Nice rationalization, Gramps.

Never any shade of gray with these types.  Always black and white.

From NYTimes (January 28, 2008):

Mr. McCain also went after Mr. Romney for his work as head of Bain Capital, a leveraged-buyout firm. “As head of his investment company he presided over the acquisition of companies that laid off thousands of workers.”

Once again, a GOPer pretends that there are only two ways to govern the country: unrestrained capitalism and Stalinism. It’s like they’ve gotten their world view from Star Wars. 

So, a company is only non-communist, if it eeks every last dollar out of the workers, and treats everyone as property and doesn’t care about the common good.   So in McCain’s world, totally ok for country’s to fire all their employees, and set up shop in China, since their labor is cheaper, so they make more money as a whole.  Otherwise, not working in China would be communist?

The net effect of John’s Mittens love is to push the Teavangelicals further away.  

It was a question of can I make more money with less risk by liquidating a company, or make more money with greater risk by  pursuing a strategy  of turnaround and growth.   Romney was entitled to maximize profit for himself and his firm, but he should be honest about the fact pursuit of profit trumped other considerations.

The Bible says don’t work on the Sabbath.  If you work on the Sabbath, you aren’t a Christian.  The opposite of Christianity is Satanism.   

This game is fun.

exactly- was he entitled-  yes.  Does that make him a good person, or more importantly, able to run this country?  Not a great quality I want in my President.

Says the party that described the last VP as Darth Vader.  None of the candidates are suggesting unrestrained capitalism.  When your party is screwing up the country somebody has to call them on it.  Its a bitter pill, but it’ll all be better in 2013.

Unelected officials have taken over Washington and are orchestrating the daily news. 99% of the comments and replies you’re reading online come from an NSA software program spamming the internet. Comments are created before the stories are ever reported. The oldest, first, highest, best, and most popular rated comments are all propaganda. They are conducting Psy-ops (psychological operations) for domestic spying. They have 1000′s of handles and are determined to bury the truth and attack anyone leaking it.

The next election is shaping up to be as big of a sham as the last. Do you know why Sarah Palin’s bus tour was really canceled? Do you know why she stayed 30 miles away from the second debate and chose the death of Steve Jobs to announce that she’s not running? Know what leaked out? Sarah Palin and Cain aren’t in the race for the same reason, the truth leaked out.
 

What game is that government troll? Lying on message boards and pretending to represent public opinion?

clock out big brother and lie someplace else

And another big brother troll chimes in

Always lies and spin from your big brother handle

For fun, let’s look, as of 9/30, at a Bain fund’s Financial statements-  Market Value 122m  Cash 21m escrow 1m.  Expenses 94k.  Cost of investments 66m

Seems they are doing pretty well, don’t think they are communist.  So that is 56m unrealized gain on their companies.  So is saving a few jobs, let’s cut that to ONLY 55m, make them Commies?

“None of the candidates are suggesting unrestrained capitalism.”

No one in the GOP calls it by that name, but that’s indisputably the intent. When someone even raises the question of corporate greed and income inequality, you’re immediately savaged as “putting free enterprise on trial.” That’s the voice of a party that wants no limits whatsoever on the markets and no protections whatsoever for the consumer: aka, unrestrained capitalism.

Another Bain fund (hey, another Cayman Islands exempted LP!)  Market Value-313m  Cost-258m.  Another winner!  The American Way-  make more money for the wealthy-  drive expenses (jobs) down

This whole matter was covered by Danny Devito and Gregory Peck in “Other People’s Money”. Danny had the Mitt role. But in that movie, Devito works out a new deal for the town to keep its jobs with new investment capital from Japan.

Thanks for chiming in big brother. Use all the handles on this story today

I disagree –  the party that was (and still is) screwing up the country is the GOP, unless, of course, you’re a 1-percenter. 
p.s. Cheney himself purported the Darth Vader image on CNN’s Larry King
(http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0606/22/sitroom.03.html).

They do and call it free market economics.

Gosh, do you even listen to what your guys are advocating for?

My best regards to Boehner and his great work in the House.

Smells of desperation from the senile old angry fart

glad she called him on his hypocrisy! gm was bankrupt, bains companies were credit worthy! apples and oranges!

Why would The Morning Spew make the DHS list?
http://themorningspew.com/2012/01/12/4801/

At least John McCain’s endorsement won me New Hampshire.  Other than that, he’s worthless.

Sometimes I think they saw “Red Dawn” too many times.

John McCain is a communist!

McCain needs to go somewhere and retire.  He ruined the chance for a Republican president for the next few generations.   

Logical implication used in all political propaganda machines to spin the truth. Liberals know it well.

Irrelevant to the discussion. He is correct about capitalism.

no if you work on the sabbath you will be put to death…

VAMPIRE CAPITALISM…

you can either be for garden capitalism where you reap what you sew or you can be for vampire capitalism where you feed off of others and leave the carcass..
both are legal..

so who are we as americans? farmers or vampires? the cure or the disease?
i guess that is what people need to ask themselves..

he is still mad he lost….and of course is even more irrelevant..

And that is the point. Most of political talk is propaganda that spins the truth. All politically savvy people know it well.

Except for the fact that when only Chinese have jobs, only Chinese will be able to buy things.

Communism and Stalinism are apples and oranges. Both are bad, but for different reasons. Stalinism is pure dictatorship based on paranoia. Communism is the ultimate in stupid economics.

McCain in 2008 . “Mr. McCain also went after Mr. Romney for his work as head of Bain Capital, a leveraged-buyout firm. “As head of his ‘investment’ company he presided over the acquisition of companies that laid off thousands of workers.”” 
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/28/mccain-fires-back-at-romney/

I can’t wait to see all the Republican candidates hammering Romney for this now flipflopping and taking the same tone on this as McCain once Romney is the candidate in a few months time.

Wow, how many tens of thousands is Barry and company “laying off” with military cuts again? How many “shovel ready jobs” are being gutted with little Barry and the military haters?

Are there any other spending cuts, other than military spending cuts, that liberals believe in?

Military spending would one of the least efficient government spend programs for creating jobs. Spend a billion on an aircraft carrier you get an aircraft carrier that does not create economic benefit and only cost to operate.

Spend that same billion on the next Hoover dam or research and education it pays for it self.

But that assumes that the government is not interested in building empire and making the world safe for multi- national corporations and leave the citizens paying the bills.

Bain preyed on healthy companies as well as weak ones.  They are asset strippers and pension raiders.

Obama will butcher Romney with Bain ads

You should be against bloated government.  

 You are not being objective. Barry has held firm with our national defense to a far greater extent than anyone would have imagined. His policies, which are very much further to Bush, but with more touch, have netted osama and several other top bad guys, stayed strong in Afganistan, left Iraq according to the Bush time table, helped usher in the Arab spring, and we continue to negotiate from strength, including the use of drones and other  But naturally when you end a war and bring people home you expect your expenses to go down, including manpower and equipment, etc.

How come when John McCain himself and also his super pac ran basically the same ads against Romneys time at Bain it  was  acceptable now it isn’t.  I guess it depends who the gop establishment wants for its candidate.  Seems abit hypocrital to me

ROFLMAO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Newt, Rick, Sarah, and Todd go rogue, and The Clampdown is here! To quote Chris Hayes, The next thing out of Newt might be a mic check at a Romney rally.

The ruling Royalist Wing of the Republican Party is before the nation’s eyes conducting a shutdown of dissent and free speech–for Willard, someone they don’t even much like if at all–with all the thuggish finesse of tinpot third-world dictators.

My new populist heroes: Newt, Rick, Todd, and…Sarah!

LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

maybe communism would help this country out…feeding/educating every hungry/poor person while taking away capitalism doesnt sound so bad these days

Unelected officials have taken over Washington and are orchestrating the daily news. 99% of the comments and replies you’re reading online come from an NSA software program spamming the internet. Comments are created before the stories are ever reported. The oldest, first, highest, best, and most popular rated comments are all propaganda. They are conducting Psy-ops (psychological operations) for domestic spying. They have 1000′s of handles and are determined to bury the truth and attack anyone leaking it.

The next election is shaping up to be as big of a sham as the last. Do you know why Sarah Palin’s bus tour was really canceled? Do you know why she stayed 30 miles away from the second debate and chose the death of Steve Jobs to announce that she’s not running? Know what leaked out? Sarah Palin and Cain aren’t in the race for the same reason, the truth leaked out. The truth is linked to in my name. Cowardly attacks covering up the truth are welcomed.

Communism isn’t economics at all; read your Marx.  

That’s why you see the terms “Marxist-Communist” & “Marxist-Socialist” – the idea being that, without the guiding vision of a Marxism frame, a communist polity couldn’t adapt successfully to circumstances. The TRICK in Marxism is to figure out where your polity stands in the overall context.Pretty early on in the Lenin experiment, by the 1920s, the prevailing view in the Supreme Soviet became that they would have to shelve the long-term goal of working towards the ‘greatest good of all’, because the greatest number of citizens were uneducated peasants working the land with outmoded tools by inefficient, even counter-productive methods, so they determined on using force, just until the ‘new methods’ became self-evidently realized as ‘correct’ by the peasant class … whereupon they soon realized that adult workers were resisting not just the ‘new methods’ but also education … whereupon they determined the ‘problem’ was too many adult workers. Same thing happened later in China under Mao, except on steroids.Anyway, without sufficient flexibility to take into account deeply ingrained cultural norms, in a big enough system, before long you get to genocide – mass-murdering the folks in the very class your ideology is dedicated to empowering. The only place that’s had communism on a long-term basis where that DIDN’T happen is Cuba; but even then there were hundreds of thousands executed early on, before the leaders got to the point of feeling sufficiently secure against the threat of counter-revolution that they could even address the needs of the people they’re dedicated to empowering – & of course they still have yet to really empower the people.As with a lot of things, included 19th century unregulated free marketism, the tinkle-down supply-side Reaganomics we’ve suffered under since 1980, & now the ridiculously self-evident situation of ‘expansionary austerity’ being not a paradoxical reality but oxymoronic self-mutilation, the thing that always gets in the way of the ideology succeeding is … people.

But they DON’T have jobs. There’s so many of them, China still produces stuff, because the workers that do the producing have no choice: work or die.  

It’s not communism over there, folks; it hasn’t been communism for decades – & if you think it through, there never was a time when it was communism: that was the stated goal, & they never got there. It’s now actually quite similar to what we have in the U.S., with big money oligarchs making all the decisions & compelling optionless workers to work continually harder & harder to produce more & more cheaply, with no health care or social safety net.

Principled paleo-conservativism, like what’s going on in Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin & other Republican-run states, has an awful lot in common with the reality of Russian, Chinese & North Korean communism: ideologies that don’t work with actual people in reality world, with the immediate outcome being devastation & death for the people they claim to be seeking to empower, & with the long term outcome being failure & collapse. The only reason North Korea persists as it is, is because it serves the interests of South Korean oligarchs; North Korean slave labor is a huge competitive advantage to South Korean-owned factories. The only reason China ‘works’ is because we buy so much from them – because it’s so cheap, compared to the same products made in places where there’s taxpayer-supported public services, a social safety net & functioning health care. And the only reason that Russian works is … it doesn’t; it’s just like Canada is becoming with its Conservative government serving the tar sands above everything else, leading inevitably to the inequalities in income, education & social mobility we already ‘enjoy’ here; the system in Russia serves a few large projects, like the giant gas production from Sakhalin Island, making for massive, chronic, embedded inequalities.

Economically, a bloated government is a huge improvement over a pointless military. With a bloated government, you still get some sort of an economic multiplier effect; a military, whether necessary or extravagant, is an economic sinkhole. 

Our government isn’t bloated anyway; what it is, is inefficient. There’s duplication at just about every level, & stuff that should be run at one level where it makes most sense is being run at another level (or levels) where it makes least sense; & in many areas, government at one level is running on a perceived mandate of opposing government at another level. 

Example: It makes no sense, & does no good, for federal governments to hire & fire individual teachers; but likewise it makes no sense, & does no good, for local governments to fix basic educational standards, because then you get phenomena like the Texas state education board voting to ban science & distort history, & using, intentionally or not, it’s ‘market power’ to impose those decisions on other state & local education boards over which it has no authority. It’s like if we disbanded the national weather service & gave it over to the states: then every day would be “a great day in South Carolina” even as a hurricane is blowing down Columbia. And that would be silly … if it wasn’t already reality. What possible sense did it make for Chris Christie to turn down the new tunnel works between Jersey & NYC? It hurt everyone’s interest, but particularly the citizens of New Jersey.

It would give a short-term false impression of welfare, then fail for lack of flexibility. Capitalism is a necessary component to flexibility. The country shouldn’t be a slave to unrestrained capitalism, because unrestrained capitalism leads to slavery; but without a large & healthy component that rewards innovation, the country fails.  

The KEY to the best outcome is a properly functioning governor on the various components – & in the case of a market-based economy, which is the U.S., the best governor, the only one that works, is a progressive taxation system. We don’t even need to look to examples from other countries to prove this is so: just look at the U.S. from WWII through to when Reagan came in, the 40 years from ~1940 to ~1980. That’s the ultimately comedic tragedy in all this: we already came up with the best, most flexible marriage of self-government & economic prosperity in the history of the species, & we junked it. 

Not too many years from now, history is going to be looking at how we empowered an oligarchy-serving nitwit like Grover Norquist & asking our generations: What were you morons even THINKING? 

Lester Thurow’s The Future of Capitalism, written mid-1990s:

“History teaches us that the survival-of-the-fittest versions of capitalism do not work. The free market economies that existed in the 1920s imploded during the Great Depression and had to be reconstructed by government….It is well to remember that the social welfare state was not implemented by wild-eyed leftists. Its midwives were almost always enlightened aristocratic conservatives (Bismarck, Churchill, Roosevelt) who adopted social welfare policies to save, not destroy capitalism by protecting the working class…If one asked what must governments do in capitalistic socieities to make conditions better, the socialist answer was to own and run business firms. That answer proved to be incorrect. The right answer is to force a high level of private and public investment.”

Marx supported capitlism because it would lead to a ownership society and he didn’t coin the term, it came about 200 years previous. Adam Smith didn’t think corporations were a good idea and was against their privilege to exist because they weren’t responsible to the hired help and consumers. I’ll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one.

wow!

You are right that China is (almost) purely capitalist now. You seem to grasp that communism is not supposed to create a permanent dictatorship. It is merely the worst possible economic idea. It is so bad that every group that tried it got stuck in a dictatorship.

On the other hand, dictatorship is not dependent on an economic ideology like communism or capitalism. It is created when the power of the gun (or spear) is concentrated in the hands of the few. Note that I say the power to kill or imprison, not the power to buy and sell goods and services.

As for conditions in China, I know them very well. I lived there for seven years. I know that not every Chinese has a job. I know that some Chinese are very wealthy. I know that one wealthy person GAVE a portion of her business to a Communist Party member, and he screwed it up royally, but she got something out of having a connection with that person. This amounts to the “crony capitalism” that the right (or all people) is now complaining about.

You are also right about Russia.

As for the rest of your “thesis,” I say it is hogwash! You see failure and collapse everywhere, but the reality is that economies go through cycles of boom and bust and in-between. There is no single perfect combination of economics and politics. It is a continuing human experiment as we humans attempt to get closer to some kind of perfection.

Your thoughts are confused. I think you meant to say an ownerLESS socitey.

I can only agree with the last sentence.

My memory of reading Adam Smith does not specifically reference corporations per se. He wrote of capitalists as the owners or businesses in a way that we would assign to the CEOs and shareholders of today’s corporations, but not of the corporations themselves. Smith also envisioned generous capitalists who would not allow the less fortunate to suffer and therefore would be charitable. If you can find an example of Adam Smith condemning corporations, please show it.

Marx never dreamed that communism would exist in Russia or China. He thought Russia was too rural and agricultural, and he never even considered Asia. He only saw communism as workable in heavily industrialized places like Germany. (He was German, you know and when he was kicked out of Germany, he went to France and died in England. All of which were heavily industrialized.)

McShame is nothing less than brilliant.  I keep telling you.  Brilliant.  Such a mind has he!

Communism was an attempt to solve an economic problem–scarcity–with a political solution–the removal of the capitalists. Marx envisioned a society in which the capitalists would not have to be executed. They could be educated to a new reality in which the means of production were shared by all people.

Scarcity is the reason for both politics and economics. Imagine a world in which survival is easy because there is enough food and shelter for everybody. A tropical island could be such a spot. Now add that there is no threat from another island or continent. Security is also ensured.

We need one more thing. There can be no greed. People must be willing to share, not hoard and claim the best fruit trees or the best fishing boats for themselves. That was the kind of world that Marx envisioned, but it is just another utopian dream that Marx thought could be accomplished IF man’s natural greed could be trained away.

That is Marx’s thesis in a nutshell. The capitalists were the embodiment of greed, and they must be removed from the system by force, and then trained to understand that their greed was the cause of all of man’s ills. Once this training was complete, they could rejoin their fellow man in the new utopia.

A dictatorship would be necessary to bring this about, but it would disappear as soon as all men were properly trained. (By the way, such retraining would supposedly work for gays and other “deviants,” but I’m not sure Marx was concerned about that.)

There is a great similarity between Marx’s utopia and the Libertarian utopia. In both, there is no government because there is no need for one. The difference is that the Marxist (real Marxist, not Communist Party Member) says we must share and we want to without the need for government intervention. The Libertarian says what is mine in mine, and no government can take it away.

Ron Paul is, and I agree with  him 100%. The only sane politician in the bunch.

But the state has no money to build the tunnel, Christie is trying to cut taxes, everything in N.J. is over taxed. They even tax you if you sell your house and move out of state. Your former governors caused the problem, not Christie.

Are they private corporations?

Were any of these businesses saved?

What part of communist applies to McCain? Do you say the same of Obimbo?

How does a business eek-out every last dollar from it’s workers, treats everyone as property, and does not care about the common good? I’m not fallowing your line of reasoning.
I thought a business was in business to make money?

Didn’t you say this country was not Christian?

I think Obimbo repaired that mistake in three short years.

If a business is not viable, then you do what’s necessary to make it viable, or go out of business,which helps no one.

Lester Thurow is a dime a dozen economist who sells books based on “the sky is falling”, with little or corrupted fact.