this is long, but if you have strong opinions about Mitt (either way), you SHOULD READ IT.

[Dr. Jones]

Some incredibly good posting going on here. Great reading and well worth the time investment to read.

 

[franklin]

Some incredibly good posting going on here. Great reading and well worth the time investment to read.

& the nothickkks

 

[Dr. Jones]

Why don't you tell us more about you, Frank? I've said a lot about me, what I've done, what I believe.. How about you get outta the books?

 

[babe]

I agree with what you say here almost entirely. "Obama" (not just the man, but the movement) has been thoroughly appropriated by the bankers that have been in control since at least Reagan. I think there were reasons to believe otherwise when "Obama" was a candidate, but the writing is ****ing plastered on the walls.

That said, I'm not casting a vote for Romney. I'm not sure how you (even jokingly) get a 10:1 preference for Romney when you seem to acknowledge a fairly small actual difference.

you're right. I do pretty much think they'll make about as much difference as lipstick on a pig, either way, so far as the real interests of ordinary Americans goes. . . . Except for this. . . . .

Obama radiates the wrong message about America to China, Russia, and even Iran. And practically everybody else. Romney believes America stands for God, as much as he believes in money. Obama believes we stand for the Evil Empire, and doesn't care about money as much as his socialist ideals. Well, rather, as much as his power.

I'd have to be prophesying war to explain it any better.

 

[babe]

Why don't you tell us more about you, Frank? I've said a lot about me, what I've done, what I believe.. How about you get outta the books?

you have to be pretty much a nobody to be in here doing serious thinking. Sounds to me like you have actual accomplishments in life. . . . I think Frank has a smart wife who knows economics, and Frank has a real job, probably running analytical equipment for a labrat's wage. And Frank is smart enough to listen. And probably makes good investment decisions. . . .

My own wife believes she's an economist, though she's an acolyte of the late Milton Friedman. But she doesn't have the time of day to supervise me, or care what I say in here. . . . so I'm a pure rebel, a wannabe skeptic of everything, and a farmer who can still hustle hay like any illegal laborer.

This is what I do to try to hang on the remnants of a mind. . . .

One Brow is one of our real intellectuals, though he believes in the existence of experts, and has other fantasies about the Universe and Life.

Kicky is one of the smartest contributors in here, though in terms of electronic orbital theory he's been captured by a low-lying inner orbital otherwise known as the Law Profession, the last bastion of Sellouts to the Establishment. Nothing short of an all-out thermonuclear event is going to get him out of that rut.

And you just have to know, I really love these guys. . . . .

And I make even worse observations on my own existence. . . . lol.

 

[Duck Rodgers]

My own wife believes she's an economist, though she's an acolyte of the late Milton Friedman. But she doesn't have the time of day to supervise me, or care what I say in here. . . . so I'm a pure rebel, a wannabe skeptic of everything, and a farmer who can still hustle hay like any illegal laborer.

Didn't you say once that she threatened she would have her brother put a picthfork in you or something if you didn't stop posting on Jazzfanz so much? I don't know, I don't have a flawless memory, but it's good enough to remember who runs babe's house.

 

[Dr. Jones]

you have to be pretty much a nobody to be in here doing serious thinking. Sounds to me like you have actual accomplishments in life. . . . I think Frank has a smart wife who knows economics, and Frank has a real job, probably running analytical equipment for a labrat's wage. And Frank is smart enough to listen. And probably makes good investment decisions. . . .

My own wife believes she's an economist, though she's an acolyte of the late Milton Friedman. But she doesn't have the time of day to supervise me, or care what I say in here. . . . so I'm a pure rebel, a wannabe skeptic of everything, and a farmer who can still hustle hay like any illegal laborer.

This is what I do to try to hang on the remnants of a mind. . . .

One Brow is one of our real intellectuals, though he believes in the existence of experts, and has other fantasies about the Universe and Life.

Kicky is one of the smartest contributors in here, though in terms of electronic orbital theory he's been captured by a low-lying inner orbital otherwise known as the Law Profession, the last bastion of Sellouts to the Establishment. Nothing short of an all-out thermonuclear event is going to get him out of that rut.

And you just have to know, I really love these guys. . . . .

And I make even worse observations on my own existence. . . . lol.

Thanks Babe. I very much enjoy reading your posts. (I was, btw, only messin' with Frank..)

 

[jimmy eat jazz]

You are an idiot if you think this article is coming from an unbiased and factual material.

Any type of "business" has one purpose and thats to make money. You are living in the wrong country if you believe making money or success should be seen as evil.

So, if we accept the premise stated on another thread that all media is biased in one way or the other, and we accept the premise stated here that articles from 'biased' sources cannot be trusted, then just what what the hell do we have left?

I realize that dismissing the article because it came from Rolling Stone is an easy way for partisans to dismiss it without actually considering it. But, let me put forward the heretical proposition that sometimes, just sometimes, media sources that have a political slant in one direction or the other, can occasionally produce useful information. I realize that this makes it harder for Partisans to dismiss things without actually considering them, but, hey, no one said life was easy.

And No, Glenn Beck is not the same as Rolling Stone. We don't need to pay attention to Beck, not because he's conservative, but because he's an F'n moron.

I frequently read the conservative press and though I disagree with much of what I read there, I also often find some very useful insights.

 

[Dr. Jones]

Fwiw, I stated there's an often ugly side to private equity funds and they're not always (or never) fun to fully disclose their dealings. I only stated (and not even in a partisan way) the article was obviously written to be intentionally harsh .. Dramatizing the bad and omitting the good.

I also know you weren't talking to me, specifically, but I was rather clarifying my position ..

 

[jimmy eat jazz]

Fwiw, I stated there's an often ugly side to private equity funds and they're not always (or never) fun to fully disclose their dealings. I only stated (and not even in a partisan way) the article was obviously written to be intentionally harsh .. Dramatizing the bad and omitting the good.

I also know you weren't talking to me, specifically, but I was rather clarifying my position ..

No problem. I concede that perhaps the article did shade to the side of focusing on the bad. That's always a challenge in assessing these kinds of articles (same problem with documentaries) is determining whether there might be another unstated side to the argument (there always is, the question is how valid is it). So it's not a bad policy at times to withhold final judgment.

But still, sometimes, how much to the good side does there need to be to compensate for the bad? If mean, if the bad side is really bad, does it always necessarily matter how much good there is too?

Not saying that's the case here, just wondering out loud.

 

[NAOS]

Fwiw, I stated there's an often ugly side to private equity funds and they're not always (or never) fun to fully disclose their dealings. I only stated (and not even in a partisan way) the article was obviously written to be intentionally harsh .. Dramatizing the bad and omitting the good.

I also know you weren't talking to me, specifically, but I was rather clarifying my position ..

No problem. I concede that perhaps the article did shade to the side of focusing on the bad. That's always a challenge in assessing these kinds of articles (same problem with documentaries) is determining whether there might be another unstated side to the argument (there always is, the question is how valid is it). So it's not a bad policy at times to withhold final judgment.

But still, sometimes, how much to the good side does there need to be to compensate for the bad? If mean, if the bad side is really bad, does it always necessarily matter how much good there is too?

Not saying that's the case here, just wondering out loud.

Like anything, if there is a "good side" to the LBO, debt-restructuring side of capitalism, then that "good side" is relative to certain values with respect to "labor" and "the market." It's cool to see some of us come together across the normal partisan divide and imagine these goods and bads. But, I'll state this again: despite whether this is the intention of the Rolling Stone article or not, there are legitimate arguments against the whole of this morphology capital and it's current mechanisms/functioning. These arguments aren't whimsical nostalgias for older labor relations of the factory and older debt structures, but are the next wave of dissent from the left that refuses this act of capital and its appropriating measures: the precariousness of work; the fractalization of labor time in the digital cognitive economy and subsequent erosion of private time; the fact that individual consumers have been made to bear the enormous sovereign debt of the Cold War years; etc.

ONE IMPORTANT EDIT MADE. DAMN YOU AUTOCORRECT.

 

[NAOS]

you're right. I do pretty much think they'll make about as much difference as lipstick on a pig, either way, so far as the real interests of ordinary Americans goes. . . . Except for this. . . . .

Obama radiates the wrong message about America to China, Russia, and even Iran. And practically everybody else. Romney believes America stands for God, as much as he believes in money. Obama believes we stand for the Evil Empire, and doesn't care about money as much as his socialist ideals. Well, rather, as much as his power.

I'd have to be prophesying war to explain it any better.

Can't say I agree with this since I really haven't seen anything that smacks of socialism.
And, I think it's curious that you have such easy access to each man's/movement's psychology and intentions.... but, whatevar. Thanks again for sharing.

 

[BabyPeterzz]

For those who don't want to read the whole article, here are the greatest hits.

First, here's how he "fixes" companies using massive spending and crippling DEBT. Sound familiar?

The reality is that toward the middle of his career at Bain, Romney made a fateful strategic decision: He moved away from creating companies like Staples through venture capital schemes, and toward a business model that involved borrowing huge sums of money to take over existing firms, then extracting value from them by force. He decided, as he later put it, that "there's a lot greater risk in a startup than there is in acquiring an existing company." In the Eighties, when Romney made this move, this form of financial piracy became known as a leveraged buyout, and it achieved iconic status thanks to Gordon Gekko in Wall Street. Gekko's business strategy was essentially identical to the Romney–Bain model, only Gekko called himself a "liberator" of companies instead of a "helper."

Here's how Romney would go about "liberating" a company: A private equity firm like Bain typically seeks out floundering businesses with good cash flows. It then puts down a relatively small amount of its own money and runs to a big bank like Goldman Sachs or Citigroup for the rest of the financing. (Most leveraged buyouts are financed with 60 to 90 percent borrowed cash.) The takeover firm then uses that borrowed money to buy a controlling stake in the target company, either with or without its consent. When an LBO is done without the consent of the target, it's called a hostile takeover; such thrilling acts of corporate piracy were made legend in the Eighties, most notably the 1988 attack by notorious corporate raiders Kohlberg Kravis Roberts against RJR Nabisco, a deal memorialized in the book Barbarians at the Gate.

Romney and Bain avoided the hostile approach, preferring to secure the cooperation of their takeover targets by buying off a company's management with lucrative bonuses. Once management is on board, the rest is just math. So if the target company is worth $500 million, Bain might put down $20 million of its own cash, then borrow $350 million from an investment bank to take over a controlling stake.

But here's the catch. When Bain borrows all of that money from the bank, it's the target company that ends up on the hook for all of the debt.

Take a typical Bain transaction involving an Indiana-based company called American Pad and Paper. Bain bought Ampad in 1992 for just $5 million, financing the rest of the deal with borrowed cash. Within three years, Ampad was paying $60 million in annual debt payments, plus an additional $7 million in management fees. A year later, Bain led Ampad to go public, cashed out about $50 million in stock for itself and its investors, charged the firm $2 million for arranging the IPO and pocketed another $5 million in "management" fees. Ampad wound up going bankrupt, and hundreds of workers lost their jobs, but Bain and Romney weren't crying: They'd made more than $100 million on a $5 million investment.

To recap: Romney, who has compared the devilish federal debt to a "nightmare" home mortgage that is "adjustable, no-money down and assigned to our children," took over Ampad with essentially no money down, saddled the firm with a nightmare debt and assigned the crushing interest payments not to Bain but to the children of Ampad's workers, who would be left holding the note long after Romney fled the scene. The mortgage analogy is so obvious, in fact, that even Romney himself has made it. He once described Bain's debt-fueled strategy as "using the equivalent of a mortgage to leverage up our investment."

But under Romney's business model, leveraging other people's debt means you can carve out big profits for yourself and leave everyone else holding the bag. Despite what Romney claims, the rate of return he provided for Bain's investors over the years wasn't all that great. Romney biographer and Wall Street Journal reporter Brett Arends, who analyzed Bain's performance between 1984 and 1998, concludes that the firm's returns were likely less than 30 percent per year, which happened to track more or less with the stock market's average during that time. "That's how much money you could have made by issuing company bonds and then spending the money picking stocks out of the paper at random," Arends observes. So for all the destruction Romney wreaked on Middle America in the name of "trying to make money," investors could have just plunked their money into traditional stocks and gotten pretty much the same returns.

The only ones who profited in a big way from all the job-killing debt that Romney leveraged were Mitt and his buddies at Bain, along with Wall Street firms like Goldman and Citigroup. Barry Ritholtz, author of Bailout Nation, says the criticisms of Bain about layoffs and meanness miss a more important point, which is that the firm's profit-producing record is absurdly mediocre, especially when set against all the trouble and pain its business model causes. "Bain's fundamental flaw, at least according to the math," Ritholtz writes, "is that they took lots of risk, use immense leverage and charged enormous fees, for performance that was more or less the same as [stock] indexing."

Here's a section of his KB Toys raping. And there's more! Mid-page 3, it's great!

'I'm not a Romney guy, because I'm not a Bain guy," says Lenny Patnode, in an Irish pub in the factory town of Pittsfield, Massachusetts. "But I'm not an Obama guy, either. Just so you know."

I feel bad even asking Patnode about Romney. Big and burly, with white hair and the thick forearms of a man who's stocked a shelf or two in his lifetime, he seems to belong to an era before things like leveraged debt even existed. For 38 years, Patnode worked for a company called KB Toys in Pittsfield. He was the longest-serving employee in the company's history, opening some of the firm's first mall stores, making some of its canniest product buys ("Tamagotchi pets," he says, beaming, "and Tech-Decks, too"), traveling all over the world to help build an empire that at its peak included 1,300 stores. "There were times when I worked seven days a week, 16 hours a day," he says. "I opened three stores in two months once."

Then in 2000, right before Romney gave up his ownership stake in Bain Capital, the firm targeted KB Toys. The debacle that followed serves as a prime example of the conflict between the old model of American business, built from the ground up with sweat and industry know-how, and the new globalist model, the Romney model, which uses leverage as a weapon of high-speed conquest.

In a typical private-equity fragging, Bain put up a mere $18 million to acquire KB Toys and got big banks to finance the remaining $302 million it needed. Less than a year and a half after the purchase, Bain decided to give itself a gift known as a "dividend recapitalization." The firm induced KB Toys to redeem $121 million in stock and take out more than $66 million in bank loans – $83 million of which went directly into the pockets of Bain's owners and investors, including Romney. "The dividend recap is like borrowing someone else's credit card to take out a cash advance, and then leaving them to pay it off," says Heather Slavkin Corzo, who monitors private equity takeovers as the senior legal policy adviser for the AFL-CIO.

Bain ended up earning a return of at least 370 percent on the deal, while KB Toys fell into bankruptcy, saddled with millions in debt. KB's former parent company, Big Lots, alleged in bankruptcy court that Bain's "unjustified" return on the dividend recap was actually "900 percent in a mere 16 months." Patnode, by contrast, was fired in December 2008, after almost four decades on the job. Like other employees, he didn't get a single day's severance.

I ask Slavkin Corzo what Bain's justification was for the giant dividend recapitalization in the KB Toys acquisition. The question throws her, as though she's surprised anyone would ask for a reason a company like Bain would loot a firm like KB Toys. "It wasn't like, 'Yay, we did a good job, we get a dividend,'" she says with a laugh. "It was like, 'We can do this, so we will.' "

Oh, and the hits just keep on comin'. Your boy keeps fine company.

In the Eighties, when Romney and Bain were cutting their teeth in the LBO business, the primary magic trick involved the junk bonds pioneered by convicted felon Mike Milken, which allowed firms like Bain to find easy financing for takeovers by using wildly overpriced distressed corporate bonds as collateral. Junk bonds gave the Gordon Gekkos of the world sudden primacy over old-school industrial titans like the Fords and the Rockefellers: For the first time, the ability to make deals became more valuable than the ability to make stuff, and the ability to instantly engineer billions in illusory financing trumped the comparatively slow process of making and selling products for gradual returns.

Romney was right in the middle of this radical change. In fact, according to The Boston Globe – whose in-depth reporting on Romney and Bain has spanned three decades – one of Romney's first LBO deals, and one of his most profitable, involved Mike Milken himself. Bain put down $10 million in cash, got $300 million in financing from Milken and bought a pair of department-store chains, Bealls Brothers and Palais Royal. In what should by now be a familiar outcome, the two chains – which Bain merged into a single outfit called Stage Stores – filed for bankruptcy protection in 2000 under the weight of more than $444 million in debt. As always, Bain took no responsibility for the company's demise. (If you search the public record, you will not find a single instance of Mitt Romney taking responsibility for a company's failure.) Instead, Bain blamed Stage's collapse on "operating problems" that took place three years after Bain cashed out, finishing with a $175 million return on its initial investment of $10 million.

But here's the interesting twist: Romney made the Bealls-Palais deal just as the federal government was launching charges of massive manipulation and insider trading against Milken and his firm, Drexel Burnham Lambert. After what must have been a lengthy and agonizing period of moral soul-searching, however, Romney decided not to kill the deal, despite its shady financing. "We did not say, 'Oh, my goodness, Drexel has been accused of something, not been found guilty,' " Romney told reporters years after the deal. "Should we basically stop the transaction and blow the whole thing up?"

In an even more incredible disregard for basic morality, Romney forged ahead with the deal even though Milken's case was being heard by a federal district judge named Milton Pollack, whose wife, Moselle, happened to be the chairwoman of none other than Palais Royal. In short, one of Romney's first takeover deals was financed by dirty money – and one of the corporate chiefs about to receive a big payout from Bain was married to the judge hearing the case. Although the SEC took no formal action, it issued a sharp criticism, complaining that Romney was allowing Milken's money to have a possible influence over "the administration of justice."

After Milken and his junk bond scheme crashed in the late Eighties, Romney and other takeover artists moved on to Wall Street's next get-rich-quick scheme: the tech-Internet stock bubble. By 1997 and 1998, there were nearly $400 billion in leveraged buyouts a year, as easy money once again gave these financial piracy firms the ammunition they needed to raid companies like KB Toys. Firms like Bain even have a colorful pirate name for the pools of takeover money they raise in advance from pension funds, university endowments and other institutional investors. "They call it dry powder," says Slavkin Corzo, the union adviser.

And to the "Saving the SLC Olympics" point. The tax payers and the federal government payed for it. He just took the BAILOUT money and "saved" the Olympics. What a hero.

Which brings us to another aspect of Romney's business career that has largely been hidden from voters: His personal fortune would not have been possible without the direct assistance of the U.S. government. The taxpayer-funded subsidies that Romney has received go well beyond the humdrum, backdoor, welfare-sucking that all supposedly self-made free marketeers inevitably indulge in. Not that Romney hasn't done just fine at milking the government when it suits his purposes, the most obvious instance being the incredible $1.5 billion in aid he siphoned out of the U.S. Treasury as head of the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake – a sum greater than all federal spending for the previous seven U.S. Olympic games combined. Romney, the supposed fiscal conservative, blew through an average of $625,000 in taxpayer money per athlete – an astounding increase of 5,582 percent over the $11,000 average at the 1984 games in Los Angeles. In 1993, right as he was preparing to run for the Senate, Romney also engineered a government deal worth at least $10 million for Bain's consulting firm, when it was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. (See "The Federal Bailout That Saved Romney" - https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-federal-bailout-that-saved-mitt-romney-20120829)

 

[sirkickyass]

FWIW: I always thought franklin had a strong contrarian streak and knew enough about both sides that he just liked to push against whichever way the wind was blowing.

 

[NUMBERICA]

Highlights of the thread:

-Obama wants to tax us into oblivion so that he can build a monument to himself and is somehow more a crony to bankers than any and every president since The Fed was implemented.

-Being proud about standing tall for money and a particular god (the one that has a deep caring of whether you wear mixed fibers or not, also the one that didn't know that germs exist).

-Anyone agreeing.

I love election years.

 

[NUMBERICA]

BTW, anyone want to give me a quick summary of how exactly someone would go about going back to the gold standard without blowing everything up (that would be bad, in case that has to be clarified)?

 

[One Brow]

name any other news program that interviews alex jones, and then the next day does an interview with a liberal?

npr.

 

[TheSilencer1313]

npr.

Never heard of a lower case "npr".

 

[Dr. Jones]

Never heard of a lower case "npr".

Are you telling us we haven't .. ?

 

[jimmy eat jazz]

BTW, anyone want to give me a quick summary of how exactly someone would go about going back to the gold standard without blowing everything up (that would be bad, in case that has to be clarified)?

Returning to the Gold Standard is another evergreen favorite of the Ron Paul types, most of whom, I'd assume, have not one iota of an idea what this would actually entail beyond the superficial talking points spoon fed them inside their echo chamber.

It won't happen . . . ever. For God's sake, get off this tired hobby horse and move to something else that has even a 1 in a million chance of happening, which is more than returning to the Gold standard has.