Bain In The Rear
The professional Left, led by its primary attack dog, the New York Times, is off and running in an effort to discredit Mitt Romney's business/management credentials.
As expected, they're going after Romney's record while at the helm of private equity firm, Bain Capital. To the capitalist eye, while not perfect, it's a record filled with one success after another, including the likes of Staples, the multi-billion dollar office supply retailer that used Bain and other funding as the catalyst for expanding from one store in 1986 to over 2000 today.
Not surprisingly, the Times conveniently ignores Staples et al and chooses to focus its liberal wrath elsewhere. More specifically, their sights are currently set on a Bain investment from the early 1990's—an Illinois medical technology company by the name of Dade.
You see, to the capitalism-ignorant Left, Bain committed a mortal sin. In its crafting of a turnaround of a failing company, it, according to the Times, "destroyed" some 1700 jobs. And...get ready for it...made a rather substantial return on its investment in the process.
In Liberal land, if you haven't noticed, a job, especially one under the auspices of a Right-leaning person or entity, must be protected at all costs, literally. That's right, literally...even if hundreds, thousands, or millions of other jobs will be compromised as a result. Apparently, the Left has no concept of "saved" jobs outside the context of its failed stimulus. Yep, better to let a business fail and wipe out all jobs, than to streamline it and save some substantial percentage.
Further proving its bias and ignorance, the Times neglected to point out that Dade, purchased for $442 million in 1994, was sold in 2007 for about $7 billion. And oh by the way, the company's workforce ultimately grew by about 7400 in that timeframe.
The Times, with its liberal blinders on, sees only the initial, restructuring-related job losses and the large financial return to Bain. It neglects to appreciate that sometimes a few have to be sacrificed in order to protect the many. Moreover, the Times cannot comprehend that a large return on investment, in addition to padding the bank accounts of the wealthy, also drives considerable tax revenue to the government, and provides major dollars that will be recycled into other job creating/saving ventures (e.g. the next Staples). In a word, it's called capitalism.
A grand irony in the Times' reporting is its failure to recognize its own hypocrisy. The Times is only viable today because it had no rational choice but to cut, over the past decade, a large percentage of its workforce due to a dramatically different economic reality in the newspaper business. To do anything else would have been suicidal. Unfortunately, they use a different lens when scrutinizing the actions of corporations and private equity firms.
Not surprising though when your world revolves around the one organization that's never been streamlined—the federal government. The very federal government weighted down by the inverse of Moore's Law—a doubling of stupidity and spending every two years. God forbid that the Times ever see the parallel between bloated, non-competitive, and inefficient government and the similar circumstance in which it and the entire newspaper business found itself in the recent past.
That's probably asking too much. Just like it's asking too much for the Times to acknowledge that the Solyndra's of the world (and their investors) should have been so fortunate as to have an outcome like Dade's.
As expected, they're going after Romney's record while at the helm of private equity firm, Bain Capital. To the capitalist eye, while not perfect, it's a record filled with one success after another, including the likes of Staples, the multi-billion dollar office supply retailer that used Bain and other funding as the catalyst for expanding from one store in 1986 to over 2000 today.
Not surprisingly, the Times conveniently ignores Staples et al and chooses to focus its liberal wrath elsewhere. More specifically, their sights are currently set on a Bain investment from the early 1990's—an Illinois medical technology company by the name of Dade.
You see, to the capitalism-ignorant Left, Bain committed a mortal sin. In its crafting of a turnaround of a failing company, it, according to the Times, "destroyed" some 1700 jobs. And...get ready for it...made a rather substantial return on its investment in the process.
In Liberal land, if you haven't noticed, a job, especially one under the auspices of a Right-leaning person or entity, must be protected at all costs, literally. That's right, literally...even if hundreds, thousands, or millions of other jobs will be compromised as a result. Apparently, the Left has no concept of "saved" jobs outside the context of its failed stimulus. Yep, better to let a business fail and wipe out all jobs, than to streamline it and save some substantial percentage.
Further proving its bias and ignorance, the Times neglected to point out that Dade, purchased for $442 million in 1994, was sold in 2007 for about $7 billion. And oh by the way, the company's workforce ultimately grew by about 7400 in that timeframe.
The Times, with its liberal blinders on, sees only the initial, restructuring-related job losses and the large financial return to Bain. It neglects to appreciate that sometimes a few have to be sacrificed in order to protect the many. Moreover, the Times cannot comprehend that a large return on investment, in addition to padding the bank accounts of the wealthy, also drives considerable tax revenue to the government, and provides major dollars that will be recycled into other job creating/saving ventures (e.g. the next Staples). In a word, it's called capitalism.
A grand irony in the Times' reporting is its failure to recognize its own hypocrisy. The Times is only viable today because it had no rational choice but to cut, over the past decade, a large percentage of its workforce due to a dramatically different economic reality in the newspaper business. To do anything else would have been suicidal. Unfortunately, they use a different lens when scrutinizing the actions of corporations and private equity firms.
Not surprising though when your world revolves around the one organization that's never been streamlined—the federal government. The very federal government weighted down by the inverse of Moore's Law—a doubling of stupidity and spending every two years. God forbid that the Times ever see the parallel between bloated, non-competitive, and inefficient government and the similar circumstance in which it and the entire newspaper business found itself in the recent past.
That's probably asking too much. Just like it's asking too much for the Times to acknowledge that the Solyndra's of the world (and their investors) should have been so fortunate as to have an outcome like Dade's.
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