Tell us why Romney will be a great president.

[Teatownclown]

He'll be a great President because he will surround himself with MORMON MORON ADVISERS!!! He will further insure the demise of MSM and American Exceptionism....

Romney Advisers Reveal Strategy: Ignore Journalists, Pander To Right-Wing Conspriacy Websites
By Judd Legum on Jul 1, 2012 at 12:42 pmIn a stunning interview with Breitbart.com, two top advisers to Mitt Romney revealed the campaign's plan to largely ignore journalists in favor of right-wing conspiracy websites.
From the beginning of the campaign, Romney has pointedly avoided news outlets who might pose tough questions. The press dubbed it "the Mittness Protection Program." As the campaign wore on, Romney has refused to answer direct questions about major policy issues central to the campaign. For example, Romney has still not stated whether he would undo Obama's order ending deportations for many young undocumented immigrants.
Romney campaign spokesman Lenny Alcivar recently outlined how the campaign will avoid journalists and cooridnate and communicate their message through Brietbart.com and the Drudge Report:
When this election is over, one of the lessons that will be learned by the mainstream media is that they no longer have a toe-hold on how Americans receive their news. Never before – in a way that has taken Democrats off stride – have we seen the confluence of an aggressive online community, led by Breitbart, and an aggressive campaign team not willing to cede an inch of ground to Democrats. This combination has created a new political reality. We no longer allow the mainstream media to define the political realities in America. The rise of Breitbart, Drudge and others, combined with an aggressive Romney campaign is a powerful tool in the arsenal of the conservative movement.
...The governor will no longer allow the mainstream media to dictate the terms of this debate. This is just the beginning... We are witnessing the rise of the center right media.
The Drudge Report and Breitbart.com, founded by the late Andrew Breitbart, a Drudge protege, are actually far-right websites that reguarly traffic in paranoid and offensive conspiracy theories. A few examples:
1. The Drudge Report aggressively pushes the birther conspiracy theory. Drudge promoted Jerome Corsi's book alleging Obama was not born in the United States. After Obama released his long form birth certificate, Drudge pushed the theory that it was a forgery. He recently featured a discredited story (first published on Brietbart.com) suggesting Obama was born in Kenya. [ThinkProgress, 5/17/12; Drudge Report, 4/20/11; TPM, 4/29/11]
2. The Drudge Report pushed the theory that Chief Justice Robert upheld Obamacare because of "cognitive problems" due to epilepsy medication. [ThinkProgress, 6/29/12]
3. The Drudge Report reguarly links to and promotes 9/11 truther Alex Jones. Jones also promotes conspiracy theories regarding "global elites enacting one-world government; secret FEMA camps; weather control; mass sterilization; the Oklahoma City bombing; the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster; vaccines; and the government using products like juice boxes to 'encourage homosexuality with chemicals so that people don't have children.'" [Red State, 6/20/11; Media Matters, 10/11/10]
4. Breitbart.com pushed the conspiracy theory that the Navy Seal operation last spring was a hoax and Bin Laden might be alive. [ThinkProgress, 5/2/11]
5. Breitbart.com frequently accused "President Obama of failing to release a valid birth certificate." [Media Matters, 9/29/09]
6. Bretbart.com "routinely compares Obama to Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, Mao, Pol Pot, and Castro." [Media Matters, 9/29/09]
It's not just Romney's advisors who are promoting sites like Drudge and Breitbart.com. In an interview with NewsMax, another far right site, Romney personally praised the Drudge Report.

http://thinkprogress.org/election/2012/07/01/509328/romney-advisors-reveal-strategy-ignore-journalists-pander-to-right-wing-conspriacy-websites/

[Teatownclown]

Because, he knows the importance of leveraged debt.

Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital
How the GOP presidential candidate and his private equity firm staged an epic wealth grab, destroyed jobs – and stuck others with the bill
Matt Tiabbi
an excerpt:
And this is where we get to the hypocrisy at the heart of Mitt Romney. Everyone knows that he is fantastically rich, having scored great success, the legend goes, as a "turnaround specialist," a shrewd financial operator who revived moribund companies as a high-priced consultant for a storied Wall Street private equity firm. But what most voters don't know is the way Mitt Romney actually made his fortune: by borrowing vast sums of money that other people were forced to pay back. This is the plain, stark reality that has somehow eluded America's top political journalists for two consecutive presidential campaigns: Mitt Romney is one of the greatest and most irresponsible debt creators of all time. In the past few decades, in fact, Romney has piled more debt onto more unsuspecting companies, written more gigantic checks that other people have to cover, than perhaps all but a handful of people on planet Earth.

By making debt the centerpiece of his campaign, Romney was making a calculated bluff of historic dimensions – placing a massive all-in bet on the rank incompetence of the American press corps. The result has been a brilliant comedy: A man makes a $250 million fortune loading up companies with debt and then extracting million-dollar fees from those same companies, in exchange for the generous service of telling them who needs to be fired in order to finance the debt payments he saddled them with in the first place. That same man then runs for president riding an image of children roasting on flames of debt, choosing as his running mate perhaps the only politician in America more pompous and self-righteous on the subject of the evils of borrowed money than the candidate himself. If Romney pulls off this whopper, you'll have to tip your hat to him: No one in history has ever successfully run for president riding this big of a lie. It's almost enough to make you think he really is qualified for the White House.

The unlikeliness of Romney's gambit isn't simply a reflection of his own artlessly unapologetic mindset – it stands as an emblem for the resiliency of the entire sociopathic Wall Street set he represents. Four years ago, the Mitt Romneys of the world nearly destroyed the global economy with their greed, shortsightedness and – most notably – wildly irresponsible use of debt in pursuit of personal profit. The sight was so disgusting that people everywhere were ready to drop an H-bomb on Lower Manhattan and bayonet the survivors. But today that same insane greed ethos, that same belief in the lunatic pursuit of instant borrowed millions – it's dusted itself off, it's had a shave and a shoeshine, and it's back out there running for president.

Mitt Romney, it turns out, is the perfect frontman for Wall Street's greed revolution. He's not a two-bit, shifty-eyed huckster like Lloyd Blankfein. He's not a sighing, eye-rolling, arrogant jerkwad like Jamie Dimon. But Mitt believes the same things those guys believe: He's been right with them on the front lines of the financialization revolution, a decades-long campaign in which the old, simple, let's-make-stuff-and-sell-it manufacturing economy was replaced with a new, highly complex, let's-take-stuff-and-trash-it financial economy. Instead of cars and airplanes, we built swaps, CDOs and other toxic financial products. Instead of building new companies from the ground up, we took out massive bank loans and used them to acquire existing firms, liquidating every asset in sight and leaving the target companies holding the note. The new borrow-and-conquer economy was morally sanctified by an almost religious faith in the grossly euphemistic concept of "creative destruction," and amounted to a total abdication of collective responsibility by America's rich, whose new thing was making assloads of money in ever-shorter campaigns of economic conquest, sending the proceeds offshore, and shrugging as the great towns and factories their parents and grandparents built were shuttered and boarded up, crushed by a true prairie fire of debt.

Mitt Romney – a man whose own father built cars and nurtured communities, and was one of the old-school industrial anachronisms pushed aside by the new generation's wealth grab – has emerged now to sell this make-nothing, take-everything, screw-everyone ethos to the world. He's Gordon Gekko, but a new and improved version, with better PR – and a bigger goal. A takeover artist all his life, Romney is now trying to take over America itself. And if his own history is any guide, we'll all end up paying for the acquisition.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/greed-and-debt-the-true-story-of-mitt-romney-and-bain-capital-20120829

Home run rock-n-roll journalism! YIKES! Mitt's a sociopath...Obama? just an ego maniac.

[erfalf]

Because, he knows the importance of leveraged debt.
Home run rock-n-roll journalism! YIKES! Mitt's a sociopath...Obama? just an ego maniac.

I wouldn't bank my retirement on the knowledge of PE from a guy that works at Rolling Stone.

Anyways, I thought I would share this. Interesting, firms actually performed better after being taken over by PE firms, even in Europe.

http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/steven.kaplan/research/ksjep.pdf

http://evca.zn.be/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/E-Y-Euro_PE_Study_2012.pdf

[Hoss]

I wouldn't bank my retirement on the knowledge of PE from a guy that works at Rolling Stone.

Anyways, I thought I would share this. Interesting, firms actually performed better after being taken over by PE firms, even in Europe.

http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/steven.kaplan/research/ksjep.pdf

http://evca.zn.be/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/E-Y-Euro_PE_Study_2012.pdf

Not mine.  And in the end, it matters the most at the place you're affected the most.  That's why I'm glad I don't work there anymore.

[Conan71]

Not mine.  And in the end, it matters the most at the place you're affected the most.  That's why I'm glad I don't work there anymore.

And for all the demonizing, there's no doubt thousands to hundreds of thousands of Americans who might not have a job if it weren't for PE and VC firms.

[erfalf]

Not mine.  And in the end, it matters the most at the place you're affected the most.  That's why I'm glad I don't work there anymore.

That's right, they wronged you so lets close PE down. And while we're at it I got some bad fruit at the grocer, let's shut them down too. Seriously?

[Hoss]

And for all the demonizing, there's no doubt thousands to hundreds of thousands of Americans foreigners who might not have a job if it weren't for PE and VC firms.

FIFY.   

While I don't doubt they have provided some jobs, three (3) different PE firms ran roughshod through my old company sofar.  The current incarnation has no problem RIFing even the most skilled and loyal of workers.  And send those jobs offshore.

Why do you think they get a bad rap?

I'd rather work for who I'm working for now...

[Hoss]

That's right, they wronged you so lets close PE down. And while we're at it I got some bad fruit at the grocer, let's shut them down too. Seriously?

Seeing how you say you worked for one, can I expect you to be impartial either?  Can you look someone in the face and tell them that PE hasn't sent thousands of jobs offshore?  Seriously?

[erfalf]

Seeing how you say you worked for one, can I expect you to be impartial either?  Can you look someone in the face and tell them that PE hasn't sent thousands of jobs offshore?  Seriously?

I can say that PE has sent only a fraction of the jobs oversees that non-PE firms have. Fair enough?

[nathanm]

Anyways, I thought I would share this. Interesting, firms actually performed better after being taken over by PE firms, even in Europe.

I would hope so. As we discussed before, the cost of capital is tax deductible when it takes the form of a bank loan. If a 30% improvement in your bottom line isn't enough to juice the numbers, you bought a real freakin' turd. What we don't talk about is how that is in fact an implicit subsidy from the rest of the taxpayers. You could, of course, argue that it's a better deal for society as a whole for us to do that, but let's not ignore that it is happening.

[heironymouspasparagus]

And for all the demonizing, there's no doubt thousands to hundreds of thousands of Americans who might not have a job if it weren't for PE and VC firms.

That's a "might" not have a job....

While it if also definite fact that there are already thousands to hundreds of thousands who already don't have a job because of PE and VC firms.  It a dilemma...

[erfalf]

I would hope so. As we discussed before, the cost of capital is tax deductible when it takes the form of a bank loan. If a 30% improvement in your bottom line isn't enough to juice the numbers, you bought a real freakin' turd. What we don't talk about is how that is in fact an implicit subsidy from the rest of the taxpayers. You could, of course, argue that it's a better deal for society as a whole for us to do that, but let's not ignore that it is happening.

I really must not be understanding you. Please explain how debt gets preferential treatment over equity?

Now I am going on my PE rant for the day. You all know I may be somewhat biased having worked for a few of them (although I didn't particularly care for one of them), so take it for what its worth.

At one point working for a PE firm was an extremely noble profession. I really don't know when that changed. Think about it, a person is extremely successful at starting their own business so instead of going the route of consultant, they start an investment firm, so they can have far more impact, and in turn more share in the results of companies. These are not collections of evil people (although there may be a few as with any profession). They offer a service that is highly desired and they get payed pretty handsomely for it. It is not theft. And to top it off, the "greedy" investors are mostly public employee retirements, university endowments & foundations. In fact, the largest single investor in Private Equity I believe is still CalPERS (California Public Employee Retirement System). Not exactly the most evil of evil institutions. On the flip side, I do think the management fee (generally around 2% a year) is outlandish, but don't blame the PE firm, blame those institutions I just mentioned. They agree to it over and over. Probably because it is more than made up for over and over.

What most people don't see is the number of PE firms that start and fail. Just as with any other line of work some will fail. No one saves them. The only ones we hear about though are the high flyers, the TPG, Carlyle, KKR, and Blackstone's of the world. And even then, the amount of good they do for the society all over the planet more than outweighs the bad.

[erfalf]

That's a "might" not have a job....

While it if also definite fact that there are already thousands to hundreds of thousands who already don't have a job because of PE and VC firms.  It a dilemma...

Generally speaking more people have a job because of PE than don't have one (many more). And on that point, it would be far more difficult to determine if those that did loose a job, would have not lost it had it been for PE. Would the company have gone under anyways? Make sense?

[nathanm]

I really must not be understanding you. Please explain how debt gets preferential treatment over equity?

We've been over this before. The interest, which is the cost of capital when equity is replaced by debt in an LBO, is tax deductible. That's preferential treatment. I'm not sure how we'd eliminate that even if we wanted to, because it's certainly reasonable for interest expense on a loan to buy production equipment to be deductible as a business expense. However, just because we can't make a distinction in the tax code does not mean we have to shut down our brains and ignore it.

[heironymouspasparagus]

Generally speaking more people have a job because of PE than don't have one (many more). And on that point, it would be far more difficult to determine if those that did loose a job, would have not lost it had it been for PE. Would the company have gone under anyways? Make sense?

You may well be right about that one. 

Big gripe with that is the preferential tax treatment awarded to the people running the operation.  Capital gains treatment on regular income?  Come on...