Rick Tyler: ‘100,000′ Romney Jobs Created in Southeast Asia and Mexico, Not USA

by Charles C. Johnson

Yesterday on Breitbart.tv Rick Tyler of Newt Gingrich’s Super Pac told us that all of the 100,000 jobs that Mitt Romney and his surrogates advertise having credited were created in Southeast Asia and Mexico.

“Mitt Romney gives a bad name to capitalism,” Tyler told Steve Bannon on Breitbart.tv. Tyler served as a communication adviser for many years to Newt Gingrich and though they are legally prohibited from coordinating with the Gingrich campaign, there is little doubt that Tyler is doing his former boss’s bidding.

Tyler, who is running a series of anti-Romney ads after acquiring a film profiling the former Massachusetts governor’s Bain years, backed off his harsher language today in a Washington Post story:

“Show me where those jobs are?” Tyler said, in a reference to Romney’s frequent claim that he created over 100,000 jobs at Bain. “I would contend they are Mexican jobs and southeast Asian jobs.”

. . .

“This is not free-enterprise in the sense of Steve Jobs and Apple,” Tyler said. “People think of these [firings] as isolated incidents. But there is a Bain victim in nearly every state of the union. If voters learn about a pattern of predatory corporate muggings, I think they’re going to get angry.”

Mitt Romney hasn’t shared how he calculated the 100,000 jobs that he and his campaign have been advertising, but he assures voters that they are there.

But Mitt Romney’s role at Bain has been profiled in every single Massachusetts race he has entered. In 1994 The Boston Globe profiled Bain, which was then actively involved in 61 companies, noting that “of those, 36 added jobs, 14 had no change in employment and 11 had decreases, most quite modest. Even allowing for a certain amount of fudging – the job totals cannot be easily verified – it’s clear Bain’s winning percentage was better than the economy’s as a whole.”

Tyler also mentioned a Bain-closed plant in South Carolina, where Mitt Romney is currently holding onto a slight lead in the polls.

But as The Boston Globe noted in October 1994, Bain was quite successful at helping Brookstone, Inc., which is based in New Hampshire, expand. Indeed, Brookstone grew by 14 stores in 1993 and 20 stores in 1994. Brookstone became one of Mitt Romney’s best capital buys at Bain.

Today’s Wall Street Journal also looked over Mitt Romney’s time at Bain, which began in 1984 and ended in 1999. They found the following:

– 22 percent either filed for bankruptcy reorganization or closed their doors by the end of the eighth year after Bain first invested, sometimes with substantial job losses.

– An additional 8 percent ran into so much trouble that all of the money Bain invested was lost.

– Ten deals produced more than 70 percent of the dollar gains.

– Bain produced about $2.5 billion in gains for its investors in the 77 deals, on about $1.1 billion invested.

– Overall, Bain recorded roughly 50 percent to 80 percent annual gains in this period, which experts said was among the best track records for buyout firms in that era.

– Academic research has shown that buyout firms during this era exited their deals on average after 5½ years, but in a large percentage of cases were still involved beyond seven years. … If the Journal analysis were limited to bankruptcies and closures occurring by the end of the fifth year after Bain first invested, the rate would move down to 12 percent. That measure would exclude several cases that have brought Mr. Romney political criticism, where businesses filed for bankruptcy seven or eight years after Bain’s investment.

James Pethokoukis, over at the American Enterprise Institute, points out that Romney’s successes at Bain were industry leading.

Of course this would not be the first time that one of Mitt Romney’s political adversaries made political hay of his Bain experience. Ted Kennedy and his union allies trucked in employees from a then-striking Indiana steel plant. Kennedy accused Mitt Romney of putting ”profits over people.” After shuttering the Indiana plant, Ampad moved its operations to Indonesia, where Staples, another company Mitt Romney worked with, continued to acquire its supplies.


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Posted Jan 10th 2012 at 5:35 am in 2012 Election, Politics | 30 Comments