Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
LINKS
Frequent Commenters Here
Blogs I Visit Every Day or Two
My novel, Temping.
"...like tincting with absinthe..."
LUTHERAN SURREALISM
Photo of Blogger
Blog Archive
- March (2)
- February (8)
- January (11)
- December (9)
- November (11)
- October (9)
- September (12)
- August (11)
- July (9)
- June (14)
- May (9)
- April (8)
- March (12)
- February (9)
- January (13)
- December (14)
- November (16)
- October (20)
- September (15)
- August (15)
- July (14)
- June (19)
- May (20)
- April (17)
- March (19)
- February (14)
- January (15)
- December (14)
- November (23)
- October (26)
- September (16)
- August (18)
- July (21)
- June (18)
- May (18)
- April (16)
- March (16)
- February (14)
- January (21)
- December (11)
- November (20)
- October (16)
- September (15)
- August (13)
- July (18)
- June (19)
- May (16)
- April (14)
- March (15)
- February (15)
- January (19)
- December (13)
- November (11)
- October (11)
- September (9)
- August (10)
- July (12)
- June (12)
- May (15)
- April (17)
- March (14)
- February (14)
- January (21)
- December (15)
- November (8)
- October (13)
- September (11)
- August (10)
- July (13)
- June (13)
- May (11)
- April (16)
- March (17)
- February (16)
- January (21)
- December (18)
- November (25)
- October (25)
- September (19)
- August (24)
- July (23)
- June (11)
- May (15)
- April (12)
- March (12)
- February (15)
- January (17)
- December (15)
- November (14)
- October (11)
- September (10)
- August (13)
- July (23)
- June (19)
- May (13)
- April (20)
About Me
- Kirby Olson
- Upstate, NY
- PLEASE READ THE INTRO AND ANNE WALDMAN'S EXAMPLE BEFORE CONTRIBUTING! Send to Kirbyolson2@gmail.com.
35 comments:
Well, sometimes dreams do come true...but not this year.
If corporations are people, doesn't that make Mitt Romney a murderer?
In order to make a plant grow better you have to peel off some of its more useless branches. Romney tried to get companies to go better by killing off some of the less functional aspects.
Your argument misses. If all that Bain did was to take existing corporations, and to reorganize them, eliminating unprofitable units, then the "pruning" metaphor works.
But Bain pulled the cash out of corporations, and they subsequently went bankrupt. If corporations are people, this is robbery and murder, not pruning.
If corporations are people, then stockholding is slavery.
mitt romney
the mormon stranggller
corporations are not only persons
they are the nobility
we must bow down to them and acknowledge their superiority to us
it's the only american way
a form of subtle cultural sodomy
in your dreams are your delusions
(my modifications of jungs thesis)
it's important in capitalism to recogtnize the importance of losing money
vast amounts of money
and somehow recognize it as
cultural progress
this will only hurt for a moment
blessed are the bear market bears
they will finance a new heaven
jh
Stu: that's what. Colbert says.
I have a dream that one day a nation will be judged on the peace it brings and not the wars it wages.
I'm always a little late with my comments.
RE: The Lutheran Surrealism T-Shirt that GM won....
Maybe the next contest should be to design the next t-shirt. I'm not sure what the prize would be. But you might end up with a really cool looking t-shirt for future poetry contests.
I have a wiki. My wikipedia article is an English translation of a foreword to a biography of a German-American poet. It's on the German wiki, so it isn't affected by the protest blackout.
GM,
Stu: that's what. Colbert says
Didn't know that. I don't watch Colbert.
I have a dream that one day a nation will be judged on the peace it brings and not the wars it wages.
This isn't a dream, it's a reality. Unfortunately, the US doesn't fair well by this standard. I have a dream that one day our nation will be a bringer of peace and not war.
Stu's comment that if corporations are people then stockholders are slaveowners seemed to me to be a near perfect statement of the OWS mentality.
Corporations are treated as people insofar as they have the right to speech. But they also have certain responsibilities. The responsibilities are somewhat less clear than the rights.
Responsibilities of a person include not murdering anyone, not stealing, going th speed limit, etc.
How corporations (say, McDonald's, since it's a favorite of the left as they love the big Macs there) can be held liable for the spreading waist lines of Americans is something the left would like to see formulated into law. But basically this is in order to bring corporations down. They don't want corporations to survive.
They instead want the state to be one big corporation, which is also one big union, which is also one big bureaucratic organization in which the bottom line is not the upmost priority. It's kindness.
(I often wish JADL would weigh in here.)
Let's say that McDonald's is turned into a government business. This would mean that they no longer had to care about whether the burgers and salads and fries and yogurts were competitive. They would simply exist, and be too big to fail, having been underwritten by the state capitalism of the left.
Then who would oversee the products? they would do it themselves?
Just as Kim Jong Il played too many roles in his society and this killed off the competition, and killed off the notion of checks and balances, government intrusion into the business sphere kills off competition and kills off checks and balances.
The single greatest threat we face as a nation is the socialist threat from within. These people have "marched through the institutions" and have now arrived at almost total power within the university system (now a Gulag archipelago of socialist thought) and even hold the government, with BO as their spearhead.
Can it be otherwise?
Can the CEO of BAIN Capital trim the giant weeds of the federal government and cut them all down to size, audit the Fed, and yet maintain a somewhat green outlook in terms of the economy?
The odds seem almost insuperable insofar as BO holds the reigns of government and has corrupt city managers in almost every inner city willing to give him as many votes as he needs to win every state, with only Holder (Acorn by other means) as the only one to support or defend the laws.
It would be a miracle if Obama were not to win in the fall. He will then proceed to slay the corporate dragons of America, and replace them with government bureaucracies.
Instead of Charmin' or Scott tissue paper, we will have government issued toilet paper. It will have the consistency of lunch bags, but we will be told it's good for you, and good for the environment.
From Solyndra to Soylent Green in one fancy dance move that leaves us all breathless, and eating one another, while despising McDonald's, and their fries. We are about to be fried up and served to one another. Anyone who complains will be referred to the Justice Department.
I have a nightmare.
Bain Capital was started by Romney and several friends. The Wiki page is fairly interesting. A University of chicago business professor says that Bain is now the model that everybody uses, but meanwhile it has gobbled up many companies including ToysrUs and Burger King:
"In 1994, Bain acquired Totes, a producer of umbrellas and overshoes.[31] Three years later, Totes, under Bain’s ownership, acquired Isotoner, a producer of leather gloves.[32]
Bain, together with Thomas H. Lee Partners, acquired Experian, the consumer credit reporting business of TRW, in 1996 for more than $1 billion. Formerly known as TRW's Information Systems and Services unit, Experian is one of the leading providers of credit reports on consumers and businesses in the US.[33] The company was sold to Great Universal Stores for $1.7 billion just months after being acquired.[34] Other notable Bain investments of the late 1990s included Sealy Corporation, the manufacturer of mattresses[35]; Alliance Laundry Systems[36]; Domino's Pizza[37] and Artisan Entertainment[38].
Much of the firm's profits was earned from a relatively small number of deals, with Bain Capital's overall success and failure rate being about even. One study of 68 deals that Bain Capital made up through the 1990s found that the firm lost money or broke even on 33 of them.[39] Another study that looked at the eight-year period following 77 deals during the same time found that in 17 cases the company went bankrupt or out of business, and in 6 cases Bain Capital lost all its investment. But 10 deals were very successful and represented 70 percent of the total profits.[40]
By the end of the decade, Bain Capital was on its way to being one of the top private equity firms in the nation,[20] having increased its number of partners from 5 to 18, having 115 employees overall, and having $4 billion under its management.[15][16] Bain Capital's approach of applying consulting expertise to the companies it invested in became widely copied within the private equity industry.[41][16] University of Chicago Booth School of Business economist Steven Kaplan would later say that the firm "came up with a model that was very successful and very innovative and that now everybody uses."[17]
Very few businesses succeed. You need a sense of adventure, the bottom line, and serving the public. I think 90% of restaurants go broke for instance in their first ten years of business. The very fact that Bain survives is a testimony to Romney's genius for business. What has BO ever started or run? BO attacks job-creating businesses, but he has never created anything that can stand on its own two legs.
I myself have never hired anyone on a long-term basis, but I admire the people who do, and can make a go of it. It requires steely nerves and a lot of imagination -- seeing a business opportunity and having feet on the ground to make a go of it. Some of Bain's businesses fell apart. Others went hog wild with profit.
Romney's millions is testimony to that. A new film out tries to argue that Romney is a corporate raider, but on Fox they had interviews with two of the men in the film who claim the film used their statements out of context, and never told them they were making an anti-Romney film.
Bain Capital was started by Romney and several friends. The Wiki page is fairly interesting. A University of chicago business professor says that Bain is now the model that everybody uses, but meanwhile it has gobbled up many companies including ToysrUs and Burger King:
"In 1994, Bain acquired Totes, a producer of umbrellas and overshoes.[31] Three years later, Totes, under Bain’s ownership, acquired Isotoner, a producer of leather gloves.[32]
Bain, together with Thomas H. Lee Partners, acquired Experian, the consumer credit reporting business of TRW, in 1996 for more than $1 billion. Formerly known as TRW's Information Systems and Services unit, Experian is one of the leading providers of credit reports on consumers and businesses in the US.[33] The company was sold to Great Universal Stores for $1.7 billion just months after being acquired.[34] Other notable Bain investments of the late 1990s included Sealy Corporation, the manufacturer of mattresses[35]; Alliance Laundry Systems[36]; Domino's Pizza[37] and Artisan Entertainment[38].
Much of the firm's profits was earned from a relatively small number of deals, with Bain Capital's overall success and failure rate being about even. One study of 68 deals that Bain Capital made up through the 1990s found that the firm lost money or broke even on 33 of them.[39] Another study that looked at the eight-year period following 77 deals during the same time found that in 17 cases the company went bankrupt or out of business, and in 6 cases Bain Capital lost all its investment. But 10 deals were very successful and represented 70 percent of the total profits.[40]
By the end of the decade, Bain Capital was on its way to being one of the top private equity firms in the nation,[20] having increased its number of partners from 5 to 18, having 115 employees overall, and having $4 billion under its management.[15][16] Bain Capital's approach of applying consulting expertise to the companies it invested in became widely copied within the private equity industry.[41][16] University of Chicago Booth School of Business economist Steven Kaplan would later say that the firm "came up with a model that was very successful and very innovative and that now everybody uses."[17]
Very few businesses succeed. You need a sense of adventure, the bottom line, and serving the public. I think 90% of restaurants go broke for instance in their first ten years of business. The very fact that Bain survives is a testimony to Romney's genius for business. What has BO ever started or run? BO attacks job-creating businesses, but he has never created anything that can stand on its own two legs.
I myself have never hired anyone on a long-term basis, but I admire the people who do, and can make a go of it. It requires steely nerves and a lot of imagination -- seeing a business opportunity and having feet on the ground to make a go of it. Some of Bain's businesses fell apart. Others went hog wild with profit.
Romney's millions is testimony to that. A new film out tries to argue that Romney is a corporate raider, but on Fox they had interviews with two of the men in the film who claim the film used their statements out of context, and never told them they were making an anti-Romney film.
WSJ has an article that appeared yesterday on Bain that argues that Bain saved American capitalism from floundering into the moribund status of European economies.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204555904577169032997242246.html
Still hoping JADL will weigh in on all this. Calling JADL calling JADL.
If Obama gets reelected, and he proposes anything like the government selling toilet paper, then I will give you 10,000 dollars.
If Obama gets reelected, the paper money will be worth no more than toilet paper.
I'm afraid I have some misgivings about electing a president for whom the White House is instinctively viewed as a suitable tax shelter.
A nation's not judged by the peace it brings--at least not by those living.
Colbert's Citizens for a better America Tomorrow Tomorrow Super PAC came up with the "Mitt The Ripper" commercial that has been running in South Carolina. Have you seen it?
Kirby,
If Obama gets reelected, the paper money will be worth no more than toilet paper.
OK, I'm calling bullshit on this. And this is something that can be evaluated explicitly.
In February of 2001, at the start of GWB's term, the Consumer Price Index stood at 175.800, increasing to 212.193 in February of 2009, at the end. If we use CPI as a surrogate for reciprocal value of money, a simple computation shows that the base inflation rate over Bush's term as President was 2.38%/year.
The CPI as of the last report (December 2011) stood at 225.672. Again, a simple computation shows that the base inflation rate over Obama's term has been 2.20%/year.
And this analysis doesn't factor in the effect of the 2008 housing/credit fiasco, which saw the CPI drop from 219.964 in July 2008 to 211.143 in January of 2009. In effect, recessions/depressions are deflationary, because the velocity falls, putting price pressure on sellers. If we remove this effect, the Bush era inflation rate was 3.62%.
A much more startling effect is visible in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which I'll take as a surrogate for the overall value of investments. Today, curiously enough, is January 20th, which is also the day of inauguration of Presidents, greatly simplifying our computations.
When GWB took office, the DJIA stood at 10588, on the day Obama took office, it stood at 7949, and today, it's at 12674. Thus, the average return on investment during the Bush years was -3.52%/year; whereas the average return on investment during the Obama years has been +6.18%/year.
The conclusions are inescapable: your investments are performing much better under Obama than they did under Bush, and the cash value of the dollar is eroding significantly slower under Obama than it did under Bush.
I understand that your ideology tells you that this can't be so. Bush must have been good for business, and Obama must have been bad. But the objective, measurable truth is otherwise, which would suggest to a rational person that there's a disconnect between ideology and reality.
Thanks for posting some interesting info on Bain Capital.
Now stu says: "If corporations are people, doesn't that make Mitt Romney a murderer?" Well, if stu's source for this lame joke was the TV funny-man Colbert, shouldn't he give the latter credit?
Perhaps whether good or lame, jokes sometimes die by supplying the context for them, and in this case, wasn't Romney's rejoinder to a heckler that "[c]orporations are people, my friend" a reference to the obvious fact that raising taxes on corporations also raises taxes on people who will in turn pass these added costs to consumers? Nor does Romney's "I like to fire people" statement survive the slightest glance at its context (i.e., if one is dissatisfied with an insurance company's service, "firing" it and taking one's business to another).
I like jokes, and/but (take your pick) sometimes they deserve to be "executed."
Now what's got the left baying at the moon again in all this is the SCOTUS decision in the Citizens United case. But as the legal scholar Ilya Somin (often read on an academic legal website, The Volokh Conspiracy) has it:
"In short, rights-bearing individuals do not forfeit those rights when they associate in groups. {. . .] [T]he common argument that corporations [including media corporations, mind] lack rights because they aren’t people demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of both the nature of corporations and the First Amendment." A summary of some expert opinions on the beneficial aspects of corporate personhood may be found here:
http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/citizens-united-and-the-foolish-attack-on-corporate-personhood/
There are some good new comments that have popped in: Stu's on the inflation rate, JADL's!, and two or three others, and I don't want to bury them.
My problem with economics is that because of the mathematical side and the tendency to shove facts aside that don't fit the wished-for outcome of presenting your side in a good light, the tendency to lie is almost a given. When I'm evaluating the left's claims I'm always looking for the lie. Very hard to find it in many cases, but if you google, you can generally find a good case made by someone else. Which doesn't mean that that person isn't lying, or misrepresenting the facts.
For years Brett has ballyhooed the Clinton Surplus. I looked up "The Myth of the Clinton Surplus," and wham, found an article that says it's not so:
http://www.craigsteiner.us/articles/16
There are other myths: that are rights are being eroded by capital, that our retirement income has been shot to pieces by corporate greed, and so on. OWS was almost a gathering place for myths such as those to fester and proliferate (the myth of the 1%!).
I have no idea where to start tunneling and digging into this, or how to sort through Stu's figures. Many on the right including Ron Paul claim that Obama is printing so much paper money that it will soon be worthless. I think it may be something like the Roadrunner cartoon in which he goes off the edge of a cliff but there's a moment before he realizes this, and then the thing crashes, and gravity kicks in.
How true to life is this?
There are also responses to the Clinton Surplus that you can find online. These claim that he had record surpluses. But to what extent was this fueled by the repeal of Glass-Steagall (under his watch) which temporarily ignited the economy only to weaken it for another president to take the fall for it (mad investments that the government was going to underwrite which then fell due during the last months of the Bush and early months of the OBama administrations).
Clinton was a sneak not just with Monica, but all down the line, and you have to wonder what on earth he was doing. He rarely did anything with long-term interests in mind. Did he have Monica's longterm interests in mind? Or was he looking for a quick turnaround? I'd suggest it was the latter and that this in general was his MO.
Looking at large data rhythms over a period of a century or more it's hard to see who's been good for the economy -- we don't really know until the other shoe's been dropped.
There have been many attacks on corporate personhood (unions may speak but not corporations! but how a union is not a corporation is beyond my understanding since both represent the financial interests of a large group), and JADL's inquiry points out some of the downfalls of this problem.
Both sides lie, and twist facts, because they obviously gain something in doing so. Bain is presented as the bane of our existence by the left, and as the lifeblood of American capitalism by the right.
If there is anything on which left and right agree (I doubt if there is, and if there is, someone would immediately try to fracture that understanding) then I don't know what it should be. I've modestly proposed larger funding for Lyme disease, but the giant sexual disease lobbies are far better positioned to have this president's ear. We need a president with Lyme in order to squeeze some lemons so that our children can come up roses.
In hurriedly catching up on the posts on this thread I missed stu's credit to Colbert--apologies to stu for that.
JADL,
In hurriedly catching up on the posts on this thread I missed stu's credit to Colbert--apologies to stu for that.
Accepted. And offered just in time to spare me the effort of pointing this out ;-).
Perhaps whether good or lame, jokes sometimes die by supplying the context for them, and in this case, wasn't Romney's rejoinder to a heckler that "[c]orporations are people, my friend" a reference to the obvious fact that raising taxes on corporations also raises taxes on people who will in turn pass these added costs to consumers?
This isn't so. Just because one framing is valid doesn't mean that other framings are invalid. Yes, Romney raised the issue in the context of taxes, and certainly, Romney takes the position that corporate taxes are indirectly taxes on people (more specifically, on the owners of the corporation, which is to say, on him). But the phrase "corporations are people" has an existence outside of this narrow context, which you well know, because we've discussed Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad as the precedent for the wrongly decided (IMO) Citizens United decision. Romney's remark lives in the broader context as well as the narrower, and it is clear given his history (cf., his enthusiastic use of SuperPACs, which are creatures of Citizens United) that his remark deserves both framings.
Or are you contending, his use of SuperPACs notwithstanding, that Romney disagrees with you and five Supreme Court justices, and he agrees with me and the other four justices, on the question of corporate personhood? If so, I might look with greater optimism to the kind of judicial appointments he'd make.
Nor does Romney's "I like to fire people" statement survive the slightest glance at its context
Again, as above, this isn't so. Is the context that of Romney's effort to defend a government mandated requirement to purchase a conforming health insurance policy from a private third-party (are you feeling the burn yet?), or is it in the context of a former corporate raider/vulture, who is still receiving millions of dollars per year in tax-advantaged deferred compensation from these activities?
It seems to me that Romney strained at a metaphor here (i.e., firing a person vs. withdrawing one's business from an unsatisfactory provider) precisely because it is the simple truth: Romney likes to fire people. He likes to exercise the economic power he has to grant prosperity or destitution to individuals based on his personal assessment of their worth. To him.
As for Citizens United, there are experts on both sides, and the real experts publish in politically neutral peer-reviewed journals, not in libertarian echo-chamber blogs. In the immediate context, Citizens United benefits my side, because it's quite clear that the big Republican money is going to be largely consumed in deciding whether to nominate the progressive gnostic or the serial adulterer, which means that (a) it's pushing up the negatives of whoever wins the Republican semi-final, and (b) it won't be available for the finals in the Fall when the union dollars come in. Cry me a river.
This in no way diminishes my belief that Citizens United was wrongly decided, and that our democracy would be better served by its reversal.
The Citizens United case was also about saying that money is equivalent to speech.
Glass-Steagall was repealed by Clinton on November 12, 1999...rather late into his presidency, no? Therefore it couldn't have been the cause of his surpluses.
Corporations as persons only makes sense if not only the BENEFITS of personhood, but also the RESPONSIBILITIES and PUNISHMENTS availed onto persons are available.
And, to a large degree, that ain't happenin'. And the republicans DEFINITELY want it to happen less and less.
Sorry about the all caps. Too much time writing screenplays.
Brett SMASHES Kirby's arguments with his unassailable rhetoric.
Kirby,
My problem with economics is that because of the mathematical side and the tendency to shove facts aside that don't fit the wished-for outcome of presenting your side in a good light, the tendency to lie is almost a given.
Numeracy is every bit as much a prerequiste to the duties of citizenship as literacy. It's disturbing to me that people who are accomplished in one field tend to discount the relevance of other fields. In truth, we need all of our specialized abilities, but also enough by way of general abilities not to be played.
As for "lie," I think this is an accusation easily made, but hard to defend. The real world is simply too complex to model comprehensively, yet there is a proven value to "back of the envelope" calculations. There is a tradeoff between comprehensiveness and comprehensibility.
With that said, I did a quick scan of the Steiner article, expecting to see winger nonsense. That's not really what I found. There is a core argument that he makes that deserves consideration, and I'll argue that he still gets it wrong, albeit in an interesting and useful way.
The question Steiner considers is whether or not there was a Clinton surplus. The conventional argument (which looks at issued debt, i.e., the total outstanding value of treasury bonds and the like) is that there was. He argues that we need to consider other governmental liabilities, e.g., the actuarial value of Social Security payouts. By doing this, he erases as $236B cash-flow surplus, and replaces it by an $18B cash-flow+liability deficit. Point taken, and indeed, I think it is a good one.
Of course, if you apply this same sort of "correction" to the Bush years, it only increases the sense in which they were a disaster, and all the more so because of the unfunded expansion of federal liabilities via Medicare Part D. The problem here is that Steiner is making an absolute argument (so as to de-mythologize Clinton) without understanding how the same argument impacts his own folks, and so the relative evaluation of each against the other. What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, and in this case, even tastier.
Here's the return volley, though, on the absolute question of Clinton and the 2000 "surplus." First, the US government expenditures in 2000 were $1.9T, so the 2000 deficit (even taking into account liability) grew by only 0.9%. This is actually a tremendous accomplishment. But at the same time, if you're going to argue this way, it's really an argument about affordability of the deficit, in which case the GDP correction should be made too. In this case, the GDP went from $11.033T for 1Q00 to $11.287T by 1Q01, so the income base of the US increased by 2.3%, the crash of the internet bubble in March 2000 notwithstanding. Include both effects, and Clinton reduced the effective liabilities (not just the debt) of the US by 1.4%.
Do you want me to do the same calculation for the Bush and Obama years? The only hard part is in finding a data source for non-debt liabilities, but I suspect I can...
Stu, you can do it if you want. The problem with the numeracy issue is that much of mathematical education is like learning the ABCs which everyone learned in high school, since everyone can read. I went to a hippie college that had no distribution requirements. I did get an A in geometry and a B in algebra in high school but I didn't really pay attention in either class and never had any clue why I was fding out what X meant or what the angle's angle was. It didn't have any application but seemed to be a boring and tedious project that had no real-world outcome. Perhaps that was just the way that math was taught in 1973 when I was a junior. Story problems were always a problem in who cares how fast Betty went between points B and C, since any idiot could sort of guesstimate in the real world, and the actual stuff didn't matter. Scientists have to find a way to make their thinking relevant to the rest of us. Arguing in real rhetoric about which movie to go to makes obvious and immediate sense to anyone learning English. Which doesn't mean that most people are good at rhetoric, which means to persuade people to come on over to our side.
How often does that ever really happen?
Obama did swindle the public with his skyhigh dreams of Yes we can! but now it's three years later and most Americans realize that no, we can't.
So your rhetoric has to have some kind of reality to it or else you are ultimately dismissed.
Newt said to his second wife Yes we can! but she apparently said, No, you can, perhaps, and Calista can, but I have a brain but also a heart, and no, I can't, I am neither a pig nor a horse.
It's hard to keep your feet on the group and still have an imagination. Newt seems to go sky high, leaving us mere mortals on the ground. Obama, too.
Mitt could accomplish real things in the real world, and make actual millions to put in the back for hundreds of thousands of people.
Jobs? For Obama, it's no we can't.
Yes we can put everyone out of work is more his skill set.
Yes, we can get America back to the bottom line and yet people to work is also not apparently part of his skill set.
Yes, we can give away billions of dollars to the IMF. That's his skill set.
Yes, we can get S & P to devalue the American economy: yes, yes, that's his skill set.
People have different skill sets. The ability to hire and fire people and make it work is part of Romney's skill set. You can't just hire people if they're not making a profit. Capitalism has to remain about profit.
Ultimately, the profit/loss scenario has to play into any managerial skill set. We have to get America to work, and lower the overhead, and get the deficit down.
That's the fundamental skill set we should be looking for in the next president.
stu's right again that there are different contexts for Romney's statement--the actual context of his rejoinder to the heckler and the "broader" context manufactured by oppo-Republicans and progressive ideologues. While Romney probably agrees with the Citizens United decision, I think he'd be inclined to frame it more as Ilya Somin did (indicated above), not as presented by TV jokers and left ideologues.
stu then abandons his reliance on these dubious sources in favour of those he refers to as "real experts [who] publish in politically neutral peer-reviewed journals, not in libertarian echo-chamber blogs." stu's insinuation that Ilya Somin (an associate law prof at George Mason U) is no "real expert" in law hardly survives a cursory glance through Somin's impressive publication record (http://mason.gmu.edu/~isomin/publications.html), nor, were he familiar with the legal website managed by Eugene Volokh (law prof at UCLA and recognized First Amendment scholar) et al, would he be able to defend his pedestrian remark that it's a "libertarian echo-chamber" blog.
As for what stu calls a "strained metaphor" about firing a company and hiring another (i.e., withdrawing one's patronage from one business and giving it to another), it's such a common reference in adverts and elsewhere that there is little need to argue this point further. What's strained is stu's perverse partisan spin on it.
Sure, legal experts differ on legal issues, and I suspect stu might prefer the views of experts like "Czar" Cass Sunstein, who on the issue of censorship at least, seems to affirm free speech libertarians' suspicions about scratching a progressive and revealing a statist and then digging a bit deeper and finding a haughty bureaucratic authoritarian.
If Brett's remarks can be taken to mean that corporations can be punished (e.g., with fines, as they are) or that corporate execs can be prosecuted for malfeasance or fraud (as they are), then I agree.
That's precisely what's behind the current Congressional investigations into details of the collapse of the Obama-favoured Solyndra operation or of MF Global (formerly headed by the Obama administration's fond "go-to guy" on the economy, former Sen-Gov-Goldman Sachs CEO-Obama bundler, Jon Corzine). He didn't take the Fifth (as did the chief of the criminal division of the US Attorney's office in Arizona in connection with the Fast and Furious affair, yet another scandal in the Obama administration), but I suspect he'll end up eventually in the dock; nevertheless, I'd argue with the assertion that he's just a "cheap" financial grifter, as would his probably defrauded investors (seems to the tune of $1.2 billion).
And speaking of credit rating downgrades, Moody's has reduced Illinois's from A-1 to A-2, which now places it at the bottom of the barrel among the fifty states (though perhaps the Democrats in control there can take some consolation that Chief Executive magazine ranks the state's business climate as "only" 48th), just a year after Governor Quinn and his fellow Democrats raised the personal income tax by 67% and the corporate rate by 46%, as the Governor had it, "'to get Illinois back on sound fiscal footing' and improve the state's credit rating" (source: WSJ).
Some more up-to-date details here, though not, alas, in a peer-reviewed journal (where the lag time in publishing is often a couple of years):
http://hotair.com/archives/2012/01/20/illinois-gets-downgraded-by-moodys/
Maybe MoveOn should host a film splicing contest for the best 30 second YouTube campaign ad featuring clips of Cleavon Little from Blazing Saddles.
the only way america makes sense:
deficit spending
Jim:
I think corporations should be subject to the death penalty.
Does this mean that everyone in the corporation would be tried for murder, if say, someone choked on an ice cube at McDonald's and died? So everyone working at McDonald's worldwide would be put to death? Or just the corporation itself would be disbanded? Just curious what you meant by this, GM.
That the corporation itself should be disbanded, assets seized and sold to pay off damages and the remainder turned over to the stockholders.
This should be the punishment for any corporation convicted of breaking the law.
Such stringent measures will ensure both proper action on the part of corporations and proper lawmaking on the part of the legislature.
I enjoyed JADL weighing in here, esp. with the new details regarding Illinois raising its taxes.
I heard a fascinating story on NPR about Greece. Apparently almost no one there pays taxes because you can instead bribe the tax collectors to not collect the taxes.
Naturally, this would lead to default. Greece was on some crap list of not a good bet for investment until they joined the EU, but they lied about their interest rate on their debt. They said it was 6% but it was 13%. When some big investment company worth a trillion dollars in Southern California found out (Prima, I think was its name) they dumped all their Greek holdings which led to a complete rout of Greek investment holdings as they all went from solid to worthless.
Greece's accountants claimed they did the best job they could. Which wasn't very good, apparently.
Many people have dreams, but it is very important to be realistic. This kingdom requires realists.
Post a Comment