2020 Democratic Primary Thread: Focus on House & Senate races

[Secure Da Bag]

We are not the political norm of America. We go to forums to discuss policies and campaigns.

There are people out there who need to feel like their candidate likes what they like to make them “relatable”. When politicians do these shows and answer those Bullshyt question it’s like that clip of Bernie with Desus and Meroz

I also hate that shyt..... I really do.

After that Bush and Beer fiasco, you'd think voters would have learned their lesson. But nooooooooooooooooooooooooo. Nope.

Black people really need to get off the symbolism bullshyt bandwagon.

 

[Jhoon]

We are not the political norm of America. We go to forums to discuss policies and campaigns.

There are people out there who need to feel like their candidate likes what they like to make them “relatable”. When politicians do these shows and answer those Bullshyt question it’s like that clip of Bernie with Desus and Meroz

I also hate that shyt..... I really do.

Calm down. Candidates have to appear in many settings to pander to many groups. You may not like photo ops but there is a significant portion of the electorate that enjoy that sort of stuff.

 

[dtownreppin214]

they were so sure about Biden despite history telling us he always fades when running for POTUS... they’ve seen him run the laziest campaign ever and they now within 100 days of Iowa freaking out and having Bloomberg run...

don’t underestimate the idiocy of the Dem establishment

It would go against everything they've been trying to do with making the debate process more transparent and reforming the superdelegate system. They've done a lot to address some of Bernie's criticisms from 2016. Unless they are willing to tear it down and take 4 more years of Trump and 2 more Supreme Court justices than I don't see it happening. I think eventually Warren will move a little more to the middle and they will coalesce around her.

 

[Secure Da Bag]

Calm down.

We will not calm down, Daniel Jhoon. We will, in fact, calm up.

Ba Rack Is Cooking

• Secure Da Bag
• Jul 17, 2019

 

[Wild self]

People are talking primaries though? Cause Biden will have the south locked up...

If you win WI, MI, and PA and remember, Trump only won those 3 by a combined 77,000... its game over.

Trump's path is as narrow as it was in 2016.

The Dem path to 270 is much more flexible than people realize.

There is a good chance that OH, IN, and even KY gonna turn blue next year, along with WI, MI, and PA. People underestimate how much Trump lost ground in the midwest due to farmers getting hammered in the Trade Wars.

 

[Secure Da Bag]

There is a good chance that OH, IN, and even KY gonna turn blue next year, along with WI, MI, and PA. People underestimate how much Trump lost ground in the midwest due to farmers getting hammered in the Trade Wars.

I wonder how much food the midwest sells to Latin America and the Caribbean.

 

[No1]

The polling released earlier this week had Biden up 10 in Nevada.

I don't buy that for a second.

 

[Jhoon]

There is a good chance that OH, IN, and even KY gonna turn blue next year, along with WI, MI, and PA. People underestimate how much Trump lost ground in the midwest due to farmers getting hammered in the Trade Wars.

I wouldn’t put faith in those farmers. There is a story that all the counties of Wisconsin has suffered job loses because of the tariffs. But if you look at the polls, our president has barely lost any ground. I wouldn’t count on the farmers to bail us out. And you have to hope that the suburbs continued to be appalled.

 

[Atlrocafella]

I don't buy that for a second.

Emerson/CNN/USA today all have him leading in Nevada. All reputable/respected polls.

 

[Berniewood Hogan]

I don’t care how they are around God Damn celebrities.

Tell me what the fukk you plan to do to make my life as a black man with a college education better.

Cancel your student loan debt, make healthcare a right for you, and fight for racial justice, which Bernie has been on the correct side of for his whole life, while all the other candidates have not.

Can't help but notice you're putting yourself in a class above black folks who didn't have access to college though, breh.

 

[King Kreole]

Liz is a joke.

this is one of the worst things I've seen come out of her campaign

 

[Wild self]

I wouldn’t put faith in those farmers. There is a story that all the counties of Wisconsin has suffered job loses because of the tariffs. But if you look at the polls, our president has barely lost any ground. I wouldn’t count on the farmers to bail us out. And you have to hope that the suburbs continued to be appalled.

So why do they now have a Dem governor? As well as Dem Representatives in the House? 2018 Midterms proved that anything that Trump touches.....dies on his watch. Trump has no new supporters and non voters that sat down in 2016, will come out in 2020 in droves.

 

[tru_m.a.c]

I would join you, but I'm not sure how they are "responsible for the current state of economic predatory policies". I do know they engage in them, but that's different than being the DBZ of vulture capital.

Guys, we voted against the founder of Bain Capital in 2012 for this reason....

Come walk with me:

In his 2009 book The Buyout of America: How Private Equity Is Destroying Jobs and Killing the American Economy, Josh Kosman described Bain Capital as “notorious for its failure to plow profits back into its businesses,” being the first large private-equity firm to derive a large fraction of its revenues from corporate dividends and other distributions. The revenue potential of this strategy, which may “starve” a company of capital, was increased by a 1970s court ruling that allowed companies to consider the entire fair-market value of the company, instead of only their “hard assets”, in determining how much money was available to pay dividends. In at least some instances, companies acquired by Bain borrowed money in order to increase their dividend payments, ultimately leading to the collapse of what had been financially stable businesses.

A classic “leveraged buyout” company, a vulture capital operation. Here’s what Bain did to Toys ‘R’ Us in 2018:

Just a few years ago, Toys ‘R’ Us was an iconic American retailer. Six months ago, it filed for bankruptcy. Two days ago, it announced that all 800 of its American stores, and all 100 of its British ones, are closing or being sold. As many as 33,000 workers could lose their jobs.

What happened to America’s biggest toy store?

Simply put, vulture capitalists ate it.

One of those vultures was Bain Capital. Deval Patrick was its managing director, the man in charge, when this occurred.
New York Media Touts Private Equity Obamist Deval Patrick as Presidential Candidate | naked capitalism

What is Bain Capital and what did Romney do there?

Bain Capital is a leveraged-buyout company, which Romney helped to found in 1984 and ran as C.E.O. until 1999. In 2007, when Romney was first running for President, the Boston Globe published a series of articles entitled “The Making of Mitt Romney.” Part 3, “Reaping Profit in Study, Sweat,” by Robert Gavin and Sacha Pfeiffer, covered Romney’s career at Bain Capital in detail. It went through a number of deals in which the firm had made a lot of money while closing factories, eliminating jobs, using tax-sheltered offshore accounts, and, in some cases, driving the companies it had bought into bankruptcy. “Bain Capital is the model of how to leverage brain power to make money,” Howard Anderson, a professor at M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management, told the Globe. “They are first rate financial engineers. They will do everything they can to increase the value. The promise (to investors) is to make as much money as possible. You don’t say we’re going to make as much money as possible without going offshore and laying off people.”

Can you give me an example in which Bain Capital made a lot of money from a company that failed?

During the early nineties, Bain Capital bought an old steel mill in Kansas City from Armco Steel Corp., and merged it with other plants it had acquired in South Carolina and elsewhere under the name GS Industries. It was Bain Capital’s tenth-largest investment under Romney.

According to a recent account by the Reuters reporters Andy Sullivan and Greg Roumeliotis, within two years of investing eight million dollars to create GS Industries and take a majority interest, Bain Capital had paid itself a special dividend of $36.1 million, financed by a big issue of debt. (Some of this money was subsequently reinvested in the company.) G.S.I. subsequently struggled against domestic and foreign competitors. In 1999 it sought a federal loan guarantee, and in 2001 it entered bankruptcy protection. More than seven hundred workers lost their jobs, health insurance, and some of their retirement benefits. A federal agency had to put up $44 million to bail out the company’s pension plan. Even while G.S.I. was fighting for survival, Bain continued to extract management fees from it—about $900,000 a year, according to a recent Los Angeles Times story. “Bain partners think the profits they made are a sign of brilliance,” an official of the steel workers’ union who negotiated with G.S.I. told the paper. “It’s not brilliance. It’s lurking around the corner and mugging somebody.”

When did Bain’s business practices first turn into a political issue for Romney?

In October, 1994, when Romney was running for the U.S. Senate against Ted Kennedy, a group of workers who had lost their jobs at a plant in Marion, Indiana, operated by American Pad & Paper (Ampad), a manufacturing company that Bain Capital had bought out two years earlier, drove to Boston and started heckling him at political events. The workers told anybody who would listen how, with Bain Capital’s backing, Ampad had fired two hundred and fifty union workers, offering to hire some of them back at much lower wages and with less generous health-care coverage.

The uproar over the Ampad workers helped Kennedy to defeat Mitt handily. That didn’t stop Ampad from closing down the Indiana plant a few months later, eliminating practically all the jobs there. And in the end, Bain Capital’s involvement with Ampad turned out to very remunerative. In 1996, the company went public in an I.P.O., enabling Bain to cash out some of its investment. But Ampad remained heavily indebted, and in 2000 it filed for bankruptcy. By then, according to the Deutsche Bank prospectus, Romney and Bain Capital had made $102 million on an initial investment of just $5 million.

For Romney, the Ampad story has never gone away. The 2007 Boston Globe series mentioned above details the Ampad saga, and examines it in this sidebar, and a 2008 Globe story looks at Romney’s role, and how it played out politically. In another important and early look at Bain Capital, which was published in December, 2007, the Los Angeles Times reporter Bob Drogin interviewed one of Romney’s colleagues who served on Ampad’s board of directors, Marc B. Wolpow. “They’re whitewashing his career now,” Wolpow said. “We had a scheme where the rich got richer. I did it, and I feel good about it. But I’m not planning to run for office.” At the time Ampad shut down its plant in Marion, Romney was back running Bain Capital. “He was in charge,” Wolpow told Drogin. “He could have ordered me to settle with the union. He didn’t order me to do that. He let me take decisions that would maximize the value of the investment. That was the right decision as CEO of Bain Capital. But let’s not pretend it was something else.”
The Bain Bomb: A User’s Guide

Now reread that original quote about vilifying Bain

 

[Wargames]

Calm down. Candidates have to appear in many settings to pander to many groups. You may not like photo ops but there is a significant portion of the electorate that enjoy that sort of stuff.

I get it, but it’s still sucks

Cancel your student loan debt, make healthcare a right for you, and fight for racial justice, which Bernie has been on the correct side of for his whole life, while all the other candidates have not.

Can't help but notice you're putting yourself in a class above black folks who didn't have access to college though, breh.

Don’t shame me for speaking my truth. Class has nothing to do with it, that’s you making assumptions. Riches guy I know dropped out of college and opened a recording studio and then flipped that money to the point he runs businesses and has a pretty high government job.

Anyhow Criminal Justice reform doesn’t help me personally at the prison level but I’ll support it and even fight for it. Don’t stress me cause as a black man. College loans reform is on my docket too.

The problem I have with Bernie in contrast to Warren is she shows her homework. It’s easy to say you will forgive college loans..... but show me how. It’s easy to say M4A...... but show me how. It’s easy to say a rising tide lifts as ships..... but show me when in history that has held true for Black People in a way that made gains for more than a few years?

 

[tru_m.a.c]

I'm like legit laughing because I didn't even get into how defending Deval Patrick was a dead end street.