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发帖数: 29846 | 1 FAIL: Obama Ad Attacks Romney for Bain Bought Company That Laid People Off…
But Romney DIDN’T Work There Then!
May 14, 2012 by Warner Todd Huston
Barack Obama released a new video ad featuring former workers of GST Steel
of Kansas City who lost their jobs because of Mitt Romney’s work at Bain
Capital — at least according to Obama that’s why they lost their jobs.
Unfortunately for team Obama, the truth seems to argue against his campaign
lies.
The ad is full of lament about GST workers having lost their jobs, sympathy
that is most certainly warranted. But the ad goes on to call Romney an “
economic vampire” over the layoffs. Union member Jack Cobb, one of the
workers in the ad, says for instance, “It was like a vampire. They came in
and sucked the life out of us.”
The ad goes on to blame Mitt Romney and Bain Capital for that vampirism.
WARNING: This Obama ad is filled with lies!
But there are quite a few problems with all these hoary claims of the evils
of Bain Capital. First of all is the fact that every voice in this video is
that of a union thug. Most especially a man noted as the lead union
negotiator, David Foster. Does anyone think a unionista will tell the truth
about what went on with a company they spent decades extorting?
It is never noted in the Obama ad that GST Steel had troubles long, long
before Bain Capital bought the company. In fact that Bain bought them in the
first place is an obvious indicator that the company was in financial
trouble. After all, that is what Bain did, buy troubled companies and try to
turn them around or shut them down if that proves impossible.
Along those lines, a former GST worker told the National Review, the unions
were the ones bleeding GST dry, not Bain.
I nearly choked on my Cheerios when I read that GST employees were
blaming Bain for their downfall. I worked at GST Steel in Kansas City for
four months in 1997 immediately after leaving the Navy.
Why only four months? Quickly after I started, I surprised to learn that
several of my fellow USW Local 13-represented employees, mostly millwrights
and electricians, we’re making between $100-130k. This was mainly due
union-mandated overtime which, at least on a few occasions, consisted of the
employees bringing in sleeping bags and pillows and sleeping in the shop.
It would be hard for any company to stay competitive while paying double-
time union wages to get their beauty sleep, but that’s not the half of it.
The union employees obviously didn’t think they had it easy enough, so they
went on strike in March of ‘97. The plant shut down for a couple of weeks
until it re-started under the operation of management and non-union workers.
The strike lasted a couple more months. I had a family to support, so I
couldn’t afford to wait. I took another (non-union) job with another
company. They shuttered the plant for good a few years later.
That’s Bain’s fault? Just classic.
It should be well known by now that when a legacy manufacturer (like steel
manufacturers, car companies, etc.) goes under one of the biggest reasons is
because unions have for decades raped the company to death.
But there is another major problem with linking the end of GST to Mitt
Romney’s work with Bain. Romney wasn’t with Bain when GST went down.
Romney had left Bain Capital in 1999, two years before GST’s 2001 collapse.
But there was at least one guy linked to today’s political landscape that
was still at Bain when GST went down the tubes. Obama donor and a Bain
managing director Jonathan Levine was working at Bain when GST went belly up.
So, the only person that worked for Bain when GST died was an Obama bundler
that raised over $100,000 for Obama.
Curiously enough, that fact wasn’t in the Obama ad video, either.
Then there’s this. Even former Obama economic adviser Steve Rattner thinks
the ad is “unfair.” |
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