Just heard on Rachel's show that Bain Capital had declined loans to auto industry

[janedrake]

So, y'all know Romney is going around trying to convince people that Pres. Obama used Romney's plan to save the auto industry after all. Romney's plan would have been a big FAIL, because the credit markets were frozen due to the 2008 economic meltdown, and the private capital resources needed to make Romney's "solution" viable were not available.

On Rachel's show tonight (2/24), one of her guests (a WaPo journalist who has been traveling with the Romney campaign - sorry, can't remember the name) said that Bain Capital was one of the firms that declined to provide the auto industry with the private capital it sought.

So, Romney KNOWS his plan would have worked only if private capital were available to the auto industry (meaning billions in private loans); he KNOWS the credit markets were frozen, and he KNOWS Bain Capital declined to work with the auto industry -- yet, he's still going around saying *his* plan saved the auto industry!



The epilogue is of course that "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt" Romney was simply going by his SOP - drive the company (in this case, the auto industry) into bankruptcy, then pick over whatever bones were left. Thank goodness, Pres. Obama had exactly the opposite approach.

[jaxx]

Yes, no private enterprise stepped up to help the auto industry. Romney is full of it.
Only President Obama had the guts to get it done.

[janedrake]

(02-24-2012 09:05 PM)jaxx Wrote:  Yes, no private enterprise stepped up to help the auto industry. Romney is full of it.
Only President Obama had the guts to get it done.

That's another good point that deserves to be driven home - as president, Obama took the kind of risk to save an American industry that Romney has shown the nation he would not be willing to take.

[jaxx]

I think Romney got his today in MI when the UAW protested his speech and he got 1200 people to a venue that holds 65,000. The empty seats spoke volumes.

[jaxx]

Car Czar To Romney: Find Me Someone Who’d Have Saved Detroit
Benjy Sarlin February 24, 2012, 11:08 AM

The auto czar who led the bailout, Steve Rattner, has a simple challenge to Mitt Romney’s claim that private investors could have rescued Detroit: find me one.

Rattner, writing in the New York Times, wrote on Friday that Romney’s contention that American automakers didn’t need federal loans to move them through a managed bankruptcy intact is ludicrous given that the only financiers big enough to step in were barely hanging on for dear lives themselves.

“I know this because the administration’s auto task force, for which I was the lead adviser, spoke diligently to all conceivable providers of funds, and not one had the slightest interest in financing those companies on any terms,” he wrote. “If Mr. Romney disagrees, he should come forward with specific names of willing investors in place of empty rhetoric. I predict that he won’t be able to, because there aren’t any.”

http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/0...etroit.php

[janedrake]

I howled when I saw those photos of the empty stadim -- and I loved seeing pundits contrast that with the standing-room-only crowds Obama was drawing at a comparable point in his campaign. And the 1200 looked they were bused in from the nearest Republican headquarters. Romney's lame "my wife has two Cadillacs" joke fell flat as a pancake even with them. Public relations disaster all around. And this was billed as a "major speech." I haven't heard anything clips on the actual substance of the speech (not that I expect there was any) the only thing that's getting play is the empty stadium and the "two Cadillacs" tone-deafness.

[Still a Democrat]

What Romney and his cronies at Bain would have demanded was government backing of the private sector loans. Privatize any potential profit, make any losses public.