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Bain Capital

Bain Capital had two main lines of business. It supplied venture capital for startup companies with a good idea, and its private equity line of business bought and turned around failing companies. Staples, the business supplies mega-store, and Bright Horizons, the child-care provider, are two of the startups that came from Bain Capital. Sports Authority and Domino’s Pizza were saved by Bain’s private equity business. The second half of Bain Capital’s business, turnarounds, is what has drawn fire from the left and from a few strangely anti-capitalist Republicans.

When a company comes up on the radar of a turnaround specialist such as Bain Capital it is already in trouble. The business of the company is in danger. Its costs are higher than its revenues and it is going to go bankrupt if nothing changes. Its customers are in danger of not having a supplier. Its vendors are in danger of not having a customer. Its employees are in danger of not having an employer. Unless something is done, the company will fail and everybody will be out in the cold. And that is when the turnaround specialist gets called in.

It’s obvious that Bain Capital is going to be blamed for jobs lost when companies cannot be turned around. And that is what we have with the demonization of Mitt Romney for his time at Bain. Just look at Randy Johnson, who is following Mitt Romney around on the Democrat Party’s dime.

The 57-year-old described how he worked at a factory making office supplies owned by Smith Corona, which facing bankruptcy, sold his plant to another company, Ampad, that has recently been acquired by Bain Capital. Ampad promptly fired all of the workers at the plant, and then re-hired most of them. Since they were a union shop, and over half of the employees had been re-hired, the new owners were forced to recognize the union. They tried to renegotiate the contract, but the union eventually decided to go on strike, so Ampad shuttered the once-profitable factory.

Does that sound like Bain’s fault, or the fault of a union that wouldn’t face reality and drove yet another American factory into bankruptcy? The union went on strike after the new owners had already fired a warning shot by firing and rehiring the staff. It’s no surprise that Smith-Corona, the famous typewriter manufacturer, would have problems with its business model after the typewriter had become obsolete. Bain tried to save what it could from Smith-Corona’s operations, but was faced by a union that was unable to face facts or adapt to change.

If Bain Capital hadn’t invested any money in this Smith-Corona factory, would any jobs have been saved? Manifestly, no. The jobs would have been gone sooner. Randy Johnson would have been unemployed sooner. Bain Capital lost money trying to keep Randy Johnson’s job and the union scuttled that plan. Bain Capital did not make any money from shuttering the factory. It lost money. This is the opposite of the complaint most Democrats and other socialists have about corporate management, that they loot their companies and make out like bandits. The Wall Street Journal notes:

One of the persistent gripes of the left is that too many CEOs make too much money even as their companies flounder. Private-equity firms target such companies or subsidiaries, replace their management, and try to unlock the underlying value in the enterprise.

The WSJ article mentioned above goes into more detail, and you are free to read it in its entirety. I just want to stick with a few points about Bain and the nature of the turnaround business.

Let’s say your company is big, used to be a thriving business but is facing big problems and now losing money. Costs outstrip earnings, and this cannot be sustained. Your stock price is tumbling and a turnaround specialist like Bain manages to get a controlling interest in your company. First, your management is replaced by Bain’s team. Then everything goes on the table. Bain tries to save the profitable parts of the company including the jobs, capital equipment, intellectual property, and other assets.

Remember, without Bain doing a turnaround, every single gosh-darn freaking job at the company would have disappeared. Those jobs should be counted as already gone, not as jobs lost. And if those jobs are saved… well that’s really something!

So the first thing Bain did to its turnaround clients is it saved a lot of those jobs. These were REAL saved jobs: Permanent, full-time saved jobs. Not like the Obama stimulus “saved” jobs, where they are double or triple counted and none of them are permanent.

The people who got laid off by Bain would have been laid off without Bain. But lots of people kept their jobs thanks to Bain. For instance, Sports Authority and Domino’s Pizza are still in business today thanks to Bain. Without Bain they would not exist, and nobody who works for them would have a job for them.

Yes, sometimes Bain tried to turn companies around and couldn’t. Those companies went out of business. But they would have gone out of business earlier if Bain hadn’t invested money in them first.

So, every time you go to Sports Authority for running shoes and every time you order pizza from Domino’s, thank Bain for saving those troubled companies. They wouldn’t still be here if Bain hadn’t turned them around.

 

But the credit rating is dropping because the federal government does not have a signed plan for reducing the long term debt of the United States Government. As the Republicans have passed the only plan to do this out of the House, a plan that was killed in the Senate by Harry Reid and which Obama would have vetoed anyway, there is no real way that Republicans could possibly be at fault. This debt ceiling crisis was manufactured by Democrats, based on Democrat failure to pass realistic budgets for years, and the truth is that Democrats deserve all of the blame for it. Republicans have not been perfect in past years, but this year they finally stepped up to the plate. Only to have beanballs thrown at them by Obama and his fanboy media.

http://yidwithlid.blogspot.com/2011/07/obama-has-gop-set-up-to-take-fall-for.html http://amplify.com/u/a19p08

 

In 2006 not one Dem voted to raise the debt ceiling #tcot #teaparty

URL:  http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/r…

Now the GOP know what to do. Why do less than the Democrats did in 2006?

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Bill Maher & David Carr think you are idiots

If you aren’t a liberal democrat who lives in one of the DC-Boston Metroplex states or in some other huge, and hugely corrupt, city then you are a slope-browed neanderthal idiot. Nice to know where you stand on Americans, Carr. Why don’t you just emigrate from the US. We hear that French people are nearly as nasty and xenophobic as you, so why not move to France and spew your bile from there?

Amplify’d from www.realclearpolitics.com

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New York Times columnist David Carr responds to Bill Maher implying Alabama and Kansas are not the “smart states.” David Carr: “If it’s Kansas, Missouri, no big deal. You know, that’s the dance of the low-sloping foreheads. The middle places, right? [pause] Did I just say that aloud?” Read more at www.realclearpolitics.com

 

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Weiner Goes to Hollywood

Relax, Weiner. And get ready for the pseudonymous “David Kahane’s” take on the Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) political comedy revue.

Pure funny!

Read the whole thing…

Amplify’d from www.nationalreview.com

“Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.” “That good, huh?” “At least I didn’t get snippy or anything.” “Sure you didn’t call anybody a jackass? Didn’t bash Dana?” “Best behavior, I swear. I apologized to the planet. I even apologized to Huma, just like you told me to.” “Glad we didn’t have a failure to communicate. Was she there?” “Are you kidding?” “Must have been tough,” I mused. “But always look on the bright side of life. Like I said the last time, I’m going to make you a bright, shining star.” “I think I want to be alone,” he said. This was bad: I couldn’t lose my star in a green-lit project. “Listen, Dorothy, you’re not in Kansas anymore. Or even Kew Gardens. What’s the matter?” “Somebody shouted, ‘Bye-bye, pervert.’” “You say that like it’s a bad thing. Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” “Somebody asked if I was more than seven inches.” I had to calm him down. “I know you. You used to be big.” “I am big,” he retorted. “It’s the pictures that got small.” He was still fuming. “Listen, Dave, I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this any more.” Read more at www.nationalreview.com

 

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Putting Austrian Economics in its Place

Catalan gets it. He most definitely gets it. The Austrian school of economics is the one branch of economics that has one theory of practice that applies from the very smallest examples at the micro end of the scale to the largest examples at the macro scale. It successfully predicted the collapse of the USSR. It predicted the failure of the stimulus in the US in 2009. And it has predicted the continuing failure of Keynesian spending and quantitative easing to do anything good for the US economy. When you switch your frame from the absurdist Samuelson version of economics, with its sharp dividing line between micro and macro and a dependence on econometric models that don’t work, to the Austrian version that uses thought experiments and derived universal truths, then the real shape of things becomes apparent.

Amplify’d from mises.org

I recently came across “Putting Economics in Its Place,” an article penned by Richard L. Heilbroner, an avowedly Schumpeter-influenced socialist.[1] Heilbroner’s main purpose is to argue that the explanatory scope of economics has been greatly exaggerated. He contends that economics does not provide a universal, underlying science of society. He exemplifies this theme by pointing to the — alleged — failure of the economics profession to predict and explain the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union.

Not only does the Austrian School not suffer from the weaknesses Heilbroner charges economics with having, but it was the Austrians who settled many of the issues Heilbroner suggests still mar the science. No less important, in reading his article through an Austrian lens, one realizes just how complete the Austrian framework is. Heilbroner, for instance, rehashes discussion on the scope and nature of the science — this discussion should have been settled with the contributions of the likes of Lionel Robbins and Ludwig von Mises.[2] Finally, an analytical union between Heilbroner’s criticisms and his own flawed conclusions buries non-Austrian economic frameworks, and as a result elevates Austrian theory above its opposition. Had Heilbroner possessed a better grasp of the many Austrian contributions to the debate, the conclusions he drew would have been considerably different.[3]

Heilbroner’s central assertion is that economics can only describe the capitalist system, and thus has nothing to offer in regards to describing noncapitalist orders, such as prehistoric and command societies. This thesis is a corollary of his belief that what defines economics is a specific technique by which man accomplishes sought ends, namely the mixture of labor and “the materials and forces of nature.”[4] From this, one can infer that Heilbroner believes that the techniques that man may employ in seeking ends in a precapitalist society, a command society, and a capitalist society are different.

But the Austrians show us just how utterly absurd Heilbroner’s position is. Society is not shaped by the techniques employed by humanity; rather, the techniques are fashioned by the underlying nature of society. Indeed, the entire purpose of economization is to organize means and ends as a method of dealing with the fundamental scarcity that characterizes society — if it were not for this scarcity, there would be no purpose for economization. The nature of this scarcity is no different whether a society is a precapitalist, capitalist, or command one; the economization technique employed is the same across the board. Indeed, economization is the technique! There is no alternative, and attempts to plan an alternative can only end in failure.[5] Read more at mises.org

 

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That “not as shovel ready as we thought” quip is going to come back to bite Obama

The campaigner in chief was in North Carolina at a confab supposedly on Jobs and Competitiveness, two things his administration has been attacking at every turn, when he made the quip that will live forever in infamy.

Amplify’d from www.investors.com

The Republican National Committee could not have scripted a more damning sound bite. President Obama on Monday attended his administration’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness at an enviro-friendly lighting firm in North Carolina. Considering the dismal state of the economy, it should have been a subdued event.

But when it was explained to the president that the federal permit process for construction and infrastructure projects can cause delays ranging from “months to years,” and “in many cases even cause projects to be abandoned,” a gaffe ensued.

It was remarked to the president, “I’m sure that when you implemented the Recovery Act, your staff briefed you on many of these challenges.” A smiling Obama responded, “shovel-ready was not as . .. uh … shovel-ready as we expected.” Read more at www.investors.com

 

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60% commented that the decision to abort made their lives worse #tcot

http://www.ourcatholicfaith.org/complicationsofabortion.html

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X-Men: First Class is a fun show

I don’t have much to add to this review from Big Hollywood. First Class is a really fun movie and Fassbender as the man who would become Magneto is great in his role, just as Kevin Bacon carries the movie as the evil lunatic Sebastian Shaw.

Amplify’d from bighollywood.breitbart.com

X-Men: First Class had virtually everything going against it in pre-production– series fatigue (it’s the fifth entry in Fox’s X-Men saga), none of the original actors in starring roles, 1960s period costumes–on paper, it seemed like the ultimate studio cash-in, only to be outdone by the inevitable X-Men in Space: Electric Space Boogaloo from Space (in 3D!). Fortunately, it’s nothing of the sort.

Despite many flaws common to the superhero genre, First Class is quite possibly the best film in the series, not because it’s chock full of impressive special effects and action, but because broiling beneath its main characters’ performances are ideas–not just any ideas, but the central political and philosophical questions of the film’s time period whose minutiae our modern pundits still grapple over. This is not so much a review as a jumping-off point for discussion, so beware of spoilers ahead. Read more at bighollywood.breitbart.com

 

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