Offshored, Outsourced and Out of Luck

Mitt Romney's strength is supposedly his experience in the private sector running companies. He knows how to make money. The problem is, his tenure at Bain Capital destroyed a lot of jobs, left a lot of companies in bankruptcy and ruin, but left him a whole lot richer from other people's misery.

I'll be the first to admit that some of those companies were were headed into the dumpster anyway. But Romney took a lot of cash out of less troubled companies and put it in his own pocket. How many of those would have survived and prospered had they not been milked dry and left to die in the ditch, so that Ann Romney could buy Olympic-caliber horses at $100,000 a pop?

A story in the Washington Post covers another aspect of Mitt Romney's experience in destroying American jobs. It examines the role of Bain Capital in the decades-long exodus of American jobs overseas. The Romney campaign complained that there is a difference between outsourcing and offshoring. It's a moot point: either way, Americans are out of luck.

A recent Doonesbury cartoon sums it up succinctly:

The problem with the massive exodus of manufacturing to Asia is that some industries are essential to the security of the United States: first and foremost, electronics and computers. These days every aspect of business, government and defense depends heavily on computers and electronic components.

Nearly all computers and their components are manufactured in Asia. American electronics companies are now even moving the design of integrated circuits to Asia. How can we be sure that Red Army agents haven't infiltrated these companies and are designing back doors into these circuits as you read this? There are reports that this has already happened, though it's not clear the design flaw was intentional. But these devices are incredibly complex and have millions of components and millions of lines of code, making it impossible to ensure that they don't have back doors. The only thing we can do is trust the source. Is that really wise?

Since corporations by definition exist only to make money, they have no allegiance to the United States. That means the US government needs to take steps to ensure that we have reliable domestic sources for all the technology critical to our business and defense needs.

Like any soulless, stateless corporation, Mitt Romney has shown his allegiance is to money and not America, American security and American workers. Romney may not be the Manchurian Candidate, but he helped send American jobs to Manchuria.