Mitt Watch - Puncturing The Myth Of Bain

Aug 29th, 2012

Team Romney has consistently told a tale of rugged, independent capitalist dynamism when describing the GOP nominee's record at Bain. 

He is credited with nearly singlehandedly saving it from collapse. 

This a a huge part of their argument for a corporate presidency.

Is it true? 

Not by a long shot writes Tom Dickinson:

"The federal records, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, reveal that Romney's initial rescue attempt at Bain & Company was actually a disaster – leaving the firm so financially strapped that it had "no value as a going concern." Even worse, the federal bailout ultimately engineered by Romney screwed the FDIC – the bank insurance system backed by taxpayers – out of at least $10 million. And in an added insult, Romney rewarded top executives at Bain with hefty bonuses at the very moment that he was demanding his handout from the feds."

He didn't build this.

Romney Watch - FBI Investigating Bain Capital?

Jan 13th, 2012

Well, yes. But, let's not all start wildly speculating.

historiographic anarchy posted last week:

"About two weeks ago, the FBI evoked FOIA exemption 7(a) and denied access to all Bain Capital records on the grounds that "there is a pending or prospective law enforcement proceeding relevant to these responsive records; and that release of the information contained in these responsive records could reasonably be expected to interfere with the enforcement proceedings."

I can find very little background on this story which has been floating around the margins for a while. That said, something is going on. It is unclear what documents were requested and for what time-frame.

It's important to again remind everyone that any number of recent Bain purchases might have triggered an automatic law enforcement review. The 2010 acquisition of $12 million in Edgar Online stock, for example, raised a number of red flags. We will keep an eye on this one.

The original document can be found HERE
Click on image for better view

Mitt Romney's Version Of Capitalism, part 3

Jan 13th, 2012

As attacks on Mitt Romney's years at Bain Capital have picked up steam, a veritable army of apologists has taken up the mantle of "defending capitalism." Except that's not precisely what they are doing.

Ross Kaminsky has a typically defensive piece over at The American Spectator. He begins with a caveat:

"Nobody is going to put Mitt Romney in a category with any of the great inventors of American history. Nevertheless, Romney's function in terms of "creative destruction" is not fundamentally different from that of any other participant in the capitalist system." EMPHASIS OURS

He then proceeds to bloviate that the advances brought to the world by Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs led to job losses, too. So there. Kaminsky's missive is a wonder of contradictions with the usual dose of "Austrian" economic voodoo.

Mitt Romney's Version Of Capitalism

Jan 13th, 2012
by F. Grey Parker

The GOP 's internal war over Mitt Romney's years at Bain Capital has gotten very interesting during the last few weeks. It is not merely because of the vendetta against the frontrunner being waged by, as David Corn put it, "Newt The Destroyer." The discussion has now gone much deeper than whether or not Romney ran the company properly. For the first time in recent memory, an intra-Republican Party debate has broken out over the moral responsibilities of the management and ownership class within the capitalist system.

The Newt Gingrich-allied SuperPAC, Winning The Future, is basically using the common sense language at the core of both the Occupy Movement and their Tea Party opposites to attack the Romney mythology of what constitutes good business.


The complete video is available HERE

I Told You So.. But...

Jan 9th, 2012
by F. Grey Parker

Generally, I am not happy when I can say, "I told you so."

After the failure of the Democratic base to turn out during the 2010 election, I opined that the Republicans had no plan for jobs and would, instead, spend the entirety of 2011 masquerading their attacks on the poor as "austerity."

I predicted that they would characterize any and all attempts to re-stabilize federal revenue as "class warfare."

I warned that there was likely to be a genuinely unprecedented assault on not just abortion, but, women's health programs and rights in general.

I also repeatedly stipulated that the House GOP leadership would call every anti-environmental bill they could throw at the Senate a "jobs bill."

Well... I told you so.

See what I mean? I take no pleasure from this. That's the point. Usually, when I have to say, "I told you so," it feels like I have arrived at the bottom of a great crevasse, battered and bloody, and am making the pronouncement from the passenger seat to a driver who I have warned repeatedly not to drive off of a cliff.

Well, not today. Today, I am enjoying a 'told ya' so moment.' Immensely.

Last Fall, a conservative colleague and I were sparring, in a friendly manner, with regard to the upcoming Presidential election. He was stunned at my position on Obama's chances against the presumptive GOP nominee, Mitt Romney.

The text of our online exchange 10/27/2011
SP: You're not worried at all?
Me: Nope
SP: Really? That's nuts. Our base hates BO. Econ can't bounce enough to save him. Indys not on his side. Libs totaly (sic) disaffected
Me: Obama's gonna win. No question.
Sp: What? How can MR possibly lose???
Me: Bain

SP: Huh?

And here we are.

Reid J. Epstein and Jim Vandehei write today in Politico:

"Forget his specific rivals. The biggest threat to Mitt Romney is hitting now and set to fully detonate in South Carolina: it’s the Bain bomb.

While conservatives look unlikely to unite around one alternative to Romney, the campaigns themselves are uniting around this one theme, that the former head of Bain looted companies, tossed people out of jobs and is now exaggerating his success at the venture capital firm."

I told you so.

As I said, my expectation was that this would be the heaviest artillery in the Obama re-election arsenal. What I never foresaw was the possibility that it would be Romney's own party that would make so effective a use of it first. This serves to illustrate just how unusual a period this is; The Democrats are having their work done for them by their opposition. 

Literally.

One DNC strategist I have spoken to is openly giddy. Quite some time was being expended on framing this with great caution. Hundreds of hours have been devoted to making the Bain attack later this year without rendering the Obama campaign more vulnerable to smears that they are "anti-business." This contact quipped this morning, "Maybe I should donate to Newt. He's doing us a real service."

This is the truth. It is Newt Gingrich who has framed the discussion. 

I had wondered whether, in the post-Tea Party political process, we might not see a practical abandonment of Reagan's "11th Commandment." But, I never saw Newt coming. 

Until a few weeks ago, Newt Gingrich seemed to be even more absurdly ridiculous than he had been as a water-boy for D'Souza. Romney might be called a flip-flopper. But, Newt is the petty, little pip-squeak who sat next the GOP's favorite she-devil, Nancy Pelosi, and endorsed not only the concept of man-made climate change, but, argued for federally mandated solutions to the problem. He's the only GOP contender who took over a million dollars from Fannie and Freddie for lobbying being "an historian." And, as his litany of vulgar peccadilloes testifies, he is NOT the "values candidate" for any party in this country unless its mission is to establish Hugh Hefner's 1963 world-view as the norm.

And yet, here we are. Somehow, Newt Gingrich has managed to capture enough wealthy hearts and minds to wage an all-out war on Romney.

Trip Gabriel and Nicholas Confessore wrote yesterday for NY Times:

"Thanks to a $5 million donation from a wealthy casino owner, a group supporting Newt Gingrich plans to place advertisements in South Carolina this week attacking Mitt Romney as a predatory capitalist who destroyed jobs and communities, a full-scale Republican assault on Mr. Romney’s business background.

The advertisements, a counterpunch to a campaign waged against Mr. Gingrich by a group backing Mr. Romney, will be built on excerpts from a scathing movie about Bain Capital, the private equity firm Mr. Romney once ran. The movie, financed by a Republican operative opposed to Mr. Romney, includes emotional interviews with people who lost jobs at companies that Bain bought and later sold."

Romney's tenure and practices at Bain Capital make the fictional economic predations of Oliver Stone's 'Gordon Gekko' look not merely tame; they make them look elegant.

Romney wasn't just a job-killer, he was a community-killer. Whole towns perished so that he might live larger. Families suffered. Mothers wept over the choice between food and rent. Grown men watched as their hungry families were unable to heat their homes, afford their food, pay their rent or have new shoes.

All this so that Mitt Romney could go to multiply-Michelen-starred restaurants where his backwards-ass can't even pronounce the name of an appetizer.

From here on in, every mention of Bain will injure the GOP. However, for the next several months, at least, most mentions of Bain will come from the GOP.

So. I told ya so... but I never saw this coming.

"When Romney Came To Town"

Jan 8th, 2012

Here is part one of the 30 minute attack on Romney's tenure at Bain launched by a pro-Newt Super PAC.

Newt's Bloodlust

Jan 7th, 2012
by F. Grey Parker

In the early morning hours (seriously) following the final vote tally from the Iowa Caucus Circus, I wrote that Mitt Romney should be ready for the worst enemy he will face this year... Newt Gingrich. I found his declaration of war concession speech downright frightening.

Shortly after the speech, Business Insider's Glynnis MacNicol wrote, "Watch out Mitt Romney. Seriously, watch out."

Even Rush Limbaugh seems to agree that this is remarkable stuff. "Newt came out there... and he is mad. He is ticked off. He is livid." He goes on, "Newt's not getting out. He's in this to destroy Romney now." EMPHASIS OURS

Any GOP operative who truly believes in their party should be having a nervous breakdown.

David Corn seems to have had the same idea:

"Newt Gingrich has finally reached his destiny: destroyer of the GOP.

In a bitter and spiteful concession speech last night in Iowa—Kanye West could do no worse—the former House speaker, who finished fourth, signaled a shift in his mission. He would no longer be running to obtain the Republican presidential nomination; he would be campaigning to obliterate Mitt Romney. He would be Sherman; the former Massachusetts governor would be Georgia."

Exactly. Newt is a very vengeful man. Everyone inside the beltway knows this. With two New Hampshire debates this weekend, the rest of the country is about to find out just how vengeful he can be.

Peter J. Boyer reports on Newt's first brutal salvo:

"The effort to derail Mitt Romney’s presidential quest heightened dramatically on Friday when a super PAC associated with Newt Gingrich outbid all comers for the rights to a scathing 30-minute attack video depicting Romney as a greedy, job-killing corporate raider “more ruthless than Wall Street.”

In a season filled with negative ads and rhetorical crossfire, the striking feature of the film, aside from its mini-documentary length, is its authorship. The film was made by Jason Killian Meath, a former associate of Romney’s top strategists, Stuart Stevens and Russ Schriefer. Meath had worked for the Romney campaign in 2008, creating much of the ad content for that failed effort. He left Stevens and Schriefer’s firm, SSG, in 2010. Meath declined to comment on his project, referring inquiries to the pro-Gingrich PAC Winning Our Future."

Now, I have said for months that Romney's record at Bain would be the heartiest red meat Obama could feed to the masses in the general election. But, until this week, I never suspected it would be a GOP rival that would make it fair game.

Think about it. Newt is the "not-Romney" whose contribution to the debate over the Occupy Movement was to tell everyone involved to "take a bath." Then, of course, came his racially-coded suggestions that we make janitors out of our "urban" children. This is a man who has arguably leveled more viciously convoluted and borderline lunatic charges against the sitting President than any other major GOP contender.

What this means is that Newt has effectively neutered the potential for the GOP to spin future attacks on Romney's business record by Democrats as "class warfare." He's making them now which means that all President Obama has to do later is to quote them.

What's more, Newt is just getting started.

It's nearly ten months until the election. We may be witnessing the beginnings of the GOP's death-rattle before it fractures into several parties.

In the near to short term, one of two things is going to happen:

A. Romney is going to wrap up the nomination so battered that he will have a less plausible chance for victory than Bob Dole had in '96 (that means slightly less than none).

B. Rick Santorum is going to somehow actually become a major Presidential nominee in the 21st Century and not the 19th.

I would caution the GOP that either option is just fine with every Democratic operative in the United States.

The second option, however, is preferred.