"Just as Romney was ending his tenure at Bain, it reached the culmination of negotiations with Hyundai Electronics Industry of South Korea for the $550 million purchase of its U.S. subsidiary, Chippac, which manufactured, tested and packaged computer chips in Asia.
"The deal was announced a month after Romney left Bain. Reports filed with the SEC in late 1999 showed that Chippac had plants in South Korea and China and was responsible for marketing and supplying the company's Asian-made computer chips. An overwhelming majority of Chippac's customers were U.S. firms, including Intel, IBM and Lucent Technologies.
"A filing with the SEC revealed the promise that Chippac offered investors. 'Historically, semiconductor companies primarily manufactured semiconductors in their own facilities,' the filing said. 'Today, most major semiconductor manufacturers use independent packaging and test service providers for at least a portion of their ... needs. We expect this outsourcing trend to continue.'"
Teaching How to Outsource
So, you get the picture? Bain not only invested in companies that outsourced American jobs, it controlled companies that taught other U.S. corporations how to do it. Romney's Bain was a "pioneer" in this practice that has destroyed much of the American industrial base and has put millions of Americans out of work.
You might think that this detailed account on the Washington Post's front page on Friday would have stopped Kessler from giving Obama's campaign "four Pinocchios" on Sunday for making much the same point, but it didn't.
Instead, Kessler pressed ahead by applying a dubious definition of "corporate raider" and brushing aside Hamburger's article as "an interesting area for inquiry" but not relevant to understanding Romney's role in outsourcing jobs.
Kessler then awarded the Obama campaign "four Pinocchios" for telling a "whopper." He wrote...
"The Obama campaign fails to make its case. On just about every level, this ad is misleading, unfair and untrue, from the use of 'corporate raider' to its examples of alleged outsourcing. Simply repeating the same debunked claims won't make them any more correct."
Yet, an honest assessment of what the Obama campaign claimed about Romney would be that the criticism is accurate and possibly understated. Indeed, you could have said, Romney was "a corporate raider who made lots of money even when the companies failed and jobs were lost. And he made even more money by pioneering the idea of outsourcing American jobs to low-wage countries."
Kessler may believe that he is safeguarding his "objectivity" when he goes out of his way to ding President Barack Obama for supposed inaccuracies. Certainly, Kessler has done this before.
For instance, last April, Kessler gave Obama two "Pinocchios" for saying in a campaign speech that "the majority of millionaires support" the Buffett Rule, a change in the tax code that would require people earning $1 million or more to pay a rate at least equal to middle-income Americans.
To support Obama's comment, the White House cited an article in the Wall Street Journal, which, in turn, cited a survey of millionaires undertaken by the Spectrem Group, which does market research on the affluent. Spectrem's survey found that 68 percent of responding millionaires backed the idea of the Buffett Rule.
Yet, in attacking Obama's comment, Kessler noted that the Spectrem group surveyed people with $1 million or more in investments. Kessler made a big deal out of the fact that the Buffett Rule would apply to people making more than $1 million a year, not people holding $1 million or more in net worth.
"So Obama -- and the Wall Street Journal -- are mixing up two different types of millionaires," Kessler wrote.
But Obama and the Wall Street Journal were not "mixing up" the millionaires. They were simply reporting that a survey of wealthy people, worth more than $1 million, favored the Buffett Rule, which is named after investor Warren Buffett who does make many millions of dollars a year and says it's unfair to charge him a lower tax rate than his secretary.
In the "two-Pinocchio" criticism of Obama, Kessler went on to make some technical arguments against Spectrem's methodology and faulted Obama for not including caveats about the survey in his brief reference to it in a speech.
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