Mitt Romney cut jobs in two key early primary states
Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Mitt Romney was running Bain Capital, and the key primary states of New Hampshire and South Carolina were not yet on his radar in an "I'm running for office, for pete's sake" kind of way, Bain combined the Holson Co. and Burnes of Boston, creating Holson Burnes, a maker of photo albums and picture frames. As the Associated Press reports, Holson Burnes then proceeded to
open and shut a plant in South Carolina and to do the same in New Hampshire. Each time, it created, then cut, jobs. In South Carolina, at least, it cut those jobs after having extracted big incentives from the government to open the plant.
But despite the job loss and the plants closed, this wasn't a failure—for Bain, at least:
For Bain, the plan was a financial success: Holson Burnes raised $24 million from its initial public offering on the over-the-counter trading market, with Bain executives retaining the majority of the company's shares. Bain, in the end, reaped more than double the return on its initial investment. But workers were left jobless just as the local economy began to slump.
To create ever-more profit for Bain, Holson Burnes shipped jobs overseas:
By 1992, the company manufactured nearly 75 percent of its photo frames overseas, according to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. One of the company's clock-making divisions also shipped work overseas from a Rhode Island plant.
Because that's how it worked. Romney may claim that "buying things, taking them apart, closing them down" wasn't how he worked at Bain, but are American workers better off if his version of keeping a business open resulted in the jobs being just as gone as if he had closed it down?