Free Republic

Cooper tires is becoming another victim of President Obama’s much too cozy relationship with the union machine. Cooper Tires was bought by an Indian company. After President Obama sent a thank you to the Steelworkers Union and slapped an absolutely brain-dead punitive tariff of tires coming from China, a few things happened: Imports of low-cost tires did not stop. They came from other countries, at tariffs even lower than the old ones on Chinese tires. Not a single new job was created in America, but more than a few jobs at tire importers were destroyed. Americans paid more for tires....

Thanks to generous support from a foreign backer, there is renewed hope for an American attempt to revolutionize, modernize and sanitize the automobile engine. The catch? The finished product will be stamped “Made in China.”

Twelve million Americans are currently unemployed, according to the most recent Department of Labor statistics. Forty percent of the unemployed have been so for at least six months, and the average job seeker spends 36.9 weeks out of work. The good news for the jobless? US industry is now in the throes of a “reshoring” trend: “Next year we’re going to bring some production to the US,” Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) CEO Tim Cook told Bloomberg Businessweek in December. “This doesn’t mean that Apple will do it ourselves, but we’ll be working with people and we’ll be investing our money.” The bad...

The outsourcing of U.S. jobs to other countries has been a political hot button during presidential debates and Michigan gubernatorial elections. One poll found it to be the top concern of Michigan residents age 18-29. Yet, there were only 2,687 jobs outsourced to other countries in the entire U.S. in 2012, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The BLS report calculates the figures quarterly and lists them as "out-of-country relocations." With over 134 million jobs in the U.S., that means about 1 in every 50,000 was shipped to another country last year. The BLS doesn’t separate the data by...

A Verizon case study recently revealed that some people will go through great lengths in order to be able to watch cat videos all day. We first heard about it on TNW. The study documents the scam of a developer, who is referred to as Bob. He worked at a "critical infrastructure" company in the U.S. and started outsourcing his work to China underneath his company's nose, and would only pay those people less than one fifth of his six-figure salary. Here's how it was possible. Bob's company had started letting employees work remotely from home on certain days, so...

BAY MINETTE, Alabama – The family of a Daphne woman who received a lethal dose of medicine due to an error made by workers in India hired to save money on the preparation of medical records has won a $140 million judgment. The verdict, handed down this week in Baldwin County Circuit Court, holds Thomas Hospital and three other firms responsible for the 2008 death of Sharron Juno. It may be the richest civil verdict in the history of Baldwin County, renowned for its conservative juries. George “Skip” Finkbohner, an attorney who represented Juno’s son, attributed the large jury award...

The prospect of hanging, as Samuel Johnson observed, "concentrates the mind wonderfully." We're counting on that kind of concentration to keep us from falling off the infamous fiscal cliff, which doesn't sound like fun. But while the Republicans and Democrats argue about whom to blame if they let the worst happen, we might look outside the box to find something beyond partisan gloom and economic doom. We've given up our role as the manufacturing colossus, which blinds us to the reality that the times, they are a-changing -- again. "For decades," writes James Fallows in The Atlantic magazine, "every trend...

PALM CITY — Because the contract with its biggest client expired, call center iVox Solutions LLC is laying off about 120 employees on Friday. The workers have known about it for several weeks, iVox Chief Operating Officer Chris Stapleton said. Still, "it'll be a tough day because we really care about our employees," he said. Stapleton said at least some of the layoffs should be short-lived. The company, founded in 2003 as Old Cell Phone Corp., a vendor of used cellphones, will begin training Monday of 20 employees, who were not laid off, for an outbound call project for a...

Red-light cameras are gaining popularity across the country. Now, New York City is being sued after it was accused of rigging the lights to catch more drivers and write more tickets. They’re “gotcha” cameras, mounted at intersections. Their photos catch and fine drivers running red lights. New York City first had them in 1998. ... By federal law, drivers have to have enough time to get through a yellow light — three seconds at the typical 30 mph intersection. Back in October, engineers at AAA New York discovered a problem. At some intersections with the cameras, the yellow lights were...

Okay, who stole our jobs? Democrats accuse Republicans of out-sourcing American jobs. But no one knows how this is happening. Republicans have no idea how they supposedly outsource jobs. If someone started a petition saying “Let’s repeal section 99 U.S.C. Section 1234 to stop outsourcing jobs,” probably 80% to 90% of citizens and elected officials would rush to sign. The repeal of such a mythical section would probably take 48 hours to pass both houses of Congress and be signed by the President. But how can you repeal something if you don’t know what you want to repeal? One of...

In a campaign speech, President Obama said: “I know we can outcompete any other nation on earth.” No we can’t. We can’t outcompete Germany, China, France–we can’t compete any other country. In fact, no country can outcompete any other. The very concept “outcompete” makes no sense on a national scale. One business can outcompete another business, but a nation can’t outcompete another nation across the board. Suppose Bangladesh firms have a comparative advantage in sewing garments. Even if Americans are better at it than Bangladeshis, both countries gain if Americans outsource their garment-sewing work to Bangladesh firms and shift American...

Among the Obama campaign’s many accusations this year, one of the more interesting ones has been the claim that Mitt Romney was an “outsourcer” during his days at Bain Capital. When exploring this claim, we must remember the job of a company like Bain Capital: it’s to create value for the investors by building a successful company. The vast majority of companies that Bain shepherded to success during Romney’s tenure were and are, in fact, major employers, major retail, wholesale, or manufacturing firms that employ thousands and thousands of Americans. The net result of Mitt Romney being involved in the...

There is nothing like having unbiased media coverage of the all-important presidential campaign leading up to next week's election. And the media is nothing like unbiased. We see this playing out again as Mitt Romney is now being accused of misrepresenting a story that Bloomberg.com reported on Chrysler's potential outsourcing of Jeep manufacturing to China. A look at the original comments from the article gives evidence as to how unfair the criticism is and just how right Romney was for pointing out the likely future outsourcing of Jeep manufacturing. According to the Detroit Free Press, Romney stated during an Ohio...

One of the most delicious moments in last week’s presidential debates was when President Obama attacked Mitt Romney for having some of his money invested in Chinese and Cayman Islands companies. Mr. Romney replied by noting that the president has some of his investments in Chinese companies and also has investments through a Cayman trust. The president indeed, through funds he holds, has invested in a private equity and buyout firm (that operates like Bain Capital) that has put money into Chinese equities and Cayman Islands partnerships. Most everyone who has investments in mutual funds is very likely to have...

The Obama October surprise has exploded with a whimper and not a bang. Liberals have gone absolutely insane after snorting bathsalts under the name of “Sensata.” Supposedly, Romney is responsible for what Bain does 12 years after he left it, and Obama is not responsible at all for 4 years of failed economic policy. And what is their claim? That Romney’s blind trust has holdings in this company that is off-shoring jobs from Illinois to China.

WASHINGTON -- With the recession hit in 2008, Congress put the idea of a "skills shortage" and a need for more H-1B visas in a closet. That didn't mean, though, that interest in raising the H-1B cap went away for everyone. New York City Mayor Bloomberg, for instance, last year called the limits on both temporary and permanent employment-based immigration a "form of national suicide." Microsoft has long advocated for more work visas. But the company's advocacy was quieted during the recession as well, as it announced in 2009 a layoff of 5,000 workers. Circumstances at Microsoft have since changed...

Industrial Policy: The president's media apologists will say it was not a gaffe, that he merely misspoke and corrected himself. But the fact remains that his policies are exporting jobs, particularly to China. President Obama, during a campaign speech at Kent State University in Ohio on Wednesday, mistakenly said he wanted to export more U.S. jobs before correcting himself and saying he was "channeling" Republican rival Mitt Romney. Or was it a mistake? To his media supporters, it's no gaffe. Their dictionary defines gaffe as anything that comes out of Romney's mouth. Certainly not the mouth of Joe Biden, who...

During the month of July, Barack Obama relentlessly attacked Mitt Romney with bogus charges of outsourcing American jobs during his tenure at Bain Capital.  Hypocrisy has become standard-operating-procedure for the Obama White House and campaign team.  However, some new information suggests that if Obama really wanted to rail against the big outsourcer he should have been talking to the man in his mirror. The Obama campaign spent millions on television ads accusing Romney of being the "outsourcer-in-chief."  But, when scrutinized by political truth-testers across the nation, the accusations proved to be false.Glenn Kessler, The Fact Checker at the Washington Post,...

Economic change unleashes powerful forces. We can stubbornly resist them and cling to the status quo, but at best, that ushers in a slow but inevitable decline. A better approach lies in understanding the forces that periodically remake the economy, so we can seize the emerging opportunities they bring. This strategy has worked in the past, and it will work today. A significant force in recent decades has been globalization. It has brought with it a surge in outsourcing, the shorthand term for businesses’ cutting jobs in the United States and moving production overseas to gain access to lower-cost labor....

Mitt Romney and Barack Obama are currently fighting over who is the more patriotic. Obama slams Romney for having outsourced jobs to China during his Bain Capital days. Romney punches back by labeling Obama “Outsourcer in Chief.” The latest is that both John Boehner and Harry Reid are voicing outrage over America’s made-in-China Olympic uniforms. “Burn them!” thunders Reid. Republicans and Democrats strangely agree that outsourcing is unpatriotic, and that the moral and patriotic thing to do is to “Hire American” and “Buy American.” Well, no. Not in a thousand years. The fear of outsourcing and international trade is economic...