Obama is the REAL Outsourcer-in-Chief

As President Obama slams Romney for being a “pioneer” in outsourcing jobs overseas, it appears the president himself and his most loyal supporters are leading the charge in American outsourcing.  According to William Bigelow of Breitbart.com, “Obama’s second largest fundraiser is John Rogers, the CEO of investment giant Ariel Capital Management. He has raised more than $1.5 million for Obama’s reelection campaign. Bully for him, except for one thing: Ariel Capital Management owns a $48.6 million stake in Accenture, which just happens to be, according to the International Association of Outsourcing Professionals, the nation’s “best” outsourcer.”

Additionally, “Obama’s largest fundraiser, DreamWorks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg, who raised $2 million for the campaign and co-hosted a $10 million Hollywood fundraiser in May, has been trying to outsource jobs to China by expanding his company’s work there. Why, Jeffrey has even been investigated by the SEC for doing it.

Americans for Prosperity released a series of ads detailing how green energy jobs were created overseas thanks to Obama’s stimulus program.  In fact, $2.3 billion dollars was wasted on such jobs.  With Obama spurring growth in China, Finland, and Mexico, it’s incredible for him to have the audacity to accuse Mr. Romney of being a “pioneer” in outsourcing when he himself seems to be the Outsourcer-in-Chief.

Furthermore, Facthceck.org accused the Obama campaign of “overreaching” with their “Come and Go” ad, which began airing on June 20.  In their analysis, FactCheck stated:

Two electronic outsource manufacturing services companies controlled by Bain Capital closed plants in the U.S. and moved work to Mexico. But Romney had left Bain more than a year before the plants closed at both companies.

A picture frame company with operations in the Far East, including in China, closed a plant in South Carolina. The Obama campaign cites the plant closing, but those workers were manufacturing photo albums for professionals — a line of work that the company discontinued because it was such a small part of the business.

Let’s take the companies one at a time.

The first is Modus Media, an outsource manufacturing services company controlled by Bain. The TV ad cites a June 2, 2000, news brief by Bloomberg News about Modus Media’s announcement that it would close its plant in Fremont, Calif., in September and open a plant in Guadalajara, Mexico. The company provided “customer support, inventory management, software packaging and computer assembly for companies such as AT&T Corp., Dell Computer Corp., and other technology and Internet companies,” Bloomberg said. About 200 jobs in California were eliminated.

But the announcement of the Modus Media plant closing occurred more than a year after Romney had left Bain. Romney took a leave of absence in February 1999 to head the Salt Lake City Organizing Committee for the 2002 Winter Olympics, and he did not return to the company. He became governor of Massachusetts in January 2003.

A similar situation existed at SMTC Corp., which is also an outsource manufacturing services company. The company closed a plant in Denver, Colo., and moved some of its production to Mexico. The TV ad cites a March 29, 2002, report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission by SMTC Corp. The report (page 7) says: “In June 2001, we closed our assembly facility in Denver, Colorado. … Production at the Denver facility … has been migrated to SMTC facilities closer to locations and to our recently retrofitted and expanded lower cost Chihuahua, Mexico facility.” But, again, Romney did not work at Bain in 2001.

Other attacks on Mr. Romney’s character, like being a “corporate raider,” is a favorite amongst members in the Obama camp, but “a Reuters editor told the Washington Post Fact Checker that the wire service typically refers to Romney as a former private equity executive or something along those lines and that the use of the phrase corporate raider, by a Reuters stringer, “must have just slipped through the net.”

(H/T Breitbart.com)