Abstract: David Brooks has apparently
broken free of the fetters and clingy mind controls that force his usually
hackneyed conclusions to conform to the pedestrian nostrums of the average New
York Times editorial scribbler. In an astonishing turn of events, at least
compared to what we usually read in this pathetic, biased ragzine, we witness
David Brooks taking umbrage with the current Obama Attack on private equity
companies, such as Bain, in his quest to discredit Mitt Romney.
Brooks
takes on the current leftist anti-business private-equity theme and offers the
results from studies that show that this is a positive effort in our economy to
change anew refine and make more efficient and cast off industries that cannot
compete any more. He states, flatly, that “American businesses emerged [from
this process] leaner, quicker and more efficient.”
But,
David Brooks leaves off before an important point is made. What if the left
really wants the US and EU economies to crash? There is every reason to believe
from several historical perspectives that if another depression hit that they
could make the case that 'capitalism has failed' and get back to solutions
Lenin wanted.” This is the current threat. And, given historical illustrations,
what can they lose??
So,
why not give it a try? Well, I think they are. Beware.
How to best read my blogs:
[I offer
extensive quotes in this blog so that the reader can view the exact language
and can be confident that nothing was taken out of context or that nobody was
misquoted. The easiest way to take in the salient points is to read the emphatic points in the quotes and then peruse my
comments. Comments on my comments are always welcome: ryckki@gmail.com.]
The
Current Babblings and the New York Times:
Months have elapsed since I have studied
and reported on one of the current Chief Babbler
David Brooks’[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9]
articles in the Opinion Section of near-bankrupt New York Times—aka the Walter Duranty
Papers.[10][11] My patience in studying his ramblings
was finally exhausted about the time he told us all about his Big Shaggy.[12] That was too much and I needed a rest. But,
breaking my discipline as I am inclined to do, I quickly scanned his current
piece and found something glittering there in those hallowed sheaves of liberalism
a piece that diametrically attacked Barak Obama. I am still stunned. I thought
my mind was dwelling in gentler fields for some time before I realized that his
current work is well reasoned and accurate. This, hopefully, will be the
beginning of a new trend in the formation of propaganda pieces from the NYT. I
have written extensively on propaganda essays and selected examples deriving, I
think, customarily all or most all of my examples, are extracted from the NYT . This is fertile ground. I have found the
following characteristics of this disease: In
the careful fabrication of
effective propaganda pieces[13][14][15][16][17] and other blends of disinformation and
half-truths, we must be careful to begin our piece with the conclusion
instantly bolted to some iron megalith with bright shining lights and noises
and that the proper order and selection of propaganda elements be chosen with
care.
Given
that premise that holds for hundreds of NYT op-Eds we find strange deviations
here in this latest article by Brooks:
“Forty
years ago, corporate America was bloated, sluggish and losing ground to
competitors in Japan and beyond. But then something astonishing happened.
Financiers, private equity firms and bare-knuckled corporate executives
initiated a series of reforms and transformations.
The process was brutal and involved
streamlining and layoffs. But, at the end of it, American
businesses emerged leaner, quicker and more efficient.”[18]-- How Change Happens By DAVID BROOKS, OP-ED COLUMNIST Published: May
21, 2012. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/22/opinion/brooks-how-change-happens.html?_r=1&hp
[Emphasis is mine in all quotes unless otherwise
indicated.]
Now, this
could be a set-up designed to interweave business elements with left-liberals
laws and edicts and other phony fluff, but reading on there is no evidence of
this. Is this the Real David Brooks? It must be
a metamorphosis of unheard of dimensions at the NYT as this form of heresy is
usually dealt with by a retraction, an opposing article or employment
termination.
“Now
we are apparently going to have a presidential election about whether this
reform movement was a good thing. Last week, the Obama administration unveiled an attack ad
against Mitt Romney’s old private equity firm, Bain Capital,
portraying it as a vampire that sucks the blood from American companies. Then
Vice President Joseph Biden Jr. gave one of
those cable-TV-type speeches, lambasting Wall Street and saying we had to be a
country that makes things again.” - How Change Happens By DAVID BROOKS May 21, 2012.
“The
Obama attack ad accused Bain Capital of looting a steel company called GST in
the 1990s and then throwing its workers out on the street. The ad itself barely
survived a minute of scrutiny. As Kimberly Strassel noted in The Wall Street
Journal, the depiction is wildly misleading.[19]”
- How Change Happens By DAVID BROOKS
A
conclusion arises:
“This
is the story of a failed rescue, not vampire capitalism.
This is the story of a failed rescue, not vampire capitalism.” - How Change
Happens By DAVID BROOKS
This is an excellent piece that sifts the
anvil-level debris from the wide propaganda window and indicts the author as a
person who manufactures political factoids with partial truths. This is
commendable.
The
battle scene:
“But
the larger
argument is about private equity itself, and about the changes
private equity firms and other financiers have instigated across society. Over
the past several decades, these firms have scoured America looking for
underperforming companies. Then they acquire them and try to force them to get
better.” - How Change Happens By
DAVID BROOKS
The words private and
equity are enough to send a good socialist into a tailspin
requiring massages, rest and some help from his or her ‘friends.’ From a
previous blog, we can easily make the obvious case that government is more than
necessary, in the leftist idiom that is, to arrange who, what and when these
growth elements should be bequeathed.
Cognitive equality is an oxymoron. There is
no way you can give standardized tests and ensure that everybody attains the
average test grade scores with nobody getting a higher or a lower test result.
The much maligned Bell Curve[20],
sometimes accused of actually causing the ‘problem’ of cognitive
mal-distribution in the US, actually states the blunt facts about our societies
and the distribution of mental skills. This salient fact that half the people
who take the standardized test will score below the median is the rallying
point for ‘change’ in ‘education.’[21] That
is not fair. Society must be equalized.[22] Thus
propaganda must replace education. The Bell
Curve correctly predicts who will pass high school, college and who will excel
in the work place—and who will not—on a group basis. This fact commits millions
to menial jobs but is casus belli for the political left.[23]
If that is accepted, then just who might we
elect to make the new products? Government people? Ivy League or middle class
people or perhaps those at the very bottom of the economic scale because the
benefits of full diversity demands their ‘inputs’ to get a holistic solution to
any social problem.
Our system is driven by markets much to the
dismay of the left. The government thus assumes that if a
market [stocks, houses, etc.] goes up then this is fine as taxes can be raised
and money spread around to ‘aid’ the lower classes and pad the salaries of the
politicians and their friends. If the market, like housing, goes
down and wealth is lost then the government, leaning on the taxpayer as always,
must make up the difference with taxes and social programs. Unemployment and lost tax revenues must be
replaced by higher taxes on the upper income levels. This effect generates
a spiral whereby more jobs and lost and taxes must be raised, which ensures
that tax revenues will decrease. The strange notion here is that
jobs and wealth cannot be lost and the government must intervene to
reverse such a situation. If the economy sinks and the GDP
falls then the government must provide money for jobs and things to pull the GDP back up even though when they raise taxes they
thus ruin new job formation. High corporate taxes force businesses to lay off
workers. The government seems to believe that the government is the employer of
last resort and lately the lender of first and last resort. This would, of
course, call for more taxes and so on and so forth. This cycle never ends. To
pay for all this socialism the government now prints money which will soon result
in massive inflation—an outcome that does not help the poor.[24]
Research on the matter:
“As
Reihan Salam[25]
noted in a fair-minded review of the literature in National Review, in any
industry there is an astonishing difference in the productivity levels of
leading companies and the lagging companies. Private equity firms like Bain
acquire bad companies and often replace management, compel executives to own
more stock in their own company and reform company operations.
Most
of the time they succeed. Research from around the world clearly confirms that
companies that have been acquired by private equity firms are more productive
than comparable firms.”
- How Change Happens
Not to anchor down this blog with a ton
of paper, we can generalize and say that most government programs do the
opposite of what was intended. [Cash for Clunkers, CRA[26],
War on Poverty, HUD, etc.] but the conclusion is that these private equity
ventures do work despite criticism by the left and profits are the proof for
this statement and the liberals ought to be glad that taxes are paid on these
profits. They are not, however.
“Private
equity firms are not lovable, but they forced a renaissance that revived
American capitalism. The large questions today are: Will the U.S. continue this
process of rigorous creative destruction? More immediately, will the nation
take the transformation of the private sector and extend it to the public sector?”
- How Change Happens By DAVID BROOKS
A
difficult question
“The
Obama campaign seems to be drifting willy-nilly into the opposite camp, arguing
that the pressures
brought to bear by the capital markets over the past few decades were not a
good thing, offering no comparably sized agenda to reform the public
sector.
In
a country that desperately wants change, I have no idea why a party would not
compete to be the party of change and transformation. For a
candidate like Obama, who successfully ran an unconventional campaign that
embodied and promised change, I have no idea why he would want to run a campaign this time
that regurgitates the exact same ads and repeats the exact same arguments as so
many Democratic campaigns from the ancient past.” - How Change Happens
Neither
do I David.
This is commendable and to the point.
But, I might offer some explanations for this from my post on the Daily
Telegraph, London where the hopeless Greek problem was discussed in detail. [see
footnote 27, 28 below]
“This
is double talk at its worst Jeremy[27].
The most salient fiscal feature on the block here is that Greece has massive
debt they can never repay, have refused to accept government spending cuts,
want to 'stay in the euro' [read begging for alms] and will vote for more and
more money to be thrust into their pockets via 'democracy' as Adam Smith warned
us about.
The EU
leaders dance around the snake pit chanting that 'austerity doesn't work' and risk a much worse fate
when more PIIGS drag down the semi-solvent other members. We find 'leadership'
like this only in mental institutions, Ivy League student lounges with ample
marijuana fumes and most anywhere in California. And when the whole
gig crashes they will announce that 'capitalism has failed' and get back to
solutions Lenin wanted.” – rycK’s
Comment[28]
[see footnote],
And, this theorem can be identified in
the Occupy Wall Street hokum and fluff[29]
[Open borders migration, Guaranteed living wage income regardless of
employment, Free college education, Begin a fast track process to bring the
fossil fuel economy to an end and other nonsense] where we hear the government
should grab everything like the banks and private property.
We need to revisit Lenin in his glory
days of 1919 to hear all about how capitalism has failed and his ‘solution’ to
the problem, which turned out to be the Russian Revolution [the second most
important event in history according to Lenin]. That solution is achievable by
the rabid left at this time if only they can print more money or ruin more
business and clearly demonstrate that capitalism has, indeed, failed. This is
what I think they are doing.
This outcome is not necessarily a loss for
the left. We
see in the European Union [such as it is being in flames now] that those people
who have lost their jobs will vote for anybody who will give them something and that something must come from others with
wealth-hence, wealth redistribution. They can make this work as they have done
so in many countries before.
We do not have that much time as our 101%
debt-to-GDP and 40% spending deficit push our debt up at a rate approaching .8%
per month so a mere 4-5 years will elapse and we will be where Greece is today—busted.
rycK
Comments: ryckki@gmail.com
[1] The Growth of Fairy Tales and Hokum over the Growth
Imperative: The NYT Wanders About
in the Cognitive Swamps again.
[2] The Babbling Brooks of the NYT
Advocates Liberal Arts Studies and Knowing The Big
Shaggy to Cope in our Society. http://rycksrationalizations.blogtownhall.com/2010/06/10/the_babbling_brooks_of_the_nyt_advocates_liberal_arts_studies_and_knowing_the_big_shaggy_to_cope_in_our_society.thtml
[3] The Babbling Brooks
of the NYT
Insanely Races to Liberal Sanity with Our Tax Monies in Education. Pay Raises
for Incompetent Teachers!
[4] The Babbling Brooks of the NYT Babbles About the Limits of
Policy in Governance of Minorities. We Must Preserve their Social Capital.
[5] By David Brooks Op-Ed
Columnist Published: May 3,
2010 The Babbling Brooks of the NYT Babbles about Brokenness and other Fluffs He must
like Utopias.
[6] The Babbling Brooks of the NYT Babbles
about Four Choices for the Dems
[7] The Babbling Brooks of the NYT Babbles
about the Suicide March of Liberalism
[8] The Babbling Brooks of
the NYT Babbles about Decision
Making [?!] and Perception?
The
Babbling Brooks of the NYT Babbles
about Nihilism with Innovative Socialist and Nihilist Overtones. Raise Taxes!
The
Babbling Brooks of the NYT Babbles
about Obama and his Failure to Have a Clear Lead Over McCain.
The
Babbling Brooks of the NYT Babbles
about Education.
The
Babbling Brooks of the NYT Babbles
about Debt and Blame but Offers No Solution.
The
Babbling Brooks of the NYT Babbles
about Lincoln, Mercury Pills and The Grip of Emotions. [?!]
From the Babbling Brooks: Confusion,
Hokum and Fluff: Vote for Obama
Echoes
from the Babbling Brooks Envision a New Conservatism. The New York Times
Advises Us on Society, as Usual: Higher Taxes
Posted by rycK on Saturday,
February 16, 2008 10:37:49
AM
The
Babbling Brooks of the NYT Babbles
about Obama and his Failure to Have a Clear Lead Over McCain.
The
Babbling Brooks of the NYT Babbles
about Education.
Echoes
from the Babbling Brooks Envision a New Conservatism. The New York Times
Advises Us on Society, as Usual: Higher Taxes
Posted by rycK on Saturday,
February 16, 2008 10:37:49
AM
[9] The Babbling Brooks of the NYT
Babbles about Changes He Can ‘Believe’ In.
[10] The Babbling Brooks of the NYT Babbles
about Israel and Hamas
[11] In honor of that celebrated Communist
stooge and liar and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for the NYT . The color RED is used in my essays in honor of Walter Duranty,
a saint, if there could be one, in the Marxist Archives of Honor.
“He said that these people had to be
"liquidated or melted in the hot fire of exile and labor into the
proletarian mass". Duranty claimed that the Siberian labor camps were a
means of giving individuals a chance to rejoin Soviet society but also said
that for those who could not accept the system, "the final fate of such enemies is death."
Duranty, though describing the system as cruel, says he has "no brief for
or against it, nor any purpose save to try to tell the truth". He ends the
article with the claim that the brutal collectivization campaign which led to the famine
was motivated by the "hope or promise of a subsequent raising up" of
Asian-minded masses in the Soviet Union which only history could judge.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty
[12] The Babbling
Brooks of the NYT Advocates
Liberal Arts Studies and Knowing The Big Shaggy
to Cope in our Society. http://rycksrationalizations.blogtownhall.com/2010/06/10/the_babbling_brooks_of_the_nyt_advocates_liberal_arts_studies_and_knowing_the_big_shaggy_to_cope_in_our_society.thtml
[13] Krugman Applies
Protosimian Logic to Health Care. Big Government and Higher Taxes! Of Course!
[14] Propaganda Gem: Krugman Distorts History as He Grubs for More Taxes.
[15] Propaganda Alert: The
New York Times Axes the Right Questions and then Answers Them with the Left
Answers.
[16] Political Lessons from the Fairy Tales by the New York Times: Propaganda
at Work.
[17] Propaganda Lesson:
Economics and Recessions from The NYT: A Long [Sad] Story and Stern Tutorial on
Tax Cuts.
[18] How Change Happens By DAVID BROOKS, OP-ED COLUMNIST Published:
May 21, 2012. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/22/opinion/brooks-how-change-happens.html?_r=1&hp [Emphasis is mine in
all quotes unless otherwise indicated.]
[19] The company was in terminal decline before Bain entered the picture,
seeing its work force fall from 4,500 to less than 1,000. It faced closure when
Romney and Bain, for some reason, saw hope for it in 1993. Bain acquired it,
induced banks to loan it money and poured $100 million into modernization,
according to Strassel. Bain held onto the company for eight years, hardly the
pattern of a looter. Finally, after all the effort, the company, like many
other old-line steel companies, filed for bankruptcy protection in 2001, two
years after Romney had left Bain.
[20] The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life
(ISBN: 0029146739)
by
Herrnstein, Richard J. and Murray,
Charles Free Press of Glencoe , Inc, Old
Tappan, New Jersey, U.S.A., 1994.
Monday,
November 26, 2007 3:44 PM
[22] Political Lies, Ghouls,
Dictators and the Eternal Quest for your Wealth.
http://rycksrationalizations.blogtownhall.com/2008/11/20/political_lies,_ghouls,_dictators_and_the_eternal_quest_for_your_wealth.thtml “The quest for ‘equality’
and ‘social
justice’ might be attained in other ways we are told and that
‘education’ of the masses is the way to do this. If we teach our offspring to
be classless and steep them in fairness and humanity then social justice will
spring forth like flowers in the meadows.
The disease that prevented this splendor was capitalism. Any intrinsic
truths in the educational theory entrenched in this message failed to
materialize in the society as a whole because of two factors: propaganda and the maldistribution of cognitive attributes or IQs. “
“To
fix this problem, propaganda must replace education. The trickle down theory of distribution of
wealth was unacceptable according to the new educated view. Now leaders of corporations became greedy
tyrants and exploited their employees instead of being benefactors and
employing millions from their risk-taking and ingenuity. Only a few of these
entrepreneurs would rise to power and they were not the ones who by an accident
of birth became royal rulers, but they were the ones who were adept in
business. In England those who were originally privileged to become educated by
their royal parents or peers of the realm were supplanted by those with higher
intelligence, more assertive personalities and advancing business skills.
Education had now, in the views of the left, produced the same monsters as the
royal bed chambers and must be severely modified to teach the masses how to
recognize the proper leaders that would create a more liberal society.
Education, then, must be modified and transformed into a major propaganda mechanism [a lie machine] that would
create a mold where the elite could push out conditioned citizens who would
conform to the liberal model. The citizens must be ‘educated’ to the phony notion that socialism or one of its variants
is the best form of government for all. This, of course, is a lie and a
difficult one to implement without some heavy propaganda
and some other drastic measures. The left used both. Educators must now be social tyrants and act
as stooges of some leftist social agenda to hold jobs in the leftist-dominated
educational system. Testing must be minimized and students passed along to
higher grade levels without regard for academic credentials or any recognizable
form of performance. Politics has now replaced facts.”
[23] The Futile Attempt of
Forcing Equality Among the Masses.
[24] The Futile Attempt of Forcing Equality
[26] Our government decided that ‘affordable
housing’ was some obvious social mandate and passed the CRA [Community
Reinvestment Act][26][26] that has now created mountains of bad debt[26] by forcing banks to give away free houses to the uncreditworthy
low class in exchange for their votes under penalty of prosecution by the
government. We now have several trillion dollars in worthless mortgages that
are forcing bank failures. The scam here was that banks were forced to loan
money to people with poor credit, scant educational skills, drug addicts and
even illegal aliens and could peddle this worthless paper into the government
financial dumpsters known as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. These two phony
big-lie federal quasi-government corporations racked up 3-5 trillion dollars in
debt [we don’t know how much yet and it must much larger than that] and started
off a steep recession that will probably turn into a depression.[26] We cannot sustain such a high debt and it is quickly doubling
during the Obama administration.
[27] Jeremy
Warner author of the article. Jeremy Warner, assistant editor of The Daily
Telegraph, is one of Britain's leading business and economics commentators. He
is @telegraphwarner on Twitter.
[28] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/9265623/Brace-brace.-Dark-times-ahead-as-Greece-heads-for-the-exit.html#comment-529275407
Jeremy
Warner printed this: "The Greek problem has been consistently misdiagnosed
and mismanaged right from the start. First there was the suggestion a year ago
from Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy that if Greece didn't buckle under and
agree austerity it might be chucked out. Markets reacted logically by selling
bonds in any country that looked vulnerable, thereby making it much harder for
all periphery governments to fund themselves.
This
disastrous admission was compounded by attempts to underpin confidence in the
financial system by forcing banks to mark their sovereign debt to market. This
destroyed the concept of the "risk free asset", forcing banks for the
first time to apply capital to their sovereign debt exposures. Unsurprisingly,
they stopped buying sovereign bonds in the distressed countries, again making
it harder for governments to fund themselves."
[29] The
"Occupy Wall Street" protesters have listed 13 proposed demands from
their website.
Demand one: Restoration of the living wage. This
demand can only be met by ending "Freetrade" by re-imposing trade
tariffs on all imported goods entering the American market to level the playing
field for domestic family farming and domestic manufacturing as most nations
that are dumping cheap products onto the American market have radical wage and
environmental regulation advantages. Another policy that must be instituted is
raise the minimum wage to twenty dollars an hr.
Demand two: Institute a universal single payer
healthcare system. To do this all private insurers must be banned from the
healthcare market as their only effect on the health of patients is to take
money away from doctors, nurses and hospitals preventing them from doing their
jobs and hand that money to wall st. investors.
Demand three: Guaranteed living wage income regardless
of employment.
Demand four: Free college education.
Demand five: Begin a fast track process to bring the
fossil fuel economy to an end while at the same bringing the alternative energy
economy up to energy demand.
Demand six: One trillion dollars in infrastructure
(Water, Sewer, Rail, Roads and Bridges and Electrical Grid) spending now.
Demand seven: One trillion dollars in ecological
restoration planting forests, reestablishing wetlands and the natural flow of
river systems and decommissioning of all of America's nuclear power plants.
Demand eight: Racial and gender equal rights
amendment.
Demand nine: Open borders migration. anyone can travel
anywhere to work and live.
Demand ten: Bring American elections up to
international standards of a paper ballot precinct counted and recounted in
front of an independent and party observers system.
Demand eleven: Immediate across the board debt
forgiveness for all. Debt forgiveness of sovereign debt, commercial loans, home
mortgages, home equity loans, credit card debt, student loans and personal
loans now! All debt must be stricken from the "Books." World Bank
Loans to all Nations, Bank to Bank Debt and all Bonds and Margin Call Debt in
the stock market including all Derivatives or Credit Default Swaps, all 65
trillion dollars of them must also be stricken from the "Books." And
I don't mean debt that is in default, I mean all debt on the entire planet
period.
Demand twelve: Outlaw all credit reporting agencies.
Demand thirteen: Allow all workers to sign a ballot at
any time during a union organizing campaign or at any time that represents
their yeah or nay to having a union represent them in collective bargaining or
to form a union. http://nation.foxnews.com/occupy-wall-street/2011/10/04/read-demands-occupy-wall-street-and-try-not-laugh
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