the candidate from Bain Capital; more on Romney and the private equity sector

November 12, 2007 in 2008, analysis, argument, campaign finance, election 2008, GOP, mitt romney, policy, republicans, romney, stupidity, the dark soul of Mitt Romney, triumph of unreason
Tags: audicy, Bain Capital, corruption, equity-sector, lies, plunder, theft

“That’s the good news for America [i.e. the Democrats backing away from a defacto isolationism]. The bad news for the GOP is that once Iraq goes from being the top headline, the economy is the next issue. And, indeed, with casualties falling, Americans are focusing on the economy,” writes eye in an eyeon08.com post titled economy most important issue?

Yes. About the economy:

“The two appointments [to the federal reserve] come after six tortured months in the credit markets that have included sub-prime debacles, a Congressional crackdown on taxes in the private equity industry, and increasing involvement of the Fed in bailouts,” writes Heidi Moore in a Financial News Online-US article titled Wall Street experts invade Washington

The two appointments Moore refers to are:

Stephen Friedman, former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs, currently co-chairman of Stone Point Capital

-and-

John A. Canning Jr., co-founder of Madison Dearborn Partners

Friedman and Canning will “take the respective helms of the two most powerful branches of the 12 banks of the Federal Reserve.” You may not know these two gentlemen. But Romney knows them. And they know Romney. Back to Moore:

… The Federal Reserve under chairman Ben Bernanke has become more involved in Wall Street bailouts and cash infusions amid the credit crunch. The Fed last week injected $41bn (€29.9bn) in the markets to guarantee liquidity, and Bernanke also supports the creation of the $80bn master liquidity enhancement conduit that will sop up assets from troubled structured investment vehicles …

Translation: using taxpayer money—public funds—to recoup private losses in the private equity sector. Back to Moore:

… In addition, some prominent former Wall Streeters hold unprecedented influence in Washington. Hank Paulson, the Treasury Secretary and former Goldman Sachs chief, has spearheaded initiatives to revamp US laws that allegedly hinder competitiveness …

Translation: initiatives to emancipate capital flows from their bondage to local procedures for adjudicating among rival claims—i.e. states, nations, communities—more privatizing gains; more socializing the costs and the losses. Back to Moore:

… The crop of current presidential candidates includes Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd, who heads the Senate banking committee, as well as Bain Capital founder Mitt Romney. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has also been rumored as a candidate …

We have harped on this string before—see: Romney and private equity: the new ruling class. As much as we wish it were so, Romney is not an aberration. He and his peers represent the most advanced sector of a new class of professionals—the product of the revolution in financial services that began in the late 70s, early 80s—that have come of age and are now taking their places in senior executive positions. Most of them are comfortable working behind the scenes—not Romney.

The equity sector is capital at the limit of its development—it is capital negating itself as capital, as it is capital without owners in any conventional sense—it is capital in the form of vast pools of spare money or other instruments managed by technical adepti and professional elites. (Drucker famously refers to capital at this level of development as “pension fund socialism.”)

The equity sector gives us the notion of the “business audit”—imagine a pension fund that has bought into a retail chain. Say also that the chain is too big an investment for the pension fund to allow to fail. So: on the basis of a business audity, the fund—the effective “owner” of the retail chain—supplies the technical and managerial expertise to “turn-around” the retail operation. Does this sound familiar? If you’re a Romney observer, it should. It should sound like Romney’s Bain Capital. It should also sound, sadly, like what Romney wants to do with our government (see his interview with Carney that we discussed here).

The equity sector elites are already plundering our treasury to pay for their losses—but how can politicians refuse their demand for relief?—so much of the equity sector is composed of pensions, mortgages, savings instruments, public and private debt, in other words, the moneys, properties, and pensions of the middle classes and the elderly—equity sector money is, in a sense, public money already, only it is public money that disproportionately benefits the class that disposes of it—hence: Romney’s millions.

Imagine a professional class with direct access to our treasury. Imagine a professional class that has the power to tax you—this is the so-called private equity sector. (Not since the central-storage economies of absolute antiquity has economic and political power been this unified or concentrated.) Imagine what this new defacto ruling class will do once of their own sits on the US presidential dais? This would be corruption on a scale that eye hath not seen, nor hath ear heard.

yours &c.
dr. g.d.

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