Sorry Barack, I am not going to vote for you this November even though I will work hard to get you more votes. My vote is reserved for our lovely First Lady. What a powerful speech she delivered. Barack, you’re one lucky guy.

Grab a cup of coffee and read this piece by Matt Taibbi. If you’re in a hurry, however, just read this portion:

Here’s how Romney would go about “liberating” a company: A private equity firm like Bain typically seeks out floundering businesses with good cash flows. It then puts down a relatively small amount of its own money and runs to a big bank like Goldman Sachs or Citigroup for the rest of the financing. (Most leveraged buyouts are financed with 60 to 90 percent borrowed cash.) The takeover firm then uses that borrowed money to buy a controlling stake in the target company, either with or without its consent. When an LBO is done without the consent of the target, it’s called a hostile takeover; such thrilling acts of corporate piracy were made legend in the Eighties, most notably the 1988 attack by notorious corporate raiders Kohlberg Kravis Roberts against RJR Nabisco, a deal memorialized in the book Barbarians at the Gate.

Romney and Bain avoided the hostile approach, preferring to secure the cooperation of their takeover targets by buying off a company’s management with lucrative bonuses. Once management is on board, the rest is just math. So if the target company is worth $500 million, Bain might put down $20 million of its own cash, then borrow $350 million from an investment bank to take over a controlling stake.

But here’s the catch. When Bain borrows all of that money from the bank, it’s the target company that ends up on the hook for all of the debt.

Now your troubled firm – let’s say you make tricycles in Alabama – has been taken over by a bunch of slick Wall Street dudes who kicked in as little as five percent as a down payment. So in addition to whatever problems you had before, Tricycle Inc. now owes Goldman or Citigroup $350 million. With all that new debt service to pay, the company’s bottom line is suddenly untenable: You almost have to start firing people immediately just to get your costs down to a manageable level.

“That interest,” says Lynn Turner, former chief accountant of the Securities and Exchange Commission, “just sucks the profit out of the company.”

Fortunately, the geniuses at Bain who now run the place are there to help tell you whom to fire. And for the service it performs cutting your company’s costs to help you pay off the massive debt that it, Bain, saddled your company with in the first place, Bain naturally charges a management fee, typically millions of dollars a year. So Tricycle Inc. now has two gigantic new burdens it never had before Bain Capital stepped into the picture: tens of millions in annual debt service, and millions more in “management fees.” Since the initial acquisition of Tricycle Inc. was probably greased by promising the company’s upper management lucrative bonuses, all that pain inevitably comes out of just one place: the benefits and payroll of the hourly workforce.

Once all that debt is added, one of two things can happen. The company can fire workers and slash benefits to pay off all its new obligations to Goldman Sachs and Bain, leaving it ripe to be resold by Bain at a huge profit. Or it can go bankrupt – this happens after about seven percent of all private equity buyouts – leaving behind one or more shuttered factory towns. Either way, Bain wins. By power-sucking cash value from even the most rapidly dying firms, private equity raiders like Bain almost always get their cash out before a target goes belly up.

This business model wasn’t really “helping,” of course – and it wasn’t new. Fans of mob movies will recognize what’s known as the “bust-out,” in which a gangster takes over a restaurant or sporting goods store and then monetizes his investment by running up giant debts on the company’s credit line. (Think Paulie buying all those cases of Cutty Sark in Goodfellas.) When the note comes due, the mobster simply torches the restaurant and collects the insurance money. Reduced to their most basic level, the leveraged buyouts engineered by Romney followed exactly the same business model. “It’s the bust-out,” one Wall Street trader says with a laugh. “That’s all it is.”

Người đọc trả lời bài tôi viết sáng nay:

Thưa Ông,

Gần bốn năm qua chỉ toàn nói láo và hứa cuội…chẳng làm được gì.. Chia rẻ, hận thù, tôn giáo và giai cấp…

Cả gia đình của Obama tiêu tiền của quốc gia như nước cho sứơng thân, trong khi dân chúng một ngày một nghèo……

Vận động bầu cử không có gì thành công để khoe nên chỉ biết vu cáo, dựng chuyện, bới móc đời tư, dùng lời lẻ hạ cấp, bẩn thỉu như tên Joe Biden….

Dùng mọi thủ đọan ma giáo, đê tiện để kiếm phiếu …những kẻ ăn trợ cấp, nhập cư bất hợp pháp, và dễ tin (dù đã gần 4 năm rồi vẫn còn mơ ngủ và tin CHANGE…)

Cũng thưa ông rằng nếu ông không biết hay không muốn biết những gì ông Obama đã làm bốn năm qua thì tôi cũng miễn bàn. Còn “dùng mọi thủ đoạn ma giáo, đê tiện để kiếm phiếu” từ những kẻ nhập cư bất hợp pháp thì quá phi lý. Bất hợp pháp thì sao mà đi bầu được mà lấy phiếu. Còn những kẻ ăn trợ cấp, chẳng lẻ cộng đồng Việt Nam lúc chân ước chân ráo đến Mỹ không ăn tiền chợ cấp sao? Tôi dám tin chắc trong số đó cũng có ông.

Như ứng cử viên phó tổng thống Đảng Cộng Hòa Paul Ryan, tôi cũng muốn cắt bỏ Medicare và tiền trợ cấp khi thấy tiền đóng thuế của mình bị lạm dụng bởi những kẻ không cần đến sự giúp đở của chính phủ. Không những họ giàu, không đóng thuế mà còn được tiền food stamp luôn cả bảo hiểm miễn phí.

Đương nhiên hệ thống nào cũng có sơ hở cả. Nếu như cắt bỏ hết thì thật sự quá dả mang với những người nghèo khó thật sự cần giúp đở. Như ông Ryan đã từng ăn tiền trợ cấp lúc 16 tuổi khi cha ông qua đời, tôi và mẹ tôi cũng nhờ tiền trợ cấp lúc thuở ban đầu đặc chân đến đất Mỹ. Như ông Ryan đã được cơ hội đi học thành tài, dỉ nhiên là tôi không tài bằng ông ta, tôi cũng nhờ đến sự giúp đở của chính phủ. Cho nên giời đây tôi không ngần ngại giúp đỡ những người cần sự giúp đỡ để có cơ hội vương lên. Còn những kẻ lạm dụng thì để họ tự trả lời với chính lương tâm của họ.

Gần đây tôi có xem một số tin tức trong cộng đồng người Việt nói rằng tổng thống Obama lấy $716 tỉ đô của Medicare để bỏ vào Obamacare. Tin này thật quá sai lầm. Cả hai Obama và Ryan đều giảm tiền Medicare. Tuy nhiên bên Ryan thì lấy số tiền đó để giảm nợ còn Obama thì lấy số tiền đó để giúm đỡ những người không mua nổi bảo hiểm sức khoẻ.

Trong khi Obama cắt cả trăm tỷ tiền quốc phòng và nâng thuế dân giàu và công ty lớn để bỏ vào tiền nợ, Ryan cộng thêm một ngàn tỷ vào quốc phòng và giảm thuế cho 2% dân giàu lại không có giải thích nào chính đáng là lấy tiền ở đâu ra để chi cho quốc phòng.

Nhưng đều tôi quan tâm nhất là trông khi ông Ryan bỏ cả tỷ tỷ vào quốc phòng mà ông lại cắt $170 tỷ tiền học bỏng (Pell Grants) cho học sinh nghèo. Chẳng khác gì ổng đẩy những đứa trẻ nghèo (con em chúng ta) ra khỏi trường học và đưa họ vào chiến trường.

Ezra Klein:

Obama’s cuts to Medicare are different because Ryan “keeps that money for Medicare to extend its solvency” while Obama uses it “to pay for a new risky program of his own that we call Obamacare.”

Here’s the big different in the two plans:

But Romney/Ryan also add a trillion dollars to the defense budget. And they have trillions of dollars in tax cuts they haven’t explained how they’re going to pay for. So those decisions make future cuts to Medicare more likely. Meanwhile, Obama cuts defense spending by hundreds of billions of dollars, raises about $1.5 trillion in new taxes, and puts all that money into deficit reduction. So that makes future Medicare cuts less likely.

As his favorable slipping, even in the Republican party, Mitt Romney needs to do something to galvanize his base and that something is his selection of Paul Ryan as his running mate. Romney knows that he has to make this bold move to get a shot at the general election. He needs to adopt Ryan’s proposals as his own because he doesn’t really have one. And anyone who has been following up with Ryan’s plan knows how ideological it is.

To reduce the government’s deficit, Ryan’s budget would cut federal spending on Social Safety programs including Medicare, Medicaid and Pell grants. But then his proposal would increase spending on defense. Furthermore, Ryan believes in Ayn Rand’s idea of “equal opportunity—not equal outcomes” and looking at “one another’s success with pride, not resentment.” While his proposal would cut aid to the needy, it also would cut taxes for corporations and the wealthy. No wonder economist Paul Krugman called Ryan’s plan, “the most fraudulent budget in American history.”

So Romney’s choice of Ryan might be good for the Republican party, but bad for America.

Paul Krugman:

Once you’ve decided to hide your beliefs and say whatever you think will get you the nomination, to pretend to agree with people you privately believe are fools, why worry at all about truth?

The truth is that Mr. Romney is so deeply committed to insincerity that neither side can trust him to do what it considers to be the right thing.

It seems like yesterday that Obama won his historic election, and yet here we are again for 2012. So what the President had accomplished so far? On foreign policies, he had intelligently gotten rid of Osama bin Laden and he’s bringing our troops home. The bailouts weren’t a popular decision, but they stabilized the economy. He lowered taxes on the majority of Americans and passed universal healthcare.

Sure, Obama couldn’t make the change he has promised in 2008 because Washington is not easy to transform. As Ryan Lizza pointed out in “The Obama Memos“:

Obama was learning the same lesson of many previous occupants of the Oval Office: he didn’t have the power that one might think he had. Harry Truman, one in a long line of Commanders-in-Chief frustrated by the limits of the office, once complained that the President “has to take all sorts of abuse from liars and demagogues…. The people can never understand why the President does not use his supposedly great power to make ’em behave. Well, all the President is, is a glorified public relations man who spends his time flattering, kissing and kicking people to get them to do what they are supposed to do anyway.”

But he has definitely learned how to work with the system to get things done rather than changing it. He is more confidence and the experience he has gained over the past few years would be an advantage for American.

Up to this point, I am still in favor of Obama, but I am also keeping an ear out for other candidates. So far I am enjoy seeing GOP candidates ripping each other to pieces, but I have not yet convinced. I am not envy of Millionaire Mitt’s success of earning about $57,000 a day, which is most average American makes in a year, but I am deeply concerned that Mitt doesn’t see anything wrong with paying less taxes than average American. In fact, his firm Bain Capital hired lobbyists in 2007 to killed a bill that would increase tax on private equity firms. As for Grandiose Gringrich, can you trust a guy who cheated not once but twice? I rest my case.

In his New Yorker‘s “The Obama Memos,” Ryan Lizza concludes:

Obama didn’t remake Washington. But his first two years stand as one of the most successful legislative periods in modern history. Among other achievements, he has saved the economy from depression, passed universal health care, and reformed Wall Street. Along the way, Obama may have changed his mind about his 2008 critique of Hillary Clinton. “Working the system, not changing it” and being “consumed with beating” Republicans “rather than unifying the country and building consensus to get things done” do not seem like such bad strategies for success after all.

Andrew Sullivan:

What liberals have never understood about Obama is that he practices a show-don’t-tell, long-game form of domestic politics. What matters to him is what he can get done, not what he can immediately take credit for… Not for the first time, I realized that to understand Obama, you have to take the long view. Because he does.

Worth reading.