Romney Brags About His Happy Little Chinese Slave Laborers

Factory girls. You gotta put up barbed wire to keep ’em out!

So much is revealed in Romney’s surreptitiously recorded Rat’s Mouth fundraiser speech (that’s “Boca Raton,” if you prefer) that the media hasn’t been able to figure out how to get it all out to viewers.  One jaw-dropping, mind-boggling, bit has only come across my radar in this piece from Daily Kos, which I suggest you read. But you may want to start with this video of the relevant portion.

The transcript, from the anonymous catering person who recorded it:

95% of life is set up for you if you were born in this country. And, I remember going to ah, uh, sorry just to bore you with stories.
When I was back in my private equity days, we went to China to buy a factory there. It employed about 20,000 people. And they were almost all young women between the ages of about 18 and 22 or 23. They were saving for potentially becoming married.

And they work in these huge factories, they made various uh, small appliances. And uh, as we were walking through this facility, seeing them work, the number of hours they worked per day, the pitance they earned, living in dormitories with uh, with little bathrooms at the end of maybe 10, 10 room, rooms. And the rooms they have 12 girls per room.

Three bunk beds on top of each other. You’ve seen, you’ve seen them? (Oh…yeah, yeah!) And, and, and around this factory was a fence, a huge fence with barbed wire and guard towers. And, and, we said gosh! I can’t believe that you, you know, keep these girls in! They said, no, no, no. This is to keep other people from coming in.

Because people want so badly to come work in this factory that we have to keep them out. Or they will just come in here and start working and, and try and get compensated. So we, this is to keep people out. And they said, actually Chinese New Year as the girls go home, sometimes they decide they’ve saved enough money and they don’t come back to the factory.

And he said, so, on the weekend after Chinese New Year there will be a line of people hundreds long, outside the factory, hoping that some girls haven’t come back. And they can come to the factory. And, and so as we were experiencing this for the first time, going to see a factory like this in China some years ago.

The Bain Partner I was with turned to me and said, you know, 95% of life is settled if you are born in America. This is uh, this is an amazing land and what we have is unique and fortunately it is so special we are sharing it with the world.

So, see — Mitt Romney DOES have a jobs plan for the U.S.!

Several cynics out there, myself included, suspect that Romney was being sold a line of bullcrap by the factory owners about “the fence is to keep people out.” He profited (oh, did he ever!) from believing it, though, and so believe it he did.

Of course, it is possible that girls were hoping to get in — if, for example, they were sold by their parents into servitude, or beaten if they didn’t go, or went only to save starving family members. The poignant thing, of course, is that the cost of doing it right would not be that much greater than the cost of doing it so very wrong. They could have less densely packed workspaces, more time off, more days in which they could allow workers to escape to — um, I mean leave for — home. They could even pay better wages.

But no — these are the sorts of places to which the likes of Romney have transferred jobs from the United States. They’ve generally been rewarded by the markets for doing so — and sometimes even subsidized by the government. This is one reason why some of that 47% doesn’t pay federal taxes — due to unemployment. They’re one thing that American workers will not, and by law should not have to, put up with. But to Romney it’s JUST FINE!

Either Romney is (A) a credulous fool who cannot be trusted to negotiate on behalf of our citizenry with the Chinese or anyone else, or (B) he’s lying to his fundraisers to demonstrate how gangsta banksta he is, or (C) he’s a cynical bastard who would happily profit from slavery given the ability to get away from it. Or, yes — any and all of the above.