Tag Archives: offshoring

My pain is Mitt Romney’s gain: Sensata and American jobs lost to China

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This from Tom Gaulrapp, an employee of Sensata for 33-years:

“I hold Mitt Romney responsible because he created Bain Capital. He helped pioneer the outsourcing of good American jobs to China, and he created the model that the company has followed over the years. It’s a business model that puts profits above people — at all cost to us back home. And it’s the approach he would take as CEO of our country. But Mitt Romney’s connection to Sensata is even more direct. He is also personally invested in Sensata Technologies, according to his 2010 and 2011 tax returns, and last year got a huge tax break by moving some of his Sensata stock to one of his foundations. That’s right: Mitt Romney got a big tax break on his investment in his company that’s shipping my job to China. My pain is Mitt Romney’s gain.

[...] Mitt Romney hasn’t lifted a finger to help us. Instead, his campaign blamed the outsourcing of our jobs to China on President Obama, because his pension with the Illinois State government has invested in Sensata. The Romney campaign didn’t mention Mitt’s personal investment in Sensata, the big tax break he got from shifting his Sensata stock to his foundation, or his own role in Bain’s longtime practice of outsourcing. Instead of owning up to his past and helping save our jobs, he decided to play politics with our lives. In Romney’s world, everyone else is guilty and he’s the innocent bystander. Fortunately, our story is beginning to be heard. Last week, I was quoted in an article that was on the front page of the New York Times about Romney, Bain and China. Our country should know that the issues being debated in this presidential election are not abstract, and are playing out everyday in my community. In 20 days, on November 5th, I’ll be out of a job.”

A vote for Romney is a vote of approval for every American job that’s been off-shored to China for the past 30 years.

Related: 

The Mitt Romney way: how he made millions from the rescue of Detroit

The Mitt Romney way: how he made millions from the rescue of Detroit

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Greg Palast: “Mitt Romney, through Ann Romney’s blind trust—not so blind, they could see exactly where the money was going—gave their money to Paul “The Vulture” Singer… Singer, with two of his hedge fund buddies, bought up the auto parts division of General Motors for only 67 cents a share. They were able to turn 67 cents a share into $22 a share by threatening GM and the U.S. Treasury with a complete shutdown of the auto industry. They had complete control of all the steering wheels and steering columns of every car that was being made in America. GM would have been liquidated. They literally threatened to shut down GM. And so, they—the government simply allowed GM to pay them $12 billion. About half of that was straight from the U.S. Treasury in a takeover of Delphi’s pension fund.

Once they got the money—once they got the money, they eliminated 28 of 29 auto plants in the U.S. They moved—they eliminated every single job of every UAW member; 25,200 UAW members all lost their jobs. Almost every plant was then moved by the Romney group to China. Delphi is making a fortune today. So you have 25,000 workers who lost their jobs to China. Three hedge fund managers made at least $4 billion, $4.2 billion. And the Romneys have made at least 15, but the evidence suggests that it’s more like $115 million for the Romneys, about a 4,000 percent profit.

What we can’t get from them at this moment, this may be the reason why they are not releasing their 2009 taxes, because that would give us a better hint. Unfortunately, they’ve not only moved the company operations to China, but they’ve moved their incorporation of the auto parts division of General Motors from Troy, Michigan, to the Isle of Jersey in the Mediterranean Sea, which hides their taxes and also, of course, hides their accounts.”

— “Mitt Romney’s Bailout Bonanza: How He Made Millions from the Rescue of Detroit”

It would be great if someone would ask Mitt Romney to explain: 1) this, or 2) how vulture capitalism helps America or the tax payer — or the 47 percent he was sneering at with his wealthy donors in May — or, 3) how more tax cuts for “small businesses” like Delphi would translate into “job creation.”

Related:

My pain is Mitt Romney’s gain: Sensata and American jobs lost to China

Ann Romney hears women’s voices and listens very, very selectively

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In an interview with KWQC-TV6 on Sep. 7, Ann Romney refused to comment on issues stemming from the ongoing War on Women. Romney tells the anchor that issues like same-sex marriage and contraception provided through an employer’s health insurance plan are irrelevant topics to women in this election.

Anchor David Nelson:  “What is your message to voters?”

Ann Romney:  “My message, really was, ‘women, I hear your voices,’ and the interesting thing about this economy, this tough economy that we’re going through, is that women have been hit the hardest.  And I wanted to make sure that women of America knew that we have been across this country for the last year and a half and we are very aware of how tough it is for them.

They are juggling so many things, and I think all of us know that women work harder than anyone and that they hold down jobs, they are raising the kids, they’re trying to get food on the table and everything else and they’re really being stretched and my message was really for women and it’s saying ‘trust my husband, he does not fail he will not fail’ and he is going to work harder than anyone to make sure that your economic prosperity and your future will be more sound with him.”

Anchor David Nelson:  “Here in Iowa, as you know, same-sex marriage is legal.  Do you believe a lesbian mother should be allowed to marry her partner?”

Ann Romney:  “You know, I’m not going to talk about the specific issues.  I’m going to let my husband speak on issues.  I’m here to really just talk about my husband and what kind of husband and father he is and, you know, those are hot-button issues that distract from what the real voting issue is going to be at this election.  That, it’s going to be about the economy and jobs.

And, frankly, the President said four years ago that if he doesn’t turn this economy around he’s going to be looking at a one-term presidency.  And I frankly believe that Mitt is the person that is so going to be focused on jobs and job creation and making sure that women’s economic prosperity is more certain and by the way their children’s future is because as we all know we’re facing this debt crisis.  Sometime, somewhere, somehow someone’s going to have to pay off these debts, and it’s going to be our children.  And we have to, it’s getting to be a desperate situation.  We will be looking at a Greece-like situation or a Spain situation if we don’t address these issues very quickly.”

Anchor David Nelson: “Do you believe that employer-provided health insurance should be required to cover birth control?”

Ann Romney:  ”Again, you’re asking me questions that are not about what this election is going to be about.  This election is going to be about the economy and jobs.“

Anchor David Nelson:  “Well, a Pew Research poll shows those issues are very important to women, ranking them either “important” or “very important.”

Ann Romney:  “You know, but I personally believe, and this is what I’m hearing from women all across the country that they are going to look for the guy that’s going to pull them out of the weeds and get them job security and a brighter future for their children.  That’s the message.

Listen, I’ve been across this country, I’ve been for a year-and-a-half on the campaign trail.  I’ve spoken with thousands of women and they are telling me, they’re telling me a couple of things, one they say they’re praying for me which is really wonderful, and then they’re saying, ‘please help, please help.  We are so worried about our jobs.’ So really if you want to try to pull me off of the other messages it’s not going to work because I know because I’ve been out there.“

Anchor David Nelson:  “Well, I don’t want to pull you off any message.  You just told a reporter who was questioning you in Cleveland that you want women to have a secure and stable future.  I asked you about marriage and whether lesbian mothers should be allowed to marry.  Isn’t marriage a part of creating a stable future?

Ann Romney:  “You know, again, I’m going to talk to you about the economy and about job creation and about how my husband is the right person for the right time.  This is going to be an election that is very important for women, and we are going to make sure that their economic prosperity is more certain under a President Romney.”

(Via: Think Progress) Watch a four-minute video of the interview.

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All these women supposedly telling Ann they’re worried about their jobs… it almost sounds like she’s been threatening to lay off her housekeepers, doesn’t it?

If only Mitt and Ann had listened to women (and men) who were worried about losing their jobs back when Bain Capital was in its heyday: bankrupting companies, laying off the workforce, offshoring their jobs to China and India. Oh, well! Better to pretend to listen now than never.

The ethos of Mitt Romney: “make-nothing, take-everything, screw-everyone”

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“…Instead of cars and airplanes, we built swaps, CDOs and other toxic financial products. Instead of building new companies from the ground up, we took out massive bank loans and used them to acquire existing firms, liquidating every asset in sight and leaving the target companies holding the note. The new borrow-and-conquer economy was morally sanctified by an almost religious faith in the grossly euphemistic concept of “creative destruction,” and amounted to a total abdication of collective responsibility by America’s rich, whose new thing was making assloads of money in ever-shorter campaigns of economic conquest, sending the proceeds offshore, and shrugging as the great towns and factories their parents and grandparents built were shuttered and boarded up, crushed by a true prairie fire of debt.

“Mitt Romney – a man whose own father built cars and nurtured communities, and was one of the old-school industrial anachronisms pushed aside by the new generation’s wealth grab – has emerged now to sell this make-nothing, take-everything, screw-everyone ethos to the world. He’s Gordon Gekko, but a new and improved version, with better PR – and a bigger goal. A takeover artist all his life, Romney is now trying to take over America itself. And if his own history is any guide, we’ll all end up paying for the acquisition.”

— Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital | Matt Taibbi | Rolling Stone

“Mitt Romney is one of the greatest and most irresponsible debt creators of all time.”

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“…This is the plain, stark reality that has somehow eluded America’s top political journalists for two consecutive presidential campaigns: Mitt Romney is one of the greatest and most irresponsible debt creators of all time. In the past few decades, in fact, Romney has piled more debt onto more unsuspecting companies, written more gigantic checks that other people have to cover, than perhaps all but a handful of people on planet Earth.

“By making debt the centerpiece of his campaign, Romney was making a calculated bluff of historic dimensions – placing a massive all-in bet on the rank incompetence of the American press corps. The result has been a brilliant comedy: A man makes a $250 million fortune loading up companies with debt and then extracting million-dollar fees from those same companies, in exchange for the generous service of telling them who needs to be fired in order to finance the debt payments he saddled them with in the first place. That same man then runs for president riding an image of children roasting on flames of debt, choosing as his running mate perhaps the only politician in America more pompous and self-righteous on the subject of the evils of borrowed money than the candidate himself. If Romney pulls off this whopper, you’ll have to tip your hat to him: No one in history has ever successfully run for president riding this big of a lie…”

— Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital | Matt Taibbi | Rolling Stone

(Emphasis above, mine.)

Tony Soprano explains Bain Capital

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Tony Soprano and Henry Hill from ‘Goodfellas’ (1990) explain how Bain Capital works. Read the HuffPost article here: http://huff.to/KXl1SG

One half of all jobs in the U.S. today now pay less than $35,000 a year

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We were once a great country that proudly built things, exported goods, and earned a living wage—in large part because we had thriving labor unions. We also had a healthy public sector employment rate, which contributed to employment, the economy and America’s overall success. Over the past 30 years or more, we’ve been outsmarted with tax laws written to benefit the one percent, had our labor unions and government workers demonized by conservative ideology, and we were Bain Capitalized out of our manufacturing base—we were Bain Capitalized to death. The GOP and their wealthy benefactors have killed America’s middle class for nothing more than greed—and here we are today.

A report from NPR: How America’s Losing The War On Poverty:

According to a recent survey by The Associated Press, the number of Americans living at or below the poverty line will reach its highest point since President Johnson made his famous declaration of war on poverty in 1964.

Close to 16 percent of Americans now live at or below the poverty line. For a family of four, that’s $23,000 a year. On top of that, 100 million of us — 1 out of 3 Americans — manage to survive on a household income barely twice that amount. How is this poverty crisis happening?

[...] One half of all jobs in the U.S. today now pay less than $35,000 a year. Adjusted for inflation, that’s one of the lowest rates for American workers in five decades.

There’s a common perception that somebody who’s poor or living below the poverty level is lazy or simply living off government handouts. Edelman says the actual average poor person is working.

[...] Many economists say that when the economy does recover, a lot of the jobs that were lost won’t be coming back. That suggests the possibility of significantly high unemployment for a long time — maybe even a permanently large class of Americans who live in poverty. Blackwell says we can act to prevent that future. “And it’s not rocket science.”

“We know now that by 2018, 45 percent of all jobs in this nation will require at least an associate’s degree,” she says. “We could invest in the system of training — particularly focusing on community colleges and preparing people to go to four-year institutions and improving our high school education.”

“We actually have extraordinary infrastructure in this country, from the manufacturing base we once had,” she continues. “We need to retool it, we need to refit it, we need to make sure that it’s ready for the kind of advanced manufacturing that we’re seeing develop in other countries.”

What we don’t need is to be “Bain Capitalized” further — or more of those “great” ideas like outsourcing work that can be done locally in the public sector. To let Republicans find more ways to cut spending, more austerity cuts for 99% of us—just to give the wealthiest even more tax breaks—costs our society, and our people, in too many ways to count.


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Romney’s “Plan for a Stronger Middle-Class” wouldn’t create ANY American jobs

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Pat Garofalo explores our man Mitt Romney’s claim that he’d create 12 million jobs and finds that Romney’s plan would actually kill jobs in America:

“Romney claims his plan will create 12 million jobs is one that his economic advisers have been echoing. However, a Center for American Progress Action Fund analysis found that Romney plan would actually kill 360,000 jobs next year alone…

“[...] Several of Romney’s proposals entail no change in policy, so its unclear how they would create jobs. Several others — including tax incentives for outsourcing — would actively undermine U.S. employment. Remember, Romney’s job creation record as governor was hardly stellar, as Massachusetts was 47th in job creation during his tenure.

“163,000 jobs created is encouraging, albeit too few to substantially bring down the unemployment rate. But the unemployment rate would be a full percentage point lower were it not for the hundreds of thousands of public sector layoffs that have occurred as a result of budget cutbacks. And Romney would double down on those sort of austerity measures, slicing the budget while cutting taxes for the rich under an economic ideology that has failed to produce results.”

America certainly doesn’t need to be “Bain Capitalized” anymore than it already has been: outsourcing American jobs overseas, austerity measures, and replacing living wages with minimum wage—all to benefit corporations and the one percent. Thanks, but no thanks.


via: atsirka

Do you really want someone with “Bain Capital” business experience in the White House?

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Hasn’t America been Bain Capitalized enough?

Krugman: this election really is about the rich versus the rest

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Paul Krugman approves of the Obama campaign’s decision to continue hammering Mitt Romney on his history with Bain Capital and his refusal to release any tax returns prior to 2010. He says,

“…this election is, in substantive terms, about the rich versus the rest, and it would be doing voters a disservice to pretend otherwise.

“[...] The print media do offer analysis pieces — but these pieces, out of a desire to seem “balanced,” all too often simply repeat the he-said-she-said of political speeches. Trust me: you will see very few news analyses saying that Mr. Romney proposes huge tax cuts for the rich, with no plausible offset other than big benefit cuts for everyone else — even though this is the simple truth. Instead, you will see pieces reporting that “Democrats say” that this is what Mr. Romney proposes, matched with dueling quotes from Republican sources.

“So how can the Obama campaign cut through this political and media fog? By talking about Mr. Romney’s personal history, and the way that history resonates with the realities of his pro-rich, anti-middle-class policy proposals.

“Thus the entirely true charge that Mr. Romney wants to slash historically low tax rates on the rich even further dovetails perfectly with his own record of extraordinary tax avoidance — so extraordinary that he’s evidently afraid to let voters see his tax returns from before 2010. The equally true charge that he’s pushing policies that would benefit the rich at the expense of ordinary working Americans meshes with Bain’s record of earning big profits even when workers suffered — a record so stark that Mr. Romney is attempting to distance himself from part of it by insisting that he had nothing to do with Bain’s operations after 1999, even though the company continued to list him as C.E.O. and sole owner until 2002. And so on.

“The point is that talking about Mr. Romney’s personal history isn’t a diversion from substantive policy discussion. On the contrary, in a political and media environment strongly biased against substance, talking about Bain and offshore accounts is the only way to bring the real policy issues into focus. And we should applaud, not condemn, the Obama campaign for standing up to the tut-tutters.”

“What was good for Bain Capital definitely wasn’t good for America.”

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Paul Krugman remarks on why the ultimate purpose of corporations would never be good for America:

“Consider one of Mr. Romney’s most famous remarks: “Corporations are people, my friend.” When the audience jeered, he elaborated: “Everything corporations earn ultimately goes to people. Where do you think it goes? Whose pockets? Whose pockets? People’s pockets.” This is undoubtedly true, once you take into account the pockets of, say, partners at Bain Capital (who, I hasten to add, are, indeed, people). But one of the main points of outsourcing is to ensure that as little as possible of what corporations earn goes into the pockets of the people who actually work for those corporations.

“…if Bain got involved with your company, one way or another, the odds were pretty good that even if your job survived you ended up with lower pay and diminished benefits.”

“Why, for example, do many large companies now outsource cleaning and security to outside contractors? Surely the answer is, in large part, that outside contractors can hire cheap labor that isn’t represented by the union and can’t participate in the company health and retirement plans. And, sure enough, recent academic research finds that outsourced janitors and guards receive substantially lower wages and worse benefits than their in-house counterparts.

“Just to be clear, outsourcing is only one source of the huge disconnect between a tiny elite and ordinary American workers, a disconnect that has been growing for more than 30 years. And Bain, in turn, was only one player in the growth of outsourcing. So Mitt Romney didn’t personally, single-handedly, destroy the middle-class society we used to have. He was, however, an enthusiastic and very well remunerated participant in the process of destruction; if Bain got involved with your company, one way or another, the odds were pretty good that even if your job survived you ended up with lower pay and diminished benefits.

“In short, what was good for Bain Capital definitely wasn’t good for America. And, as I said at the beginning, the Obama campaign has every right to point that out.”

A corporation’s ONLY purpose is to maximize profits for the owners, by any means necessary.