fact-check item also by Kessler, with half a dozen similar exaggerations, distortions, etc.

A very tough item by Jonathan Bernstein, on the WaPo's Plum Line blog, with the headline "Paul Ryan fails -- the truth."

And another on the Post's site by Ezra Klein. Sample: "Quite simply, the Romney campaign isn't adhering to the minimum standards required for a real policy conversation."

And even a WaPo editorial on the misleading nature of the speech.

An excoriation by Jonathan Cohn, in The New Republic, under the headline, "The Most Dishonest Convention Speech ... Ever?" As Cohn adds: "I'd like to talk... about what Ryan actually said--not because I find Ryan's ideas objectionable, although I do, but because I thought he was so brazenly willing to twist the truth.

"At least five times, Ryan misrepresented the facts. And while none of the statements were new, the context was. It's one thing to hear them on a thirty-second television spot or even in a stump speech before a small crowd. It's something else entirely to hear them in prime time address, as a vice presidential nominee is accepting his party's nomination and speaking to the entire country."

I know that TNR is not "mainstream" in the sense that the NYT, WaPo, AP, etc., are. Still this is a very powerful item. And it leads to:

An AP item headlined, "FACT CHECK: Ryan takes factual shortcuts in speech."

An item from NPR with a mildly "he said, she said" headline ("Fact Checkers Say Some of Ryan's Claims Don't Add Up") but that gets the main points across.

One just now from the NYT, with the headline "In Ryan Critique of Obama, Omissions Help Make the Case." It begins this way: "In his speech accepting the Republican nomination for vice president at the Republican National Convention, Representative Paul D. Ryan criticized President Obama for seeking Medicare cuts that he once sought as well, and for failing to act on a deficit-reduction plan that he too opposed."

Another excoriation by Michael Tomasky, in the Daily Beast, that is headlined "Paul Ryan's Convention Speech and his Web of Lies" and which begins, "It just boggles the mind to imagine how Paul Ryan can stand up there and lash Barack Obama for abandoning Bowles-Simpson when he did exactly that himself."

An item on the Fox News site for which there must be an interesting backstory, in which contributor Sally Kohn says that "Ryan's speech was an apparent attempt to set the world record for the greatest number of blatant lies and misrepresentations slipped into a single political speech."

On TPM, a catalogue with the headline "Top 5 Fibs in Paul Ryan's Convention Speech."

Update An excellent item I had somehow missed before, by Jonathan Chait in NY Mag, about "Paul Ryan's Large Lies and One Big Truth." Worth reading in general, and to see what that "truth" is.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/...speech/261775/

Honestly, I bet everything Paul Ryan is technically correct, just like Niall Furguson's Newsweek article, but just extremely deceptive in how it was delivered.