On November 5th, Bain Capital, the Company Mitt Romney founded, will ship 170 US jobs to China. On November 6th, Mitt Romney will ask to be your President.
Sensata technologies manufactured sensors for US automobiles, ships, electronics, appliances and aircraft. It was an inheritor of the intellectual capital of Honeywell, a set of knowledge and trade secrets that was a pivotal component of the US defense industry and critical to US national security. They served a broad range of customers from GM to the US military. The company helped to support a vital economy in Freeport Illinois. That was all before Bain Capital got a 51% stake in Sensata and began doing the terrible work of sending the company, its intellectual property and, most importantly, its jobs to China.
The first phase of this transfer of US jobs, intellectual and economic capital to China involved training Chinese workers and a transfer of the trade secrets of a US company to Chinese shores. Sensata employees were forced by Bain to train Chinese workers at the American facility. And when Chinese workers came, the company Mitt Romney founded forced Sensata to lower the American flag. So, for a time, American workers labored under a de-flagged US company to hand over jobs and US trade secrets related to national security to the Chinese even as this activity created big profits for Bain company executives and major share holders.
It is important to note that the loss of these jobs from US shores doesn’t help the impoverished Chinese workers who are forced by China and by companies like Bain to work in terrible sweat-shop conditions at low wages and at little hope for economic advancement. So what Bain’s transfer of Sensata jobs to China represents is the favoring of building slave wage overseas jobs in pursuit of short-term profits over US middle class jobs, building the American dream, and long-term prosperity at home.
The second phase of Bain’s activity at Sensata will wrap up on November 5th, the day before the US Presidential election, when Sensata’s 170 workers are fired and the transfer of US jobs from this vital US industry to China is complete.
More than anything else, this is Mitt Romney’s legacy. He founded Bain Capital. He pioneered its outsourcing and shipping US jobs overseas for profit practices in the 1980s and 1990s. He developed that model for liquidating US jobs and replacing them with low-wage work overseas which so many of the greedy in this country have used for their own enrichment. So, sadly, Sensata is but the most recent of scores and scores of US companies whose jobs were sent to China as Bain profited. And today, as a major share-holder of Bain Capital, holding more than 8 million dollars in company stocks, Romney still profits from the terrible practices he put in place when he sat at Bain’s helm.
These facts weren’t lost on Sensata’s workers who organized a petition with 35,000 signatures pleading with Mitt Romney not to ship their jobs to China. Thus far, all they’ve earned is silence.
Yet Mitt Romney is asking Americans for a favor on November 6th. He’s asking us to trust him. He’s asking us to ignore the Americans who worked at Sensata and so many other US companies whose jobs and intellectual capital were sent to China. He’s asking us to believe he holds Americans’ best interests at heart, despite making large profits from shipping US jobs to China and keeping that money in a secret Cayman Islands bank account in order to dodge paying US taxes and support the American public interest. He’s asking us to believe he is a patriotic American even though it is the practice of the company he founded to lower the US flag on American workers who are forced to labor to train their Chinese replacements.
How can we trust a man who built his legacy on a foundation of harm to Americans? How can we trust a man who, even now, ignores the plight of the workers the company he founded continues to victimize, continues to push onto US government assistance roles and remove their hopes of economic independence? And how can we trust a man who has, throughout his entire career in business favored China over America and personal profits over the best interests of the American people?
Links:
http://www.rrstar.com/news/x887150325/Sensata-workers-go-Bainport-to-protest-Freeport-outsourcing
http://tucsoncitizen.com/baja-democrats/2012/10/14/the-romney-economy/
robertscribbler 