Oh, hey, look who's benefitting from Bain Capital

[cybrsage]

Yup, that's why the oil industry promotes selling out so green energy firms can take its place. Please oh please, congress, destroy our industry, it's killing the world. We want to die and you can help us.

They don't do that because they are not liberals.

 

[Bowfinger]

"creating profit"? How do you "create profit"? Revenue - Expenditures = profit. Profit isn't just arbitrarily designated.

Profits serve to signal what is needed (in demand) to producers.

That's a highly ignorant comment when talking about businesses like Bain. Perhaps you should educate yourself on exactly how they extract most of the wealth from the companies they gut.

 

[Genx87]

Don't be such an apologist for Bain. Did they help some companies? Sure, when they could figure out how to skim maximum profit from doing so. Did they also destroy both companies and lives to benefit themselves, in spite of the long term harm? Yes, yes they did. The point is the little good they did with their vampire capitalism is far outweighed by the bad.

I am hardly an apologist for Bain, What I am is somebody asking you how you would do it differently than bain. If Bain is such a horrible company tell me how you would run it differently. Simply blathering on about vampire capitalism is a great sound bite. I havent seen anything they have done as systematically terrible. They purchased some companies, some thrived, others failed. Welcome to the real world.

 

[Bowfinger]

Everyone is indeed greedy, according to everyone else.

Me? I'm just acting in my own self-interest. But I think you should exercise some goddamned restraint. You don't need to maximize your income. Think of other people who could use that money. Don't be so greedy.

Sorry, you're wrong. Repeating the same nonsense doesn't magically make it right. I don't think everybody else is greedy, nor do I think most people think that way. You're simply trying to be a greed apologist, pretending that there's nothing wrong with greed because it's entirely subjective and exists only relative to the observer.

 

[Atreus21]

That's a highly ignorant comment when talking about businesses like Bain. Perhaps you should educate yourself on exactly how they extract most of the wealth from the companies they gut.

Are you suggesting they stole it?

 

[DrPizza]

DrPizza, that "Congressman A" is a terrible politician. Just because the game doesn't want to change, doesn't mean you should change for the game. Have some conviction and principle. To me that what Romney lacks and it's evident in the way he ran Bain Capital.

I disagree wholeheartedly. If you were a Senator for 1 state, and the other 49 states each passed out 5 billion dollars to each state, but you said, "No, I don't want that money for my state, because that's what my principles are." You would be AWFUL. You are elected to look out for the best interests of your state. Screwing the citizens in your state out of income that could be used to improve jobs there, or infrastructure there, would be an awful choice.

Hmm.. another example - the NFL teams voted on instant replay. Not 100% were in favor of having instant replay. Do you think that only the teams who voted "yes" are the teams that use it, and the teams that voted "no" don't take advantage of it?? I suppose that makes them bad coaches/owners, huh?

 

[Bowfinger]

I am hardly an apologist for Bain, What I am is somebody asking you how you would do it differently than bain. If Bain is such a horrible company tell me how you would run it differently. Simply blathering on about vampire capitalism is a great sound bite. I havent seen anything they have done as systematically terrible. They purchased some companies, some thrived, others failed. Welcome to the real world.

OK, I'll allow another option. You're either a Bain apologist, or like our friend Atreus21, blissfully ignorant about what Bain often does when buying companies. Things like loading them up with crushing debt while skimming lavish "management fees". That is attacking businesses, not saving them.

 

[Genx87]

OK, I'll allow another option. You're either a Bain apologist, or like our friend Atreus21, blissfully ignorant about what Bain often does when buying companies. Things like loading them up with crushing debt while skimming lavish "management fees". That is attacking businesses, not saving them.

So you dont really have any idea how you would run it differently. Instead you want to resort to name calling and sound bites. I should have figured as much.

 

[Atreus21]

Sorry, you're wrong. Repeating the same nonsense doesn't magically make it right. I don't think everybody else is greedy, nor do I think most people think that way. You're simply trying to be a greed apologist, pretending that there's nothing wrong with greed because it's entirely subjective and exists only relative to the observer.

No, I didn't say there's nothing wrong with greed. What I meant was precisely what you said in the bolded. If leftists see any distinction between self-interest and real greed, it is only made evident depending on if you're their enemy or not.

 

[Bowfinger]

So you dont really have any idea how you would run it differently. Instead you want to resort to name calling and sound bites. I should have figured as much.

Kiss off. You've been backed into a corner and now you're trying to change the subject. Your question presumes Bain has some inherent right to destroy vulnerable companies. I reject that "greed is good" mindset, at least from an ethical standpoint (and note I've never claimed what Bain does is illegal, only harmful). There are many other approaches that can be and are used to revitalize struggling companies (and not all undervalued companies are even struggling).

Now if you have some specific example you'd like me to consider I'm all ears. Tossing out some inane, hypothetical deflection like how would I run "it" is just noise.

 

[Bowfinger]

No, I didn't say there's nothing wrong with greed. What I meant was precisely what you said in the bolded. If leftists see any distinction between self-interest and real greed, it is only made evident depending on if you're their enemy or not.

/facepalm

That's exactly what I said was nonsense, your suggestion that greed is "entirely subjective and exists only relative to the observer." That is false. It's being an apologist for greed. It's not about left vs. right. It's about being willing to hurt others in your lust for more and more money. It's about putting money above everything else.

 

[Atomic Playboy]

So you dont really have any idea how you would run it differently. Instead you want to resort to name calling and sound bites. I should have figured as much.

The problem is that Bain Capital has a different idea of what makes a successful company than the employees of said company might. Bain is considering how the company looks on a balance sheet, how they can drive up revenue relative to expenses, how they can make the company look good to investors and ultimately make the company financially successful to make money for themselves. Unfortunately, one of the common tactics was reduction in worker salaries, benefits, pensions, retirement investment options and jobs. These look good on a balance sheet; less money to workers lowers expenses. But for employees of the company, it's not even remotely their idea of making the business successful, it's just taking money out of their pockets. Worse, Bain would use their influence to get these companies to borrow large sums of money to buy back shares owned by Bain so they would get a massive payout while leaving the company with crippling debt. Did they make the companies more successful by reducing employee salaries and benefits, massive rounds of downsizing, increasing the debt to earnings ratio and making off with hundreds of millions of dollars? What measure do you use to define success? If you're a worker who got fired with no pension while Bain Capital gets hundreds of millions of dollars, you'll have a pretty negative view of the whole situation.

 

[BoberFett]

Everyone is indeed greedy, according to everyone else.

Me? I'm just acting in my own self-interest. But I think you should exercise some goddamned restraint. You don't need to maximize your income. Think of other people who could use that money. Don't be so greedy.

Ha, you've hit upon one of the major forms of cognitive dissonance in "liberals" nowadays. They're always amazed that lower or middle class people vote "against their interests" in the form of more government services paid for by other people. So in their eyes, wanting what someone else has is OK as long as you're not rich, it's just voting in your own self interest. But when the rich want what other people have, that's greed, and needs to be corrected. So some greed is good, but other greed isn't, in their eyes.

 

[Atreus21]

/facepalm

That's exactly what I said was nonsense, your suggestion that greed is "entirely subjective and exists only relative to the observer." That is false. It's being an apologist for greed. It's not about left vs. right. It's about being willing to hurt others in your lust for more and more money. It's about putting money above everything else.

And to hear leftists talk about Bain Capital and any other corporations that don't donate to democrats, simply trying to maximize profits (which everyone does) is greed. Of course, when they do it, it's just self-interest. There's good reason for it. Unions can't be greedy, by definition. Their hearts are in the right place.

I suppose my theme is this. There are truly greedy, evil people. In general, they are found far less commonly than I think you think they are. Truly evil people of the type that would use any method to get rich, or eliminate anything standing in their way, are rare.

Best of all, the best mechanism for restraining these truly greedy people, is capitalism. To the extent all exchange has to be voluntary, you can only be as greedy as your ability to provide someone else with something they want, unless you're a thief. In such a system, greed is subordinated to service.

 

[cybrsage]

Bain Capital, the investment firm that Mitt Romney made famous, made a leveraged buyout that saved the site of Barack and Michelle Obamas’ first kiss.
In 2005, Bain and two other private equity firms purchased Dunkin’ Brands Incorporated for $2.425 billion, according to a 2006 company press release.
Dunkin’ Brands is the parent company of Baskin-Robbins, at whose Hyde Park, Chicago location the president and his future wife Michelle went on their first date — and shared their first lip lock.
President Obama took the first lady out on a date in 1989 when the two worked at the same Chicago law firm, according to a Chicago Tribune article.

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2012/08/16/romneys-bain-saved-site-of-obamas-first-kiss/#ixzz27bqFhYJT

If you like Dunkin Donuts, you should be thankful to Bain Capital for its existance. They saved it. Made a lot of money doing so, too.

Here are other companies they saved:

Bain capital has invested in or saved many companies. Some of those that people would recognize are:

Staples
Toys R Us
Clear Channel Radio
Dunkin Donuts
Domino's Pizza
The Weather Channel
Burger King
Sealy Mattress

These are just a few of the companies that Bain has successfully purchased or invested in. So unlike the lies liberals tell, Bain capital is NOT about firing people, it is about helping business succeed, or if it is going out of business anyway, to make the most money for investors as possible as the company goes out of business.

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20120705075853AAfE1WX

Each one can be independantly sourced if needed.

 

[BoberFett]

I disagree wholeheartedly. If you were a Senator for 1 state, and the other 49 states each passed out 5 billion dollars to each state, but you said, "No, I don't want that money for my state, because that's what my principles are." You would be AWFUL. You are elected to look out for the best interests of your state. Screwing the citizens in your state out of income that could be used to improve jobs there, or infrastructure there, would be an awful choice.

Hmm.. another example - the NFL teams voted on instant replay. Not 100% were in favor of having instant replay. Do you think that only the teams who voted "yes" are the teams that use it, and the teams that voted "no" don't take advantage of it?? I suppose that makes them bad coaches/owners, huh?

That's exactly what conservatives are told to do all the time in this forum. Since they're against big government spending, the "liberals" around here mock any conservative who dares to use government services of any kind.

 

[Atreus21]

The problem is that Bain Capital has a different idea of what makes a successful company than the employees of said company might. Bain is considering how the company looks on a balance sheet, how they can drive up revenue relative to expenses, how they can make the company look good to investors and ultimately make the company financially successful to make money for themselves. Unfortunately, one of the common tactics was reduction in worker salaries, benefits, pensions, retirement investment options and jobs. These look good on a balance sheet; less money to workers lowers expenses. But for employees of the company, it's not even remotely their idea of making the business successful, it's just taking money out of their pockets.

And what is the alternative? If the goal is to keep the company afloat, is it better that some people are laid off and suffer, or that the company go under and everyone gets laid off and suffers?

Worse, Bain would use their influence to get these companies to borrow large sums of money to buy back shares owned by Bain so they would get a massive payout while leaving the company with crippling debt.

...crippling debt...and control of their company as opposed to Bain owning it?

Were those companies tricked into this, or did they know they'd have to do this?

Did they make the companies more successful by reducing employee salaries and benefits, massive rounds of downsizing, increasing the debt to earnings ratio and making off with hundreds of millions of dollars? What measure do you use to define success? If you're a worker who got fired with no pension while Bain Capital gets hundreds of millions of dollars, you'll have a pretty negative view of the whole situation.

One has to ask: If Bain was offering a product that left the company worse off than it was at first, how on earth did Bain do so well? Why would anyone want this product?

 

[Incorruptible]

Just another thread showing that Obama supporters say he can do no wrong. Yawn.

Are you surprised, the man and his supporters are complete idiots destroying this country

 

[Atomic Playboy]

One has to ask: If Bain was offering a product that left the company worse off than it was at first, how on earth did Bain do so well? Why would anyone want this product?

The company was better off from an investment standpoint; the workers often had to absorb the majority of the cuts while investors reaped the rewards. That's the problem with combining a management consulting company with a private equity firm; there's a strong desire to make the business profitable from an investment standpoint with no care paid to how workers fare. Companies like Bain helped to deliver the mantra of the 80s and 90s that workers were an expense, a drain on a company, and that any way you could reduce that expense would help your profit-margin. This led to massive rounds of downsizing across major corporations, the disappearance of pension plans, cutting of benefits and salaries and moving jobs offshore where they could be performed by significantly cheaper labor. This worked out great for the investors who made millions on these reductions; the American workers got the shaft.

Now, if you're in management or investing, you're pleased as punch to be making millions through expense reductions in your labor force. But I'm not part of that class. And the policies that were normalized through these processes helped make life a lot harder for lower and middle class American workers, which I am. I don't consider Bain Capital's management of these companies to be a success story since the success went exclusively to the investors and not to the American workers they screwed over to get wealthy.

 

[Moonbeam]

Ha, you've hit upon one of the major forms of cognitive dissonance in "liberals" nowadays. They're always amazed that lower or middle class people vote "against their interests" in the form of more government services paid for by other people. So in their eyes, wanting what someone else has is OK as long as you're not rich, it's just voting in your own self interest. But when the rich want what other people have, that's greed, and needs to be corrected. So some greed is good, but other greed isn't, in their eyes.

No, greed is bad but some folk can't see a difference between greed and fairness. It's really about how big your thinking about the commons is.

 

[DucatiMonster696]

The company was better off from an investment standpoint; the workers often had to absorb the majority of the cuts while investors reaped the rewards. That's the problem with combining a management consulting company with a private equity firm; there's a strong desire to make the business profitable from an investment standpoint with no care paid to how workers fare. Companies like Bain helped to deliver the mantra of the 80s and 90s that workers were an expense, a drain on a company, and that any way you could reduce that expense would help your profit-margin. This led to massive rounds of downsizing across major corporations, the disappearance of pension plans, cutting of benefits and salaries and moving jobs offshore where they could be performed by significantly cheaper labor. This worked out great for the investors who made millions on these reductions; the American workers got the shaft.

Now, if you're in management or investing, you're pleased as punch to be making millions through expense reductions in your labor force. But I'm not part of that class. And the policies that were normalized through these processes helped make life a lot harder for lower and middle class American workers, which I am. I don't consider Bain Capital's management of these companies to be a success story since the success went exclusively to the investors and not to the American workers they screwed over to get wealthy.

If most of these companies were given a second breath of life or in some cases where divvied up so that the remains of their assets could be recycled in the economy to allow other firms to grow then it was indeed a success story.

Bain's actions and record speaks for itself in its success in the marketplace where results matter. You not "benefiting" is a red-herring because it has nothing to do with the actual benefits private equity firms such as Bain provide for the economy as whole of which you eventually benefit from indirectly via the efficiency in the market place whic is promoted by EQ firms and the ability to recycle assets of failed companies so that others may grow. Furthermore you also fail see the potential jobs they create in helping firms they take over to become more efficient and profitable again so that they can sustain themselves and potentially grow again or the benefit of the recycling of the bits and pieces of failed companies in the market place (if there is no hope to keep them afloat) which provides others in the economy a benefit from purchasing their remains at a discounted price and also allows other firms to grow themselves in their own right by eliminating the dead wood of unsuccessful and failed companies.

Thus your specific issue is that you cannot reconcile with what had/has to be done to sate the economic reality facing many troubled companies that are bought up by Bain (or other private equity firms) in order to turn them around with what you "feel" should of been done in your opinion.

 

[1prophet]

No, you can't make that stuff up. Let me compare it to something you understand though: Congressman A says, "I think it's wrong that we have all this pork barrel legislation." But, the rest of Congress doesn't get rid of it. Congressman A would be an IDIOT if he didn't get some pork for his own legislative district. Ditto things like stimulus money. Saying "I don't think we should give out stimulus money" does not make someone a hypocrite when they later say, "well, they're giving it out anyway; I better make sure my congressional district gets a piece of the pie."

edit: there have been plenty of threads here like that. "Look! He's against the stimulus spending, but he requested x-dollars for his district! OMG!" I find such statements to be incredibly simplistic, else made solely for the purpose of pretending that someone is a bad politician.

If Bain Capital has a great rate of return, it would be foolish not to invest simply out of the principle of what they stand for. Well, you can - there are people who refuse to allow their managed portfolios include companies like Phillip Morris, because they're against smoking. But most people are able to separate that emotion from logic & their desire to make money.

Or, to put it another way, there's a pizza shop owner nearby who is an absolute ass to his employees. I do try to avoid that shop, but sometimes I eat there - not because I agree that being an ass to employees is a good thing to do, but because I want something on their menu. Just because I eat there does not mean I endorse his practices towards his employees.

Sorry but that logic is akin to someone not supporting slavery with their lips in the day but benefiting from it none the less.

Slavery was the key to national prosperity—for both the North and the South; nearly 60 percent of U.S. exports of this era were cotton; the slavery advocates argued that if their economy were tampered with, the great industrial cities of the North would crumble; many Southerners viewed the North as a parasite, nourishing itself on slavery while at the same time criticizing it.

 

[DrPizza]

Sorry but that logic is akin to someone not supporting slavery with their lips in the day but benefiting from it none the less.

You're making my point. It's natural human nature - you can be against it, you can strive to have it stopped. But, as long as it's still existing, you'll often still take advantage of its existence.

 

[Matt1970]

That's a highly ignorant comment when talking about businesses like Bain. Perhaps you should educate yourself on exactly how they extract most of the wealth from the companies they gut.

I think YOU need to educate yourself on Bain. Wikipedia would be a good start.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bain_Capital

Contrary to what you might hear from the MSM there just isn't a lot of profit in hostile takeovers and then gutting a company.

 

[trenchfoot]

I can't speak for everyone, but for me, this issue wasn't that Bain Capital was evil. It was that I don't want the country to be run the way Bain Capital is run, ie: outsourcing/downsizing. Don't let this get in the way of your rant though.

Nothing wrong with your line of thinking IMO. Romney, in his usual style of stating fiction as fact, claimed that his business experience gave him sterling credentials for being POTUS. Imagine that. A businessman just like Bush and Cheney claiming his business experience qualified him to run the country, when a couple of guys with experience just like Romney had run the country almost bankrupt from exploiting the government's finances for fun and profit exactly the same way they did it in the private sector, only from the INSIDE. The voting public gave those two guys the keys to the treasury and like the true businessmen they are, they immediately ran the country like Romney ran other businesses he (Bain) victimized: exploit the Company known by the name of The United States of America for maximum personal gain and leave it in ruin after wringing it bone dry.

And Romney wants to use his experience gained at Bain to take control of the US of A in a hostile takeover so he can do the exact same thing that his fellow businessmen Bush and Cheney did, because....that's what big-time predatory businessmen do for a living: Make obscene profits by draining a company dry and move on to the next...and the next....and the next...it's what they do. Nothing personal about it. It's just business.

And the filthy rich? Why they dutifully collect their Social Security benefits just like everybody else while attempting to corrupt our politicians into privatizing the fund so they can collect even more from the folks who have absolutely no experience in the stock market but get forced into it via privatization.

And the Tea Party folks want to balance the budget via shrinking the size of government, only don't anyone dare take away their Social Security checks, Medicare benefits, government pensions, VA benefits, etc.