"Behind this giant is Cerberus Capital Management"


Chairman of Cerberus Capital Management is John W. Snow who was Secretary of the Treasury under George Bush

The Chairman of Cerberus Financial is Dan Quayle.

Link (new window)

This is a Republican scheme, whatever it is.

There's absolutely no mystery about it. Cerberus started buying up gun companies years ago. They re-branded as Freedom Group to get away from being associated with the car bailouts.

Huh. I assumed I was going to read a worthwhile story and it sadly turned out to be the biggest waste of my time of the day.

NFA: "Behind this giant is Cerberus Capital Management"


Chairman of Cerberus Capital Management is John W. Snow who was Secretary of the Treasury under George Bush

The Chairman of Cerberus Financial is Dan Quayle.

Link (new window)

This is a Republican scheme, whatever it is.

armed rebellion?

NFA: Chairman of Cerberus Capital Management is John W. Snow who was Secretary of the Treasury under George Bush

Meh, Jon Snow was killed by the Night's Watch for being too liberal.

Cerberus ^{(^)}? Was "Hellhound Financial" taken?

Somaticasual: So, soros wants to buy out the industry so he can shut it down?

Amazing how he can do things that he isn't even involved in. He's the greatest Republican boogieman ever!

Weaver95: NFA: "Behind this giant is Cerberus Capital Management"


Chairman of Cerberus Capital Management is John W. Snow who was Secretary of the Treasury under George Bush

The Chairman of Cerberus Financial is Dan Quayle.

Link (new window)

This is a Republican scheme, whatever it is.

armed rebellion?

Gottschalks

/John Brunner

GAT_00: Somaticasual: So, soros wants to buy out the industry so he can shut it down?

Amazing how he can do things that he isn't even involved in. He's the greatest Republican boogieman ever!

I'd say that's a pretty good move on their part as about the only things that are selling are guns and ammo.

Article is old news. This was headlined when Chrysler got bailed out. This company buys failing companies that they feel are American icon name brands (like Chrysler and Remington Arms). They then try to make the company profitable again. Remington was the unusual purchase because they were owned by Dupont and thus not "failing." There's nothing new about this company and they are far from liberal.

It would be funny and a little ironic if it was capitalism that took away people's right to bear arms.

The more the company diversifies its portfolio, analysts say, the more it has to offer to firearms distributors and leading retailers like Wal-Mart and Cabela's.

I'm not happy with this.

Over the last 30 years I've watched the economy plunge as powerful corporations bought up everything they possibly could. In a lot of instances, corporate raiders bought companies just to fire everyone, sell off the assets and dispose of the land. In other instances they closed local manufacturers, unemployed thousands and shipped the jobs overseas, usually to China.

When the FCC loosened regulations over the ownership of radio stations, ClearChannel popped up, buying up stations across the country and basically creating major suckage since one entity now controlled them all.

Pressure by powerful companies caused the FCC to relax the regulations on TV commercials, allowing for the much hated infomercial to clog the channels at night and the infamous 'mini-infomercial' to annoy viewers. (That's the two minute spot shilling some cheap krap before the OTHER 2 minute spot with the normal 8, 15 second commercials -- giving you 4 minutes all totaled of being annoyed.) Your cable carrier has NO CONTROL over these.

I don't suppose any of you recall when Barnett Bank went and grabbed up every, small home town bank they possibly could, which resulted in higher fees for the customers and more restrictions? A small but nice local bank in my city was bought out, then bought out again, then again and once more. Now, it's not so nice.

I don't suppose any of you know about that group which, for the past 5 years or so, has been quietly buying up US Nuclear power plants? In several cases they made them better, more efficient and safer. However, currently they now own a large percentage of these plants which contribute previously cheap power to the US power grids.

Several Made In America, reliable brand names were 'bought out' -- well, their reputable names were. Like Westinghause and General Electric. They used to be among a small group of reliable manufacturers which produced reliable products for the home. Now, the label might say 'Westinghause' but the product itself was made overseas by $4.00 an hour labor and iffy quality control.

I used to be able to walk into a dealership of my choosing, and, if I could afford it, buy a brand new car. Currently I don't know of ANY dealership that will do more than LEASE and brand new car to you. Meaning, they own it until the lease is up. THEN, you have the option to actually buy it.

Leasing killed the first, efficient and likable electric car made by GM. The EV1. Nearly overnight the car was recalled, owners who didn't want to part with them and even made offers to buy them outright, were forced to give them up. No one knows why, but the EV1 hit the metal shredders faster than any car recall ever. I don't think there's even one left in a museum. Collectors, to my knowledge, could not even find ways to keep one.

Randolph Hearst bought up newspapers until he basically controlled the news. Then he bought up pulp paper plants and logging companies until he owned a major percentage of US paper production. Various restrictions on the ownership of news media were put into place by congress years ago (weakened today by the FCC) because his papers printed what he told them to. Often, biased. He also managed to get pot made illegal in the us, because hemp made for cheaper paper and would have cut into his major logging enterprises.

Walmart managed to get popular brand names to cheapen their products by buying huge amounts of them. Like Black and Decker. However, it was just following the same process invented by K-mart. All in the name of profit. If you want a Black and Decker drill to last years, buy it from a hardware store at a considerably greater price. If you want it to last basically months, go to K-mart or Walmart and buy the same drill much cheaper. The changes are on the inside.

Then there was that whole thing about a major agricultural company buying up every independent farm it could which eventually resulted in higher food prices. The farms it couldn't buy, it supplied with genetically modified seeds -- which produced no viable seeds after planting so farmers could not hold some back to reduce their next crops seed bill.

So, when I start seeing major corporations suddenly popping up and buying out everything I tend to get concerned. Usually, it means that prices are going to go up for consumers.

Welcome to what happened in every other industry over the last 15 years. An individual or institution with a lot of assets seeks out private companies, buys them, and then tries to flip them real quick to make some money. What's happening with Cerberus and these gun companies is Cerberus bought up a bunch of companies outright, taking on their debt, and then to make a quick buck they're consolidating all of their operations. This meant closing factories with skilled machinists, moving entire production lines, and consolidating operations in new locations, with a new workforce. One need only google "Remington/Marlin/Bushmaster/DPMS Quality Control" to get an idea for how well it's turning out.

People are comparing it to what happened to Harley Davidson in the 70s. The good news is that there are still tons of gun makers that haven't fallen victim to Cerberus. Springfield Armory, Smith and Wesson, Colt, Ruger, Mossberg, etc., are all independently run.