Re: Mitt Romney, Crybaby Capitalist

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On Jul 20, 7:32 am, Fair Play <u...@example.com> wrote:
> Mitt Romney, Crybaby Capitalist
>
> http://www.tnr.com/blog/plank/105065/mitt-romney-crybaby-capitalist
>
> Rapacious capitalists ain’t what they used to be. “Law? What do I care
> about the law?” the shipping and railroad tycoon Cornelius "Commodore"
> Vanderbilt (1794-1877)  famously bellowed (in legend, if not in fact).
> “Hain’t I got the power?” His son William (1821-1885) demonstrated a
> similar indifference to public opinion when he said, “The public be
> damned.... I don’t take any stock in this silly nonsense about working
> for anybody’s good but our own, because we are not.”
>
> The banking tycoon J.P. Morgan (1837-1913) held the same view, and
> didn’t hesitate to articulate it. “I owe the public nothing,” he said.
> “Men owning property should do what they like with it.” None of these
> men pretended to reconcile their acquisition of wealth with the common
> good, or even with the law as it applied to lesser men. This attitude
> posed certain problems, but it left them with what, in retrospect,
> seems a refreshing unconcern about what people said about them. Being
> rich, they understood, made it unlikely they would be loved.
>
> It’s different with Mitt Romney. Unbelievably, Romney is continuing to
> complain that it’s somehow off-base for President Obama to attack his
> record of layoffs and outsourcing while running Bain Capital (a record
> Romney emphasizes in his own campaign, partly to avoid discussing a
> record as Massachusetts governor that his fellow Republicans deem
> insufficiently conservative). Now Romney’s got Ohio Sen. Rob Portman,
> his likeliest-seeming choice for the number-two slot, doing it, too!
>
>  They’re both crying foul after Chicago Mayor (and former Obama Chief
> of Staff) Rahm Emanuel gleefully tore into Romney for this crybaby
> routine. “What are you going to do when the Chinese leader says
> something to you, or Putin says something to you?” Emanuel asked.
> “Stop whining.... If you want to claim Bain Capital as your calling
> card to the White House, then defend what happened to Bain Capital.”
>
> Emanuel, it should be noted, doesn’t really want Romney to stop
> whining, any more than I do. The more Romney whines, the worse he
> looks, so if you’re rooting for President Obama to win re-election you
> should hope Romney never stops whining. (Observe Obama’s inability to
> suppress a delighted smile when asked today, yet again, why he won’t
> be apologizing for attacking Romney’s stewardship of Bain. This is a
> question he will never tire of.) The mystery is why Romney’s campaign
> aides allow him to continue being such a crybaby.
>
> The issue became Page One news after campaign spokesperson Stephanie
> Cutter pointed out that Romney’s claim not to have been responsible
> for what Bain did after 1999, when he left Bain to run the Salt Lake
> City Olympics (and when much—though not all—of the criticized company
> actions took place), was not consistent with SEC filings that
> continued to list Romney as the company’s owner and chairman. Either
> Romney was being dishonest now, Cutter said, or he’d committed a
> felony back then by misrepresenting his role to the SEC. This comment
> prompted much hysteria within the Romney camp, and even some miss-ish
> tut-tutting by the New York Times editorial page (“did go too far,
> perhaps”) that it was over the line for the Obama campaign to suggest
> Romney was a felon.
>
>  Oh, please. Cutter never suggested that Romney was a felon. She said
> he was logically either a phony or a felon, with the clear meaning
> that he was pretty unavoidably a phony—that even though he’d given up
> day-to-day supervision of the company, Bain remained his company
> during this period, and he remained legally (and therefore morally)
> responsible for whatever it did. I doubt even Cutter ever dared hope
> the Romney campaign would be dumb enough to echo Richard Nixon in
> asserting, in effect, “I am not a crook.” (The tactic also calls to
> mind the 1974 press conference that the late Sen. William Scott,
> R.-Va., called to deny a report in New Times magazine identifying him
> as the dumbest person in Congress. Thereafter no one had cause to
> question that assessment, and in short order Scott was replaced by
> Republican Sen. John Warner.)
>
> What would the Commodore say? I think he’d say something like this.
>
> “Yes, Bain Capital laid off people working at the companies that we
> purchased; yes, we outsourced jobs; we even offshored people. This
> wasn’t a damned employment agency! We were trying to squeeze every
> last dime out of overhead so Bain could take these companies public
> and make as much money as possible. Making money—that’s what we were
> in business to do!”
>
> “Sometimes our actions turned out to be a good thing for the company.
> Sometimes, not. We didn’t really care, because we weren’t going to
> stick around anyway. We didn’t even care that much whether these
> companies went bust before we had a chance to take them public,
> because we still did a pretty nice business milking them for fees.
> Heads we win, tails you lose. Beats taking a lot of damn fool risks
> with Bain’s money, wouldn’t you say?”
>
> “That’s what the leveraged—ahem, the private equity business, that’s
> what we had to start calling it after Michael Milken landed in the
> slammer—that’s what private equity is all about, son. We tried our
> hand at venture capital, and sure, it gave me a nice story to tell
> about building the Staples office-supplies empire up from the ground.
> But we figured out pretty quick that the trouble with taking risks on
> new ventures, creating wealth out of thin air, is, well ... it’s
> risky. Maybe you get rich, maybe you  don’t. We decided—hell, I
> decided—I was the boss, you know—that  it was a damned sight easier to
> get rich when you take the risk out of it.”
>
> Granted, Commodore Vanderbilt never wanted to be president. To be
> president, you need to be loved, and saying things like this may not
> be the best way to get there. But bawling about how mean the president
> is being about how you made your fortune, it seems to me, is quite a
> bit worse.

GREAT POST!!!

TMT