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Thursday, January 12, 2012
Bill Moyers: "I'll believe corporations are people when..."
"I'll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one." Bill Moyers
In the following clip, Moyers talks more turkey in six minutes than the GOP has in the last six years.
Bill Moyers And Stephen Colbert Talk Corporations, Racism (VIDEO)
Public television icon Bill Moyers sat down with Stephen Colbert on Tuesday, and was called a racist more times than he probably has been in a while.
Moyers was on to promote his new television show, "Moyers and Company." He said that the aim of the show was to "look at America through the experiences of a lot of people who don't make it onto most television shows."
Colbert asked him about capitalism. Moyers said the system is "out of control," and criticized the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision. As he put it, the decision said that a corporation was a person "even though it doesn't eat, drink, make love, sing, raise children or take care of aging parents. You cannot have a peoples' democracy as long as corporations are considered people."
After the audience's applause died down, Colbert said, "You understand that you sound like a racist, okay? And that Southern accent is not helping you." Moyers took that one in stride.
Later, Colbert received word that Mitt Romney had won the New Hampshire primary.
He recalled Romney's famous "corporations are people" comment.
"As a friend of mine from texas says, he will believe corporations are people when Texas executes one," Moyers said.
"So you're racist and bloodthirsty," Colbert responded.
To glimpse the infantility of Republican "opinion makers," check out Colbert's report on The 2011 Halloweenn Party at The Obama White House.
My middle school playground -- when solely occupied by queen-bee-wannabes and guys like "Moe" in Calvin and Hobbes -- was like an Oxford post doctoral program in comparison with these gag-inducing bozos.
Pass the ipecac.
White House Halloween party coverage splits the middle
With the Colbert Report video above, the story of the 2009 White House Halloween party has completed its trip across the politico-media spectrum. The story emerged with the pre-publication disclosure of tidbits from “The Obamas,” a new book by New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor. The author wrote about the festivities, which included appearances by Johnny Depp and Tim Burton, not to mention an
Alice in Wonderland theme and drinks served in blood-vial look-alikes. Military families were invited to the shindig.
“White House officials were so nervous about how a splashy, Hollywood-esque party would look to jobless Americans — or their representatives in Congress, who would soon vote on health care — that the event was not discussed publicly and Burton’s and Depp’s contributions went unacknowledged,” writes Kantor.
Conservative media loved the alchemy: Tough economic times, a lavish affair, topped with a scramble by Obama officials to keep things under wraps. Rush Limbaugh bit: “The White House went out of its way to cover this up, to keep this quiet.” A commentator on Fox News called the thing a “mini-coverup.”
The White House, practiced in shouting down emerging literary look-backs, protested, suggesting that the affair was a model of transparency. “If we wanted this event to be a secret, we probably wouldn’t have invited the press corps to cover it, release photos of it to Flickr, or post a video from it on the White House website,” said White House spokesman Eric Schultz.
When the right wing froths about something like a Halloween party, and its opposition has a convincing comeback, you can bet that the 80-person staff of the Colbert Report is paying heed. They put together a laugh-inducing presentation, one whose satire rested on a wholesale purchase of White House rhetoric. In his sum-up of the affair, Colbert proclaimed:
If any Obama voters are still clinging to their support of this man, consider this: Your president used his Hollywood connections to throw a Halloween party for our troops’ kids and then told us about it.
Hahaha.
Some interesting facts came out of a piece of reporting on the Halloween party. WaPo’s Reliable Source noted that, indeed, the White House had a pool reporter at the event, yet mentions of the celebrities were scarce. The pool reporter, Richard Wolf of USA Today, insists he never saw the Hollywood stars at the event. Here’s how he recalls it, in a discussion with me:
We didn’t get to see State floor in the middle of the building. It looked like the area was set up for this Halloween party but we were only brought into the East Room, where there were 50 or so kids with some of their parents.
The Hollywood actors didn’t turn up in the White House visitor logs,according to Politico.
The evidence yields the possibility that the White House was fine with reporters taking note of the goings-on, with an accent on the celebration of military service. But not too eager to see the names of Hollywood stars attached to the festivities. Perhaps they saw how President Clinton got hammered with that mallet. Schultz says this about the celebrities: “We may not have alerted folks that Johnny Depp was coming, but we didn’t announce Chewbacca was coming either.”
Whatever the case, the story is not definitive in either direction. There’s no large-scale coverup here; nor is there a White House eager to share every last detail of the evening with the public. Just like real life, it’s complicated. The two Americas will come away with two impressions: Watchers of Limbaugh will convince themselves of a sinister suppression by the White House; watchers of Colbert will convince themselves of utter White House forthcomingness. The truth will stand in the middle, craving attention.
(from Julie Driscoll at Politics Anonymous comes a rough transcript of Newt Gingrich’s television spot criticizing Mitt Romney’s record as the head of Bain Capital.)
“Wall Street’s corporate raiders made billions of dollars . . . their greed was only matched by their willingness to do anything to make millions in profits. Nothing spared, nothing mattered but greed. This film is about one such raider and his firm. Mitt Romney became CEO of Bain Capital the day the company was formed. His mission: To reap massive rewards for himself and his investors.”
“Romney took foreign seed money from Latin America, and began a pattern exploiting dozens of American businesses.”
The film highlights four of Romney’s “many targets, four businesses, and the people who worked there.
“He’s tearing down his 3,000 square foot house to build an 11,000 square foot house.”
“A group of corporate raiders led by Mitt Romney, more ruthless than Wall Street . . . for tens of thousands of Americans, the suffering began when Mitt Romney came to town.”
UniMac: “The company was Bain Capital, its CEO and President . . . Mitt Romney. He had a Harvard pedigree and he was on a tear . . . stripping American businesses of assets . . . and often killing jobs for big financial rewards . . . One stop on Mitt Romney’s quest: Marianna, Florida. For more than 50 years the UniMac Corporation had steadily built an American work force . . . back at his Massachusetts headquarters Romney had found his target. Bain took control of UniMac. One of the first things they did, according to workers, was to start ‘cheapening the product.’ Workers run out of parts, and sometimes they would send a machine out without a part on it. One of the very first orders of business for Romney’s Bain team: Slash paychecks while keeping the workers in the dark. Romney and Bain up-ended the company and gutted the work force. Now they were ready to make a handsome profit. Romney and Bain’s sale to the Canadians netted a whopping 230% profit for Romney and his investors. The deal left behind a trail of wreckage.”
KB Toys Inc.: “Romney and Bain’s cash rampage would ultimately slash jobs in nearly every state in the country, like popular childrens’ toy seller, KB Toys. Romney and Bain bought the 80-year-old company in 2000, loaded KB Toys with millions in debt, then used the money to re-purchase Bain’s stock. The debt was too staggering. By 2004, 365 stores had closed. Romney called it ‘creative destruction.’ Romney and other top executives’ take: $120 million dollars. By 2009 the debt accumulated under Romney was too great. KB Toys was no more. Mitt Romney and Bain saw a 900% return on their investment. Romney and Bain’s profits at the expense of 15,000 jobs was described by the Boston Herald as ‘disgusting.’ Under Romney, Bain was making billions, at the same time contributing to the greatest American job loss since World War II. It was called the ‘Bain Way’, Romney’s Bain Capital almost always managing to turn the misfortunes of others into their own enormous financial gains.”
DDI: “A striking example of this was a technology company Bain financed with facilities in Texas, Colorado and California. The company was called DDI. With help from friends at Wall Street’s Lehman Brothers, Bain was set to offer an initial public offering of stock in DDI. Lehman Brothers would issue a buy rating and Romney and Bain would watch investors swarm. A signature of Romney’s ‘Bain Way’ strategy, employees were quickly fired in order to pump up profits. Helped by a favorable rating from Bain’s Wall Street friends, DDI’s 12 million share IPO raised a quick $170 million. People were buying into the promise that DDI was headed to become a billion-dollar company.
“Then, instead of sticking with the stock, Bain dumped it. Just after six months, Bain sold shares making $39 million. Then they dumped the rest four months later, collecting $54 million more. All the while, the Wall Street banks they hired gave cover, issuing glowing reports. DDI ended up losing $400 million dollars, a little over two years later, the stock was nearly worthless. The result: DDI filed for bankruptcy. 2,100 jobs were lost. Average investors without insider connections were left with huge losses.
“Romney denies being involved in the controversial deal, claiming to have left Bain to lead the 2002 Olympic Organizing Committee. But SEC filings prove otherwise. During the DDI deal Romney is listed as a member of the Managing Committee of Bain Capital, with control of over 1.3 million shares of DDI Corporation. Sure enough, the probe uncovered evidence that Lehman Brothers continued to encourage investors to buy DDI stock, even though they had misgivings themselves. Romney’s “Bain Way” model played out over and over. Employees, creditors and investors were hurt. But not Bain. Even though time and time again thousands of jobs were lost, investors and creditors were out hundreds of millions, Romney and Bain made piles of money.”
Ampad: “The vicious cycle would play itself out this time in America’s heartland. In 1992, an interesting prospect appeared on the Romney-Bain radar, a paper company called Ampad with plants in Holyoke, Massachusetts, Buffalo, New York, and Marion, Indiana. The potential was there for Romney and his investors to reap a bonanza of cash – perhaps over $100 million dollars. Romney’s hatchet men moved in, firing some, re-hiring others, slashing paychecks. While keeping a smaller workforce, Romney and Bain began executing a scheme the New York Times called ‘getting back your bait,’ extracting hundreds of millions for himself and Bain investors by running up extraordinary debt.
In six months, over 200 of the employees Romney and Bain had re-hired were all fired. Lula Gibson and her husband James were one such couple [who worked together at the plant.] They had a son in high school. For Shannon Conliff, the emotional toll was hard on a new mother. For Romney, it was a score. Romney and Bain went on to make over $100 million from Ampad. To Romney and Bain Capital, it was just another deal. To others, it was a pit of despair. Romney had made himself rich beyond imagination. He went on to purchase a $3 million home in New Hampshire with a private beach, and a $12 million beachfront property in California. Even that wasn’t enough. Mitt Romney is now personally worth somewhere over a quarter of a billion dollars. Mitt Romney’s company, founded with some wealthy Latin American investors, is worth $65 billion today.”
“For some of the thousands of American workers he left in the dust, the nightmare never stopped. Now Romney says he wants to bring what he learned on Wall Street to the White House. What would his cabinet look like? Who would he put in positions of power around him? Bain reaped millions from companies that sent jobs overseas, closed factories, or plunged into bankruptcy.”
Victim of Bain’s greed: ”Let’s look deeper. Let’s look deeper in his life. I think he’s a money man and he’s gonna look out for the money people.”
Romney: ”Make a profit, that’s the name of the game, right?”
My middle school playground -- when solely occupied by queen-bee-wannabes and guys like "Moe" in Calvin and Hobbes -- was like an Oxford post doctoral program in comparison with these gag-inducing bozos.
Pass the ipecac.
White House Halloween party coverage splits the middle
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive
Alice in Wonderland theme and drinks served in blood-vial look-alikes. Military families were invited to the shindig.
Don't miss Newt Gingrich's "attack ad" in which he accuses Mitt Romney of "Vulture Capitalism."
http://www.salon.com/2012/01/12/newts_killer_attack_ad/singleton/
THURSDAY, JAN 12, 2012 10:45 AM EASTERN STANDARD TIME
Newt’s killer attack ad
Here's the former speaker's indictment of Bain Capital that is now on the air in South Carolina