There is a real-life story playing out in real time in Freeport, Illinois, which is west of Chicago. Bain Capital is closing a Sensata factory there, to move the jobs and work to China. The workers are camped out in a tent city they have named "Bainport." They are asking Mitt Romney to show that he means what he says about jobs and China by helping them keep their jobs. Right now, the Sensata workers are blocking trucks brought in to ship the equipment to China.
This is an important story because it tells the story of our economy's loss of jobs and factories and the resulting downward wage pressure. It is also the story of how a very few people are enriching themselves at the expense of the rest of us.
Blocking Trucks
WIFR.com: "'Bainport' Blocks Equipment Removal,"
Members of the "Bainport" tent community say two trucks pulled into the factory lot around 6 this morning to begin removing machinery from the building, and sending it over to China.
Once the truck pulled in, about a dozen members from "Bainport" and other supporters from the outside community blocked the entrance so cargo could not go in or out.
The Freeport Journal Standard: "Sensata workers protest as 'time runs out'," (emphasis added, for emphasis)
"We saw them bringing in trucks to remove the equipment," said Sensata employee Tom Gaulrapp. "We are going to try and stop them. We are more and more desperate as time runs out. We'll do whatever we have to at this point."Police were called to the scene as protestors had said they would block the trucks from leaving. As of press time, protestors had complied with police and no arrests had been made.
... "We hope that the next company that decides to outsource jobs will think twice and look at what we're doing here," said Gaulrapp. "We want a place where our kids can get good jobs and be able to stay here in Freeport. It rips up the town and it rips up families."
Asking Romney For Help
The Sensata workers camping at Bainport are asking Mitt Romney to come help them keep their jobs. Romney insists that he has nothing to do with Bain Capital anymore (his tax returns showed that he gets more than $400,000 a week from Bain investments).
Helping the Sensata workers would show that he means it when he says he has nothing to do with the things Bain does now, and that he will do something about the jobs being sent to China. What better opportunity to prove both than to show up and confront Bain for sending these jobs to China!
When asked about this, the Romney campaign responded,
"Governor Romney has not worked at Bain Capital for over a decade, but for four years President Obama has been presiding over an economy that is creating too few jobs and sending more jobs overseas. Despite the President being invested in Sensata through his personal pension fund, and the government owning a major Sensata customer in GM, President Obama has not used his powers to help this situation in any way."-- Curt Cashour, Romney Campaign Spokesman.
See also Ryan Grimm and Dave Jamieson at The Huffington Post, "Mitt Romney Gets Tax Break Off Firm Sending Jobs to China,"
While the workers and the town may suffer, Romney himself has done well as a result of Bain's work with the company. According to his recently released 2011 tax returns, Romney transferred $701,703 worth of Sensata stock to the Tyler Charitable Foundation, a 501(c)3 tax-exempt nonprofit controlled by Romney. The gift is listed on page 323 of the pdf, on form 8283 (below).
Moving the stock to his nonprofit brings Romney twin benefits. First, he gets to deduct the full value of the stock. At a 35 percent tax rate, that's nearly a $250,000 benefit. At 15 percent, it's just over $100,000.
Second, Romney is able to avoid paying capital gains taxes on the stock price increase. Romney's returns list no cost for the stock, and indicate he obtained them as part of a partnership interest in Bain. Avoiding capital gains taxes on the full increase would save an additional $100,000. In 2010, Romney gifted $170,000 worth of Sensata stock to his charity, saving $25,000 in capital gains taxes that year.
Cheryl Randecker, a Sensata worker facing an imminent layoff, said, "I could pay off my house with that [$25,000], and he doesn't need it anyway."
... Rebecca Wilkins, an attorney with Citizens for Tax Justice, said that Romney's move is a prime example of the way that the super-wealthy are able to game the charitable deduction while still holding on to their money.
The Harvest
This video is titled "Romney's latest harvest" based on the "harvest" video, in which Romney described Bain's strategy to "harvest" companies for profit:
OLB Spends an Evening at Bainport from Occupy Riverwest on Vimeo.
See And Read
You can see striking and wonderful photos of the people and their camp in this Daily Kos diary by noise of rain, "The Faces of Outsourcing: Bainport's Tent-City Protest in Pictures",
Sensata is owned by Bain Capital which was co-founded and previously run by U.S. Presidential candidate, Mitt Romney. Recently, a video has come to light in which Romney explains the business model he created for Bain Capital and states their purpose is to buy companies and "hopefully, five to eight years later, to harvest them at a significant profit,". In January 2011, Bain Capital announced they would be outsourcing over 170 jobs from this plant as well as all equipment, to China. Romney, still owning stock in Bain, stands to profit quite a bit from this move.
You can read about Bainport at bainport.com,
We're workers at Bain Capital-owned Sensata, 2520 Walnut St, Freeport, Illinois. We're fighting to save our jobs from being shipped to China by the end of this year. We are calling on Mitt Romney to come to Freeport, IL and we will camp across the street from our plant for as long as it takes!
Help spread the word, this is an important story!
This post originally appeared at Campaign for America's Future (CAF) at their Blog for OurFuture. I am a Fellow with CAF.
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Tom Gaulrapp: My Pain Is Mitt Romney's Gain: My Story as a Sensata Worker
Ira Fromm..
They were repaid by the company firing them and shipping their jobs to China.
Bain (bane) Capital and MITT ROMNEY are responsible for this.
US Businesses must also pay US citizens in the USA much lower (hourly wages) pay scales that are well below the wages that they pay foreigners in foreign Asian nations in order to COMPENSATE for the additional costs of EPA compliance, additional US labor payroll costs that the National Healthcare, Unemployment Insurance, Social Security, and other Federal Government payroll taxes add on top of the direct costs of US labor payrolls, when economically justifying where to locate a new manufacturing facility.
No healthcare, retirement benefits, etc., etc.
ARE YOU SERIOUS?
The USA must re-industrialize in order to prevent this scenario!
The USA must re-industrialize in order to pay off our government debts.
The USA must re-industrialize in order to create more jobs.
The USA must re-industrialize in order to correct the negative foreign trade balance.
The USA must re-industrialize in order to create more wealth in the USA that will be available for government confiscation to pay for government activities.
I guess another few more million unemployed US citizens does not matter to President Obama!
Surely the Union Leaders knew the employment implication results of NAFTA, but maybe not.
Some people point out that the U.S. is still the world's largest manufacturing nation, but the US manufacturing businesses are mostly only assembling foreign made assemblies, foreign made parts, and using foreign made materials with the minimum US labor where a large portion of each product is imported and then the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) counts 100% of this product cost as a part of the GDP when only a small part fo this is actually made in the USA.
If US labor costs are four to twenty times the Asian labor costs, if US electrical energy generated in accordance with EPA regulations costs are at least ten times the Asian electrical energy costs, if US environmental compliance costs are many times greater than the Asian environmental compliance costs, and if other US manufacturing costs are more expensive than Asian manufacturing costs, how can the US manufacturing be competitive with Asian manufacturing production costs.
You should blame President Clinton when he signed NAFTA into law. NAFTA was signed into law by President Bill Clinton on December 8, 1993 long after his 1992 election and he began to enforce that treaty on January 1, 1994, and that was the first of many treaties created by many subsequent the "FREE TRADE" legislation actions with third world nations!
Why did he sign it into law?
He did not have to! Without Bill Clinton signing NAFTA into law, many US jobs for US citizens would have stayed in the USA.
George Bush and most all of the elected Republican and Democratic US Congressmen and Senators were also in favor of NAFTA, so I guess the US workers were just sold out for lower cost consumer products.
I can only remember Ross Perot objecting to NAFTA! He said that NAFTA would "Suck the remaining jobs from the USA to Mexico"
Ross Perot was right, but the Republicans and the Democrats were both promoting NAFTA.
Where were the Union Labor Leaders that should have objected to NAFTA? They say that they objected, but I do not remember them objecting, so maybe this is why Bill Clinton enacted NAFTA. Why don't the US Labor Unions object to President Obama’s new Free Trade Agreements today?
What about the WTO World Trade Organization implications on jobs for US citizens while Bill Clinton was president, such as Most Favored Nation Status (MFN) that he gave to China?
Why then did our elected presidents and congressmen create all of these "Free Trade Legislation" laws?
How do you think that these "FREE TRADE AGREEMENTS" were created?
Do you think that maybe the foreign product manufacturers that export consumer products to the USA might have paid professional US lobbyists to spend hundreds of thousands of US dollars on wine, food, women, song, vacations, cash, sexual services, corporate jobs for the (otherwise unemployable) children/wives/girlfriends on enough of the US senators and US congressmen (and their congressional aides who actually control the members of congress) plus campaign contributions to influence/entice (bribe) enough of our Republican and Democratic US Presidents, Congressmen and Senators for the past 20 years to create all of that "FREE TRADE AGREEMENT LEGISLATION" to ratify various trade agreements that allowed, caused, and ECONOMICALLY REQUIRED our businesses to take advantage of the lower labor costs, lower electrical energy costs, lower business taxes, lower payroll taxes to pay for health care costs, lower unemployment insurance costs, lower environmental manufacturing costs and other anti-business costs that are not required in various foreign countries with fewer anti-business laws that are/were applicable to businesses in the USA?
How do you think that US Government contracts, guaranteed (Solyndra type) loans, grants, and/or any other laws giving tax money to only a few people (campaign contributors) were created by our elected US Presidents, US congressmen, US senators, and their bureaucratic administrators?
Individuals being paid to influence individual members of the US congress and the Federal government administration to award government contracts by Professional Lobbyists is really institutionalized bribery!
Don't you realize that "outsourcing jobs that can be done here" was previously taxed in order to keep US jobs in the USA.
Remember Mitt's comments that when Bain purchased a business they applied the "Bain Way" well now you know what that is.