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Local, National Attacks Continue on Romney Auto Ads
YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio – Fallout continued locally and nationally Wednesday from ads run by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney implying that General Motors and Chrysler were shifting jobs to China.
Media organizations including the New York Times, Denver Post, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Detroit Free Press and Columbus Dispatch carried news stories, columns and editorials on the ads, which attempt to undermine a pillar of President Barack Obama’s support in Ohio and the Midwest, his backing of government funds for GM and Chrysler as they restructured under bankruptcy protection.
The veracity of the Romney ads has been widely challenged by news organizations.
“Nothing smells like desperation more than the falsehoods and half-truths coming out of the Romney campaign about Chrysler purportedly moving Jeep manufacturing jobs to China,” states the opening paragraph of the Denver Post editorial. The Romney claim that Obama “sold Chrysler to Italians who are going to build Jeeps in China” at the implied cost of American jobs earned a “Pants on Fire” rating from the PolitiFact Ohio column in Wednesday’s Plain Dealer.
The claims that GM and Chrysler are adding jobs in China at the expense of Ohio workers drew rebukes from both automakers. Still, a Romney spokeswoman told the Associated Press that their criticisms “don’t refute anything in our ads.”
“When you have nothing to say sometimes you just make stuff up,” offered Dave Green, president of United Auto Workers Local 1714, who with Glenn Johnson, president of UAW Local 1112, held a news conference Wednesday at the downtown Obama for America headquarters. The labor leaders called on the Romney campaign to retract them.
All the domestic auto manufacturers produce car overseas to serve those markets but “[i]t’s a falsehood to misrepresent that those jobs are being moved from the United States to China,” Johnson said. “The impression is that they are going to take our jobs here and move those jobs to China, which couldn’t be further from the truth.”
“Yes, GM does build cars in China but they sell them in China,” Green said. “They’re not taking our cars in the United States and shifting them to another country,”
Green recalled the start of the controversy, when Romney, in a northwestern Ohio appearance last week, “propagated a rumor” that Chrysler was shifting Jeep production from Toledo to China. Although Chrysler debunked the presidential candidate's statement -- it plans to reopen a plant in China to serve that market but is also adding jobs in Ohio to boost production for the U.S. market -- Romney “had the gall to put up an ad in Toledo and right here in the Valley repeating” the erroneous statement, Green said.
“Yesterday, Mitt Romney tripled down on his dishonesty by releasing a radio ad designed to mislead Ohioans into believing that not only Chrysler but General Motors could be moving production to China,” Green continued.
The ad “falsely blames” Obama for GM cutting 15,000 jobs, the Local 1714 president said. Those cuts happened before the auto rescue plan Obama introduced in the summer of 2009, and since then more than 152,000 American auto jobs have been created, he added. Ohio has seen more than 17,300 auto jobs added between June 2009 and September 2011.
Because of agreements the UAW has reached and Obama’s “bold decision,” domestic automakers will add 20,000 direct manufacturing jobs through 2015, and spinoff will create 180,000 additional jobs, Green said. The manufacturers have also committed to $20 billion in investment through 2015, including $220 million to build the next-generation Chevrolet Cruze at Lordstown.
Romney opposed both the bridge loans offered under former President George W. Bush and the longer-term funding under Obama.
The kind of bankruptcy that Romney and his running mate, Paul Ryan, backed would have been a “Bain Capital bankruptcy,” one that would have brought companies in to “pick at the bones of the auto industry,” Local 1112’s Johnson said. Bain Capital is the venture capital firm Romney formerly headed.
“I was at the plant when helicopters were flying over, when there were people walking through with clipboards. They were getting ready to liquidate our facility,” Green said. Romney is “desperately trying to win an argument that he knows he lost. He didn’t support us -- he knows he didn’t, and now he’s trying to pretend he did,” he remarked.
Copyright 2012 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.