Wednesday, September 05, 2012

Rolling Stone shows Romney's elite twist in his poison pill












bluegrue said...

While the FDIC is backed by the US federal government it is funded by premiums paid banks and thrift institutions, as the WaPo points out. These costs will be passed on to the customers, most of whom would also happen to be tax-payers. WaPo awarded 3 Pinochios as the customers were screwed over, but not in their capacity as taxpayers. Doesn't change the old observation: Privatise gains, sozialise losses. The Bain story looks to me like a case of increasing private gains by actively increasing sozialised losses.

Brian said...

Yeah, I'm unimpressed by the differential between bank customers and the taxpayers.

J Bowers said...

IIRC, Bain Capital were paid handsomely for loaning Romney to Bain & Co. If the loan was $30m, the FDIC accepted $5m to retire $15m, was the remaining $15m used to pay the bonuses and Bain Capital?

david lewis said...

Democracy Now! has a video clip up entitled The Romney-Koch Hanshake: Network TV Misses Revealing Moment Between Nominee and Billionaire at RNC

The video is a split screen: on one side of the screen is the US network TV pool feed camera everyone following events on network TV saw, which followed Romney on his way up to the podium, which would pan away periodically for 'context' shots, such as delegates or the convention center. When footage from the Democracy Now! camera is placed in a window on the other side of the split screen, you can see what it was panning away from. It is shown that just before Romney pauses to enthusiastically meet and greet David Koch, the network TV pool camera suddenly had to cut away to more important things, such as a young woman in red waving her body back and forth and a shot of the convention center. Just when it would be safe to show Romney again, i.e. when Koch would be safely off camera, funny thing, the network pool camera switched back to show Romney walking through the convention on his way up to the podium again.

bluegrue said...

Brian, I'm not impressed with the distinction either. Even if it were not the public being screwed over I would still not be impressed by this sort of behaviour. However, I think this kind of inaccuracy can and will be used to dismiss the entire story by people who need to hear it.

Jeffrey Davis said...

Basically I'm impressed by the capacity of modern man to be worse than even my misanthropy expects. If people -- even Tea Partiers -- understood how Romney has used "rich people perks" to rip them off, he'd be in wooden stocks, trying to dodge rotten tomatoes and dead cats. I'd thought W was a weasel for the way he got rich. The partnership W was in used eminent domain to build a sports stadium. W had to borrow money to buy into the partnership, but after the partnership sold the team, W's silent partner gave W his profit from the sale! Sweet. The silent partner had come into the deal at first on the stipulation that W have NOTHING to do with running the team. Sweeter. Imagine making money from nothing. Less than nothing: W was forbidden from making any substantive contribution at all! There was a man who understood the menace of George W. Bush.

Romney trumped that for weaselity by a) actively harming the people whose companies he destroyed and then b) sticking the country with the bill for the evaporated pension funds. It's as if Dracula had billed Van Helsing for blood transfusions.

cynthia said...

Yep, same old giving money away is bad business unless it's for me and my pals. Helping the poor is bad. Helping the rich that raped and pillage companies for financial gains with bailouts is good. I wonder how much of bonuses the top of Bain received for a company that almost fell into bankruptcy. Helping GM, a company that made a product in the good old USA, was bad. Helping Bain, a company that would outsource jobs to other countries, good. I guess the Dems have compiled a whole bunch of these types of issues against Romney and now that the GOP convention is over they'll release the hounds to expose Romney and his hypocrisy.

But I'm not holding my breath on it. Mittwit and his sociopathic bankster friends are holding a gun to the head of both parties.