Some dark comedy
by David Atkins
When the times are out of joint and it falls on a few committed people to set it right, it’s important to avoid madness by maintaining a good sense of humor. So enjoy a couple of pieces of dark comedy today:
Don’t get too down out there. We’ve got a long, long slog ahead.
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What happened at Bain in 1999?
by digby
I have been wondering obsessively why Romney is so keen on saying that he left Bain in 99 instead of 02. I mean it’s not as if he’s running from his career there in general. So why is so adamant that he not be associated with it during that period? The easiest answer is that he stupidly said it without really thinking through the implications of holding the title and being compensated while allegedly being uninvolved and now he’s stuck with it because of his FEC filing.
On the other hand, there are some things beyond the usual off-shoring and layoffs that he might not want it known that he profited from. Henry Blodget writes:
[T]he reason this issue is important is that Romney wants to disavow responsibility for anything Bain or Bain companies did after early 1999.
And one of the things that Bain did after early 1999, as Dan Primack of Fortune points out, is invest in a company called Stericycle whose services included the disposal of aborted fetuses.For obvious reasons, an investment in a company that performed this service might hurt Romney’s standing with the right-to-life voters in the Republican party, even though Romney was pro-choice at the time the investment was made…
As “Chairman, CEO, and President” of Bain, he damn well would have remained responsible for these decisions. In which case, saying he had “left” and implying that he had no involvement or responsibility whatsoever is highly misleading.
The CEO of a car company may not have input into the decision of what specific cars the company makes or where it makes them (though he or she obviously could if s/he wanted), but this CEO is unequivocally responsible for these decisions.
Similarly, if Romney was CEO of Bain at the time it made the Stericycle decision, as well as the company layoffs and other unpleasant facts that Candidate Romney would like to disown, he certainly was responsible for these decisions.
You have to wonder how the true believers would feel about that little deal. Once being pro-choice is one thing. Profiting from abortion may just be a bridge too far for people who have compared that company to Nazis.
Update: I missed this original comprehensive piece last week from Mother Jones breaking the story of the disposal business:
The SEC filing lists assorted Bain-related entities that were part of the deal, including Bain Capital (BCI), Bain Capital Partners VI (BCP VI), Sankaty High Yield Asset Investors (a Bermuda-based Bain affiliate), and Brookside Capital Investors (a Bain offshoot). And it notes that Romney was the “sole shareholder, Chairman, Chief Executive Officer and President of BCI, BCP VI Inc., Brookside Inc. and Sankaty Ltd.”
The document also states that Romney “may be deemed to share voting and dispositive power with respect to” 2,116,588 shares of common stock in Stericycle “in his capacity as sole shareholder” of the Bain entities that invested in the company. That was about 11 percent of the outstanding shares of common stock. (The whole $75 million investment won Bain, Romney, and their partners 22.64 percent of the firm’s stock—the largest bloc among the firm’s owners.) The original copy of the filing was signed by Romney.
Another SEC document filed November 30, 1999, by Stericycle also names Romney as an individual who holds “voting and dispositive power” with respect to the stock owned by Bain. If Romney had fully retired from the private equity firm he founded, why would he be the only Bain executive named as the person in control of this large amount of Stericycle stock?
Good question.
Update II:
You should check out this StopStericycle site. One of their major campaigns is to out the executives of the company and warn away investors:
If you are a trader of stocks or a holder of mutual funds, please check your portfolio for the company Stericycle (SRCL). If you find that you are partaking in the blood money of Stericycle, pull out now. Your investment in Stericycle helps to financially support Stericycle’s daily collaboration with the abortion industry.
Additionally, please check your portfolio for the companies listed on our top shareholders, mutual fund investors and other investors lists. These companies are profiting from Stericycle’s blood money, and if you invest in them, you are as well. We encourage you to remove your investment until these corporations stop supporting Stericycle.
Correspondingly, it is important to also contact the corporate officers and fund managers of these companies via phone, postal mail or e-mail and inform them that you have ceased supporting their company until they discontinue their investment in Stericycle. You may click on the names of each company on our profiteers lists to obtain their respective contact information.
Update III: I should make it clear that I have no idea if Romney was aware of the abortion tie (doubtful) or even if the company was doing it in 1999. But I’m guessing that either way he doesn’t want to be associated with it. For obvious reasons.
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Crazy like a Fox (news)
by digby
This is a bad day for Mitt Romney what with being accused of potentially committing a felony for lying to the SEC and outsourcing to China and all, but for my money, this is the worst thing he’s said during the entire campaign:
By the way, I had the privilege of speaking today at the NAACP convention in Houston and I gave them the same speech I am giving you. I don’t give different speeches to different audiences alright. I gave them the same speech. When I mentioned I am going to get rid of Obamacare they weren’t happy, I didn’t get the same response. That’s ok, I want people to know what I stand for and if I don’t stand for what they want, go vote for someone else, that’s just fine. But I hope people understand this, your friends who like Obamacare, you remind them of this, if they want more stuff from government tell them to go vote for the other guy-more free stuff. But don’t forget nothing is really free.
I don’t know why he didn’t just call Obama the “Food Stamp President” while he was at it. A lot of us immediately saw Mitt’s speech for what it was — a chance to show the racists among his base that he’s one of them and African Americans know it.
Yes, he couched in the idea that he says this to all audiences (which isn’t true, but he had said this before.) But he and his handlers aren’t fools and know that saying this to the NAACP carries a very different sort of freight. They knew exactly what they were doing.
Update: Michael Tomasky discusses the speech itself as obviously a ploy to turn the event into a Coretta Scott King funeral among the Freepers:
That speech wasn’t to the NAACP. It was to Rush Limbaugh. It was to Tea Party Nation. It was to Fox News…Romney and team obviously concluded that a little shower of boos was perfectly fine because the story “Romney Booed at NAACP” would jazz up their (very white) base.
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Your Daily Grayson
by digby
There is one Democrat out there who consistently makes the case for health care on a moral basis. And they call him crazy for it:
“Republican Governers are engaging in a sadistic form of public policy making by denying these people their care.”
It’s true.
Grayson’s got a good chance to win this time and be back in the House in the fall, in a much more secure Democratic district than he had before. But they are going to throw tens of millions of dollars at this district to try and stop him. If you’d like to help him fight them off, you can donate to his campaign here.
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Profiting From Market Failure
By tristero
Douglas Smith is an author, a consultant, an executive, a teacher, and one of the most astute political/cultural observers I know. Recently, he helped found Econ4, a consortium of prominent economists who seek to challenge economic orthodoxies and groupthink to develop new kinds of economic policies for the 21st century. Recently, he published an important article for the Captialism Unmasked series on Alternet entitled Profiting From Market Failure: How Today’s Capitalists Bring Bad Things to Life. Here are a few excerpts, but do read it all:
Cheerleaders of capitalism attribute failure only to government, to individuals and occasionally, to organizations – but never to markets. Yet except in the dream worlds of fact-free economists, markets are always out of balance and screwing up.
The same forces that so brilliantly coordinate resources in a global automotive market have also operated to plan obsolescence, to impede the provision of safety belts and air bags, and to obstruct the pace of fuel-saving innovation.
Clearly markets often fail in bringing us the things that make our lives better. Which raises the question: How do capitalists respond to market failures?
More specifically, to what extent do capitalists deploy their wealth in the search for new and better mousetraps? And to what extent do capitalists double down on market failures by intentionally perpetuating and profiting from the failures themselves? And, most importantly, how do the markets for gathering and deploying capital respond to failures in markets that deliver crappy products and shoddy services?
Consider Joe Wilson of Xerox, a Rochester, New York hometown boy who took the reins of the family office supplies business, learned about Chester Carlson’s invention of “dry writing,” and then bet his company and capital for 14 straight years on the promise that xerography would dramatically improve communications. Fourteen years. This was not the “fast buck, no risk” capitalism of today’s swashbuckling pirates. It was difficult, nerve-wracking, persistent and risky.Joe Wilson and Xerox reveal the persistence, focus and actual risk-taking demanded to convert market failures into market success. Such powerful forces, though, threaten incumbents. When better mousetraps emerge, some players lose. Xerox’s success pushed out carbon copies, and those who profited from them. Economist Joseph Schumpeter called this process “creative destruction.” Like water finding its own level, capital should flow to better mousetraps if capitalism is to fulfill its potential to expand “good things to life” for humanity.
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[But] take a look at healthcare markets. Instead of taking Joe Wilson-style risks on innovation, too many captains of the heathcare industry and the capitalists who fund them choose to perpetuate market failures and enrich themselves in the process. They “just say no” to the risks inherent in searching for new life-saving drugs and treatments. Ditto to opportunities to dramatically expand access to those who currently cannot afford them. For these well-off incumbents, there is simply too much profit to be made by raising prices, manipulating intellectual property protections, bribing doctors, misleading the public, cutting costs, and choking distribution. (See Maggie Mahar’s Money-Driven Medicine.)
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If you’re part of the 99 percent, take a clear, long look around. Odds are, you’ll read about people distressed from the consequences of too many market failures in housing, financial services, energy, labor, law, accounting, healthcare, insurance, transportation, telecommunications and more. Likely enough, you have shared some of this distress yourself.
Buckle up. It’s going to get worse. Having extracted so much wealth and power from exacerbating instead of fixing failures in so many markets, the lords and ladies of free-market capitalism want even more by privatizing education, prisons, parking and tolls, the military, and with Citizens United, democratic politics.
Remember this: all markets both succeed and fail. The balance between more successes versus more failures is in the hands of ethical and responsible owners and investors… like Joe Wilson, who invest capital in converting failures into good things for life. Today, those folks are losing out – badly — to people who thrive on failed capital markets that put a higher premium on perpetuating failures instead of fixing them. There is one way to fix the mega-failures in capital markets: regulation. Governments must step in now. Otherwise, capital markets free of all restraint will, as sure as night follows days, rain ever more pain on the many in order to generate wealth for the few.
Nice work, press corps!
by David Atkins
Americans paid the lowest tax rates in 30 years to the federal government in 2009, in part because of tax cuts President Obama sought to combat the Great Recession, congressional budget analysts said Tuesday.
Fantasy (courtesy Freedomworks in July 2009):
From the East to West Coasts and in the heartland in between, and to the wilds of Alaska, the Tea Party tax protests are enthusiastically continuing. Over the July 4 holiday, TEA (Taxed Enough Already?) Party rallies are already planned in 1,267 cities and towns across the nation, and the list grows longer as more volunteers who feel they have been taxed enough join the effort.”
Corporations with record profits, mass unemployment, declining wages, and the lowest tax rates in 30 years, just 8 years after a two-term disaster of a Republican turned a government surplus into significant deficits.
This was the environment in which the “Taxed Enough Already” conservative Republican anti-government protests took place in 2009.
That this was allowed to take place without the full mockery and revulsion of every serious press analyst was the biggest media failure since their failure to catch the housing and derivatives bubble in 2007. But I suppose the press corps could be forgiven for those failures given its success in pursuing the politicization of the justice department mere months after bloggers first uncovered it, its intrepid work in countering the lying Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, its probing queries of government evidence that saved us from the invasion of Iraq, its proud defense of Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame, its brilliant reporting on the Florida election in 2000, and its laudable success in reducing the number of people who believe that climate change is real despite mounting evidence.
A round of applause for everyone.
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And now for something completely different
Discrimination doesn’t discriminate
by David Atkins
While everyone focuses on the NAACP booing Mitt Romney particularly over his reference to repealing “Obamacare,” Stephen Stromberg makes an excellent point:
Mitt Romney’s audience at the NAACP conference booed him on Wednesday after the GOP presidential candidate said that he would repeal Obama’s health-care law, a hot-button subject right now. And, yet, that was not the moment in the speech most worthy of disapproval.
Earlier in the address, Romney said he wants “to represent all Americans, of every race, creed or sexual orientation.” Then he spoke about the importance of the family to social cohesion and economic growth, and he promised to promote strong families as president. But how? Amazingly, the only policy Romney deemed worthy of mention was one that would actually make it harder for certain Americans to build families: defending “traditional marriage.”
Mr. Romney has absolutely nothing to offer that will help working families. He is the candidate of the 1%. And while some of us may quibble about where the President stands on these issues, there’s no question at all where Mitt Romney stands.
And since Romney has nothing real to offer, all he and his Republican friends can do is to attempt to drive wedges of discrimination based on outdated perceptions of African-American resistance to marriage equality. Divide and conquer, same as always.
Unfortunately for Mr. Romney and pals, it’s not going to work.
Voting for failure
by digby
This really is shocking:
Ari Melber focuses in the right direction:
[A]sking whether Republicans look good by attacking healthcare again is the wrong question. By stoking another healthcare debate, even for a failed vote after a court loss, they are distracting people from the relentless GOP obstruction on economic recovery. And if there’s no jobs plan, of course, it’s easier for their nominee to keep asking where the jobs are.
This may or may not work for them. But there can be little doubt that they made a strategic political decision some time back to do everything they could to keep this economy in crisis. The fact that the Democrats have been unable to make this crystal clear proves just how complicated it is to get the facts out in our politics. All people know is that everything is still messed up — the why of it is left up to the interpretation of people they trust. And unfortunately, most of them either trust Villagers or right wing lunatics.
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Pitching in to help raise the GDP
by digby
Representative Stephen King speaks for the Tea Partiers:
“There are more and more people that are looking at others saying they shouldn’t be making that much money because I’m not. And they don’t feel as much guilt about the 72 different means tested welfare programs that we have.
Today it’s almost a government guarantee of a middle-income standard of living from all these [government safety net] programs we have. I like an America where people feel some guilt about that and they want to step up and help and carry their fair share of the work.
There’s a number approaching 100 million Americans of working age that are simply not in the workforce, and that includes the 13 million that are unemployed. Some can’t do anything about that, some aren’t willing to do anything about that. When you add that all up, roughly a third of Americans of working age are not contributing to the gross domestic product of the United States.
They should do their fair share.
One of the things is, people are told they don’t need to create opportunities. It’s up to somebody else to offer them a job.
I don’t think I need to tell you how sociopathically deluded that is. Is he advocating that people work for no money in order to contribute to the GDP? We did that. Fought a war over it as a matter of fact.
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