Your guy attacked Bain Capitalism and then after Rush blasted him, he did a quick turn around. Meanwhile, the left had a field day with his comments.
http://open.salon.com/blog/ted_frier/2012/01/11/so_should_we_start_calling_gingrich_a_socialist
1) Romney's vaunted "private sector experience", is of a particular kind (private equity management, not 'venture capitalism') that's going to represent a huge liability in the general election. Nobody's asserting that Bain Capital's actions were necessarily illegitimate nor unlawful, but it's obvious that Romney was no white knight of entrepreneurial capitalism.See Selling out capitalism in the defense of Romney and Bain.
2) Questions on business ethics are legitimate inquiries that one should have to answer for, especially if they're running for public office—these are not attacks on capitalism, and it's completely goofy that some were construing it that way. The kind of backdoor socialism Romney was peddling wasn't doing capitalism any favors—rather, it was ironically validating the Left's destructive sophistry against capitalism.
"Lately, Bain founder and GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney has found himself in a spirited defense of the private equity industry, doing all he can to spin decades of data which confirm, without failure, that PE Leveraged Buy Outs are nothing but "efficiency maximizing" transactions whose only goal is the "maximization" of EBITDA in the pursuit of dividend recap deals, IPOs or outright sales, while loading up the company with untenable amounts of leverage. All this with a 3-5 year investment horizon, which ignores the long-term viability of a company and seeks to streamline (read fire as many as possible) operations as quickly as possible in the goal of maximizing short-term returns. We wish him luck in his endeavor."Also note that Romney relied on corporate welfare. Go ahead, take a walk down the list here:
A comparison of the 1999 Bain portfolio obtained by the Los Angeles Times to the information in the Subsidy Tracker database my colleagues and I at Good Jobs First created (as well as other sources), yields examples such as the following:
Steel Dynamics Inc. In 1994 this company, among whose financial backers at the time was Bain, got a $77 million subsidy package—including grants, property tax abatements, tax credits and reimbursement for training costs—for its steel mill in DeKalb County, Indiana (Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, June 23, 1994).
GS Industries. In 1996 American Iron Reduction LLC, a joint venture of GS Industries (which had been taken private by Bain in 1993) and Birmingham Steel, sought some $20 million in tax breaks in connection with its plan to build a plant in Louisiana’s St. James Parish (Baton Rouge Advocate, April 6, 1996). As the United Steelworkers union noted recently, GS Industries later applied for a federal loan guarantee, but before the deal could be implemented the company went bankrupt.
Sealy. A year after the 1997 buyout of this leading mattress company by Bain and other private equity firms, Sealy received $600,000 from state and local authorities in North Carolina to move its corporate offices, a research center and a manufacturing plant from Ohio (Greensboro News & Record, March 31, 1998). In 2004 Bain and its partners sold Sealy to another private equity group.
GT Bicycles. In 1997 GT, then owned by Bain and other investors, decided to move its manufacturing operations to an enterprise zone in Santa Ana, California. Being in the zone gave the company, which was later purchased by Schwinn, special tax credits relating to hiring and the purchase of equipment (Orange County Register, July 9, 1999).
Ricky Santorum - “I’m very proud for all the earmarks that I took”
Or this one:
Chris Wallace - “You voted against the national right to work law, which would have allowed for people to get jobs without having to join a labor union...In both of those issues, YOU sided with big labor sir.”
Ricky - “You need to remember I was from the state of Pennsylvania”
LoL!
Bain is to capitalism as Westboro Baptist is to Christianity.
Newt figured that out.
Rush didn’t.
Neither did you, apparently.