Good morning America!! Today New Hampshire speaks and they tell us who they think is worthy of the GOP nomination.

In case you missed it, Todd Palin endorsed Newt yesterday.

OK, let’s talk about this movie regarding Bain Capital and Romney. Some are jumping to conclusions and immediately defending capitalism as if it has been attacked. It actually hasn’t been. What is being highlighted is the corrupt, crony capitalism that was practiced by Bain.  There is nothing wrong with streamlining a company with layoffs. There is nothing wrong with profit. Not everything Bain did was bad. However, Mitt’s not even in office and he already stuck taxpayers with a $44 million dollar bill by defaulting on pensions, while he profited. That isn’t right.

Romney would love nothing more than for his actions at Bain to be lost in people’s defense of capitalism. He loves that idea. He wants to make this about capitalism vs anti-capitalism. You will start to see Romney stooges out there pushing this narrative.  It isn’t true but that is what they want you to believe.

I know that the producer of the movie is not against capitalism and neither is Gingrich, Perry or Huntsman, all of whom have questioned Romney’s work at Bain. His work should be questioned, it is what he touts the most as his experience for being POTUS.

I also know that there are some conservatives that refuse to accept that there really is predatory lending and predatory capitalism. Well, let me share a bit. Before the economic crash, Mr. Firelight was a Senior Manager in Commercial Finance for a major fortune 500 company. 5 days before Obama was inaugurated his division was shut down.  His division was very profitable for this company but they decided that the profits produced from the loan portfolios they held could be used in other areas.  Did my hubby participate in predatory lending? No, he was a wholesaler but the finance companies and lenders he provided capital to certainly played in the gray.  Predatory lending is real. What does it look like? Well, the most common example is mortgages (not my hubby’s industry). A couple gets approved for a loan and they read their contract at closing (some don’t but many try). Most of the time they don’t really understand it and may ask a few questions of their realtor, lender or title company. They assume that by reading it and asking questions that they will get truthful answers. Many times they are told something completely false but sounds reasonable and sounds correct. Sometimes it is because the person giving the answer really doesn’t know and sometimes they just want to close the deal.  The buyer walks away thinking that they are educated on the loan they received but they are not. Only when something goes wrong do they find out that they were lied to and what they have is not what they thought they were signing papers for.

Now some will say that is their fault. No one made them sign they should have read the fine print, yada, yada, yada. This is all true but many people need to remind themselves that farmer Joe likely does not have a degree in finance, contracts and risk analysis. What he likely does is ask the right questions and make a good-faith attempt to understand what he is getting in to.  I will go out on a limb and say that many (not all) lenders, realtors and title agents know full well that farmer Joe doesn’t understand his contract but they know that if he did, they might lose the deal so they lie to him and dismiss his concerns.

This is what predatory lending is and I’m not talking about the person who lies on their loan docs or is buying a house they can’t afford. The problem is real and it still exists. We normal peons depend on these “professionals” to give us their professional opinion. I can remember when we were told that something was “standard language” and only since my hubby was in finance did we know that it wasn’t. We stopped a closing on a house and made them fix it. They had a meltdown over it and told us we were being unreasonable. Now imagine someone who knows nothing about lending and finance would feel? Most give in and don’t want to make a scene because they aren’t confident that they know what is really going on.

Well, there is also such a thing as capitalism and predatory capitalism. Romney and Bain participated in corrupt, crony, predatory capitalism. Real, true capitalism is success AND failure. It is when a company goes bankrupt and the investors also suffer the financial loss. Romney bankrupted some companies and in at least one case he got rewarded with a government bailout of $44 million taxpayer dollars. We paid him to not suffer the consequences that come with a bad business deal.  How did that happen?

When a private equity firm takes over a company and is forced to empty the pension accounts and use operating funds as their profit, that isn’t profit. That isn’t what capitalism is about. If a company goes under, we should see a loss on Bain’s bottomline. In federal bankruptcy court, a small business owner would be charged with fraud if he filed bankruptcy and profited from it. How is it OK for Bain?

We need to stay focused. Every conservative wasting time on defending capitalism at the expense of minimizing Romney’s corruption is doing the public a disservice.  We should all be shaping the narrative not playing style and semantics games. Perry, Huntsman and Gingrich are being forced to spend their time defending capitalism because of this semantics and style game. We know they are not anti-capitalists. What a waste of time. We should be saying that this isn’t about honest capitalism so lets not spend time there, it is about corruption. We should not be attacking the messengers even if their execution isn’t exactly the way we would have liked it.  We should be keeping the focus on Romney and the corruption that was real and did/does exist. Don’t play into Romney and the establishments hands by getting side-tracked with the anti-capitalism vs capitalism argument. That is a strawman.  Stay focused on the real issue.

Do we trust Romney to look after us if we have another economic crash? He supported TARP. Will he use our tax dollars to bail out Wall Street? Yes, I think he would. Folks, as Rush said today, that isn’t capitalism.  That is what Romney did with some of his Bain deals.  No, I do not trust him to understand that our tax dollars are not available to him for just any use especially to make sure that his Wall Street buddies don’t have to suffer the consequences of REAL capitalism.

Here are some articles that state the facts:

Possibility that the 100,000 jobs Romney claims to have created were all over seas jobs. That isn’t American capitalism.

WSJ analyzes Bain Capital under Romney’s leadership.

Raiding the pension plans of employees and then getting the government to bail it out is NOT capitalism. Those are our tax dollars.

Romney loves to say that he only served for 4 years but he has been running for election in some type of position since 1994 and has lost most of them.  There is a reason why and it is called Bain Capital. I find it amusing that some conservatives think that if the right doesn’t use it as an attack on Romney, the left won’t either.  Think again…

Before anyone wants to accuse me of anti-capitalism let me just say that the Firelight house is all about REAL capitalism. We also believe in honest, ethical business practices and Mr. Firelight has seen his share of soulless executives who lack those qualities. He knows what they look like, he works with them. Capitalism is VERY good and vital to America but corruption will send us down a road where the Occupy Wall streeters and liberals can convince the masses that we must get rid of capitalism to fight the corruption. We can not let them do that. We must come down hard on corrupt business practices. For the record, Mr. Firelight rebounded just fine. He made an industry change out of finance but is happy working for the sister company of his former employer in Mid-Management.  When the economy turns around, he will likely go back into his field of expertise but Obama will have to be out of the White House for that to happen.

Even Rush doesn’t completely get it.

NEWSFLASH: Just as much as we don’t want to spread the wealth, we also don’t want people like Romney spreading their failure.   Under REAL capitalism, Bain should have suffered the failure.  Did that happen or did tax payers and employees bail him out? When they bankrupted a company, did they lose hundreds of millions of dollars or did they somehow walk away with hundreds of millions of dollars.

To Rush and his millionaire buddies, this little peon is tired of my tax dollars bailing our your buddie’s bad business decisions and practices. That makes me more supportive of capitalism than your buddies who will look to everyone elses’s money to offset their losses.

Bannon interviews Rick Tyler with Newt’s Superpac who bought the movie (they didn’t make it)

Bannon interviews Barry Bennett

Bannon interviews Peter Boyer

Bannon talks with Larry O’Connor who takes issue with the movie

You knew this was coming… Mitt Romney and off shore bank accounts.

This guy has an interesting perspective on it.

OK, done with my soapbox. Feel free to disagree with me.

Mitt caught in a lie…

LOVE this video on Wisconsin and what Walker is doing.

This is what we are fighting against… bye, bye Nikki.

You can pre-order Chuck Heath Jr’s new book.

I don’t want to hear any complaints from conservatives who are defending Mitt and taking issue with this Mitt movie when they read this.

These tea partiers forgot to sign in…

This is comforting…

Mitt drops the F bomb… had you thinking…

This is just wrong… what happened to O’s home for the holidays campaign?

**If you are looking for some fun in the sun and relaxation. Please consider coming to our Reload Retreat.

I’ll be back here tonight watching election results from New Hampshire.

Have a great day everyone! If you live in New Hampshire, please go vote.