At 2 p.m. on Wednesday, representatives of Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign paid a visit to the senior editorial staff of the Washington Post. Their request: that the paper formally retract its June 21st story illustrating how Bain Capital, Romney’s old private equity shop, invested in firms that outsourced American jobs. Their chief complaint: that the Post failed to distinguish between outsourcing—which sometimes refers to a company contracting out to other U.S. firms functions previously done in-house—and offshoring, which by definition means shipping jobs overseas.
On Hardball on Wednesday night, Howard Fineman honed in on the flaw in Romney's push-back: that for many struggling Americans, it's a difference without a distinction.
“The outsourcing, the off-shoring, call it what you want, taking jobs" from here, putting them over there . . . is a really good way to get at the fears and the passion of the people you're talking about," Fineman said.
Fineman hammered home that Americans just want basic economic fairness. "It’s one thing to complain about CEOs getting big salaries . . . not every working class person complains about that. They just want to make sure they’re treated fairly. When you talk about manipulating stocks and all that, it’s a mystery to them. Shutting down the plant down the block" and shifting jobs to India, China, or Indonesia, is something they can see and feel.
The fact is, the Romney campaign can't deny that it moved jobs from Here to There. Performing semantical acrobatics to ignore that is insulting to Americans' intelligence.
Leave a Comment:
Which of the companies mentioned in the Washington Post article fired US workers and hired workers in foreign countries to do that same job?
Let’s all start bringing jobs back to America One Call and One Vote at a Time.
I think both parties need to be honest on the outsourcing issue affecting USA jobs and futures for our children. A good place to start is the companies donating cash to get their respective candidate in office. Can someone do some research and calculate the amount of positions these companies have offshore? Publicizing this list will bring more light to the outsourcing issue and probably save a few jobs in America. I can’t imagine any candidate would take support from a company pushing overwhelming jobs offshore.
We can also all do our part by requesting a USA representative the next time we are on a call with our bank, credit card, customer service and/or the like. Pushing these call back into the USA has an immediate impact on adding jobs in the USA.