A look at one of Bain Capital's first deals shows a get-rich-quick-at-everyone-else's-expense pattern forming: borrow heavily, gut assets, cut wages, cut safety, crush unions, restructure for tax avoidance and sell with a sweetheart, insider deal. That pattern foreshadowed what happened to our jobs, communities, industries, economy and country since the early 1980s. more »
Did Mitt Romney really "create 100,000 jobs" with Staples? Simple answer: only if no one else was selling office supplies, stationery, etc. before Staples came along. What Staples did was force many competing stationery, office supply and computer stores out of business, probably shifting their employees into lower-wage jobs. more »
I wanted to wait a few days before commenting on Newark Mayor Cory Booker’s spontaneous criticism of Barack Obama for picking on Mitt Romney's experience at Bain Capital. Booker doesn’t know much of anything about private equity, but many financial services donors have his ear. more »
Bain Capital must seem like a Frankenstein monster to Mitt Romney's campaign. Like Mary Shelley's creature, it's stalking its creator just as he's about to claim the thing he loves most. But Bain Capital—and Bain capitalism—isn't Mitt's creation. It was sewed together from the corpses of dead ideals and shocked into life in Washington's political laboratories.
It's been apparent for several weeks that the Wall Street reform bill will not cut down the largest U.S. banking behemoths to a safe and manageable size. But individual oversized banks are not the only problem Big Finance poses to the economy—the overall sector is much too large, and if we do not shrink it, we'll be dealing with difficult economic conditions for years to come. more »
At a meeting with bloggers before last week's Building The New Economy conference, AFL-CIO President Rich Trumka talked about how we have developed two economies, one real and one financial. more »
Delicious
Digg
StumbleUpon
Propeller
Reddit
Magnoliacom
Newsvine
Furl
Facebook
Google
Yahoo
Technorati
