Monday began a new chapter in the reelection campaign of President Barack Obama as his team released a series of documentary-style videos regarding Mitt Romney’s time as the CEO of Bain Capital. The team also released a website that paints Romney as a corporate takeover artist who destroys jobs. A two-minute video and a six-minute video were released by the Obama team that interviews former employees of GST Steel. GST Steel was a company acquired by Bain Capital in 1993. The GST plant in Kansas City closed in 2001, which cost 750 employees their jobs.
The website launched by the Obama team focuses on the jobs lost at GST and jobs lost at two other companies acquired by Bain Capital, Dade International and Stage Stores. Dade International was a medical equipment company and Stage Stores was a chain of department stores in small towns across the country. Both companies went bankrupt after being acquired by Bain Capital.
The two-minute video will air in Ohio, Iowa, Colorado, Pennsylvania and Virginia. The video that is six minutes can only be seen online and both are embedded in this post. GST is described by the Obama campaign on the website as follows:
“Kansas City’s GST Steel was a successful company that had been making steel rods for 103 years when Mitt Romney and his partners took control in 1993. They cut corners and extracted profit from the business at every turn, placing it deeply in debt. When the company eventually declared bankruptcy, workers were denied their full pensions and health insurance, and the federal government was forced to step in and bail out the pension fund.”
A spokesman for Romney, Ryan Williams, issued the following comment about GST: “Bain Capital invested in many businesses. While not every business was successful, the firm had an excellent overall track record and created jobs with well-known companies like Staples, Dominos Pizza and Sports Authority.”
