The Guardian U.K. published a great article the other day titled 'I'm sick to my stomach': anger grows in Illinois at Bain's latest outsourcing plan, to which I've added some questions and picked out some prime quotes below:
How would you feel if I brought in foreign workers at your job and said, "I'd like all of you to train these people in what you do because they are your replacements"?
The shock of losing a precious job in a town afflicted by high unemployment is always hard. A foundation for a stable family life and secure home instantly disappears, replaced with a future filled with fears over health insurance, missed mortgage payments and the potential for a slip below the breadline.
But for Bonnie Borman – and 170 other men and women in Freeport, Illinois – there is a brutal twist to the torture. Borman, 52, and the other workers of a soon-to-be-shuttered car parts plant are personally training the Chinese workers who will replace them.
Wait. I'm also going to begin dismantling your plant where you've made your livelihood for years and start shipping the machinery overseas to China, how would you feel about that?
It's a surreal experience, they say. For months they have watched their plant being dismantled and shipped to China, piece by piece, as they show teams of Chinese workers how to do the jobs they have dedicated their lives to.
"It's not easy to get up in the morning, training them to do your job so that you can be made unemployed," said Borman, pictured, a mother of three who has worked for 23 years at the Sensata auto sensors plant.
Well, America, this is Bain Capital's way of bringing jobs to America in August of 2012. But you are one of his apologists who plans to still vote for him, because Mitt no longer is the CEO? Still, he owns millions of shares of the Bain funds which control Sensata:
But, in the midst of the 2012 presidential election, Freeport is different. For Sensata is majority-owned by Bain Capital, the private equity firm once led by Mitt Romney, that has become a hugely controversial symbol of how the modern globalised American economy works. Indeed, Romney still owns millions of dollars of shares in the Bain funds that own Sensata.
So as Sensata strips out costs by sacking American workers in favour of Chinese ones, the value of Romney's own investments could rise, putting money into the pockets of a Republican challenger who has placed job creation in America at the heart of his bid for the White House.
Perhaps you will come back at me at say, "It appears the left would rather see them close shop vs. keep going elsewhere," as some poster on Motley Fool replied yesterday.
I'd like to direct that Motley Fool poster's attention to this part of the Guardian story:
Workers insist their operation is profitable and makes top quality auto sensors. "I understand business needs to make a profit. But this product has always made a ton of money. It's just that they think it is not enough money. They are greedy," said Tom Gaulraupp, who has put in 33 years at the plant and is facing the prospect of becoming jobless at the age of 54.
Mark Shreck, a 36-year-old father-of-three, confessed he was one of the few workers not surprised at the layoffs, as this is the second time his job has moved to China. "I feel this is what companies do nowadays," he said.
To which I say there comes a point when enough is enough.
Does a corporation or vulture fund have to squeeze the very last pennies of margin from an operation just to prop up a stock price and fuck the expense to what it does to our country?
Think about what Bain is doing.
A worker of 33 years, who takes his paycheck, banks in one of our nation's small towns, spends his money at other businesses in that small town, invests in its future by paying taxes that support the schools, the fire department, the police, the infrastructure, is now thrown out of work with no job prospects paying him anywhere near as much as he made at this factory.
Not only that, after hollowing out this town's soul all the more, Bain watches its investment notch upward as poorly paid Chinese workers use the same equipment which used to sit on a factory floor in America to pad its margins in its investment in this company.
Meanwhile, the former factory workers without jobs in Freeport, IL can no longer go out and buy a new car with parts their own factory used to supply. And as they are on the unemployment lines, they are thinking about their Chinese counterparts - men and women they were forced to train - how are they being treated? When will they lose their jobs to a Philipino or Vietnamese guy who might work for $.25 cents less?
There's a reason Bain Capital should be called "Bain Vulture Fund". Companies like this swoop in with their sociopathic bean counters. "How can we maximaize profits in minimum time?" And always, to the moneyed men worth millions and billions, its about breaking the back of labor. It's about picking the meat off the bones of the carcasses of American workers they left as roadkill with no second thoughts whatsoever.
What if every factory in the USA moved overseas tomorrow?
Who would drive the domestic consumption of autos, trucks, washing machines, new homes, boats, jet skis, etc., if everyone was on the dole?
The 1% is called the 1% for a good reason. There's one of them for every 99 of us.
If us 99ers cannot afford to buy anything durable, what will drive consumption in a hollowed out shell of an economy?
We are killing the middle class.
The middle class is what drove our economy in the 50s and 60s and parts of the 70s after WWII. Back then, one breadwinner per family could support a whole family. Inflation was not built on fractional reserve lending, but a solid currency attached to something of value.
When Nixon shut the gold window on Aug. 15, 1971, that's when hockey stock inflation of our money supply took off. That's when the money men of Wall Street realized, "Aha, now we can print money from thin air and back it with nothing more than debt. We don't need gold or silver to back it up. We can wish money into being."
Then old Reagan showed us how to take care of the unions with the breakup of the air traffic controllers he tossed out of their jobs.
Then it was game on for Vulture Funds.
Cheap money - lots of it loaned at below market rates to banksters with no consciences - a greed is good ethic - and a world of poor people willing to do the work of non-bankster Americans at a much cheaper rate. Borrow money, buy a company, sell off the pieces, ship jobs overseas, improve margins, cash in options, wash, rinse, repeat, and voila, here we are with an America with tens of millions of people working service jobs for minimum wage which won't buy you a cup of Starbucks every day if you have rent to pay, food to buy, gasoline to purchase, and a car or motorbike which needs maintenance. And don't even talk about our failing public transportation which is being shut down piecemeal all over the land.
Bain Capital is as anti-American a firm as a firm selling military technology to an enemy that it is not supposed to sell to. It's as dirty as a bank funneling cocaine profits from a bloody South American cartel.
Bain Vulture Fund is what is wrong with our country. It hides behind the flag while it's pulling down the pants of everyone in our middle class and bending them over barrel.
Money rules uber alles.
Forget the lives of Americans they are destroying here.
These men are doing Satan's work and laughing about it on the golf courses at the 19th hole, or as they are parking their cars on the elevator to one of their manses. How easy it is to make money in America when you are born on 3rd base and you know how and are connected enough to borrow gobs of cheap fiat currency to purchase an asset which really needs capital to get back on its feet, but which is much easier to sell off and scrape huge profits from.
The 1% are killing America.
And now the want to raise our taxes and reduce theirs even more?
These 1%ers are pushing their luck.
That Texas judge who thinks an Obama election will forment insurrection? I laugh at such idiocy. He has no clue, no clue whatsoever what this country would face if the Oligarchs get the last crumbs on the table.
Once our ex-middle class wakes up from its sixpack/TV induced stupor and learns how the deconstruction of America really took place, it will be a matter of time before a real revolution takes place and the Republican Party becomes a memory the future generations will Google on their smart glasses.
If we don't get this country back to work at jobs that pay a decent wage, we will be in bigger turmoil than when the Republic was first formed. Except this time we won't be revolting against an English king, but the Lords and Aristocrats of the Oligarchy who raped our Economy.
