Tag Archives: Bain Capital

Harvesting companies…

Well….another day, another video showing the true side of ole Mitt….the latest has to do with his initial pitch to investors in Bain that blows apart his whole “I’m a job creator” meme that he has been pushing. I find this one almost as bad as the 47% video from a couple of weeks ago and in it, ole Mitt describes the methods that Bain will use to make money for these investors that include buying, managing, and then “harvesting” the companies….Mittspeak for trashing them to make huge profits and then walking away from the wreckage with millions of dollars in his pocket. This goes on to this day with Bain buying another company that is profitable (I can’t find the name of it) and has told all of the workers the company is to be moved to China with Mitt still making almost a million dollars from throwing almost 300 people out of work. Is this the kind of president this country needs? Nope, nope, nope…geez…

There are parallels…

Well…was sitting here watching the olympics and a thought just came to me regarding the relationship that ole Mitt’s tenure at Bain has to do with how he would govern as president….while at Bain, ole Mitt gutted companies and fired people with little regard for the human toll that it took, all the while enriching himself and his rich buddies. When you look at what little detail he has presented in his economic plan (and his fealty to the Ryan plan), it appears that the same kind of thing would happen with ole Mitt as president…huge tax cuts for the rich, huge cuts to Medicare and Social Security for everyone else with little regard for the human toll of the plans…in fact I think he gleefully likes that effects….since he has no empathy for anyone other than those that were born rich like him and has shown this lack of empathy throughout his life and career. It heartens me that Obama has finally started to frame the argument in these terms, to highlight that what Romney wants to do is exactly what was tried by the Bushies…didn’t work then, won’t work now….and that the polls have started to turn against ole Mitt since he so inept at everything….what a joke…geez…

Mitt is still a liar…

Well…I have been trying to winnow out the happenings of the day to get to one that I want to write about, and have decided to go back to that gift that just keeps on giving…ole Mitt. Today, the story of Mitt not being responsible for all of the reprehensible behavior at Bain Capital fell apart with the disclosure that his assertion that he had left Bain in 1999 is not true…SEC filings show that he was still the CEO of Bain until 2002; well into the bad days of gutting companies for profit and throwing thousands and thousands of people out of work. But, this is just more of the same for ole Mitt who feels (like most repubs) that the truth is what he says it is, not what it really is…and goes along with the latest revelations that he has hidden large amounts of income in havens like the Cayman Islands so he doesn’t have to pay taxes on it…not something available to normal folks and a good indicator of what his administration would look like…more privilege for those that have money and connections and everyone else can go to hell. Coupled with his weird assed speech to the NCAAP the other day where he tried to convince the delegates there that he would be better for black people because he would end “Obamacare” and give more tax cuts to the rich, it is abundantly clear that ole Mitt is so out of touch with the 99% of us that have to work for a living that he should just go back to his house with the car elevator and leave the rest of us alone…geez…

Been thinking about this for a while…

Well…a nice article by Eugene Robinson in the Washington Post this morning kind of crystallized something that has been rattling around in my head for quite a while and highlights something that I think has been downplayed in the whole Bain Capital/creative destruction argument that has been presented as justification for the destruction of companies and lives by the right. While the entire emphasis has been from the investor side and the rightful assertion that people should make money from their investments, what about the investments of the people that work at these companies? The investments of time, loyalty, and forgone opportunities that came from listening to the promises of management and choosing to contribute to the growth and success of those companies has largely been ignored in the calculus of how the rewards should be distributed. Why should the investor class walk away with 88 percent profits yearly on their investments (as happened in one 10 year span at Bain) while the workers whose companies were gutted and ransacked by Bain walked away with nothing to show for their decades of service? It is just the latest manifestation of the contempt that the right has for labor and anyone who is not in the 1 percent…geez…

Bain Capital’s brand of capitalism…

Well…interesting research in the papers today that revealed some facts about ole Mitt’s tenure at Bain…and his new stump speech claiming that, while at Bain, the company never took any “bailouts” or government assistance of any sort. Mitt, Mitt, Mitt…I really don’t understand how you guys don’t understand that there are records out there, that things can be fact checked…and this one is just a huge lie…in two instances, Bain was bailed out of debt by the government…once with the FDIC forgiving 10 million dollars that was owed…and the other when they killed a steel company and then dumped the pension liabilities on the government to the tune of 45 million dollars while the execs at Bain walked away with 10 million in bonuses…yep, that’s ole Mitt’s form of capitalism…swoop in, gut a company, and then profit from pushing the liabilities of those companies on the taxpayers. I don’t see this as any different from any other bailout that happened over the past few years…just another case of the rich taking advantage of the system to steal from you and me…geez…

The true republicans come out…

Well..I hope you’ve been watching the lead up to the NH primary on the repub side and all of the Mitt bashing that has been done by the others in the race…I find it one of the funniest things I’ve seen in years but my neck hurts from watching all of the flip-flopping that has been going on. One of the most hilarious attacks centers on ole Mitt’s job creation record at Bain capital, with the crowd of contenders abandoning the central tenet of modern repub thought that business equals good and the hell with everyone else…and citing the fact that jobs were killed when Bain took over many companies while ole Mitt was running it as a reason to not elect him. What are these guys going to do if they do defeat Mitt? I just love how much ammunition the left is getting from all of these sound bites…and the fact that all of this sound a fury is exposing the repubs for what they are….unprincipled idiots who will do or say anything that they think will get them elected.

One last thing…one of the things that ole Mitt cites that makes him a job creator was Bain’s investment in Staples and he even goes so far to make it sound like he created Staples from his own ideas…it’s just not true..Bain supplied money and that was it…

A few things..

Well…just a few things that I want to comment on this morning to try to get back in the swing of things and get some political commentary going again…first…I just can’t wait for the Iowa nonsense to be over and done with…and I am glad I don’t live there to have to listen to and see all of the political ads that have dominated the airwaves…but there will be one bright spot to come out of today..or maybe two…we probably won’t have to listen to Michelle Bachmann or Rick Perry any more since they are both likely to finish well back in the pack…I don’t know why anyone listened to them anyway…they are two of the most stupid sounding politicians that I have ever heard…and I’ve been around a long time. I really can’t wait until they start to hammer ole Mitt on his claims to have created over 100K jobs while at Bain Capital when it is just not true…never created one job….remember that folks…never created one job and I look forward to him having to really answer for his destructive reign there and personally profiting in the hundreds of millions of dollars while he and his cronies looted companies that would still be alive if it weren’t for them.

Oh, one last thing….I see that the incestuous right wing media nonsense continues in today’s Detroit News where they treat their house dog Manny Lopez as an independent writer when they published his screed about Obama’s vacation and ole Manny’s contention that Obama can’t care about the 99 percenters since he is one of the one percent. The first thing to me is that there should be disclosure that Manny is regular columnist at the News and to make it look like he is an independent “other voice” is just dishonest and only adds to the echo chamber that is the right wing media. The more salient point to make here, though, is that Obama worked hard and achieved his way to the one percenter that he is…he didn’t have mommy or daddy start him on third base and tell him he hit a triple…geez….