Mitt Romney and the 47% who support Obama

[phil_]

Originally Posted by Bells

non-partisan…
not vile…
not made up bullshit…
Fox News

I'm not seeing how, given the first three premises, one can conclude that a thing (Jagos' threads, in this case) feels like Fox News.

[Bells]

Originally Posted by phil_

I'm not seeing how, given the first three premises, one can conclude that a thing (Jagos' threads, in this case) feels like Fox News.

Bizarro-Fox News?

Nox Fews?

Shnox Shmoews?

Benign Cancer?

[Meister]

Originally Posted by Meister

Requesting a citation on an uncited statement is perfectly good discussion behaviour and explicitly encouraged, and deserves a better reply than "citations lol right here you go ".

Your next post in this thread must contain either the requested citation from a trustworthy source or your honest confession that your statement was wrong. You can definitely provide one of those. Don't try and get around this by not making a post at all.

Oh hey, forgot about this. Let's call it a seven day news-specific ban.

[Jagos]

And so for Romney, he has reaped exactly what he has sown:

link

Mother Jones has obtained a video from 1985 in which Romney, describing Bain's formation, showed how he viewed the firm's mission. He explained that its goal was to identify potential and hidden value in companies, buy significant stakes in these businesses, and then "harvest them at a significant profit" within five to eight years.

I swear, I would feel bad for Mitt Romney if he weren't such an asshole douchebag that essentially wrecked the US economy by destroying families and jobs for his own profit.

[Ryanderman]

Doesn't harvest, in this context, just mean sell for a profit? So he bought businesses with potential, improved their value by improving and growing the company, and then sold them again.

[Bells]

pretty much what people do in developping neighborhoods. Buy a low cost house or empty lot cheap, in a place where you have good information that a Mall and a walmart and a brand new gas station are coming to in the next 3 years, and 3 years later... BAM! sell for 4x profit. THAT is not evil at al...

Although, i would suspect that in this case, with romney and companies... there is more to it than that.

[Jagos]

Originally Posted by Ryanderman

Doesn't harvest, in this context, just mean sell for a profit? So he bought businesses with potential, improved their value by improving and growing the company, and then sold them again.

Actually no...

He bought healthy companies, loaded them with debt and pocketed the profits.

That's why I call him a debt creator.

[Ryanderman]

Which companies did he do that to, and why did anyone buy them from Bain once he did that?

[Odjn]

Originally Posted by Ryanderman

Which companies did he do that to, and why did anyone buy them from Bain once he did that?

No one 'bought them' as I understand it. He took out loans from investors to buy companies. He did put small of Bain's money down too, but once the companies were bought, the debt became that company's debt, not Bain's. So then the company had to pay them for those loans, often requiring that company to take out more loans or cash in extreme amounts of shares, which usually caused them to go belly up.

Here's the link to where I got that info, and the specific quote.

MATT TAIBBI: Well, look, again, this is what—how companies like Bain made their money. And a great example was a company that I went and visited—well, the place where it used to exist—KB Toys, which used to be headquartered out in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. They took over the company with like $18 million down. They financed the other $302 million. So that’s borrowed money that subsequently became the debt of KB Toys. This is an important distinction for people to understand. When they borrowed that money to take over that company, they didn’t have to pay it back, KB had to pay it back. Once they took over the company, they induced it to do a $120 million, quote-unquote, "dividend recapitalization," which essentially means that the company had to cash in a bunch of shares and pay Bain and its investors a huge sum of money. And in order to finance that, they had to take out over $60 million in bank loans. So, essentially, you take over the company, you force them to make enormous withdrawals against their credit card, essentially, and pay the new owners of the company. And that’s essentially what they did. They took over a floundering company that was sort of in between and faced with threatening changes in the industry, and they forced them to cash out entirely and pay all their money to the new owners.

[Ecks]

holy shit
and people were pissed at enron and the delphia thing (three people took $1 billion dollars, or something, lewis black did a bit on it a few years back)

why isn't this stuff being brought to light?

like i don't already know rich people own the media and filter this shit out