Hillary's Plan on How to Go After Trump

The Iowa caucus results are not yet fully in and other than Jeb Bush crashing and burning, all that is known is that Trump and Cruz are neck and neck - a choice in my view for the nation between a bullet to the head or cyanide poisoning.  But some in the Hillary Clinton campaign believe that it is time to plan for how to counter and attack Donald Trump should he be the GOP presidential nominee.  Politico looks at the Clinton plans to counter Trump and turn his demagoguery against him, especially the his business dealings that he doesn't want voters to focus upon.  Here are article highlights:

It’s tunnel-vision time for Hillary Clinton as she battles Bernie Sanders here — but she’s casting some serious side-eye in Donald Trump’s direction.

After months of laughing off Trump — and assuming his ascent would propel the Republican Party to a 1964-style wipeout — her campaign and its allies have begun to steer time and resources into framing lines of attack against the blustery billionaire, even if there’s still considerable confusion over how to attack 2016’s top-of-the-food-chain predator.

The emerging approach to defining Trump is an updated iteration of the “Bain Strategy” — the Obama 2012 campaign’s devastating attacks on Mitt Romney’s dealings with investment firm Bain Capital, according to a dozen Democratic operatives and campaign aides familiar with the accelerating planning inside Clinton’s orbit. This time, Democrats would highlight the impact of Trump’s four business bankruptcies — and his opposition to wage hikes at his casinos and residential properties — on the families of his workers.

[P]eople close to Clinton think the key to beating the real estate mogul is to undermine his oft-repeated assertion that he is a great businessman. And it fits in with Hillary Clinton’s personal philosophy of politics, often articulated to friends and allies, that “attacking an opponent’s strengths,” not their weaknesses, is the key to any presidential campaign.

Those attacks would come in conjunction with a larger, more obvious push by Hispanic and women’s groups to rebroadcast Trump’s greatest, most offensive hits.

Clinton’s team is wary but confident heading into Monday’s caucuses — their internal tracking is consistent with public polling showing her with a slight lead. Sanders’ seemingly unstoppable mid-January momentum has “stalled,” according to one aide. Even with the result uncertain (and Clinton trailing Sanders badly in New Hampshire), the Brooklyn brass — especially campaign chairman John Podesta — think Clinton needs to begin girding immediately for a Trump showdown.

Moreover, there is a growing sense of annoyance on the campaign — especially among Podesta and his one-time boss Bill Clinton — that underestimating Sanders and waiting for the last few weeks to begin attacking his electability and capacity to do the job of president, turned a Clinton romp into a real race. The Clintons don’t want to make the same mistake with Trump, a vastly nastier antagonist than the mildly cranky but intermittently cuddly Vermont socialist.

A Clinton-Trump contest would feature two candidates with disapproval ratings traditionally deemed too high for national electoral success: Clinton’s disapprovals hover around the 50 percent range, while Trump’s have rocketed as high as 60 percent, an unprecedented number that should preclude the possibility of his winning a general election.

But attacking him is tougher than it seems, mainly because he is so comfortable throwing a sucker punch and the Clintons aren’t. And he’s already signaled that he would stop at nothing if he faces off against the former secretary of state and her husband.

When NBC’s Chuck Todd asked Trump how he would respond if the Clintons attacked him, he suggested he’d delve more deeply into their personal history.  “Well, I don’t want to say it’s a threat. But it is a threat,” he said on “Meet the Press.”

Even if Trump doesn’t follow through on the threat — or if America yawns — Carville thinks that the Republican front-runner is wily enough to figure out a new way to get under Clinton’s skin.

“Trump’s got talent. He can hold the line when he’s attacked. He uses irony,” he added. “He’s different, so people naturally pay attention. But the question — and nobody can answer it yet — is how he will wear on people over the course of a campaign, over a long period of time? Time may be what really kills Trump.”

Mitt Romney: Master Speculator But No Businessman

Much of Mitt Romney's sales pitch has been that he's an experienced businessman who knows how to create jobs. It's a line of bullshit if there ever was one because in truth Romney was a vulture capitalist or, as David Stockman - yes, Ronald Reagan's David Stockman who was budget director - argues in The Daily Beast a master speculator. Neither one adds up to the skilled businessman Romney seeks him self to be.  But then, who ever accused Romney of being anything but a liar.  Here are excerpts from Stockman's lengthy and detailed must read piece:

Bain Capital is a product of the Great Deformation. It has garnered fabulous winnings through leveraged speculation in financial markets that have been perverted and deformed by decades of money printing and Wall Street coddling by the Fed. So Bain’s billions of profits were not rewards for capitalist creation; they were mainly windfalls collected from gambling in markets that were rigged to rise.

Nevertheless, Mitt Romney claims that his essential qualification to be president is grounded in his 15 years as head of Bain Capital, from 1984 through early 1999. According to the campaign’s narrative, it was then that he became immersed in the toils of business enterprise, learning along the way the true secrets of how to grow the economy and create jobs.

Except Mitt Romney was not a businessman; he was a master financial speculator who bought, sold, flipped, and stripped businesses. He did not build enterprises the old-fashioned way—out of inspiration, perspiration, and a long slog in the free market fostering a new product, service, or process of production. Instead, he spent his 15 years raising debt in prodigious amounts on Wall Street so that Bain could purchase the pots and pans and castoffs of corporate America, leverage them to the hilt, gussy them up as reborn “roll-ups,” and then deliver them back to Wall Street for resale—the faster the better.

That is the modus operandi of the leveraged-buyout business, and in an honest free-market economy, there wouldn’t be much scope for it because it creates little of economic value. But we have a rigged system—a regime of crony capitalism—where the tax code heavily favors debt and capital gains, and the central bank purposefully enables rampant speculation by propping up the price of financial assets and battering down the cost of leveraged finance.   The vast outpouring of LBOs in recent decades has been the consequence of bad policy, not the product of capitalist enterprise.

In truth, LBOs are capitalism’s natural undertakers—vulture investors who feed on failing businesses. Due to bad policy, however, they have now become monsters of the financial midway that strip-mine cash from healthy businesses and recycle it mostly to the top 1 percent.  .  .  .  . The credentials that Romney proffers as evidence of his business acumen, in fact, mainly show that he hung around the basket during the greatest bull market in recorded history.

Romney’s record at Bain is so completely perverse. The record is actually all about the utter unfairness of windfall riches obtained under our anti-free market regime of bubble finance. 

The startling fact is that four of the 10 Bain Capital home runs ended up in bankruptcy, and for an obvious reason: Bain got its money out at the top of the Greenspan boom in the late 1990s and then these companies hit the wall during the 2000-02 downturn, weighed down by the massive load of debt Bain had bequeathed them. In fact, nearly $600 million, or one third of the profits earned by the home-run companies, had been extracted from the hide of these four eventual debt zombies.

Bain’s acclaimed success with another retailer—Staples—is also not what it is touted to be.   . . . . . this honest capitalist efficiency, which benefited millions of customers, was achieved by a rampage of job destruction among tens of thousands of Main Street stationery and office-supplies stores and other traditional distributors.

The larger point is that Romney’s personal experience in the nation’s financial casinos is no mark against his character or competence. I’ve made money and lost it and know what it is like to be judged. But that experience doesn’t translate into answers on the great public issues before the nation, either. The Romney campaign’s feckless narrative that private equity generates real economic efficiency and societal wealth is dead wrong.

Quote of the Day: Bill Clinton on Romney's Lie Filled Debate Performance

I have not endeavored to hide my view that Mitt Romney lied through his teeth during last week's presidential debate. The man will say and do anything to win - probably even sell Ann Romney into prostitution if it would guarantee that he secured 50.1% of the vote on election day. Apparently, former president Bill Clinton likewise views Mr. Romney as a lying piece of shit and took some shots at the ever flip flopping, chameleon like Romney. Here are some highlights of Clinton's comments via Towleroad: 

Said Clinton:

I had a different reaction to that first debate than a lot of people did. I mean, I thought, “Wow! Here’s old Moderate Mitt. Where you been, boy, I missed you all these last two years!” But I was paying attention these past two years. And it was like one of these Bain Capital deals where, you know, he’s the closer. So he shows up, doesn’t really know much about the deal and says, “tell me what I’m supposed to say to close.”

Now the problem with this deal is, the deal was made by Severe Conservative Mitt. That was how he described himself for two whole years. Until three or four days before the debate they all got together and said, “hey Mitt, this ship is sinkin’ faster than the Titanic…but people are still frustrated about the economy, they want it fixed yesterday, so just show up with a sunny face and say I didn’t say all that stuff I said for the last two years. I don’t have that tax plan I’ve had for the last two years, you gonna believe me or your lyin’ eyes here? Come on. What are you doin’?” And if I’d been the President, I might have said, “well, I hate to get in the way of this, I missed you.” 

Here's the video clip. Clinton's delivery makes the comments quoted above even more cutting:

Mitt Romney's Trade Policy Claims Versus Bain Capital's Practices

One of the things that Mitt Romney claims that he would do is "get tough on China" should he win election.  The sound bite plays well with the Christofascist/Tea Party element in the GOP.  The problem is that the claim isn't even consistent with what Romney's former buddies at Bain Capital are doing as they help ship American jobs to China.  The New York  Times looks at example where automotive manufacturing jobs have been and/or are soon to be outsourced to China.  As seems to always be the case, Romney says one thing yet reality is something very different.  Here are some story excerpts:

The tale of Asimco Technologies, an auto parts manufacturer whose plants dot eastern China, would seem to underscore Mitt Romney’s campaign-trail complaint that China’s manufacturing juggernaut is costing America jobs.
 

Nine years ago, the company bought two camshaft factories that employed about 500 people in Michigan. By 2007 both were shut down. Now Asimco manufactures the same components in China on government-donated land in a coastal region that China has designated an export base, where companies are eligible for the sort of subsidies Mr. Romney says create an unfair trade imbalance. 

But there is a twist to the Asimco story that would not fit neatly into a Romney stump speech: Since 2010, it has been owned by Bain Capital, the private equity firm founded by Mr. Romney, who has as much as $2.25 million invested in three Bain funds with large stakes in Asimco and at least seven other Chinese businesses, according to his 2012 candidate financial disclosure and other documents. 

As a candidate, Mr. Romney uses China as a punching bag. He accuses Beijing of unfairly subsidizing Chinese exports, artificially holding down the value of its currency to keep exports cheap, stealing American technology and hacking into corporate and government computers.  . . . . .  But his private equity dealings, both while he headed Bain and since, complicate that message. 

Among the companies in which the Bain funds have invested is a global auto parts maker that is in the process of closing a factory in Illinois and moving most of the equipment and jobs to Jiangsu Province, where the Chinese government has built it a new plant; a Chinese electronics retailer accused by Microsoft of selling computers with pirated software; and a Hong Kong-based Chinese appliance maker that was sued for copying another company’s design for a deep-fat fryer. 

Mr. Romney continues to have money in Bain funds with sizable holdings in China. He has as much as $250,000 in the Bain Capital Asia Fund and as much as $1 million each in Bain Capital Funds IX and X, all Cayman Islands entities used by Bain to make sizable investments in China . . . . 

Bain’s interest in China dates to when Mr. Romney ran the firm. During a panel discussion at the Federal Reserve Bank in Boston in February 1998, he told of touring an appliance factory in China where 5,000 employees “were working, working, working, as hard as they could, at rates of roughly 50 cents an hour.” 

Mr. Romney also has millions invested in a series of Bain funds that have a controlling stake in Sensata Technologies . . . . Two years ago, Sensata bought an operation that made automobile sensors in Freeport, Ill. At the first meeting with the plant’s 170 workers, Sensata managers announced that by the end of 2012 all the equipment and jobs would be relocated, mostly to Jiangsu Province. 

There is more to the article, but the foregoing paints a clear picture: Romney says one thing on the campaign trail, but his own investment strategy and that of his former Bain compatriots tells a very different story.  Is Romney a liar?  Draw your own conclusions.  I've drawn my own: Romney is a pathological liar and money is his only real god.

NEW ROMNEY VIDEO: Bain's "Harvesting" of Companies for Profits

While Mitt Romney claims on the campaign trail that he would create new jobs for American workers, while at Bain Capital he did largely the opposite as he and his fellow vulture capitalists swooped down on companies, bought them, loaded them with debt, and then dismembered them for a profit.  Sometimes for huge profit.  And what of the employees of these companies?  They were all too often left jobless, with no health insurance and pensions that evaporated.  In the mind of Romney and his compatriots, this behavior comprised "harvesting" companies.  Harvesting riches for themselves and leaving little or nothing for everyone else, especially the former employees.  Yes, Bain had a few successes where companies survived Bain - Romney points to Staples - but many more did not.  And then, of course there was the exporting of jobs by Bain and its affiliates to China and elsewhere.  Currently, Romney hopes that Americans will somehow forget how he got so wealthy and the rapaciousness with which he left many, many Americans unemployed.   But there was a time when Romney boasted about what he and Bain planned to do.  Mother Jones has unearthed a video where Romney explained his plan to "harvest companies. Here are excerpts from Mother Jones' piece on this video:

Campaigning for the presidency, Mitt Romney has pointed to his stint as the founder and manager of Bain Capital, a private equity firm, as proof he can rev up the US economy and create jobs at a faster clip than President Barack Obama. Last year, while stumping in Florida, Romney declared, "You'd have a president who has spent his life in business—small business, big business—and who knows something about how jobs are created and how we compete around the world."

But at Bain, Romney's top priority wasn't to boost employment. As the Wall Street Journal recently noted, creating jobs "wasn't the aim of Bain or other private-equity firms, which measure success by returns produced for investors."

Mother Jones has obtained a video from 1985 in which Romney, describing Bain's formation, showed how he viewed the firm's mission. He explained that its goal was to identify potential and hidden value in companies, buy significant stakes in these businesses, and then "harvest them at a significant profit" within five to eight years.

The video was included in a CD-ROM created in 1998 to mark the 25th anniversary of Bain & Company, the consulting firm that gave birth to Bain Capital. Here is the full clip, as it appeared on that CD-ROM (the editing occurred within the original):

  [T]his short clip offers a glimpse of Romney when he was at the start of his private equity career and saw businesses as targets of opportunity that could be harvested for the benefit of his investors, not as long-term job creators or participants in a larger community. His remarks were hardly surprising, but they did encapsulate the mindset of get-in/get-out private equity deal makers.

In this clip, Romney mentioned that it would routinely take up to eight years to turn around a firm—though he now slams the president for failing to revive the entire US economy in half that time.

Was there any thought or concern for those who lost their livelihoods and/or retirement funds?  Of course not.  It was all about enriching Romney and his investors.  The man is despicable and as far as one can get from the Gospel message of caring for one's neighbor.  Romney rode to riches over the shatter lives on many, many Americans.