http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2010/04/02/dan_quayle_still_blaming_perot_for_clinton/index.html
Friday, Apr 2, 2010
Dan Quayle still pushing "Perot elected Clinton" nonsense
For nearly 20 years, the right has been arguing that the Democrats' 1992 win should come with an asterisk
By Steve Kornacki
In 1992, Bill Clinton won a decisive victory in the presidential race, snagging 370 electoral votes and relegating George H.W. Bush to a smaller share of the vote than any incumbent president since William Howard Taft in 1912.
The right is still pretending this didn’t really happen. Oh sure, they acknowledge that Bill Clinton was elected and sworn-in as the nation’s 42nd president. They just claim it wasn’t really a legitimate victory. Case in point: an op-ed from Dan Quayle set to appear in Sunday’s Washington Post. Quayle writes:
Many remember the Reform Party of the 1990s, which formed around the candidacy of Ross Perot. I sure do, because it eliminated any chance that President George H.W. Bush and I would prevail over Bill Clinton and Al Gore in 1992. What started as a grass-roots phenomenon ended with 19 percent support at the ballot box -- and a majority of those voters would probably have gone Republican in a two-party race. Speaking on behalf of the Bush-Quayle campaign, to this day we firmly believe that Perot cost the Republican Party the White House.
Republicans have been blindly pushing this argument for nearly 20 years now, acting like George H.W. Bush was all set to win a second term until some crazy Texas billionaire came along and messed it all up. It’s understandable why they like this narrative: it lets them off the hook for losing the public’s confidence in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s -- and casts Clinton’s electoral triumph as an accident of history.
But let me try, one more time, to set the record straight: there is absolutely no rational reason -- none -- to believe that Perot cost Bush and Quayle the 1992 election. To understand why, let’s quickly review what happened in the ’92 campaign.
In the early stages of the race, just after the Gulf War in 1991, Bush looked positively unbeatable. As a result, every big-name Democrat -- Bill Bradley, Mario Cuomo, Al Gore, Jay Rockefeller and on and on -- backed out. And for the spring and summer of ’91, virtually no other Democrats stepped up to the fill the void. Former Massachusetts Senator Paul Tsongas was the only active candidate until the middle of the summer, and few took him seriously.
But as the Gulf War afterglow faded and the sputtering economy gained more attention, Bush’s popularity returned to earth. Several Democrats, including Clinton, Tom Harkin, Bob Kerrey and Jerry Brown, entered the race. And when, in December, Cuomo resisted a last-minute push to recruit him into the race, Clinton emerged as the clear front-runner. He was badly damaged by scandal in early ’92 and nearly overtaken by Tsongas, but by April, Clinton had emerged as the inevitable Democratic nominee.
At that point, he was given little chance of winning, mainly because of the scandals (Gennifer Flowers, draft-dodging and so on). But economic anxiety was widespread, and Bush’s job approval ratings were poisonous. He was a plainly vulnerable incumbent. This is where the Perot phenomenon took hold: With voters initially unwilling to trust Clinton, Perot stepped forward and rocketed to the top of national polls. By the late spring, he led in three-way trial heats, with Clinton lagging in a very distant third place.
Then came the Perot crack-up. Faced with media scrutiny he’d never before experienced, Perot’s erratic, paranoid and even delusional tendencies became evident to the general public. His numbers began to slide. He grew cranky – with the media and with the campaign team he’d assembled. In July, hours before Clinton was to deliver his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention, Perot withdrew from the race.
Here the GOP’s “blame Perot” excuse-making falls apart, because immediately after the Democratic convention, Clinton soared ahead of Bush in polls -- by more than 20 points. This was with no Perot in the race. The explanation was obvious: Clinton, after a beautifully choreographed convention, had convinced millions of Americans to give him a second look. It had been clear for months that voters were ready to throw out Bush, but they’d been unwilling to embrace Clinton. After the convention, though, they were.
Clinton’s one-on-one lead over Bush survived for the next 11 weeks. Not a single independent poll after the Democratic convention ever showed Bush leading Clinton – not even immediately after the August ’92 GOP convention (after which Bush temporarily closed the gap, to as few as six points in one poll). By Labor Day, the Bush convention bounce was gone and Clinton was back ahead by double-digits -- a lead that endured all the way through September.
It was then, as October arrived, that Perot jumped back in the race. But his re-emergence didn’t disproportionately hurt Bush -- who, it cannot be emphasized enough, was already being drubbed by Clinton. In a CBS poll on the eve of Perot's re-entry, Clinton led Bush by 13 points in a two-man race – and by 11 in a three-way race. In other words, Clinton’s lead actually declined (very slightly) with Perot back in the mix.
Throughout October, Clinton maintained a steady, commanding advantage over Bush. Three presidential debates were held that month. In the first, Perot stole the show and earned a measurable polling bounce -- from single digits back to double-digits. In the second, Bush was excoriated for glancing at his watch, feeding the impression that he was insufficiently energized and engaged as president; his poll numbers ebbed. In the third, Bush fared better, and by the end of October, he’d pared Clinton’s lead back to the mid- to high- single-digits.
Any last-minute Bush momentum, though, was undermined on the Friday before the election when Iran-Contra independent counsel Lawrence E. Walsh indicted Caspar Weinberger, Ronald Reagan’s old Defense secretary – and, in a statement released with the indictment, implicated Bush, who had been dogged for years by questions about his Iran-Contra involvement.
The following Tuesday, Clinton nabbed 43 percent of the vote, good for 370 electoral votes. Bush finished with 37 percent and 168 electoral votes. Perot tallied nearly 20 percent, and exit polls showed that his voters were roughly split evenly on whom their second choice would have been.
In other words, take Perot out of the mix, and Clinton still wins -- handily. The argument of Quayle and other Republicans that Perot cost Bush the election would be more credible if there had been even a single independent poll after the Democratic convention giving Bush the lead over Clinton in a head-to-head race. There never was. Clinton won the race and Bush lost it -- no asterisks needed.
Showing posts with label Dan Quayle. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dan Quayle. Show all posts
Sunday, April 11, 2010
Thursday, May 31, 2007
The Cerberus takeover of Chrysler
http://wsws.org/articles/2007/may2007/cerb-m17.shtml
World Socialist Web Site
The Cerberus takeover of Chrysler—what it means for auto workers
By Shannon Jones
17 May 2007
Chrysler CEO Tom LaSorda called for cuts in retiree health benefits one day after the announced sale of the North American unit of DaimlerChrysler to the private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management. The statement by LaSorda, who will continue to head Chrysler under Cerberus ownership, confirms that the sell-off of Chrysler is the preparation for a wholesale assault on North American auto workers.
The sale of the Michigan-based automaker to Cerberus has been widely presented by politicians, the media and the leadership of the United Auto Workers as a blessing for Chrysler workers. The change of ownership, it is said, will help shore up and stabilize the automaker’s operations and ultimately benefit the workforce.
The reality is that Cerberus, a firm notorious for stripping companies of their assets in order to resell them at a profit, is preparing to brutally slash the jobs, wages and benefits of Chrysler workers. Since its founding in 1992, Cerberus has amassed enormous wealth from the contraction, not the expansion, of corporate entities ranging from retail chains to auto parts and supply companies. It has left a trail of battered companies either drastically downsized or dismantled.
Last year, for example, Cerberus bought 600 Albertson’s supermarkets. Within months it had laid off 1,000 workers. In 2004, Cerberus purchased the Mervyn department store chain. The next year it closed 62 Mervyn stores, eliminating 4,800 jobs. It recently closed a bus plant in Canada and several textile mills in the US. It has also been involved in the downsizing of the car rental firms Alamo and National.
The sale of Chrysler to Cerberus “will shake the ground under people’s feet in a huge way,” Kevin Boyle, a professor at Ohio State University and a noted historian, told the New York Times in a May 14 article entitled “Cerberus Emerges from the Underworld.”
The Wall Street Journal on May 15 quoted Peter Pestillo, the former CEO of auto parts maker Visteon and for a time the Ford executive in charge of UAW talks, as saying, “This deal by Cerberus sets things up for very significant changes in Detroit. It will shake up GM and Ford as well.” Cerberus, Pestillo continued, doesn’t “soldier on with bad contracts. They shine things up and sell.”
Unlike mutual funds, private equity funds operate largely outside of government regulation, since their stock is not publicly traded. They pool huge amounts of private capital seeking the largest return in the shortest time. The modus operandi of firms like Cerberus is not to create profit through the development of new products and technologies, but to plunder the assets of existing companies.
An article in the May 14 edition of the German magazine Der Spiegel, entitled “Hellhound Snaps up Chrysler,” had this to say: “Venture capital firms like Cerberus invest in or purchase other companies that are about to go bankrupt. After buying them, they either take control as the largest creditor, rationalize the business and re-sell it—or they carve it up into pieces. Originally, Cerberus primarily bought the debt of bankruptcy candidates from their creditors. Since then, the portfolio has expanded to all kinds of problem-ridden assets. Firms like Cerberus have earned the nickname of ‘vulture funds.’”
One asset Cerberus undoubtedly has its eye on is Chrysler’s profitable auto finance unit Chrysler Financial. Cerberus already owns a majority stake in General Motors Acceptance Corporation Financial Services (GMAC), which it bought from General Motors last year. It is likely that Cerberus will attempt to carve Chrysler Financial, with net assets of $5.5 billion, out of Chrysler and merge it with GMAC, creating a massive and potentially highly profitable entity.
Cerberus’s owners have reaped enormous profits since the company’s start-up in 1992. Company founder, Stephen Feinberg, formerly worked at corporate buyout firm Drexel Lambert, notorious in the 1980s for popularizing so-called “junk bonds.” Fortune magazine in 1999 listed Feinberg as one of the richest Americans under the age of 40. At that time his net worth was $274 million.
According to an October 3, 2005 report in BusinessWeek, some of the top personnel at Cerberus earn up to $40 million a year. An article in CNNMoney from November of 2006 noted that private equity firms returned 22.5 percent on investments, as compared to an average of 6.6 percent for companies included in the Standard & Poor’s 500 list.
Such extraordinary returns are not possible from more traditional business operations, and certainly not from the production and sale of automobiles. The functioning of firms such as Cerberus often involves complex and risky transactions that have absolutely nothing to do with the creation of real value.
A piece in the March 16, 2006 edition of USA Today states that the secret of private equity firms “is the use of debt—usually as much as seventy cents of every dollar they invest. Because they pile debt onto the companies they buy, private equity firms free up their own cash, allowing them to make additional investments and maximize their potential returns.”
In some cases, private equity fund managers have been accused of taking out loans against the assets of companies they have purchased so as to award themselves fat payouts, regardless of what happens to the takeover target.
Underlying the rise of private equity is the ready availability of investment cash. Following the 2000 stock market collapse, private equity became a preference for investors seeking big returns.
Increasingly, private equity funds have obtained investment capital from public pension funds, which accounted for about one quarter of all new money raised by private equity firms last year. According to a report in the May 15 New York Times, among the investors in Cerberus are the Los Angeles Fire and Police Pension System and the Pennsylvania Public School Employees Retirement System.
Thus, workers’ pension funds are being used to help underwrite the takeover and destruction of companies and the consequent elimination of the jobs and benefits of other workers.
Further, given the highly speculative nature of private equity ventures, the increasing turn by pension funds to private equity investment is exposing workers’ retirement benefits to substantial risk. There is already talk in some circles of a “private equity debt bubble” (Boston Globe, May 1, 2007).
Who runs Cerberus?
A look at the leading personnel of Cerberus underscores the socially reactionary character of this enterprise. Feinberg has assembled a management team comprised of individuals from politics and business whose names are associated with job-cutting and other anti-social polices carried out by the US and international ruling class over the past several decades.
* The chairman of Cerberus is John W. Snow, formerly Bush’s treasury secretary. Snow led the drive for massive tax cuts for the rich. Prior to his tenure in the Bush cabinet, Snow headed CSX Corporation, the railroad conglomerate.
* Former Republican Vice President Dan Quayle is another notable at Cerberus. Since joining Cerberus in 2000, he has focused on international operations, using his political connections to assist in acquisitions in Japan and Germany.
* Former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was an investor, according to a report filed in 2001.
* David Thursfield, a senior member of Cerberus’s automotive and industrial team, gained a reputation at Ford as a savage cost-cutter. His push to force parts suppliers to reduce prices produced so much tension within Ford management that he was forced to leave the company in May 2004, the same month he joined Cerberus.
* A new figure at Cerberus is Wolfgang Bernhard, a former executive at Chrysler and Mercedes Benz. According to a report in the May 14 New York Times, “At both companies he wielded a cost-cutting ax, ruffling the feathers of the labor unions and higher-ups.”
* Another important team member, assisting Cerberus operations in Europe, is former German Defense Minister Rudolf Scharping, who is said to be an advisor. Scharping was dismissed from his government post in 2002 following several scandals.
For the UAW bureaucracy to praise the sale of Chrysler to Cerberus, claiming it is in the “best interests” of workers, says much about the reactionary interests the UAW serves.
World Socialist Web Site
The Cerberus takeover of Chrysler—what it means for auto workers
By Shannon Jones
17 May 2007
Chrysler CEO Tom LaSorda called for cuts in retiree health benefits one day after the announced sale of the North American unit of DaimlerChrysler to the private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management. The statement by LaSorda, who will continue to head Chrysler under Cerberus ownership, confirms that the sell-off of Chrysler is the preparation for a wholesale assault on North American auto workers.
The sale of the Michigan-based automaker to Cerberus has been widely presented by politicians, the media and the leadership of the United Auto Workers as a blessing for Chrysler workers. The change of ownership, it is said, will help shore up and stabilize the automaker’s operations and ultimately benefit the workforce.
The reality is that Cerberus, a firm notorious for stripping companies of their assets in order to resell them at a profit, is preparing to brutally slash the jobs, wages and benefits of Chrysler workers. Since its founding in 1992, Cerberus has amassed enormous wealth from the contraction, not the expansion, of corporate entities ranging from retail chains to auto parts and supply companies. It has left a trail of battered companies either drastically downsized or dismantled.
Last year, for example, Cerberus bought 600 Albertson’s supermarkets. Within months it had laid off 1,000 workers. In 2004, Cerberus purchased the Mervyn department store chain. The next year it closed 62 Mervyn stores, eliminating 4,800 jobs. It recently closed a bus plant in Canada and several textile mills in the US. It has also been involved in the downsizing of the car rental firms Alamo and National.
The sale of Chrysler to Cerberus “will shake the ground under people’s feet in a huge way,” Kevin Boyle, a professor at Ohio State University and a noted historian, told the New York Times in a May 14 article entitled “Cerberus Emerges from the Underworld.”
The Wall Street Journal on May 15 quoted Peter Pestillo, the former CEO of auto parts maker Visteon and for a time the Ford executive in charge of UAW talks, as saying, “This deal by Cerberus sets things up for very significant changes in Detroit. It will shake up GM and Ford as well.” Cerberus, Pestillo continued, doesn’t “soldier on with bad contracts. They shine things up and sell.”
Unlike mutual funds, private equity funds operate largely outside of government regulation, since their stock is not publicly traded. They pool huge amounts of private capital seeking the largest return in the shortest time. The modus operandi of firms like Cerberus is not to create profit through the development of new products and technologies, but to plunder the assets of existing companies.
An article in the May 14 edition of the German magazine Der Spiegel, entitled “Hellhound Snaps up Chrysler,” had this to say: “Venture capital firms like Cerberus invest in or purchase other companies that are about to go bankrupt. After buying them, they either take control as the largest creditor, rationalize the business and re-sell it—or they carve it up into pieces. Originally, Cerberus primarily bought the debt of bankruptcy candidates from their creditors. Since then, the portfolio has expanded to all kinds of problem-ridden assets. Firms like Cerberus have earned the nickname of ‘vulture funds.’”
One asset Cerberus undoubtedly has its eye on is Chrysler’s profitable auto finance unit Chrysler Financial. Cerberus already owns a majority stake in General Motors Acceptance Corporation Financial Services (GMAC), which it bought from General Motors last year. It is likely that Cerberus will attempt to carve Chrysler Financial, with net assets of $5.5 billion, out of Chrysler and merge it with GMAC, creating a massive and potentially highly profitable entity.
Cerberus’s owners have reaped enormous profits since the company’s start-up in 1992. Company founder, Stephen Feinberg, formerly worked at corporate buyout firm Drexel Lambert, notorious in the 1980s for popularizing so-called “junk bonds.” Fortune magazine in 1999 listed Feinberg as one of the richest Americans under the age of 40. At that time his net worth was $274 million.
According to an October 3, 2005 report in BusinessWeek, some of the top personnel at Cerberus earn up to $40 million a year. An article in CNNMoney from November of 2006 noted that private equity firms returned 22.5 percent on investments, as compared to an average of 6.6 percent for companies included in the Standard & Poor’s 500 list.
Such extraordinary returns are not possible from more traditional business operations, and certainly not from the production and sale of automobiles. The functioning of firms such as Cerberus often involves complex and risky transactions that have absolutely nothing to do with the creation of real value.
A piece in the March 16, 2006 edition of USA Today states that the secret of private equity firms “is the use of debt—usually as much as seventy cents of every dollar they invest. Because they pile debt onto the companies they buy, private equity firms free up their own cash, allowing them to make additional investments and maximize their potential returns.”
In some cases, private equity fund managers have been accused of taking out loans against the assets of companies they have purchased so as to award themselves fat payouts, regardless of what happens to the takeover target.
Underlying the rise of private equity is the ready availability of investment cash. Following the 2000 stock market collapse, private equity became a preference for investors seeking big returns.
Increasingly, private equity funds have obtained investment capital from public pension funds, which accounted for about one quarter of all new money raised by private equity firms last year. According to a report in the May 15 New York Times, among the investors in Cerberus are the Los Angeles Fire and Police Pension System and the Pennsylvania Public School Employees Retirement System.
Thus, workers’ pension funds are being used to help underwrite the takeover and destruction of companies and the consequent elimination of the jobs and benefits of other workers.
Further, given the highly speculative nature of private equity ventures, the increasing turn by pension funds to private equity investment is exposing workers’ retirement benefits to substantial risk. There is already talk in some circles of a “private equity debt bubble” (Boston Globe, May 1, 2007).
Who runs Cerberus?
A look at the leading personnel of Cerberus underscores the socially reactionary character of this enterprise. Feinberg has assembled a management team comprised of individuals from politics and business whose names are associated with job-cutting and other anti-social polices carried out by the US and international ruling class over the past several decades.
* The chairman of Cerberus is John W. Snow, formerly Bush’s treasury secretary. Snow led the drive for massive tax cuts for the rich. Prior to his tenure in the Bush cabinet, Snow headed CSX Corporation, the railroad conglomerate.
* Former Republican Vice President Dan Quayle is another notable at Cerberus. Since joining Cerberus in 2000, he has focused on international operations, using his political connections to assist in acquisitions in Japan and Germany.
* Former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was an investor, according to a report filed in 2001.
* David Thursfield, a senior member of Cerberus’s automotive and industrial team, gained a reputation at Ford as a savage cost-cutter. His push to force parts suppliers to reduce prices produced so much tension within Ford management that he was forced to leave the company in May 2004, the same month he joined Cerberus.
* A new figure at Cerberus is Wolfgang Bernhard, a former executive at Chrysler and Mercedes Benz. According to a report in the May 14 New York Times, “At both companies he wielded a cost-cutting ax, ruffling the feathers of the labor unions and higher-ups.”
* Another important team member, assisting Cerberus operations in Europe, is former German Defense Minister Rudolf Scharping, who is said to be an advisor. Scharping was dismissed from his government post in 2002 following several scandals.
For the UAW bureaucracy to praise the sale of Chrysler to Cerberus, claiming it is in the “best interests” of workers, says much about the reactionary interests the UAW serves.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
