The Obama administration and Democrats have been busily puncturing
Mitt Romney’s record as an experienced “job creator,” with a
multi-pronged attack on Romney’s role as a “pioneer” in offshoring jobs
while heading up the private-equity fund Bain Capital
President Barack Obama speaks during a campaign event in New Hampshire on June 25, 2012. (Photo by Jewel Samad/Getty Images)
Backed up by an ever-mounting supply of evidence from the
New York Times,
Boston Globe, and the
Washington Post, Obama and the Democrats have shredded Rommey's arguments that he is the man to restore employment.
Yet recent leaks
reveal that the Obama administration has been secretly
negotiating
with Pacific Rim nations the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade
deal, based on the job-destroying NAFTA model. Obama—as with his trade
deals last year with South Korea, Panama, and human-rights pariah
Colombia—is
once more falling into line behind CEOs in promoting what he as a candidate
fiercely denounced
in 2008 as “trade deals like NAFTA and China [that] have been signed
with plenty of protections for corporations and their profits, but none
for our environment or our workers who've seen factories shut their
doors and millions of jobs disappear.
Thus, the Obama administration’s efforts to pass the TPP muddle the
partisan divide on the offshoring issue, which his campaign is now using
so effectively against Romney. With 86% of Americans
convinced
that the offshoring of jobs contributes significantly to the nation’s
economic problems, the 2012 election’s outcome may very well hang on the
perception of Obama as the defender of the public interest on this
issue.
Fortunately for Obama, Romney’s well-documented support for the
offshoring of jobs has monopolized the media's attention, thanks to an
effective Democratic and labor onslaught. New polling from NBC/
The Wall Street Journal show
significant gains
for Obama in swing states, where a new ad campaign is being focused. A
combination of front-page revelations about Bain Capital, powerful
rhetoric from Obama (plus
this video
comparing Bain Capital to the Sopranos’ Mafia operation), skillfully
crafted ads, and cleverly–timed legislation are keeping the spotlight on
Romney.
As Tom Hamburger of
The Washington Post reported:
Mitt Romney’s financial company, Bain Capital, invested in a series
of firms that specialized in relocating jobs done by American workers to
new facilities in low-wage countries like China and India. During the
nearly 15 years that Romney was actively involved in running Bain, a
private equity firm that he founded, it owned companies that were
pioneers in the practice of shipping work from the United States to
overseas call centers and factories making computer components,
according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
In New England on Monday, Obama mocked Romney’s efforts to
distinguish between supposedly positive and negative forms of
outsourcing and offshoring,
thundering:
Gov. Romney's commitment to outsourcing is not just part of his
record, it's part of his overall economic vision that he and Republicans
in Congress want to implement if they win this election.
You don't need someone trying to explain to you the difference
between outsourcing and offshoring. You need someone who's going to wake
up every single day and fight for American jobs and investments here in
the United States.
Meanwhile,
a new TV ad,
which Priorities USA Action plans to spend $10 million airing, features
a worker named Mike Earnest who was employed at Bain-owned AMPAD in
Marion, Indiana. Earnest recounts how he was assigned to building a
stage, from which Bain officials announced that the once-profitable
plant was closing:
Mitt Romney made over a $100 million dollars by shutting down our
plant and devastated our lives. Turns out that when we built that stage
it was like building my own coffin, and it just made me sick.
Labor and progressive Democrats are hoping to draw a stark contrast
with Romney and the GOP by pushing for a vote shortly after the July 4
holiday on the Bring Jobs Home to America Act. The measure would
withdraw tax incentives for relocating jobs overseas and extend tax
credits to corporations bringing jobs back to U.S. plants. The proposal
also coincides with Obama’s severely exaggerated
touting of a trickle of returning jobs as a meaningful “trend” toward voluntary “insourcing” by U.S.-based firms like
Master Lock.
Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisc.), the Democratic candidate for a vacant
U.S. Senate seat, told a Milwaukee news conference last week, “We’ve
been seeing manufacturing taking it on the chin for years. We’ve got to
take away the perverse incentives to shift our industrial base
overseas.”
In an interview with Working In These Times, Baldwin noted that many
of the firms engaged in offshoring jobs are already paying little or no
corporate taxes. But she argued that the bill could be a starting point
that would build momentum toward a sweeping policy to rebuild America’s
industrial base.
“This is not a substitute for a more comprehensive manufacturing policy, ” she stressed.
Moreover, the pro-labor Baldwin said that she had joined other
members of Congress in signing a letter to U.S. Trade Representative Ron
Kirk objecting to the Trans-Pacific Partnership’s provisions which
would ban the use of “Buy American” regulations and strengthen
corporate-run dispute-resolution panels over regulations democratically
created by the U.S. Congress and state legislators.
The TPP’s staunchest opponents characterize it as a "backroom trade
deal for the 1%." While the working text of the TPP has been
withheld—until the recent leaks—from representatives of labor,
environmental, public-health and other organizations, top corporate
officials have enjoyed privileged access. As Lori Wallach, director of
Global Trade Watch,
has observed:
[M]ore than 600 business representatives serving as official U.S.
trade advisers have full access to an array of draft texts and an inside
role in the process. The strategy is to squelch informed debate until a
deal is signed and any alterations become difficult.
The TPP’s shroud of secrecy is triggering cries of protest both in Congress and at the grassroots level, with the
Texas AFL-CIO
particularly active. The combined weight of this opposition, if
intensified, may be sufficient to derail the completion of negotiations
and congressional approval this year.
If the TPP can be blocked, the protests will have performed an
enormous service to Barack Obama. While Romney almost surely lacks the
skills or desire to use the Trans-Pacific Partnership against Obama, his
corporate backers have the financial and PR resources to launch a
massive ad campaign against Obama’s support of the TPP, thereby
discouraging potential Obama voters.
The electoral stakes around the offshoring issue are huge, as
Jamelle Bouie argues at
The American Prospect:
For Romney to win, he needs to consolidate a huge majority of the
white vote. To paint Romney as an “outsourcer-in-chief” is to damage his
credibility with the non-college-educated whites who will form the
basis of a Romney victory in states like Ohio, Iowa, and Wisconsin.
After all, these are voters whose lives have been most affected by
the outsourcing pioneered by Bain-owned companies and who have been hit
hardest by the relentless profit-seeking of companies like Bain. If the
Obama campaign can identify Mitt Romney with outsourcing, then they can
blunt his appeal with these voters and keep him from breaking the
threshold for white support—around 60 percent.
© 2012 In These Times
Roger Bybee is a Milwaukee-based freelance writer and progressive
publicity consultant whose work has appeared in numerous national
publications and websites, including Z magazine, Common Dreams, Dollars
& Sense, Yes!, The Progressive, Multinational Monitor, The American
Prospect and Foreign Policy in Focus.
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