[News] Post a Political News Story

Ongoing discussion of the political news of the day. This thread is for 'smaller' stories that don't call for their own thread. If a story blows up, please start a new thread for it.

Study: Immigrants in the U.S. are more likely to start firms, create jobs. Compared to native-born citizens, immigrants are more frequently involved in founding companies at all scales.

Which makes the dislike of many republicans a bit more understandable. They see immigrants as taking what they have - and they are right. Immigrants seem to be working harder to get the "American Dream"

farley3k wrote:

Study: Immigrants in the U.S. are more likely to start firms, create jobs. Compared to native-born citizens, immigrants are more frequently involved in founding companies at all scales.

Which makes the dislike of many republicans a bit more understandable. They see immigrants as taking what they have - and they are right. Immigrants seem to be working harder to get the "American Dream"

"Just pull yourself up by your bootstraps - No, no, wait a minute, I didn't mean YOU!"

Pull ME up by your bootstraps.

.

Jonman wrote:

Pull ME up by your bootstraps.

I found my new kink.

Vrikk wrote:
Jonman wrote:

Pull ME up by your bootstraps.

I found my new kink.

Your safeword is "social safety net".

Now get to pullin'.

That should be the sole reason for OAN's existence:

24/7 Coverage of how the election was legitimate.

Did they only have to air that 30 second spot one time? That’s not a punishment. Not even a slap on the wrist.

JC wrote:

Did they only have to air that 30 second spot one time? That’s not a punishment. Not even a slap on the wrist.

And they probably aired it at 4 am between My Pillow informercials which none of their viewers watch because they all already own several.

JC wrote:

Did they only have to air that 30 second spot one time? That’s not a punishment. Not even a slap on the wrist.

barely a inconvenience.

Maybe. But it can be posted on every news source available so admitting the election wasn’t stolen is important

farley3k wrote:

Maybe. But it can be posted on every news source available so admitting the election wasn’t stolen is important

Sure- but the attention span of humans is less than a goldfish... So this is just a blip. Now, if they had to do it every day for the next 2 years. That might move the dial, a millimeter.

Poor poor Susan….

(CNN)Republican Sen. Susan Collins called the police over the weekend after an abortion rights message was written on a sidewalk outside her Maine home

The message, which read "Mainers want WHPA -→ vote yes, clean up your mess," was written in chalk and appeared on the sidewalk.

JC wrote:

Poor poor Susan….

(CNN)Republican Sen. Susan Collins called the police over the weekend after an abortion rights message was written on a sidewalk outside her Maine home

The message, which read "Mainers want WHPA -→ vote yes, clean up your mess," was written in chalk and appeared on the sidewalk.

Collins issued a statement to the Bangor Daily News, saying she was "grateful to the Bangor police officers and the City public works employee who responded to the defacement of public property in front of our home."

Guess my kids have been defacing public property for years.

LOL!

Russian oligarch had a seat on the board at MIT

So Russian billionaires are bad but American billionaires good....because their goals are .... different....? No billionaires are more similar to each other than they are to any middle class person in their own country.

JC wrote:

Poor poor Susan….

(CNN)Republican Sen. Susan Collins called the police over the weekend after an abortion rights message was written on a sidewalk outside her Maine home

The message, which read "Mainers want WHPA -→ vote yes, clean up your mess," was written in chalk and appeared on the sidewalk.

I’m very concerned for her.

You call the police because of something written in chalk?
Does Collins not know what a hose is?

Something you turn on protesters?

I guess a note wrapped brick through a window might be more comfortable for her...

I see a lot of handwringing among my conservative friends/acquaintances about protesting out in front of private homes. I get that it can be seen as intimidation and annoying for innocent neighbors but I don’t see it as OOC, at least not yet.

I’m a bit more concerned by the fire bombing and threats from Jane’s Revenge, provided of course it’s not a false flag op. And yes I get the other side has done far more violent stuff and recognize maybe it’s time to fight back. I just don’t have a good answer about whether there’s really no other democratic way left out of this mess, in which case violence could be seen as moral or at least inevitable.

DISCLAIMER:

This story is from Mother Jones, who I, as a they/them libcuck, enjoy a good deal. But nevertheless, it is Mother Jones, so grain of salt and all.

The Smash-and-Grab Economy

After 16 years at the helm of Houdaille Industries, CEO Jerry Saltarelli want­ed out. Since 1941, he’d poured his heart and soul into the company, starting out as a young lawyer and moving up the executive ranks. As CEO, he’d helped the company transform from a manufacturer of bumpers and shock absorbers into a nationwide construction and machine tools conglomerate.

With the company on solid footing, he was ready to retire, but there was a problem. Houdaille—cash-rich and with minimal debt—was the kind of company in vogue with the corporate raiders of 1970s Wall Street, and the New York Times declared that a takeover might prove “irresistible.” This would likely lead to restructuring and layoffs—bleeding the company of its value and tossing aside its way of doing business. Saltarelli wanted none of that. All he wanted was a way to sell his stake while keeping Houdaille independent, doing right by his colleagues, and protecting his legacy.

As he pondered his predicament, ­Saltarelli got a phone call from an unfamiliar trio of bankers. Jerome Kohlberg Jr., Henry Kravis, and George Roberts, friends from their time engineering deals at Bear Stearns, had started investment bank KKR just two years prior. They presented ­Saltarelli with a plan that they said could check all the CEO’s boxes: a leveraged buyout, or LBO. Saltarelli had to admit he’d never heard the term.

KKR arranged a meeting with Houdaille in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where they explained how an LBO would work. Institutional investors would lend them money based on Houdaille’s healthy cash reserve, enabling KKR and partners to buy up all the company’s shares and take it private. Houdaille would easily pay that debt back in four to five years, they said, thanks to the magic of corporate tax write-offs: Through some clever accounting, they could help Houdaille push off paying almost all corporate income tax for years, savings the company could use to pay off the debt it would incur during the buyout. By the time Houdaille had to pay Uncle Sam, the debt would be under control, and KKR would take the company public again, but at a much higher share price. Thanks to this plan, they could immediately offer Saltarelli and investors around $40 per share, about double what ­Houdaille was trading at. Not only would Saltarelli get his wish, but he’d make a hefty profit.

When Saltarelli agreed to KKR’s terms, it was historic: At the time, leveraged buyouts had only been applied to a few smaller companies worth less than $100 million. The Houdaille deal was worth almost four times that. Both Houdaille executives and the KKR financiers were set to come out of it nicely: According to journalist Max Holland’s 1989 book about LBOs, Saltarelli got around $5 million in cash ($20 million in today’s dollars), plus a retirement package, and new CEO Phil O’Reilly’s salary reportedly almost doubled. Baked into the deal were also annual management fees that Houdaille would pay to KKR (ranging from $646,000 to $1.3 million in today’s dollars), plus 1 percent of the total transaction cost for putting the deal together, and 20 percent of any capital gains accrued by KKR’s partners in the deal, which the industry calls “carried interest.” KKR kicked in as little as $1 million toward the buyout, which cost around $380 million, nearly all of it financed with debt that Houdaille alone would be responsible for repaying.

Within a few years, however, the American machine tool business went south, and Houdaille found itself drowning in its debt. Soon, KKR divested seven divisions of the company, eliminating 2,200 jobs. Then it borrowed even more money, put the debt on Houdaille’s tab, and used it to engineer a handsome buyout for the LBO’s initial investors who now wanted out. A year later, KKR sold Houdaille to a British firm, which sold all but one of Houdaille’s remaining divisions back to KKR, which used them to form a new company, IDEX. Houdaille died, yet the investors who’d killed it walked off with millions and called it a success: “All of the Houdaille ‘constituents’…fared well in the LBO,” declared a report commissioned by KKR. Just like that, a new kind of financial monstrosity was born.

Houdaille “was a wake-up call,” says Eileen Appelbaum, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Wall Street firms, she says, were giddy at the discovery that they could load companies up with debt they’d never be responsible for paying down themselves and take an ample cut of the proceeds that came from stripping a company bare—and it was all legal.

“The public documents on that deal were grabbed up by every firm on Wall Street,” a principal at an investment firm told the New York Times in 1987. “We all said, ‘Holy mackerel, look at this!’”

In the four decades since, investment firms that execute buyouts like Houdaille’s have expanded their grip on ever more pieces of civic life. Buoyed by LBOs and other forms of financial engineering, they have come to be known as “private equity” because they invest in transactions that are walled off from the public markets. In just a few decades they’ve bought up everything from dental offices to international call centers to Taylor Swift’s sor­rowful ballads and mined them all for profit. Private equity’s favored methods for taking over companies have been back in the news this spring, thanks to Elon Musk’s $44 billion LBO of Twitter, where Musk has himself played the role of a private equity firm, securing billions in debt that he plans to load onto the social media company. Covid-19 did not slow private equity’s rise: In 2020, the private equity sector generated about $1.4 trillion—about 6.5 percent of the United States’ GDP, and a jump from two years prior, when it was 5 percent of GDP. Private equity firms also managed $7.3 trillion in assets in 2020—roughly the value of Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Tesla combined. Nearly 12 million workers—one in every 14 employees in the United States—collect paychecks from companies run by private equity.

This has been my experience working for several companies owned by private equity: they don't give a f*ck about employees or customers. They will bleed a company dry and sell off the husk right before the wheels fall off.

And there are quite a few game companies owned by private equity companies...

Inflation’s biting. Roe’s fraying. Dems are still trying to connect with voters.

Only after Rep. Katie Porter put bacon in her cart at her local grocery store recently did she notice that its price had spiked to $9.99 a pound. Reluctantly, she put the package back.

It was a dose of reality that Porter, a California progressive and single mother of three, has long understood. But she’s not sure all of her Democratic colleagues share her interest in connecting to average Americans’ experiences outside the Beltway.

When Porter gave an emotional speech about how inflation has been hitting her family for months during a private House Democratic Caucus meeting last week, she said it seemed like the first time the personal toll of high consumer prices had sunk in for some lawmakers in the room.

“Too often, Congress recognizes issues too late,” Porter, a top GOP target this fall in a swing district, said in an interview. “I had a colleague mention to me, ‘We’re not seeing it in the polls’ ... Well, you don’t know what to ask.”

IMAGE(https://previews.123rf.com/images/twindesign/twindesign1402/twindesign140200061/26082867-depresso-sigaretta-uomo-di-fumare.jpg)

The Democrats are doing great. Wouldn’t change a thing. No notes.

Ex-Labor Secretary Says Second American Civil War Has Begun

Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, who served in President Bill Clinton’s administration, on Wednesday explained why he believes the second American Civil War is already in progress.

Reich, in a lengthy essay for The Guardian, wrote that this clash between the states would be “less of a war than a kind of benign separation analogous to unhappily married people who don’t want to go through the trauma of a formal divorce.”

I keep seeing stories about the baby formula shortage and I don't get it. This is capitalism. The demand is not high enough to make it profitable to make more supply. That is what millions of Americans say makes this country great!

All (well most) sarcasm aside why is it the government's job to get involved? It is how the free market works.

Biden to speak with infant formula companies and announce steps to address shortage

Iowa lawmakers push FDA to boost baby formula production amid shortage

Baby formula shortages: Here is how to keep your baby healthy and fed