Happy Birthday Frederic Bastiat
7 years ago
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
Obama the venture capitalist
Isn’t it interesting that the Obama campaign has decided that its primary strategy is to attack Bain Capital? That Mitt Romney had left the firm to run the Salt Lake City Olympics is beside the point, Obama has decided to tie Romney to what it contends are egregious sins. In so doing it is attacking venture capital and capitalism. Obama has vigorously defended the attack ads and the ranting of surrogates, however it did back away from Jim Clyburn’s (D-SC) liking Bain to a rapist. Clyburn said "This is not an attack on free enterprise," Clyburn, D-S.C., said on MSNBC. "I don't take contributions from payday lenders. I refuse to do that. That's free enterprise. ... And there's something about raping companies and leaving them in debt and setting up Swiss bank accounts and corporate businesses in the Grand Caymans. I have a real serious problem with that." Note that he aligned venture capitalists with payday lenders saying “This is not an attack on free enterprise”! Huh? What Obama is doing is going after Romney because he cannot tout his record. What Romney has to do is stay on message and just brush off the attacks. Romney needs to point out that capitalism has made this country great and that the great experiment wandering away from capitalism has resulted in the slowest recovery on record. Obama wants to contrast his goals: changing the basic economic tenets of American capitalism and economic “justice” with what he claims characterizes Romney: getting rich on the backs of working class Americans. As Clyburn contends Romney and Bain Capital destroyed jobs, bought businesses, saddled them with debt and drove them into bankruptcy. However, I have yet to hear anyone point out that Obama has done something similar with the automobile bailouts. Thousands of jobs were destroyed, dealerships were closed, plants were closed and GM still owes the government $14 billion and Chrysler owes it $1.3 billion. The only difference is that Obama did it with someone else’s money while Bain Capital risked their own.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
This is from an interview of Lanny Davis by Bill Hemmer on Fox news last week?:
Hemmer said, "Cory Booker, the Mayor of Newark, what he was saying is that these are good people at private equity firms that work on Wall Street. Don't classify 'em all as evil."
Davis: "There was a problem with the ad that I saw. It was misleading because it omitted a number of important facts that the viewer should see. Romney wasn't even there when that plant went down. That plant was about to go bankrupt before Bain bought it, brought it back, and in fact created jobs, and then it went under, as the head of the union said, because of foreign imports. So the ad is misleading because it omitted those facts, apart from the fact the person at Bain is currently an Obama bundler when that company went bankrupt. It's not a good idea to mislead people."
The administration in disarray. They're beholding to the anti-capitalists, but they've miscalculated badly. Bain was called in by failing companies, with 80% of them saved during his tenure and jobs created.
Post a Comment