Saturday, July 14, 2012

 

I think a good strategy is just to follow David Corn.

Below I denounce Jonathan Chait for saying that the Obama campaign incorrectly claimed that Romney personally managed Bain when it outsourced and offshored. Chait is incorrect as is shown by the June 21 Washington Post article to which I linked.

I found that with one Google search. Since then, I have lost my temper with Washington Week in Review. Their ground rule appears to be that if it is more than a week old, it doesn't exist. They rebroadcast a Romney ad claiming there was no evidence that Romney was involved with outsourcing. The Washington Post (in particular Glenn Kessler) was cited again and again. The article noting that Bain invested in off shoring firms in the mid 90s is evidently nullified by the Week in Review statute of limitations.

Oddly, I wasn't looking for that I article. I was looking for this July 11 article by Corn (which doesn't add all that much).

On April 17, 1998, Brookside Capital Partners Fund, a Bain Capital affiliate, filed a report with the Securities and Exchange Commission noting that it had acquired 6.13 percent of Hong Kong-based Global-Tech Appliances, which manufactured household appliances in a production facility in the industrial city of Dongguan, China.

[skip]

At the time Romney was acquiring shares in Global-Tech, the firm publicly acknowledged that its strategy was to profit from prominent US companies outsourcing production abroad. On September 4, 1998, Global-Tech issued a press release announcing it was postponing completion of a $30 million expansion of its Dongguan facility because Sunbeam, a prominent American consumer products company and a major client of Global-Tech, was cutting back on outsourcing as part of an overall consolidation. But John C.K. Sham, Global-Tech's president and CEO, said, "Although it appears that customers such as Sunbeam are not outsourcing their manufacturing as quickly as we had anticipated, we still believe that the long-term trend toward outsourcing will continue."

In 1998 Bain invested in a firm whose business plan was based on off-shoring. Even if Romney was a do nothing CEO and President at Bain from 1999 through 2002, he undeniably invested in off shoring before then. This is not contested. It has been ignored.

I think a large part of the problem is that the Romney campaign lies in so many different ways that it is hard to keep track. The non managing CEO line is not the most striking lie they told this week on the very narrow topic.

posted by Robert permalink and comments3:36 AM