I hope Obama is able to make a big haul from the Wall Street hedge fund crowd, because when Romney gets the nomination, it’s going to get ugly:
[…]’You see, Romney made a Mittload of cash using what’s known as a leveraged buyout. He’d buy a company with ‘money borrowed against their assets, groomed them to be sold off and in the interim collect huge management fees.’ Once Mitt had control of the company, he’d cut frivolous spending like jobs, workers, employees, and jobs. Just like America’s sweetheart, Gordon Gecko. […]“Because Mitt Romney knows just how to trim the fat. He rescued businesses like Dade Behring, Stage Stories, American Pad and Paper, and GS Industries, then his company sold them for a profit of $578 million after which all of those firms declared bankruptcy. Which sounds bad, but don’t worry, almost no one worked there anymore.
When Obama points out the difference between Mitt’s fantasy that he was a job-creating machine, and the reality that Bain was a job annihilator, he’s going to hurt a lot of delicate feelings on Wall Street, since most of them buy into Mitt’s rhetoric about the role of hedge funds in job creation. Obama’s smart to extract their donations now, while he can point out that Democrats aren’t holding the future of the country for ransom.
Triassic Sands
Jobs? We don’t need no steenking jobs.
gordon schumway
Now, I am become Bain, the destroyer of jobs!
gene108
Considering Obama had the Wall Steeters at “hello” in 2008, I wonder if he can rekindle the magic.
jcgrim
Obama can point out to his hedge fund donors the gift of the public school coffers he’s opened up for them. Privatized charter schools, no-bid contracts the new frontier for the educational industrial complex.
http://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com/2011/06/another-super-mugging-ny-state.html
The Fat Kate Middleton
The day I hear Obama say “I welcome their hatred” is the day I give my life over to him and his campaign.
Napoleon
Except he will never point that out. With a few notable exceptions, which are far and few between, he has been pathetic at bringing stuff like this up.
the fenian
I’m sure Tim Geithner is on board with this clever anti-Wall Street strategery.
kdaug
@The Fat Kate Middleton: Roger that. Suspect we’ll be waiting a while, though.
The Fat Kate Middleton
I think another appropriate response here would be, “The moon doesn’t have snacks, dip nut!”
WereBear
@The Fat Kate Middleton: There’s a great difference between a spoiled son of great wealth; and the son of a single mother with racial challenges… when it comes to saying “hate” in public.
WyldPirate
Fuck Obama. He can suck the hedge fund managers cocks for dough all he wants. He, like anyone else that is going to get elected, is going to let Wall St and the financial class continue to rape, pillage, outsource and sell off America until there is nothing left except their gated communities and serfs to service the needs of the wealthy.
Why? Because like the Rethugs, he is their bitch and they own his ass.
And, prior to you wasting your time with a 500+ word diatribe of Opologies and mindless horseshit excuses for why Progressives can’t do this or that, Brachiator-eat shit and die.
mistermix
@Napoleon: If he runs against Romney, he will either point it out or lose. And, whatever you want to say about Obama, he doesn’t want to lose.
Chris
Here’s a rant someone once wrote on this general topic:
“Nothing sets me off like this kind of bullshit economizing. After 10 years of a “jobless recovery” everyone I know who still has a job is doing the work of two or three people. The American work force is the most efficient it ever has been. The ‘fat’ these people want to cut out hasn’t been there for 30 years.
Almost every big management fad of the last 30 years has been ‘lean’ this and ‘efficient’ that. They want to squeeze blood from a turnip. If instead of squeezing their suppliers and workers and soaking their customers, they had concentrated on making reliable products at decent prices and taking care of their suppliers and workers, they would have all the customers they could dream of, because we would still have a middle class that was healthy and ready to buy.
If instead of racing to the bottom with NAFTA, what if we had had a treaty that guaranteed, minimum wage, working condition, education and environmental standards? You’d have an entire hemisphere of customers to sell to. Now, we have a billion or so peasants in North and South America and only a few hundred million people who are in a position to buy anything at all.”
(Full credit for glorious rant to 77South at Sadly, No! last fall, http://www.sadlyno.com/archives/33685.html#comment-1134261).
The Fat Kate Middleton
@WereBear:
absolutely. Thanks for reminding us.
boss bitch
@The Fat Kate Middleton:
Oh how I long for the day when the left stops romanticizing about a man who they would despise today.
boss bitch
@WyldPirate:
Its too early for your fantasies. You need help.
boss bitch
@the fenian:
hmmm….I noticed that the calls for his head stopped cold once some of his plans started making money. Now I guess the new talking points are out?
bkny
mitt’s awesome business skills of destroying companies and laying off people is not allowed to be discussed. check out friday’s hardball transcript when howard fineman tries to interject that there’s another side to mitt’s mad econ skillz — tweety completely shuts it down; basically saying ‘blahblahblah, dirtyfuckinghippie’ … it was quite revealing.
WyldPirate
@boss bitch:
there are multiple ways of whoring you stupid bitch. Obama is a whore for campaign dollars.
The “Masters of the Universe” crashed the economy by legal and illegal means. Obama turned a blind eye to it. He pumped billions to keep them afloat and the QE by the Fed has allowed the same cocksuckers in finance to make billions more in profits in fees for just turning paper while the rest of America slowly circles the toliet bowl on the way to the sewer.
Next to no one in the financial sector has been prosecuted much less investigated. And the “financial reform” bills put into effect are essential meaningless. Why? Because the Dems that wrote it in conjunction with the Wall St. and bankster lobbyists are bought and paid for whores as well.
Chris
@boss bitch:
FDR was indeed roundly criticized by the ideological left (this was back when socialism was still something that many believed in heart and soul) for saving capitalism from itself (not that the captains of industry either then or now showed him any gratitude for it) when the opportunity was at hand to toss it out for good and institute a socialist government.
No doubt many of today’s left wingers would dislike him for not going far enough. On the other hand, it’s not “romanticizing” to point out that FDR played to populist, anti-capitalist sentiments much more openly than Obama has (although the environment was more conducive to that).
Chris
@boss bitch:
FDR was indeed roundly criticized by the ideological left (this was back when soshulism was still something that many believed in heart and soul) for saving capitalism from itself (not that the captains of industry either then or now showed him any gratitude for it) when the opportunity was at hand to toss it out for good and institute a soshulist government.
No doubt many of today’s left wingers would dislike him for not going far enough. On the other hand, it’s not “romanticizing” to point out that FDR played to populist, anti-capitalist sentiments much more openly than Obama has (although the environment was more conducive to that).
(And FYWP, also too).
amk
@WyldPirate: You should audition for AG’s role. You make a convincing case … based on ideology.
Felanius Kootea (formerly Salt and freshly ground black people)
Campaign finance reform. I wish…
Chinn Romney
Uncle Mitt earned his money the old fashioned way, he stole it. He’s part of a long and glorious robber baron tradition. He’s been toning down the baron part for the masses. He can field gotcha questions that lock up Sarah’s brain. He even lets the dog ride inside the Car now. He’s on your side, whatever your side may be. And yes, he’s got a boatload of money.
Lookin’ good Uncle Mitt. Lookin’ good.
Zach
This is one of Romney’s biggest liabilities if he somehow gets over wanting to give people healthcare and thinking that doubling the atmospheric CO2 concentration in a century might be a bad thing. That and being a coddled rich kid.
A killer anti-Romney ad would juxtapose his announcement speech with images of him and his dad and interviews with folks he fired.
Shrillhouse
Mittens’ history with Bain should be his biggest liability. In a just world, Obama would bash him 24/7 over this issue. With the economy in tatters, unemployment going up, and the middle-class getting squeezed ever-harder by our Galtian overloads, this should be a no-brainer.
Mittens (and his rich buddies at Bain) made a killing on leveraged buyouts. Taking the hard work of middle-income Amercians and turning it into millions, all while throwing those workers out of a job. And, now Romney is going to run against Obama on the economy? It’s friggin infuriating…
ChrisB
Don’t you understand, those jobs had to be destroyed so new jobs could be created.
burnspbesq
I had to click through in order to find out that the quoted material was from Colbert, not Benen. I think people tend to evaluate Colbert under different standards than they evaluate Benen. So that should have been attributed more accurately. Try harder.
Note to WyldPirate: when you can raise $100 million for Obama’s campaign, then you have standing to get pissed about him raising money from people who have money. Until then, you don’t.
Daddy-O
One mistake, a grievous one, in the very last sentence of your post here:
“…Democrats aren’t holding the future of the country for ransom.”
We HAVE NO FUTURE. We’re doomed. I guess you just forgot that?
Nick
As much as I’m loath to defend Romney or Bain, this post is a little over the top. The majority of Bain’s business (as it was at the time, the Private Equity stuff is now a separate company called Bain Capital, rather than being part of Bain and Co.) has nothing to do with leveraged buyouts.
Further, there really isn’t anything objectionable about leveraged buyouts at all. It’s no different than any other kind of loan (other than desperate payday loan style stuff, does anyone ever take out a loan with the expectation that the stuff they’ll buy with the money is worth less than the loan and interest they’ll have to pay back?).
I’ve got no problem with the business he was in, I’ve got a problem that he practiced it in the most loathsome and ineffective way possible. Bash Romney for pretending financial engineering, and layoffs, and outsourcing are anything other that short term cons rather than serious long term success, not because he worked in private equity. It has the added bonus that actually people understand layoffs, outsourcing, and the looting of a company.
maya
So, these hedge fund leveraged buyout firms, like Bain, are just recycled Reagan era junk bond kingdoms.
American ingenuity is just teh awesome.
Culture of Truth
He saved Teldar Paper, and he can save that other bankrupt institution, the U S of A !
rikyrah
it’s up to other groups to point out just what Mittens’ business ‘ expertise’ consisted of. simple political ads. find folks who USED to work at the companies that he supposedly ‘ saved’. same ad,different companies, same message.
Mitt Romney made his money by screwing the American Worker.
say it over and over and over.
ruemara
!. Damn Wyld, wtf is it with you and the gay bottom as a slur thing? Wtf is it with you calling women bitches? You’re a total hate machine.
2. I am sick, sick, sick of the whining about “Obama should be saying __” bs. With all the damn advocacy groups begging me for my money, where the fuck are all the commercials I should be seeing on the airwaves? Where’s the ads? The narrative control is more in the hands of media figures and consumers than it is in the hands of President. Why are advocacy groups wasting time with online petitions to tell the President to do this or that-despite some real facts on how he’s being blocked on a number of things-when they could do more outreach to sway people and activate people to press Congress instead? Goddamn people, history isn’t a collection of favourite soudbites. It’s hardass work with large groups of people who coalesced around leaders and ideas and who never gave up even in the face of death. Y’all want snippets of FDR? I’d like some longform Freedom Riders.
gene108
@Napoleon:
Sitting Presidents, at least Republican ones, never bring this sort of thing up about their potential opponents.
That’s left to right-wing media and special interest groups.
Presidents try to stay above the fray, until the campaign is actually on.
lol
@gene108:
President John Edwards would’ve USED THE BULLY PULPIT and FOUGHT because he’s NOT GOING TO LET THEM SHUT HIM UP.
If only Obambi had done that, we’d have single-payer already.
Paul W.
I see someone put up the troll paper, seems to be working quite effectively with the amount of worthwhile comments this post has collected so far.
PurpleGirl
A good explanation of what Bain Capital did and the companies Romney murdered and the jobs he killed.
http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2011/06/is-mitt-romney-job-creator-or-job.html
Joel
Mitt the Knife, indeed…
Stefan
When Obama points out the difference between Mitt’s fantasy that he was a job-creating machine, and the reality that Bain was a job annihilator, he’s going to hurt a lot of delicate feelings on Wall Street, since most of them buy into Mitt’s rhetoric about the role of hedge funds in job creation.
Correction #1: Bain is not a hedge fund. It’s a private equity and alternative asset management firm.
Correction #2: Wall Street does not, in fact, buy into the rhetoric about the role of hedge funds in job creation. Wall Street does not care about job creation, job creation is irrelevant to Wall Street’s mission. Wall Street cares about the allocation of capital in order to make a profit. If job creation causes profits, then god bless, if job destruction causes profits, then god bless also, too.
So, these hedge fund leveraged buyout firms, like Bain, are just recycled Reagan era junk bond kingdoms.
Correction #3: not true. As noted above, Bain Capital is not a hedge fund and not a leveraged buyout firm.
Lydgate
Yes indeedy, let us hope that Obama gets boatloads of cash from our plutocrats!
They won’t get a single thing in return.
Power to the people.
Mike Kay (Chief of Staff)
@Lydgate: Meh. I gladly trade some policy in return for 2 to 4 justices in the next term. And if that occurs, we’ll have enough justices to legalize gay marriage.
Jo Mamm
@Nick:
Bullshit – anytime Bain comes in for a ‘strategic’ overhaul heads are rolling across the board.
My guess is that you’ve never been on the receiving end of their ‘blue folder’
Lydgate
@Mike Kay (Chief of Staff): Is this response a joke?