Will Mitt Romney’s job killing policies leave the US looking like Marion, Indiana?

Marion, Indiana is a microcosm for exactly what’s wrong with this country. Outsourcing has gutted the entire town. 

Formerly, the biggest employers were General Motors and RCA (Thomson Consumer Electronics), and both places paid a good middle class wage for their manufacturing jobs and made cars and television sets in Marion. (Thomson also had a factory in Bloomington, Indiana).

Thomson Consumer Electronics alone has fired over 12,000 people in Indiana (about half in Marion, and half in Bloomington), and exists only to license “brand names” (which, for the more intelligent among us, means nothing all by itself) and so-called “intellectual property” (see Richard Stallman’s essay about why you should not use the term “intellectual property” - https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html -).

Thomson’s main business in the United States now is paying groups of lawyers to disassemble products made by other companies (such as ipads, iphones, Android tablets and cell phones, etc.) to see if they can sue that company and extract money for “patent violations”.

The term for a company that does this is “patent troll“.

They are no good for our economy, and I would say we’d be better off if companies like Thomson went ahead and went out of business completely, if not for the fact that someone else would just buy all their patents at fire sale prices and continue suing innovative companies with them.

When Thomson Consumer Electronics eventually laid everyone in Marion off, and left an empty building that still stands there today, they took advantage of the Republican’s tax cuts for “outsourcing expenses” that were passed during the Bush administration by a Republican Congress. Between 2001 and 2008 (when Bush left office), the United Stated lost over 5.8 million manufacturing jobs. Bush had a Republican Congress to work with from 2001-2007. Now they want us to trust Mitt Romney? Now they want us to put in a new Republican-majority Congress? No thanks. We’ve seen where the Republicans took us last time we handed them the wheel.

Marion, Indiana is now just another Republican horror story. They (and a few DINOs) caused the Marion, Indiana we see today. We need to tell Mittens that we don’t need a professional outsourcer who keeps most of his money in a Swiss bank account in the White House.

One last thing I should mention is how Mitt Romney dodged the Vietnam draft. We all know about Bush’s fake posting in a champagne unit in the Texas Air National Guard, where he spent most of his time drunk and AWOL, but Mitt Romney actually got to hide out in France while over 60,000 *other* (as in not rich and connected) Americans went and fought in Vietnam and died.

So I says to ‘em…..”So long boys, tell me how that whole Vietnam thing goes for ya!”