Free Republic

With Wall Street out of fashion this election season, can Mitt Romney fend off the attacks on his tenure at Bain Capital? Some GOP presidential rivals, especially Newt Gingrich, have laid into his private equity past, accusing him of "looting companies" and laying off workers. While those attacks may backfire now — conservatives have rallied to Romney's defense — they might work in the general election.

GORDON GEKKO IS A DEMOCRATMarch 25, 2009 How did Republicans get saddled with Wall Street? Obama just got the biggest campaign haul from Wall Street in world history, and Republicans still can't shake the public perception that they are tied at the hip to Wall Street bankers who hate them. It's as if National Rifle Association members conspired with Republicans to bankrupt the country and everyone blamed the Democrats for being shills of the NRA. Maybe if the financial capital of the nation were located in Salt Lake City, rather than Manhattan, the financial community would support Republicans. But Wall...

A Credit to the Corporate Raider Stuart K. Hayashi The media's exploitation of the 2001 corporate scandals in its hysterical (and popular) campaign to defame businesspeople in general harkens back to another anti-capitalist witch hunt they conducted in the 1980s. That era is now pejoratively dubbed "the Decade of Greed," as it saw the proliferation of honest but controversial characters known as "corporate raiders." "Corporate raiders" are the mavericks who launch "hostile takeovers," trying to take over failing mega-corporations for themselves. (Successful companies have higher stock prices and are thus harder to buy out.) To do this in the...