Today, the Washington Post reported that Bain Capital, the private equity firm Mitt Romney headed for fifteen years, invested extensively in corporations that shipped jobs overseas to low-wage countries like China. The practice contradicts the rhetoric of candidate Romney, who since announcing his presidential ambitions, has criticized government policies that have led to jobs, particularly those in manufacturing, moving offshore.
The difference between the old higher wages here and the newer lower wages over there filled the pockets of Bain’s rich investors, as well as Romney’s wallet. In other words, Wall Street Mitt made his money redistributing income from working Americans to the idle rich. That’s what so-called free trade is all about. Romney knows this. So does the Washington Post, but the corporate media giant isn’t going to tell you that.
You know all those big fat houses Romney owns? He got them by shipping the jobs of workers overseas and pocketing the difference between the old wages and the new.
Rather than dispute the substance of the article, the Romney campaign has responded to the Post piece by parsing words, claiming that the story is “fundamentally flawed” for not differentiating between the technical definitions of “outsourcing” and “offshoring”:
“This is a fundamentally flawed story that does not differentiate between domestic outsourcing versus offshoring nor versus work done overseas to support U.S. exports. Mitt Romney spent 25 years in the real world economy so he understands why jobs come and they go,” Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul said. What Saul didn’t say in interesting; jobs went away so that the wages of working people could be redistributed to the 1 percent. Saul continued, “As president, he will implement policies that make it easier and more attractive for companies to create jobs here at home. President Obama’s attacks on profit and job creators make it less attractive to create jobs in the U.S.”
Technically, the campaign is correct. The official definition of outsourcing is pushing activities outside of the company that could have been performed in-house. A company can outsource, while keeping the activity domestic. Offshoring is the practice of sending jobs overseas.
However, outsourcing is commonly used to describe the practice of moving jobs to foreign countries. But just to be clear, ThinkProgress has changed the text of the Post article so that the proper technical terms are used:
