Posted on 03/04/2016 1:49:27 PM PST by dennisw
Now that’s a screaming case of the pot calling the kettle black if there ever was one. Mitt Romney has lashed out at The Donald for being a “phony and fraud”, but consider this. During his 16-years at Bain Capital, fully one-fourth or $600 million of the firms cumulative $2.5 billion of profits were scalped from companies which went bankrupt soon after Mitt and his partners got out of town with the loot.
No wonder the American voters did not believe him when he claimed to be the “job creator”!
Yes, the GOP establishment’s putative “jobs” candidate from 2012 was never really a businessman at all. He was an LBO strip-mining artist who rode the first Greenspan Bubble to riches between 1987 and 2000. Yet in the overwhelming share of the 77 investment deals he superintended during that period, he left behind financial cripples, zombies and Chapter Eleven bait.
I documented this in depth in a chapter of the Great Deformation called “Willard M. Romney And The Truman Show Of Bubble Finance”. The portion excerpted in Newsweek In October 2012 honed-in exactly on Romney’s phony claims and is reprinted below:
Bain Capital is a product of the Great Deformation. It has garnered fabulous winnings through leveraged speculation in financial markets that have been perverted and deformed by decades of money printing and Wall Street coddling by the Fed. So Bain’s billions of profits were not rewards for capitalist creation; they were mainly windfalls collected from gambling in markets that were rigged to rise…..
Except Mitt Romney was not a businessman; he was a master financial speculator who bought, sold, flipped, and stripped businesses. He did not build enterprises the old-fashioned way—out of inspiration, perspiration, and a long slog in the free market fostering a new product, service, or process of production. Instead, he spent his 15 years raising debt in prodigious amounts on Wall Street so that Bain could purchase the pots and pans and castoffs of corporate America, leverage them to the hilt, gussy them up as reborn “roll-ups,” and then deliver them back to Wall Street for resale—the faster the better……
The waxing and waning of the artificially swollen LBO business has been perfectly correlated with the bubbles and busts emanating from the Fed—so timing is the heart of the business. In that respect, Romney’s tenure says it all: it was almost exactly coterminous with the first great Greenspan bubble, which crested at the turn of the century and ended in the thundering stock-market crash of 2000-02. The credentials that Romney proffers as evidence of his business acumen, in fact, mainly show that he hung around the basket during the greatest bull market in recorded history.
So the jobs creator wasn’t all that, and as a politician he was far worse. Romney’s disastrous campaign in 2012 is exactly why the nation has had to endure four more years of the Obama White House’s feckless tampering with our already feeble economy; and why he bears the complete responsibility for the fact that since then Obama has further packed the Fed with even more extreme monetary cranks and Keynesian money printers.
Yet now Romney has the audacity to come out of the obscurity he so richly deserves in order to do it again. That is, to help insure that Hillary Clinton follows Obama into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Then again, maybe that is not so surprising. Romney is completely on board with the Imperial City’s conceit about its “indispensable” role in bringing security, stability, ballot boxes, Coca Cola and long pants to the backward peoples of the Middle East and other benighted lands.
When it comes to Hillary’s foreign policy agenda—– regime change in Libya, no fly zones in Syria, stumbling back into the Iraq quicksand, punching Putin in the nose, pivoting to China to rag about its sand bars in the Spratly Islands and much more—–Romney is completely in sync. He’s a neocon echo chamber who has not the slightest grasp that the Washington War Party is ransacking the world and bankrupting the nation.
Actually, Romney’s much worse. The Warfare State is burying the taxpayers of America in insuperable debts, but this fool campaigned four years ago for eliminating the sequester and enacting a dramatic increase in the already bloated Pentagon budget. At the same time, he refused to call for a sharp means test on social insurance entitlements for the affluent retirees and loudly declaimed he would not raise taxes.
But then there was no special reason to expect that Romney would excel in fiscal math. After all, when you make a fortune riding financial bubbles and scalping profits from failing and impaired companies you don’t need to be that sharp with the pencil.
_______SNIP______ more at the source
Hang down your head, Mitt Romney
Hang down your head and cry
Hang down your head, Mitt Romney
Poor boy, you’re bound to lie
lol
From this article:
Yet now Romney has the audacity to come out of the obscurity he so richly deserves in order to do it again. That is, to help insure that Hillary Clinton follows Obama into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Then again, maybe that is not so surprising. Romney is completely on board with the Imperial City’s conceit about its “indispensable” role in bringing security, stability, ballot boxes, Coca Cola and long pants to the backward peoples of the Middle East and other benighted lands.
When it comes to Hillary’s foreign policy agenda—– regime change in Libya, no fly zones in Syria, stumbling back into the Iraq quicksand, punching Putin in the nose, pivoting to China to rag about its sand bars in the Spratly Islands and much more—–Romney is completely in sync. He’s a neocon echo chamber who has not the slightest grasp that the Washington War Party is ransacking the world and bankrupting the nation.
Actually, Romney’s much worse. The Warfare State is burying the taxpayers of America in insuperable debts, but this fool campaigned four years ago for eliminating the sequester and enacting a dramatic increase in the already bloated Pentagon budget. At the same time, he refused to call for a sharp means test on social insurance entitlements for the affluent retirees and loudly declaimed he would not raise taxes.
But then there was no special reason to expect that Romney would excel in fiscal math. After all, when you make a fortune riding financial bubbles and scalping profits from failing and impaired companies you don’t need to be that sharp with the pencil.
GOOD one, K.T. fan!
David Stockman. Now there’s a blast from the past. I think he worked on the national budget during Reagan’s administration.
I’ve been hearing more from him in the past year. I guess he misses being part of what makes Washington work.
Once their criminal operation is threatened we can really see the true colors and the truth
Read his book, it’s scary.
(The Great Deformation)
I think he’s got it pretty much correct, says the debt will crush us
Didn't want to have to do this, but you forced me into it.
Good for Stockman, taking down the real flim-flam man.
Romney is doing this because The Cheap Labor Express demanded it.
They are getting desperate to prevent us from electing Trump.
That’s terrifying, is that real?
Ed
To too many people it is all about taking sides. So when Romney criticizes Trump, we get posts criticizing Romney. I never thought Stockman was popular here, but suddenly he is.
Romney has no pull for me, but that neither makes his words right or wrong. Stockman has even less appeal, but again his arguments could be good or bad.
Scanning the article, there is the usual smears of doubtful value. Here’s something I could sink my teeth into:
“Actually, Romney’s much worse. The Warfare State is burying the taxpayers of America in insuperable debts, but this fool campaigned four years ago for eliminating the sequester and enacting a dramatic increase in the already bloated Pentagon budget. At the same time, he refused to call for a sharp means test on social insurance entitlements for the affluent retirees and loudly declaimed he would not raise taxes.”
This sounds like a Democratic party position. Stockman is even worse that I thought. So now we don’t like Romney because he wouldn’t raise taxes? We don’t like him because he was for increasing defense spending?
Trump probably loves his country - in sharp contrast to Obama. So that is a plus I would like to share. Yet it seems to me that many of his (always avid) supporters at FR are indulging in Anti-Trump Derangement Syndrome.
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