I was reading the transcript of the Ann Romney speech and noted something that she said about her Welsh coal miner immigrant father,
I am the granddaughter of a Welsh coal miner who was determined that his kids get out of the mines. My dad got his first job when he was six years old, in a little village in Wales called Nantyffyllon, cleaning bottles at the Colliers Arms.
When he was 15, dad came to America. In our country, he saw hope and an opportunity to escape from poverty. He moved to a small town in the great state of Michigan. There, he started a business -- one he built himself, by the way.
He built it himself, by the way Really???
I was intrigued since I had never heard exactly what type of business Ann Romney's father had started or what they did. I looked up her bio and found out that her father, Edward R. Davies, a Welsh immigrant had started a marine equipment firm called Jered Industries. So I went to the website of its successor Jered LLC and found this in the firms history:
Jered LLC started its walk in maritime construction over sixty years ago. Founded in Detroit, Michigan in 1946, Jered began as a general engineering design firm serving commercial and government markets. As the company grew, a major portion of the projects undertaken were in the marine field, particularly with the U.S. Navy.
Mr. Davies apparently built this firm himself from the ground up ......with a little help from the US taxpayer in the form of contracts from the US Navy. It seems very clear to me when a portion of your firms business is in support of the US Navy, you are in essence, a government employee, or at very least, dependent on the US taxpayers dime for your success. To say that "He built it himself" is totally disingenuous since it was the US taxpayer contributing to the success of that firm.
I am sure that Mrs. Romney's father did fine work for the US Navy that contributed to the success of the firm, but this company did not succeed in a vacuum. They were dependent on the US taxpayer for a great measure of their success and to echo the President, "We built it together!" That is the message that Mrs. Romney should have told had she not been so self centered and shallow to recognize that fact. Perhaps she will int the future.