It accomplishes that not by “investing” in a company and making it better, smarter, faster, but through “financial engineering” – a euphemism that falsely implies an engineer’s constructive role in designing, building, operating and maintaining the essentials of our daily lives. Private equity firms ruthlessly strip companies to the bone, then grind what’s left. It overrides operating management and essentially converts everything to cash, gutting the company’s ability to operate as a going concern. Even Wal-Mart leaves its suppliers enough money to take the bus home. Private equity’s “financial engineering” is as far from real engineering as it is possible to be.

Vultures feed on dead carcasses, an evolutionary niche that requires them to have great resistance to the unhygienic quality of their meals, but which doesn’t require them to be swift or strong, just observant and resistant to dung and offal. (They do need to be swifter than others who also feed on carrion.)

Bain Capital and its ilk, such as those who bought and are dismantling the LA Times, are a hybrid. They also have a predator’s ability to hunt down their prey and turn it into carrion before they feed. Some parasites are so efficient they kill their prey too soon, and shorten their own lives. Actors such as Bain Capital are efficiently foreshortening the economic lives of many Americans. This is not a man whom Americans in the bottom 99.9% of incomes should expect to act in their economic or political interest.

And of course the Republicans are just telling outright lies.

Back in ‘56 Adlai Stevenson was running against Ike for President. Adlai had a fabulous stump speech, just peppered with spicy one liners.

About Republican disingenuousness he’d say “…well as long as the Republicans keep lying about us, we Democrats are just gonna have to keep telling the truth about them.”

I used to think that was my song when I was a kid.

I still do. :)

You should suggest to KKKarl that he might want to ‘bounce’. Bet he won’t, the turkey.

And of course the Republicans are just telling outright lies. Did you hear that Mr. Rove? You oversized twit.