5.02.2008
For weeks Clinton has been touring the Hoosier State with Bayh attached to her hip. Most of her stump speeches have addressed the outsourcing of Indiana jobs. Back on April 11th the Post Tribune reported:U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton on Saturday will discuss the future of defense industry jobs with former employees of Magnequench at a town-hall meeting at Washington Township High School, just east of Valparaiso.
The rally begins at 3:45 p.m. in Dold Gym. The meeting is free and open to the public but details on getting tickets were not available Thursday. The visit will be the last leg of a three-stop tour of the state, marking nearly three dozen visits to Indiana by Clinton, former President Bill Clinton and daughter Chelsea Clinton since March.
The high school is not far from the former Magnequench plant in Valparaiso, which manufactured magnets used in the guidance systems for "smart bombs" until it closed five years ago. The parent company moved its manufacturing operations to China.
In a conference call with reporters from Northwest Indiana, U.S. Sen. Evan Bayh, a Clinton supporter and possible vice presidential running mate, said Magnequench's move cost the region 225 manufacturing jobs that provided better-than-average wages and benefits.
"It's not very smart to align America's defense on the goodwill of the Chinese, and yet that's exactly what happened," he said.
But Bayh seems to be forgetting something. Back in 1995 he was blasting the Clinton administration for the sale of this same company. ABC reports:A memo prepared for Bayh by the non-partisan Congressional Research Service earlier this year stated that the Clinton administration could have objected to the sale under CFIUS, but it did not, and that the consortium promised to keep those Anderson, Ind., jobs in the U.S. only until 2005.
An Oct. 6, 2005, press release from Bayh noted that he asked for the Government Accountability Office to study "concerns over foreign takeovers of American companies with national security implications & after an Indiana company called Magnequench closed thanks to a 1995 decision by CFIUS to approve a Chinese consortium's takeover. At the time, Magnequench made 85 percent of the magnets used to guide U.S. smart bombs."
Said Bayh, in the release: "The committee responsible for providing this protection does not have a good track record, as I saw myself when it allowed an Indiana company that made smart bomb magnets to be purchased by a foreign business. When it comes to protecting our national security interests, we should be doing more, not less."
But Bayh now glosses over the outrage he once expressed at the Clinton administration's approval of that 1995 sale, emphasizing instead the fact that there are currently no companies in the U.S. that manufacture Neo magnets.
Hillary also mentions the closing of the Magnequench plan in one of her latest ads running in Indiana:
So here we have Clinton decrying the idea that American defense parts are being made in China and blames it on the Bush Administration. But just like so many other things emanating from the Clinton campaign, this is completely false. The sale of Magnequench to the Chinese was approved by Bill Clinton in 1995.
There you have it, the loss of the Magnequench jobs in Indiana was a direct result of Bill Clinton's failure to act to protect foreign acquisition of defense technology. This is just another instance of Clinton ignoring reality and hoping not to get called out on it.
I hope that when this hits our local papers tomorrow morning that Hoosiers will see it for what it is: more lies and pandering. Clinton is pretending to care about the economic havoc that her husband’s own administration helped sow, while still continues denying her own long-record of advocating for NAFTA, and then manufacture staged photo-ops so that the national press corps can snap pictures of them downing a shot of whiskey - as if that proves her down-home credentials.
Labels: Clinton, Indiana, Primary Season
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