Washington Post versus Bain Capital

This is posting is not about man-made global warming.   Ok, so why am I posting it,  well because I question the Washington Post’s (WP) understanding of business and also their distorted attempts to paint Mitt Romney, the Republican Candidate for President of the US as a destroyer of US businesses.

I read and report on “alternatively powered” vehicles for this blog, as my regular readers know.  In doing so, I come across a lot of articles about gasoline/diesel powered vehicles.  Not to long ago, General Motors (GM) announced that they were going to build Cadillacs in China.  It seems that up-scale cars are selling pretty well in China.  Sales of the US made Caddies have been encouraging and GM concludes that they will increase their sales if they manufacture the Caddies in China.  Now think about the Toyota and BMW and Nissan vehicles that are being made in the US.  GM wants to do the same thing in China that these companies are doing here in the US.   Sounds like a smart move to me.

The WP published a story on Bain Capital, the business in which Romney had been a partner.  The newspaper’s pitch is that Bain has  “outsourced’ some small US businesses or part of their operation. Because of this, the WP wants to persuade their readers that Romney will be bad for the US business.  This WP article has been taken apart by James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute.  Pethokoukis shows that much of what the Washington Post reported is inaccurate and in some places just plain wrong. But equally as important is that industries across the globe move some manufacturing out of their homeland at times in order to be competitive.  If the business is not competitive, it goes out of business.

So here is the hypocrisy: General Motors (often called Government Motors) is essentially a branch of the US government as a result of the bail-out several years ago by this administration.   The companies that the Washington Post uses to impugn Bain are so small compared to GM there can be no comparison.  Yet if the WP feels strongly about the issue of outsourcing, why do they not take on GM?  I guess that is easy to figure out.

cbdakota